In the following essay, Dykes examines the poetry and prose of famous English authors writing on abolitionist themes, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Dickens. These authors focused their attacks on British slavery until it was abolished in 1833, after which they turned their attentions to the United States.

In the following excerpt, Ferguson examines the 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave to show that Prince's language and agenda were often at odds with white female abolitionists.

In the following essay, Coleman argues that even as white female abolitionists in the late eighteenth century tried to connect their own subjugation to the plight of slaves, their writings tacitly created insurmountable boundaries between whites and blacks.

In the following essay, Ferguson describes why Hannah More was chosen by London's Abolition Committee to compose a poem condemning British slavery, and how her “Slavery: A Poem” influenced subsequent depictions of Africans as powerless and passive victims in need of European guidance and support.

In the following essay, Rice argues that English attitudes toward slavery can be understood by examining how the subject was treated in British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concludes that the transformation of how slaves and slave-owners were depicted during this period is evidence of a cultural revolution in English thought.

In the following essay, Button discusses feminist and antislavery themes in Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, which she asserts was the first English novel to attack slavery in the United States.

In the following excerpt, Richardson argues that even though poetry by abolitionists writers Robert Southey, Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, and Anne Yearsley shows that British Romanticism contributed to the construction of racial identity, their racial representations varied considerably.

In the following excerpt, Oldfield examines antislavery literature aimed at British children, which its authors believed would ultimately be beneficial in spreading the abolitionist message to the public at large.