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Site: Museum of London

I took this photo at the Museum of London. The figure in the photo appears in a tobacconist shop that is part of a larger exhibit that recreates a Victorian street of stores. I wish that the museum had provided much more information on this figure – especially a probable date. If I were going to work on a research project that incorporated this image, I would have to work to find out more information on it.

Tobacco Shop African

The figure immediately caught my eye, reminding me of the sort of racist caricatures that would have been part of the very fabric of everyday life in the Victorian period. Personally, it struck a chord with me because it is so similar to a racist image from my own childhood in the very white world of central Pennsylvania, where my sweet grandmotherly neighbor, who I don’t think had ever met an African-American in her life, had a “lawn jockey” figure on her front lawn. (Do you guys know what a lawn jockey is? Hopefully

not. They were pretty common in some places in the 70s when I was growing up.) Also consider the analogous American convention: the tobacco store “Indian” figure that holds cigars. The fact that American culture has used very similar images (and maybe continues to do so) stops me from feeling much superiority in relation to Victorian racist culture.

lawn jockey

Here’s a lawn jockey, grabbed from Google images. Like the figure above, the lawn jockey is a representation of dark-skinned servitude. The humans represented in these statues are frozen in positions of attendance on the white costumers or employers (or owners) they are meant to serve. That, apparently, is an unquestioned assumption about dark-skinned people.

Note the similar forms of exaggeration at work in the representation of physical features of these figures: the jet black skin, the exaggerated red lips, the exaggerated staring eyes. The chief difference seems to be that the Victorian figure is dressed out to appear as “primitive” as possible. His only clothing is a sort of brightly feathered skirt or loincloth which appears in inverted form as a headdress. He wears a necklace made from brightly colored beads of the same color and carries a roll of tobacco under one arm. The feathered skirt and necklace also might have had the effect of feminizing the dark African Other. Victorian imperialism frequently imagined other people, particularly those who were darker than themselves, as feminine, passive, waiting to be conquered by an active and masculine imperial power. The representation of racial otherness was not of course always the same, but that feminization seems to be at work here.

This demeaning caricature captures a crucial element of the Victorian international economy, which was based on buying raw products (tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco) from dark people in distant places and transforming them into luxury goods at home. Economic exploitation went hand in hand with racist caricature. Imagine the broad effect on the minds of those Victorians who passed such figures on a daily basis as they went on their shopping trips and errands. Such figures must have confirmed the sense that the world was made for them. Being civilized and enlightened modern subjects rather than supposedly primitive Africans, it was their good fortune to be at the top of the evolutionary ladder, to have the privilege of being able to buy materials from around the world with which to make life more pleasurable at home. Victorians absorbed such assumptions with the air they breathed.

OK, so that took me about half an hour to write, which is the upper limit of time I’d like you to spend on journal entries based on specific objects that catch your eye in the sites you will visit. I went way over the suggested word count because I wanted to explain the American “lawn jockey.”  Remember that this should be a part of your day-to-day work during our time abroad. And specificity is the crucial thing!