Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw was published by Richard Bentley in 1836 and holds a significant place in literary history as one of the first English-language novels to take the abolition of American slavery as its explicit subject — predating Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin by sixteen years. The novel draws directly on Trollope’s American experience: she had lived in a slave state (Ohio was free, but she traveled in slave states), and her horror at slavery was one of the strongest reactions recorded in Domestic Manners.
The title character is a poor white overseer in Louisiana — brutal, ignorant, and cruel — who embodies the corrupting effect of the slave system on those who administer it. Trollope’s argument is not merely that slavery is cruel to the enslaved (though she depicts that cruelty unflinchingly) but that it degrades everyone it touches: the slaveholder, the overseer, the society that permits it. The novel includes scenes of violence and sexual exploitation that were shocking for their time and that give it a power that more genteel abolitionist fiction lacks.
The novel was praised by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic and attacked by pro-slavery commentators. Its commercial success was modest compared to Domestic Manners, but its historical significance is considerable: it established the anti-slavery novel as a viable literary form and demonstrated that fiction could be an effective weapon in political argument.
Collecting Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw
First edition (Richard Bentley, London, 1836): Three volumes, cloth boards.
Market values:
- First edition (3 vols): $400–$1000
- Later Victorian reprints: $50–$150
- Modern scholarly editions: $15–$40