Signals of Distress was published by Viking in 1994. Aymer Smith, a prosperous soap manufacturer from the Midlands, is stranded in the small Cornish fishing town of Donat (Crace’s invented towns again) in November 1836 when storms prevent his ship from sailing. A vessel is wrecked offshore; its cargo includes a group of Africans being transported as indentured laborers. Their rescue and the question of what to do with them become the novel’s central moral crisis.
Smith is a Quaker, an abolitionist, and a progressive — but his progressivism is untested, theoretical, comfortable. Confronted with actual poverty, actual racial difference, and actual moral complexity, his principles prove less robust than he believed. The Africans are not grateful recipients of benevolence but autonomous people with their own purposes; the townspeople are not mere obstacles to justice but struggling humans with legitimate grievances; and Smith’s own factory depends on palm oil obtained through the same colonial systems he claims to oppose.
Crace sets the novel precisely at the moment of transition between the old world (sailing ships, small communities, local economies) and the new (steam, factories, global trade), and examines how moral language adapts to serve new forms of exploitation while appearing to resist them.
Collecting Signals of Distress
First edition (Viking, London, 1994): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25