International Journal of Scottish Literature 'ev'ry Heart Can Feel': Scottish Poetic Responses to Slavery in the West Indies, from Blair to Burns

In 1788, the Scottish physician John Ferriar published an ‘altered’ stage version of Oroonoko that ‘adapted’ the play to the ‘circumstances of the present times’.[1] In his preface to the play, Ferriar explains that ‘when the attempt to abolish the African Slave Trade commenced in Manchester, some active friends of the cause imagined, that by assembling a few of the principal topics, in a dramatic form, an impression might be made, on persons negligent of simple reasoning’.[2] Replete with an epigraph from Hamlet, Ferriar’s Oroonoko sought to awaken negligent audiences inured to the evils of slavery. As Ferriar remarks, ‘when those who hear with Serenity, of depopulated Coasts, and exhausted Nations, are led by tales of domestic misery, to the forces of public evil, their feelings act with not less violence for being kindled by a single spark’.[3] Following Scottish predecessors such as Adam Smith, Ferriar argues that the audience’s exposure to suffering would generate an empathetic response: ‘nature will rise up within them, and own her relation to the sufferers’.[4] For this reason, Ferriar selected and modified the familiar stage play of Oroonoko (known primarily through Thomas Southerne’s edition); he notes that Oroonoko ‘appear’d particularly adapted to this purpose, by its authenticity, as well as its pathetic incidents’.[5]