This talk draws on my recently completed book, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, which explores connections between Romanticism and the racial imaginaries engendered by the transatlantic slave economy. The book is organised around objects that once belonged to the major poets. Here, I will begin with a baby rattle made of coral and gold. Engraved with the year 1792 and the initials P.B.S, the rattle commemorates the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley. After surveying the period’s associations between coral, gold and Africa, I will turn to consider two poems that engage with African cartography – Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas, which is his only poem to feature an African woman at its centre, and Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, which opens with the poet-narrator declining an invitation to visit the depths of “burning Africa” in favour of staying at home in the Lake District. Shelley himself dubbed The Witch of Atlas a “visionary rhyme” and, among other things, it can be read as a refutation the homely realism of Peter Bell. After considering the role of Africa in these two poems, I will close by contrasting Shelley’s African witch to the only poem that Wordsworth ever wrote about a Black woman, a sonnet named after its date of composition "September 1st, 1802."

Mathelinda Nabugodi is a literary scholar and writer specializing in Romanticism. She completed her undergraduate degree in English literature at the University of Edinburgh before moving to University College London where she completed an M.A. in translation theory and practice and a Ph.D. in creative critical writing. Following her Ph.D., Mathelinda held a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of English at Newcastle University and a Leverhulme Trust early career fellowship in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. She has also worked as a research associate in the literary archive at the Fitzwilliam Museum.