"Epilogue to 'The Padlock'"
The Gentleman's Magazine was the biggest selling publication of the late eighteenth century. It was read (or at least bought) by anyone with any pretensions to gentility. It contained news, reviews, features, and original writing and, as one would expect, the debate over the slave trade featured prominently in its pages. Despite the fact that the magazine was in general opposed to abolition of the slave trade, its editors, always hiding behind the pseudonym "Sylvanus Urban", nonetheless allowed a number of poems, mostly favouring abolition, to be featured in its poetry section or to be reviewed in the reviews section. This poem is a supposed additional speech spoken by the character of Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Padlock: a comic opera: as it is perform'd by His Majesty's Servants, at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London: 1768). Mungo was played by Samuel Dibdin, who performed in blackface. Mungo was a comic figure, a stereotypical black slave, who could be counted on to raise laughs in the eighteenth-century London theatre. Indeed, so popular was the play that the name "Mungo" soon came to be applied in a derogatory way to all black people, as can be seen in many popular prints and newspaper articles of the time. This anonymous poem aims to subvert the comedy and re-establish Mungo as a serious character: as a man. The text given here comes from The Gentleman's Magazine for October 1787 and includes the prefatory note.
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