Nobody is doubting that a) Slavery existed, b) That, on the whole, the conditions under which slaves were kept in some places was horrible, and that c)some slave owners were absentee landlords, and they tended to have the "worst" of the plantations. But 1729? 1725? That's tantamount to saying Sir Thomas was a bad man because his grandfather's slaves rebelled!

] Caroline, I don't see anything to make me change my conclusion; the only difference this book says between Antigua and elsewhere in the West Indies is that it was one of the smaller islands. And that bit about the absentee plantocracy fits Sir Thomas perfectly.

At least my little pamphlet was part of a package discussing the slave problem, and was dated about 1806.....

] Of course Sir Thomas might have owned a non-slave plantation: he might have been running a gang of jewel thieves disguised as Avon ladies for all the explicit evidence there is in Mansfield Park.

Exactly. It's not explicit. Not only is it not explicit, but nobody in the ensuing centuries has actually managed to make a proper historical case for it, one way or another. Don't you think that if JA wanted her readers to believe one thing or another, she'd have made sure that there was enough evidence for it?

But I have seen no evidence to doubt my original conclusion, which is that JA sent Sir Thomas off to Antigua because her readers would assume that he owned slaves, and that if she hadn't wanted them to do this, then she would have sent him somewhere else.

But that's the whole point- she didn't send him somewhere else! In the height of the slave debate, she deliberately picked a place where it wasn't absolutely obvious that he was a slave owner. She didn't make it that simple- nothing about Mansfield Park is simple- and her readers, who would be well aware that slavery was a complex and contentious subject, would have thought twice about condemmning Sir Thomas to badhood simply because he went to Antigua.

] If you have any further evidence to prove the contrary, I'd be delighted to see it. But I hope you'll understand why, on a disputed area like this, I'd like something more than a quote from a remembered pamphlet with no further details.

And I hope you undersand, Linden, that I'd prefer to take a quote that is exactly contemporary with the slave debate and abolition, and exactly referential to the place in question, over quotes about events that were seventy-five years in the past, and deal with a much larger geographical area. You've proved that Slavery, in general, was bad (no debate) and you've proved that Antigua had slave plantations and that rebellions occurred on them in the 1720's(again, no debate). You haven't proved that Sir Thomas is a bad man because he was a slave owner- because there isn't any proof, and JA made darned sure that there wouldn't be.

] As you said, let's get the history right.

Of course. Obviously we have not got to the bottom of this, even now. And until we get a lot more information about the conditions of slaves in Antigua, and the existence of slave and non-slave plantations within Sir Thomas's lifetime, and we can sort of match him up with one or two particular slave owners, we won't have any evidence that JA intended her authors to jump to the conclusion that he was a bad man simply because he was a plantation owner! I think such a point is ultimately unprovable, if only because we cannot ever know JA's real intentions for sure. In fact, to generalise, I'd say that, on the whole, JA's intentions are far too complex to even consider such a possiblity.

And just to hammer the point home.....JA's quote about "not liking evangelicals" was a response to Hannah More's novels which were a) very explicit and b) very didactic, and were concerned with the slavery question. Hannah More was deliberately, obviously, and explicitly, anti-slavery, and JA seems to have despised her for it. With that in mind, how can anyone say that Sir Thomas was a bad man based upon a generality that plantation owners MUST be slave owners and MUST be bad? If Hannah More had written MP, I'd agree with you. But she didn't.