Caroline, if I may say, I think you are being most unfair here. You asked for some evidence that Antigua was a slave-holding island, which I gave, from a respectable source. (And you surely know my style well enough by now to believe me when I say that if that material in `Black Ivory' had given backing to your argument, then I would have posted it and apologised. But it didn't, so I'm sticking to my guns.)

In your response, you took some of my evidence (about slavery existing in 1729) and ignored another part (about it still existing at the time of abolition in 1834), and that allowed you to pour scorn on a ludicrous argument that I did not and would not say ("That's tantamount to saying Sir Thomas was a bad man because his grandfather's slaves rebelled!")

Frankly, Caroline, I am offended. I am surprised too, because that's not your usual style of good logic, good humour and good manners.

On some other points you've made in this thread, on this post and elsewhere. I'm not going to respond to all of it, but only to what I believe are the most important points. (You may think that, by snipping out bits of what you said, I am doing to you what you did to me; ie ignoring parts of what you said so as to ridicule it. If so, believe me that it was not intentional, and if I've done it I apologise.)

] You haven't proved that Sir Thomas is a bad man because he was a slave owner

My argument is:
(A) Someone who owns slaves commits a bad act
(B) If Sir Thomas owns slaves, then he commits a bad act.

That's a watertight argument. You can argue that someone who owns slaves does not commit a bad act, or that Sir Thomas does not own slaves. But if you believe, as I do, that to own slaves is to commit a bad act, and that Sir Thomas does it, then he commits a bad act.

] In the height of the slave debate, she deliberately picked a place where it wasn't absolutely obvious that he was a slave owner.

I'm sorry, but you really are going to have to come up with more evidence on this than you've provided so far. I am not doubting that you saw the pamphlet, but I haven't seen it. So I can't chase it up, or look at the quote in context, because you haven't provided details. You certainly wouldn't let me or any other poster on this board get away with, "I remember seeing somewhere but I can't remember where or exactly what the quote was" on an issue as contentious as this one is.

] If Antigua is a "generic slave island", then Sir Thomas is a "generic slave owner" and is supposed to be viewed as a stereotype. In that way, generic slave owning is bad, therefore Sir Thomas must be bad, because generic plantations must be run by generic slaves. However, I think anyone who assumes these generic connections is on very shaky ground.

Is anyone assuming these generic connections? What I assumed - and sorry if this sounds repetetive - is that JA sent Sir Thomas to Antigua because she was saying with her usual subtlety that he was a slave-owner, not because she wanted to say he was a Bad Man.

I want to expand on something that I said on the AOA board: Sir Thomas's slave-owning should be seen in the context of Edmund's evangelicalism. In fact, I think that this issue is not about Sir Thomas at all, but about Edmund. Everyone can see that he's torn between his principles and his love over Mary Crawford, but it's also the case that he is torn between his principles and his respect for his father. You can only know this if you know about the slavery issue: readers of JA's time would have, but modern readers don't unless somebody tells them. Please don't mistake my position for that of the film-makers of MP2. I am not running the anti-slavery line for its own sake, but as essential background information for understanding Edmund.

] 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?

What I think here is that JA didn't want to bring in the anti-slavery issue in its own right, but as part of what she was saying about Edmund. And that's why it's done so very lightly.

] The only member of the House of Commons that I know of who was also a plantation owner was a certain young man who had a rotten borough constituency

Do you want me to look through my books to find evidence that Monk Lewis was not alone in being a slave-owning MP?

] nothing about Mansfield Park is simple

Ah, on that, we are in complete agreement.