Some more on something I posted on the AOA board, about the views of the British public when Mansfield Park was published.

Extracts come from "Castlereagh" by Wendy Hinde, dealing with the issues which the British negotiators were putting forward during the Congress of Vienna.

"The British public were fanatically determined that the French should be made to give up the [slave] trade before receiving back their colonies, while the French were convinced that the hypocritical English were moved solely by a wish to cripple France's economic recovery."

Castlereagh wrote: "The nation is bent upon this object... and the ministers must make it the basis of their policy."

It's worth noting that those who were against abolition in 1806-7, or those who abstained in the vote like Castlereagh himself, were by 1814 united with the abolitionists like Wilberforce: if the British weren't going to profit by the trade, then no other country was going to.

And, as I posted earlier about the Hundred Days, one of the things that Napoleon did on his brief return to power was to abolish the slave trade; this was partly to satisfy the old revolutionaries in France (who had abolished slavery throughout the French Empire in 1794, though it was subsequently brought back again), but it was also partly to appease the British.

The slave trade, if not slavery itself, was certainly a hot issue when Mansfield Park was published.