Levites in Charge of the Ark of Culture: The Morant Bay Rebellion and Racial Justice among Eminent Victorians

Jude V. Nixon

doi:10.12957/matraga.2026.97818

Authors

Jude V. Nixon Salem State University https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8916-0706

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2026.97818

Keywords:

Racial justice, Carlyle, Gordon, Eyre, Morant Bay

Abstract

On October 11, 1865, black laborers in Jamaica rebelled and attacked the Court House, symbol of white oppression. The inspirational leader was George William Gordon, a Baptist minister, mulatto ex-Magistrate, and member of the House of Assembly who had a history of emotive exchanges with the colonial governor, Edward John Eyre. Their disagreements were over wages, taxation, poverty, food insecurity, and civil rights violation. Gordon was accused of instigating the Rebellion, court martialed, and then hanged. Victorians quickly took sides in the controversy, some, mostly from the literary community, siding with Eyre, and others, largely from the scientific community, wanting Eyre prosecuted. Eyre subsequently was recalled but not prosecuted. Racial justice, this essay argues, emerged central to the controversy, a discrete case that called into question the role of the humanities in culture, what one observer, championing its value, has referred to as “Levites in charge of the ark of culture”. Those from the non-humanities campaigned stridently for racial justice.

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Author Biography

Jude V. Nixon, Salem State University

Professor of English na Salem State University. Seus interesses de pesquisa incluem Literatura Vitoriana e Literatura Caribenha de língua inglesa. Publicou amplamente sobre os vitorianos, com destaque para Hopkins, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens e Eliot. Suas publicações recentes in-cluem The Sermons and Spiritual Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Vol. 5. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 8 vols. (Oxford, 2018), Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglopho-ne Transnational (2021), e “‘[T]he perfect love which cherishes me’: Lewes, Casaubon, and the Making of Middlemarch”, em George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies (2023). Atua em diversos editorial boards, incluindo Victorian Poetry, The Hopkins Quarterly e Dickens Studies Annual.

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