56

The Tongue; or, Essays on the uses and abuses of speech, interspersed with fictitious characters: Including a Description of the Sufferings of the Negroes in Africa, and the West-Indies. To which is added, an appendix on Freedom of Speech

British Library

Slave Trade Moral Essays Tongue Religious Visions

This small educational and moralising volume on the subject of the tongue, written by the author of The Duty of Children to their Parents, contains a number of essays, one of which addresses the slave trade: "a subject, which is calculated to rouse every feeling of the human heart [...] upon which I wish to call forth all the energies of the tongue" (53). The essay is based on a series of visions, including an allegorical discussion between "Humanitus" and a slave ship captain, an "Invocation" to the British government calling for abolition, and a vision of hurricanes, shipwrecks, wars and disease striking the Atlantic world as divine vengeance for the slave trade.

Unnamed author, attributed to the Unitarian itinerant preacher Richard Wright in the British Library catalogue (date is estimated as 1805).