Title: A Respectable Trade Author: Philippa Gregory
Published: December 23, 1994
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 512
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Bristol in 1787 is booming, a city where power beckons those who dare to take risks. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs capital and a well-connected wife.
Marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah's protection, Frances finds her life and fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves.
Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba, now a slave in England. From opposite ends of the earth, despite the difference in status, Mehuru and Frances confront each other and their need for love and liberty.
In historical fiction circles, Philippa Gregory is not generally recognized for her accuracy or seriousness. Her books are high on drama and glamor, and her reputation is for, at the very least, embroidering the details. I’ve read one of her Tudor novels, and it was perfectly fine, though it lacked staying power or memorability. A Respectable Trade is not like Gregory’s Plantagenet or Tudor books. It is, rather, a genuine and honest attempt to look into the English slave trade and the destruction it caused. If it is also an unlikely romance between a slave and his mistress, well…it’s still Philippa Gregory, after all.
A Respectable Trade takes place in the port city of Bristol in 1787. The city—indeed much of the kingdom—thrives on the slave trade, while elsewhere William Wilberforce is just beginning his decades’ long campaign for the abolition of the trade. Into this mix comes gently-bred Frances, forced by economic necessity to marry a merchant far below her station. Frances is confronted for the first time with the realities of slavery in Bristol, and finds that it’s far harder to condone such injustice when you’re witnessing beatings, rapes, and gross dehumanization under one’s own roof (especially when one of the victims happens to be the love of your life).
And I guess if we wanted to get right into it, there are some problematic things happening in this story. The slave/mistress romance itself is slightly troubling, because Mehuru doesn’t have the capability of providing consent, technically speaking. The relationship is honestly doomed from the beginning; as Gregory points out, most free blacks in England did intermarry with white women, but certainly not with the noblewomen who were unused to poverty or social censure. This is the one area where A Respectable Trade strays into improbability, but Gregory clearly recognizes this, and doesn’t create some kind of unbelievable situation in which the doomed romance gets to thrive.
Frances and Mehuru are both, individually, protagonists in their own right, though they have a sort-of romance in common. I think A Respectable Trade begins skewed more towards Frances, but by the end the story and resolution are very much Mehuru’s—which I think is good, because had this become a book about how the noble white woman redeemed herself, we might have had problems. Rather, by the end, Gregory allows Mehuru’s arc to take the spotlight, and his future is the one the reader is most invested in. Which, I think, is as it should be.
That being said, the criticism some readers have made about the way Frances’s moral quandry is resolved in the final chapter is pretty valid. Rather than have Frances be brave and confront injustice and live bravely for her convictions, she gets to…die. Kind of a cop-out on Gregory’s part, though it’s possibly preferable to France and Mehuru sailing off to Sierra Leone to live happily together forever and ever. But like I said, this is still a Philippa Gregory book.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that for a privileged white woman whose ancestors doubtless benefitted greatly from the institution of slavery, Philippa Gregory really does approach the topic with delicacy and thoughtfulness. The text doesn’t shy away from the truly brutal aspects of the slave trade, which Gregory is quick to informs readers are 100% accurate (lest we think she’s embroidering the facts again). White people are not given get out of jail free cards at any point in A Respectable Trade—both Frances the protagonist and the “radical” abolitionist character have prejudice and racism (in spite of good intentions) that are prominently displayed and examined. Gregory is not about to make excuses for anyone in this book. The story and resolution are still a bit romanticized, and things could have taken an even darker, more realistic turn, but honestly this is a pretty surprising subject for the author in question, and I’m impressed.
A Respectable Trade is not what you expect from Philippa Gregory, but I think it showcases her talents and abilities a lot better than her more recent poolside-type historical fiction (based on the one Tudor book I’ve read).
