British Women, Abolitionism, and the Musical Salon in the Late Eighteenth Century

This chapter explores the relationship between women’s abolitionism and the musical salon in eighteenth-century Britain. In the absence of written sources describing musical salons that promoted abolitionism, I search for musical evidence of this phenomenon – in the form of two piano-vocal scores. Each is a setting of William Cowper’s celebrated antislavery poem, “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788). The first setting is by an anonymous amateur composer, whom I identify as Miss Greenwood. Greenwood’s choice to publish her song in The Lady’s Magazine speaks to contemporary assumptions about women’s taste for antislavery songs, poems, and stories. The second setting, by professional composer John Wall Callcott, confirms that such songs were indeed popular with women in this period. I explore four copies of this score, which were included in British women’s personal music collections in the late eighteenth century. These important sources contain hard-to-find traces of women’s musical engagement with the abolitionist cause.