It is, of course, possible that the connection between Codrington's West Indian fortune and his role in the making of the culture of taste, which appears obvious to us now, was invisible to people in his circle, many of whom invested heavily in the ideal of an autonomous aesthetic, one that derived its authority from an ideology of disinterest. At the heart of this ideology was the belief that the realm of the aesthetic represented an alternative sphere of experience separated from the vulgarity of the everyday. This view was summed up by J. C. Friedrich von Schiller in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), where he noted that the problem of politics would be resolved only through the aesthetic, “because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.”75 A slave owner like Codrington would thus enter the public domain as an aesthetic subject by separating himself from colonial slavery through a kind of dédoublement, a gesture of self-conscious alienation.
While it is not clear exactly what his aesthetic objectives were, it is apparent that Codrington's investment in the arts denoted his way toward some calculated measure of autonomy, a way out of the materiality of the life that was his legacy and inheritance. Indeed, until he returned to the Caribbean in triumph as a soldier and governor in 1700, Codrington's connection to the island of Barbados was minimal or minimalized, as he suspended the oppressive materiality of slavery for the rarified life of Oxford and the London coffeehouse. Sent to England to be educated at the onset of adolescence, Codrington's adulthood was defined by his cultivated desire to separate himself from the world of his father: “Whereas the father spent all his days among hard-living planters and negro slaves,” notes his biographer, “the younger man grew up among the scholars of Oxford and the literary lights of Paris and London.”76 And if the world of slavery was considered corrupting, then the path to England and Oxford, the sentimental education in the ways of culture, provided Codrington with the characteristic virtues that would make him transcend the world that enabled his being as a modern subject. When he was asked to defend British interests in the West Indies as a soldier and governor, notes Harlow, Codrington “wrote Home discussing Locke's philosophy while leading armies and wrangling with assemblies in the West Indies.”77
We can now identify the double movement that enabled the man of taste to transcend the culture of slavery that was his condition of possibility: the son of the planter would be sent to the mother country to be isolated from the brutal and uncultured life of the plantation; in turn, an aesthetic education would serve as an antidote to the world of politics and commerce and the moral corruption associated with slavery while providing the financial resources that enabled the patronage of taste. Indeed, Codrington's education in the ways of culture meant occupying, maybe colonizing, all aspects of taste, which would act as his conduit into polite society. Thus, at the age of seventeen, “Christopher Codrington matriculated as a gentleman commoner of Christ Church in the University of Oxford”; at the age of thirty, he had established himself at the center of high society.78
It is interesting to note that Codrington did not gain entry into high society by patronizing politicians or using his immense wealth to influence parliamentary debates; rather, he used his money to cultivate the friendship of poets, painters, and philosophers and to pay the bills of scholars such as Thomas Creech, who otherwise would have been indigent. But to argue that Codrington was admitted into polite society and artistic circles because of his talent, as Harlow does, is to miss the role money played in fashioning a public persona. Ignoring the fact that the source of money that made the patronage of art possible was derived from scenes that were far removed from the ideal of an aesthetic education negates the extent to which the planter class used art and culture to launder its dirty wealth. Let us not forget, after all, that even when their descent was unquestionable, as in the case of the Codringtons, to be born in the colonies, to be a white Creole or an Indian nabob, was to exist under the shadow of what I call white anxieties.79
And there are some compelling reasons why these anxieties came to function as an important mark of modern identity in the British Isles. For in the second half of the eighteenth century, notes Michael Edwardes in reference to Indian nabobs, the repatriation of colonial money to Britain generated deep anxieties in the social establishment, leading to some kind of moral panic—“the British upper classes felt, and displayed, both publicly and privately, the sort of panic that might have been caused by the arrival in England of the hordes of Genghiz Khan—carrying the plague.” The source of this panic was “a comparatively small number of men who had acquired, by various means, usually dubious, large fortunes in India which they intended to spend in ensuring their entry into ‘society’.” Colonial barons were feared because they were the only ones among the middle classes with enough money and political clout to penetrate “the political, social, and economic preserves of the English landed gentry.”80
Significantly, colonial barons understood the significance of art and taste as their point of entry into the inner sanctums of Englishness. They often used their money and political influence to control art and taste, commissioning elaborate paintings and building opulent mansions. The typical British response to the panic generated by colonial money was to turn these barons into figures of caricature and mockery. For example, Sir Thomas Rumbold had risen in the ranks of the Indian trade to become a governor of Madras, and, like most wealthy people of his period, he commissioned Gainsborough to produce a massive double portrait of himself and his son in the 1770s. Still, this extravagant reconfiguration of selfhood through art did not salvage Rumbold's image; as a nabob he was subject to ridicule, reduced to a money monger at best and a fraud at worst. This same fate was reserved for most West Indian Creoles, whose origins were often the subject of aspersion and whose manners were constantly derided. The cultural dilemma of white Creoles—and hence the source of the anxiety that was both indispensable and disposable in the making of the culture of taste—was this: they were the only people with enough money to drive the engine of taste, which demanded luxury and consumption, but they were also considered to be the furthest removed from good manners and politeness.
From a genealogical perspective, the Codringtons were lucky to be associated with the pedigree of the English landed gentry before their foray into the West Indian plantation complex, and this seemed to ease their way into English society. In this sense they are atypical of colonial barons, and they seemed to have a free hand in shaping the social and physical landscape of modern Britain. Indeed, for almost two centuries the Codrington family used its immense wealth to transform Dodington Park, a property whose history reflects the changing nature of taste in physical form. When the family first bought the building in the late sixteenth century, it was a typical Elizabethan house with large cables and an adjunct church. When the second Christopher Codrington hired James Wyatt, probably the most important British architect of the late eighteenth century, to construct the new Dodington House (1798–1813), the building reflected the neoclassical revival of the day. Here, as elsewhere, fashionability was enabled by the family's income from its West Indian sugar holdings.81
A more complex story is that of colonial planters with enough money to pay for all the objects of taste but not the pedigree that was an essential part of a privileged Englishness or the manners required of people of taste. As people born in the colonies, white Creoles and nabobs were already classified as a distinct social category, and with their white identity often in doubt, they had to work hard to earn the designation of “men of taste,” people who, in Hume's words, were “easily distinguished in society, by the soundness of their understanding and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind.”82 In this context, white Creoles, like the Indian nabobs, were located in the space of the repressed in the culture of taste: they were neither black enough to occupy the slot reserved for the African slave nor white enough to be considered English, although they craved for Englishness more than anyone else.
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br /> In a culture in which, as Peter de Bolla reminds us, “writers held up the man of taste as the exemplar of the highest possible level of cultural and social rank,” white Creoles were both outsiders and insiders: money made them belong to the ruling circles; their colonial origins excluded them from the inner sanctum of manners.83 The culture of taste was predicated on the marriage of money and manners; the white Creole had too much of the former and too little of the latter. As the life of William Beckford illustrates vividly, it was in the figure of the white Creole—“Almost the same but not white,” to use Homi Bhabha's apt phrase—that money and taste would come to trouble each other in unprecedented ways.84
Some background and context is necessary here. In Britain there was no better representative and practitioner of the ideals of taste and the aesthetic than William Beckford. He had all the necessities on which a modern subjectivity depended—money, rank, and taste. When Lord Byron described him as “England's wealthiest son,” he was calling attention to something more than Beckford's immense inheritance; he was perhaps also thinking about how money and culture had come to constitute subjective identity.85 Beckford's father, popularly known as “the alderman,” had inherited a massive fortune from his own father and had used it to climb to some of the highest social and political ranks of English society. He had served as an alderman and sheriff for the city of London and was twice lord mayor of the metropolis before entering the House of Commons. He had fathered at least thirty children, but William was his only legitimate child and his sole heir.
Clearly, young William's life was one of privilege. When he was baptized in the parish church at Fonthill Gifford near the family estate on September 29, 1760, the younger Beckford was surrounded by the best society in England: William Pitt the Elder, a close friend of his father, was the godfather, and William Pitt the Younger, later prime minister and distinguished statesman, was his playmate. And since young William's aunt Effingham was the chambermaid at St. James's palace, the boy had many occasions to meet King George III and to familiarize himself with the inner workings of the court. More significantly, Beckford's education and life experiences were deliberately programmed to actualize many of the theories about manners, culture, and taste that were circulating in Britain at the time. The family estate had a memorable gateway, which was apparently designed by Inigo Jones, one of the most prominent British architects of the period, while Fonthill Splendens, the family home, was described as “one of the most princely edifices in the kingdom” and “a magnificent seat surrounded by an extensive park, landscape gardens, and grottoes.”86
Young William's first drawing lessons were supposedly conducted by Sir William Chambers, founder of the Royal Society of Architects and drawing master for George III when he was Prince of Wales. It is even said that when a young music genius named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart passed through England in 1765, William Beckford, then five years old, had a chance to play a tune or two for the child prodigy from Salzburg. Indeed, Beckford would die insisting that he was the one who produced “Non più andrai,” the famous aria in The Marriage of Figaro. In addition to such encounters, which constituted an important part in his aesthetic education, Beckford's mother had imported a tutor from St. Andrews, a prestigious Scottish university, just to be sure that her son's education in the way of beautiful things was balanced by proper instruction in morals and religion.
A few more details need to be added to this portrait of Beckford as the quintessential eighteenth-century subject of taste before exploring the anxieties that were attendant to white self-fashioning in the age of slavery. As I showed in the last chapter, one's subjectivity during this period was not simply fulfilled by living the life of the aesthete; in the emergent bourgeois culture, the presencing of virtue and rank depended on portraiture, “considered as the public commemoration of greatness” and “the clearest possible indications of rank.”87 Toward this end, the alderman made sure that his son had the best portraiture money could buy: young Beckford's first portrait at the age of six was painted by Andrea Casali, the one at eight or nine was done by either William House or Nathaniel Dance, with further portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Romney at the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two, and by John Hoppner at forty (fig. 3.10).
As was to be expected of a wealthy gentleman of the time, William Beckford considered the grand European tour to be at the heart of what it meant to be cultured. He seemed to have subscribed to Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictum that “A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.”88 For Beckford, the grand tour, like many of his other cultural activities, was an indispensable form of self-fashioning as a member of the English cultural elite. Indeed, his encounters with Italy were posited as nothing less than a mark of cultural arrival, part of an elaborate scheme in which the subject would inscribe himself into the center of European social and artistic life. On his second grand tour, in May 1782, for example, Beckford made his way through the Low Countries in such glamour and splendor that he was mistaken for European royalty: “His equipage was so splendid and the speed of his progress so great that many people, including greedy innkeepers, believed he was the Emperor of Austria travelling incognito.”89 And Beckford seemed to have been eager to follow the rituals of the grand tour to the letter. As the diaries he kept and the letters he wrote at the time attest, his journey through the European landscape was seen as a salient way to construct a character and genealogy for himself, settling the questions about cultural pedigree that had plagued his father before him, a man who had been mocked for his Creole identity and Jamaican accent.
3.10 John Hoppner, William Beckford, ca. 1800.
In a set of gestures that in retrospect seem far removed from the sugar cane plantations of Jamaica, Beckford adopted the European landscape as purely aesthetic. His stopping points on the grand tours—Italy, Switzerland, France, and Portugal—were often conceived as a way of cultivating the sublime and as “a prerequisite for the development of the aesthetic palette.”90 Beckford's presentation of his arrival in Rome during his tour of 1782 is an example of what he considered to be the sublimity of the European landscape, the terrain of his desire as the modern European subject of culture:
“When you gain the summit of yonder hill, you will discover Rome,” said one of the postillions: up we dragged; no city appeared. “From the next,” cried out a second; and so on, from height to height, did they amuse my expectations. I thought Rome fled before us, such was my impatience; till at last we perceived a cluster of hills, with green pastures on their summits, inclosed by thickets, and shaded by flourishing ilex. Here and there, a white house, built in the antique style, with open porticos, that received a faint gleam of the evening sun, just emerged from the clouds and tinting the meads below. Now domes and towers began to discover themselves in the valley, and St. Peter's to rise above the magnificent roofs of the Vatican.91
And in order to make a claim to belonging to this Europe of his imagination, Beckford went to great lengths to transform its landscape into a desirable aesthetic object:
Every step we advanced, the scene extended; till, winding suddenly round the hill, all Rome opened to our view.
A spring flowed opportunely into a marble cistern close by the way; two cypresses and a pine waved over it. I leaped out, poured water upon my hands, and then, lifting them up to the sylvan Genii of the place, implored their protection. I wished to have run wild in the fresh fields and copses above the Vatican, there to have remained till fauns might peep out of their concealments, and satyrs begin to touch their flutes in the twilight; for the place looks still so wondrous classical, that I can never persuade myself, either Constantine, Attila, or the Popes themselves, have chased them all away.92
Considered by other aristocrats to be a mere fad, Beckford conceived the grand tour as a forceful presentation of himself in the public sphere. Thus his second grand tour was meticulously plotted to rehearse and fulfill the
established rituals of travel in the late eighteenth century, to make certain that the traveler was unquestionably a person of culture and taste and was recognized as such by those who witnessed the procession. Beckford's itinerary, then, was canonical, following on the established routes of continent travel trodden by famous predecessors, but he also ensured that his sojourn through the Low Countries entered the public realm and was perceived as a prelude to his Italian apotheosis.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 18