Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes of the West Indies

"Yes, well, this is a tremendous book. He was someone a little bit like Lady Nugent, although he’s more fiercely anti-slavery than she is. What I love about Matthew Lewis is that you see in his journal entries this incredible strain of British Gothic running through. Perhaps one should call it Jamaican Gothic because a lot of British accounts of the island are inflected with these gothic conventions. And Lewis is very much saturated in all that. So, from a literary point of view it’s fascinating. But from a political point of view it’s even more interesting. Lewis’s father owned an estate to the east of the island, and in his first visit to Jamaica in 1818 Lewis expected it to be this perfect paradise. Instead he found it a perfect hell. He found that the overseer had created his own private kingdom, like a Kurtz figure out of Heart of Darkness , subjecting his slaves to this appalling white man’s violence. Lewis made, I think, two more trips to Jamaica during the last three years of his life, and this journal was published 16 years after his death. I’ve read his gothic novels ( The Monk is the most famous), and I don’t think anything else he wrote is half as good as the Jamaican journal he kept between 1815 and 1818."