In the United States, the impact of public policies has hindered African Americans, causing them to remain deprived and disadvantaged. Prejudice, discrimination, and inequality have contributed significantly to the persistence of poverty among African Americans. The literature and past research illustrate that not all Americans were treated equally, particularly in the labor, housing, and education markets, and it is not coincidental that minorities comprise a disproportionate number of the poverty population. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that white Americans have the lowest poverty rates (8.6 percent), while African Americans have the highest poverty rates (17.1 percent). This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature on the causes and extent of persistent poverty among African Americans in the United States.

Political Approaches/Explanations to Understanding Poverty

Richard Roper's book, Persistent Poverty: The American Dream Turned Nightmare, provides an understanding of what constitutes poverty, what it means to be poor, and how extensive poverty actually is in the United States. Richard Roper provides a thorough investigation of the factors contributing to poverty; which include the lack of affordable housing, low-paying jobs, deindustrialization, and irregular employment for African Americans. He provides insight into the fact that many impoverished people draw regular paychecks and are gainfully employed, but neither their compensation nor their political or economic circumstances can pull them above the poverty line, creating victims of poverty. According to Roper, social welfare programs that were designed to serve the poor have been significantly reduced, destroying the safety net for the poorest Americans.

In an array of previous studies, researchers have argued that there are two political approaches to understanding the causes of poverty, each of which provides distinct types of information. Richard Roper focused on two schools of thought that formed the foundation for most political responses and non-responses to the problem of poverty. The first approach is blaming the victim/individual and the second approach is blaming the system. Roper views poverty as an institutional cause, not as an individual's failure. In the first approach, blaming the victim, he argued that there are two issues that generate controversy: its scientific validity and its ideological role.

The history of how the terrors of Scandinavia became a recognisable reference in British literary Gothic production has lacked focused attention from critics. Therefore, the purpose of the present book has been to analyse how mythology and superstition from Nordic/Scandinavian sources were utilised to provide a new archive of terror. That much of the material was sourced from or inspired by authentic texts raises important questions about how cultural appropriation and dialogue with the past shape literary traditions, and how ideas, themes and motifs travel across borders and time periods to shape the artistic and intellectual landscape in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. I offer my findings as a contribution to the understanding of cultural and literary reinvigoration in the period.

Before the emergence of Gothic literature as a fashionable mode of writing, the idea of Britain as part of an ethno-Gothic cultural zone already played a significant role in history writing. The Norse tradition held the most comprehensive archive of pre-Christian beliefs associated with this tradition, followed by the remnants of superstition and the fairy ways recorded in folk ballads. This notion of cultural legacy was reinforced by the fact that the British Isles had been comprehensively settled by Scandinavians – the meaning of which was in the process of being reinterpreted for British culture. It has been a key argument throughout that what became recognised as ‘Scandinavian’ terror was more than just substituting one abject ‘Other’ for another. While British writers could gloat at the wayward phantasms and delusions, as they could with, for example, Catholic excesses, Scandinavian texts and practices were accepted as a window to the pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic/Germanic ancestors, which included the Anglo-Saxons. As a cultural response to the Celtic Ossian poems, ancient Scandinavian poetry was seen not primarily as a flirtation with foreign ideas but as a recovery of a native voice.

I have proposed that an important catalyst for promoting Norse terror was the response it was believed to provide to the more sentimental Ossian literature, which became a sensation in the 1760s. Norse terror was an intervention favouring what was promoted as a daring and masculine ethno-Gothic heritage.

Appendix 5: ‘Humboldt’ in References and Footnotes For The Excursions (1825)

The Height of the Dry Season, ‘Bathurst’, The Gambia, 1824.

I see her now! She's on the quayside, waiting to board. Tugging her hand is her youngest of nearly two, Eugenia Keir, wanting up into her mother's arms. Running around her bags and skirts despite the shimmering heat is her elder daughter, Tedlie Hutchison – named after her father's closest friends on his expedition to Ashantee (Asante) – and her son, Edward Hope Smith (after his great-uncle). Or so Tedlie told me, as part of her vaguely-remembered long sea journey in the summer of 1822. She was not yet three, and her brother was only six months old when the family had travelled from Paris to Le Havre, to board a ship bound for Lisbon. Once there, her parents had set out immediately to examine the local rocks, plants and animals. Then another big ship had taken them to Madeira. How seasick little Edward and she had been! She chattered about bougainvillea, banana and other trees they played amongst in the garden of their home for more than a year in Funchal, near the English Church and the houses of Mr Veitch the British Consul General, and of Mr and Mrs Keir, who had taken such an interest in her parents’ work. That was before the family set sail again last August, with Eugenia the new baby this time. When their ship reached Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, little Edward thought they had reached ‘Africa’ at last, only to learn that a further sea journey lay ahead to the Gambia, to the settlement the English called Bathurst (Banjul). They’ve been lodging here since November at Captain Findlay's residence at Government House, not far from the British garrison buildings, and the new hospital on St Mary's Island. Even Edward's little legs take him quickly to the long sandy Atlantic shore, dotted with its small fishing boats.

It's Captain Findlay talking to their mother, Mrs Sarah. She's the only English lady on the bustling quay, her dark dress and beribboned hat immediately standing out against the colourful melee of European and Gambian traders, including my many female compatriots in their finery, busy bartering, exchanging goods and instructing the porters in several languages.

The seeming hiatus of 12 years between Sarah's publication of Stories from Strange Lands (1835) and her first novel, The African Wanderers (1847), raises the stakes for the ‘continuance […] to completion’ (EM, inside title page) of her book-length ventures in expert natural history. Indeed the leanest period of their production, which Chapter 7 addresses, falls between final numbers for The Fresh-Water Fishes in 1838–1839 and Elements of Natural History (1844). The Introduction clarified how Sarah's regular publication of Gift Book stories from 1824 supported her family and new work in natural history to book-length result. Yet the marked change in this pattern is 1845 (see Appendix 1), between the Stories in 1835 and her first novel in 1847, and despite the former collection clearly and variously inspiring important episodes in the latter, as outlined below. Sarah had no further need of supporting Gift Book stories when, as Silke Strickrodt first contended, The African Wanderers was ‘one of the first novels in the English language, which is set in West Africa’, making its study part of the necessary redress of the ‘minimal attention so far paid to Sarah in the literature of English and African Studies’. Since Strickrodt did not elaborate further, this chapter investigates how The African Wanderers not only meets, but also exceeds these claims for it through its differently ‘equinoctial’ Humboldtian inspirations geographically and generically than were either the Excursions or the Stories from Strange Lands as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Of particular salience for Sarah's new departures in The African Wanderers in this chapter were the historical contexts that framed the writing of her first novel in 1847 and its immediate reception. Indeed as Chapter 3 disclosed for her Memoirs, the indicative lenses of an extensive initial review of The African Wanderers in 1848 provide similarly invaluable insights for how to read this novel in its own terms today, and within Sarah's multi-genre scientific corpus in the final decade of its major book-length production(s). Her reputation as a major writer of natural history was not in question. Rather the snapshot review of The African Wanderers in 1848 as ‘literature’ spearheads how this chapter differently argues for the work's ‘refit’ of natural history-making for Sarah's larger purposes.

Thomas B. Aveling Esq.

Robert Barclay, Esq

R. Bland, Esq.

Mrs Branthwayte,

Messrs Calkin and Budd

J. G. Children,

E. Cooper Esq.

Alex. Copeland Esq.

R. Davies Esq.

Edward Downes, Esq.

Mrs Erskine

Dr. Franck

H. Gamble Esq.

Hudson Gurney Esq

Revd. Barnard Hanbury

F.W. Herschel,

C. Hodgson Esq

Mrs Holland

J. Hudson, Esq

J. Marryat, Esq M.P

George Marryat

Mrs Marryat

Miss Marryat

R. Murchison, Esq

J. Murray, Esq.

Gerard Ralston Esq.

Rev Oliver Raymond

J. Rump, Esq

W. Sturt, Esq

Charles Tennant, Esq.

Thomas Tooke Esq.

Miss Tooke

Miss Waddington

George Waddington

Charles Webber Esq,

Dr Williams

Duke of Sussex

Duke of Devonshire

Marquess of Lansdowne

Earl Gower

Baroness Grey d Ruthyn

Sir Humphry Davy

Notes to ‘Adumissa’

(a) Note 31

I have seen many of these anniversaries, both on Adumissa's account and that of others; and nothing can be more stunning or distressing than their noise, except, indeed, that made at the funeral itself. My ears were generally saluted at sunrise by a discharge of muskets […] About ten o’clock the procession usually started from the house of the deceased, the body in its own basket or palanquin […] the bearers being painted in all the grotesque fashion that could be devised. […] all screamed to the sound of the most barbarous instruments […] and, by night, some were so tired, and others so intoxicated with the rum and fermented palm wine […] that unable to stand, they laid down, kicked and roared. I used to dread giving permission to any of my servants to assist at these ceremonies, for they were generally unable to speak, or even move, for a week […] The victims, generally bulls or cows […] accompanied by the priests and slaughterers with large knives, formed a part of the parade, and being killed in the evening, were then dealt out to the hungry mob. Where the English forts stood, thank God! these victims were confined to quadrupeds, with very few exceptions; but, in the interior, hundreds of men and women are butchered on these occasions. Many, however, were the attempts even of the natives on the coast to preserve this ancient custom, but nothing but the exceeding energy and firmness of Mr Hope Smith (Mr Bowdich's uncle), succeeded in wholly putting a stop to this horrible practice under the walls of our fortresses. I was in the country only for three weeks, and was then residing in the fort of Annamaboo; I heard a most unusual noise, and running to the ramparts wit overlooked the town, […] immediately sunder me I saw some people dragging the headless trunk of a female, which they were going to throw into the sea; her head had been cut off at the grave of her master, and buried with him. Horror-struck, I flew to Mr Hope Smith […] and he instantly summoned the authorities of the town, threatening to fire the heavy cannon […] if they immolated any more victims.

Mr. S Pether was our leading counsel and guide in regard to the fine art departments of drawing and engraving the fishes, which Sir John, at first, estimated at thirty, but when the list came to be made, we found only the following:—British fresh water fishes: 1. pike; 2. perch; 3. carp; 4. tench; 5. trout; 6. barbel; 7. grayling; 8., gwynnard, in Bala Pool, North Wales; 9. char, in Windermere; 10. chub; 11. bream; 12. roach; 13. dace; 14. pope; 15. bleak;

The cherished plan of a publication between Sir J. Leicester and I was thus announced:—

The idea was more specifically developed in the annexed suggestions in the handwriting of my respected coadjutor.

16. eel; 17. gudgeon; 18. loach; 19., minnow; 20. miller's thumb; 21. stickleback: river fish: 1. salmon; 2. smelt; 3. flounder; 4. lamprey eel, in the Severn.—Total 25.

The cost of the drawings and engravings was estimated at 200 guineas, of which the moiety was to be paid for the former by Sir John, and the second hundred for the engravings, to be repaid by the publication if it succeeded, any surplus to be mine. There was to be a popular octavo edition, after the quarto, with wood-cuts, as in Salter and Walton; when I got assent to the corporeal introduction of my small-fry friends, the minnows, sticklebacks, loaches and miller's thumbs. The plates were to be about the size of those in old Albin's “History of Esculent Fishes,” 1794; and we had a bream executed as a specimen by Mr. Clarke, recommended by Pether.

Appendix 8: Named Expert Scientific Sources in The Elements (1844)

Appendix 9: Named Expert Provenance For Anecdotes of Animals (1852)

Appendix 7: West African Travel Accounts Informing The African Wanderers (1847)

When the Bowdichs set out from Madeira for Sierra Leone via the Gambia in 1822, European scientific knowledge of its flora and fauna was sparse and hence highly sought after. Anna Maria Falconbridge's journal account of 1794, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone during the Years 1791-2-3 […], offers rare insights into what travelogues term the ‘habits and customs’ of the colony and its hinterlands. Posterity places this widow of a surgeon to slaving ships firmly on the side of anti-abolition. Her descriptions provide incidental glimpses, however, of generic species of flora and fauna that also testify to the necessarily piecemeal work of European science in Sierra Leone and the wider West African region:

By contrast, the Bowdichs envisaged their independently-funded scientific exploration of Sierra Leone from Freetown as a primary endeavour, markedly different from economic, commercial, educational or religious civilising mission, and from colonial ‘garden’ and acclimatisation projects above. Their four-year training under Cuvier, Humboldt and others at the Paris Muséum therefore included their published translation of the most recent travel accounts to West Africa, such as Gaspard Mollien's Travels in the Interior of Africa (see Appendix 1A). It augmented their knowledge of the region accrued from their own earlier sojourn and account of the ‘habits and customs’ of Ghana and the Gabon in T. Edward Bowdich's Mission to Ashantee (1819), to confirm where they could fill the missing gaps in scientific knowledge ahead of departure for Sierra Leone.

In ‘canvassing Cuvier’ and ‘harnessing Humboldt’, Sarah's remarkable book-length pub-lications from 1825 have clearly demonstrated in chapter studies thus far how she crea-tively developed their different (world-leading) expertise and parallel scientific priorities – in the Muséum; in the intercontinental field respectively – for optimal contribution to leading natural history endeavour outside its many bars to women on both sides of the Channel. The leanest period for her scientific contributions after the last numbers of the Fresh-Water Fishes (1838–1839) and publication of Elements of Natural History (1844) then starkly stands out. It coincided with the final illness and death of Sarah's mother as Donald deB. Beaver has clarified, but his DNB entry cannot then explain how she ‘entered on her most prolific period of writing […] (both fiction and non-fiction), for both children and adults’. Sarah's natural history expedition ‘in forty-four British Fishes’ (Chapter 2) had no (commissioned) field project at home to replace it. How was her new work in natural history after 1839 inspired and fostered by experts and leading peer communities as the constant benchmark for her contributions since 1825?

Chapters in this final part address both the ‘gap’ that is 1839–1844 and its pivotal impor-tance for the ‘most prolific’ last decade of Sarah's work(s) in natural history. The enduring significance of both Cuvier and Humboldt as her ‘French’ mentors and models lay also in their common cause for world natural history-making, namely to enhance its under-standing in two interconnecting ways. First was their unwavering commitment to science pedagogy and wider public dissemination of new scientific knowledge, in order to inspire newcomers besides informing experts. Among Cuvier's many functions as the Chair in Comparative Anatomy at the Paris Muséum were his public lectures and demonstrations, with women in these audiences. His famed reconstructions of extinct fossil creatures from a single tooth or bone that demonstrated his new classifications of vertebrate life forms were one with his curation of the Galleries of Comparative Anatomy and Palaeontology for expert and general public understanding. In the second part of her Memoirs, Sarah had accounted for his ‘pedagogical’ publications (also listed in its bibliography of Cuvier's many works) as summed up in the ‘Tableau Elémentaire, and the two editions of the Règne Animal, as different stages of the same work, and, with the Fossil Remains, and Natural History of Fishes, as the results of his discoveries in comparative anatomy.

The introduction drew attention to the visibly minor place of the Gambia on the inside title page of the Excursions, as ‘supplementary, separated, accidental, niche, unimportant […] in its interest’ (p. 17). Indeed, the full title of the work (EM, EMFr) lists the Gambia almost as an afterthought, like the similar place it occupied in Sarah's explanatory preface:

As noted in the introduction (p.15), Sarah produced her sole-authored publications in natural history from 1824 at several Camden addresses in close proximity. Her consistent geographical and intellectual vicinity also to London natural science collections and societies was among the ironies of women's lack of presence within them. As explored in the earlier chapters, the scientific authority, resourcing and substance of Sarah's work was manifestly empowered by her French mentors and Paris Muséum connections. Yet to situate the story of her publications from the 1840s onwards always outside the activity of London science creates a history ‘from below’, or from ‘outside’ that occludes where and how Sarah's work maintained and developed its pioneering edge concomitantly within British and London scientific contexts. Her Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (1833) was indicative of her acknowledged place between its bars. Her Fresh Water Fishes of Great Britain also acknowledged in William Yarrell (1784–1856) an expert British, London-based contemporary in natural history similarly working outside ‘gentleman science’. This chapter therefore turns to the multiple evidence for Sarah's expert knowledge of, and contributions to, specifically London-based British natural history as the locus of her more interestingly concentric command of its fields.

Sarah's single-sentence dedication of the first edition of her Elements of Natural History to ‘Richard Owen Esq. F. R. S. Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons’ is therefore key to resituating her larger place, and hitherto invisible contributions, at the epicentres of British and London natural science pursuit. By 1844, Owen's reputation and publications as the ‘English Cuvier’ were clearly established through his major publication on ‘the Pearly Nautilus’ (1832), and his 1837 Hunterian annual lecture series for informed general publics on comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. In consequence, Sarah's concise dedication calls for a major rereading:

When Tedlie Hutchison Hale wrote to The Field on 14 January 1888 to keep her mother's ‘venerable name from oblivion’ as the author of the ‘rare’ Fresh-Water Fishes discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 56), she was also correcting the initial correspondent's larger assumption: a woman's could not have been the pen (or pencil) of a work on Fishes/of science. Sarah's ‘venerable name’ was therefore doubly important to Tedlie, both as distinct from her father's and with regard to ‘Cuvier’. In the next sentence of her letter, she supplied even rarer report of her late mother's own views on her contributions to natural history: ‘The work by which my mother most wished to be remembered was her “Memoir (sic) of Cuvier,” published by Longman, now, unfortunately, out of print.’ In light of Chapters 1 and 2, Sarah's ‘Rare Book’ needs no linking to Cuvier. Her Memoirs of Baron Cuvier was no lesser a rarity, however, whether in 1833, 1888 or when digitisation restored it to open access to its original plural readerships, including ‘experts’ thanks to its modern University Press reedition. As a book ‘of enduring scholarly value’ in the Cambridge Library Collection's electronic reprint of 2014, this ‘biography […] remained the authoritative work in English on the most distinguished scientist of the age’. Almost more importantly in its day and today, Sarah's work appeared within a year of Cuvier's death in 1833 in three different imprints with major French, United States and English presses recorded in Appendix A. Why had the now open access Memoirs of Baron Cuvier/Mémoires du Baron Georges Cuvier not attracted more than footnote interest in twenty-first century studies of Cuvier in French and English? To right the potentially larger omissions concerning the French edition for French history of science and scientific biography, my first reappraisal in 2020 of the unprecedented ‘Mistress Lee’ on its cover put the case for the work's singular importance. Rare was the woman (in France) penning science in 1833 or the (first) biography of an eminent French ‘savant’ (man of science) such as Cuvier; even rarer that she was British. Rarest of all, was Sarah's skilful reattribution to Cuvier in her Memoirs/Mémoires of the very paradigm that he had perfected in respect of other major ‘savants’ (m. pl), the Éloge scientifique (official encomium by a peer to the eminent life and major scientific accomplishments of the deceased).

The first chapter revealed the magnitude of Sarah's foundational contributions to knowledge and naming of West African natural history new to European science in the Excursions (EM; EMFr). The publication of her achievements under her own name on both sides of the Channel also set her pioneering work in the field at the forefront of the new specialist Paris Muséum discipline of world ichthyology, alongside botany, ornithology and malacology. The imprimatur of both Cuvier and Humboldt on the 1826 edition only further affirmed Sarah's applications of their highest scientific standards for the period. The Excursions are then the more towering in their testimony to her overcoming of almost insurmountable personal and scientific loss. If her husband-‘instructor’ (EM, 173) in scientific field exploration overseas and her fish specimens were irreplaceable, the published text more clearly exposed Sarah's own irreplaceable independent scientific acumen. The strengths of her earlier self-determinations in natural history addressed in the introduction (pp. 14–15) and glimpsed in Chapter 1 in her preparation in 1824–1825 of the Excursions using Paris Muséum resources (p. 34) had once again overcome her untimely personal, financial and scientific straits. In little more than one year after her return to London, the proceeds of the Excursions could repay her ‘sympathizers’ and further support her family. But the same dilemma that Sarah faced in 1824 confronted her anew. How could she continue her independent work in natural history as a widow with three young children to support?

Sarah's solution was simple, because unwavering in her remarkable ‘continuance of the voyage’ of natural history endeavour in the words of the inside title page of the Excursions (Figure 0.1 and Figure 1.1). Her resolve also crystallised its larger venture. Her inventive and pragmatic new departure in 1824 was to make London (Britain) the ‘overseas’ for her ongoing French natural history work. Sarah was already employed in Banks's Library as Cuvier's aide naturaliste in all but name, to verify fish drawings for his Histoire naturelle des poissons, as his peer in French ichthyology. As a Briton and a woman in its domain, she was also unprecedented among its Muséum experts and overseas ‘correspondents’. To invert gain (London) for loss (Paris, the Gambia/Sierra Leone) in this way was also an entrepreneurial, creative and strategic move for a nonconformist widow making her living by her pen and pencil in Britain in 1826.

As the introduction outlined and contra Donald deB. Beaver, Sarah resourced both her young family and her continuing work in natural history after 1824 by publishing original stories commissioned by Rudolph Ackermann's Forget Me Not and Thomas Pringle's Friendship's Offering (see Appendix 1), the two most important of Britain's new Gift Books. At first sight her Stories of Strange Lands and Fragments From the Notes of a Traveller in 1835 was therefore little more than a money-spinning reprint. Its collection of ten of the ‘Stories’ and four ‘Fragments’ in the above-named Gift Books even adhered to the chronology from 1826 to 1833 of their first appearance. Indeed Sarah's prefatory rationale for the 1835 collection specified that ‘[m]any fruitless enquiries have been made for them, as the first are out of print; and many questions asked, and explanations demanded, by those who have read them; and to satisfy all, I have gathered them together, and added such notes and remarks as would tend to their elucidation’ (SSL, xiii). Yet several had been reprinted in this period, often in the first volume of newcomer reviews in the burgeoning print market discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 53–54). ‘Story VI, Samba’, and ‘Fragment V, The Voyage Home’, are not traceable to them, however. Rather Edward Moxon, a new entrant publisher of major writers and poets including Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), saw the reputational gains precisely in ‘reissuing’ Sarah's already-published ‘West African’ stories and fragments’ for what they ‘added’ not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. The entirely new West African material of ‘Story VI’ and ‘Fragment V’ included their strikingly choric ‘Notes to Ditto’ also figuring for those preceding them on the contents page placed, unusually, at the end of the volume. In effect, the original Gift Book version in each case saw supplementation by at least a further third through its respective ‘Notes’. These also concealed five interleaved plates, to which chapter 7 returns, unmentioned on the inside title page. Their descriptions are again found only at volume end in the table of contents. Moxon's edition of the Stories of Strange Lands therefore aligned with the original Gift Book format with selected illustrations, by now including Sarah's own as integral to its new material.