First pub­lished at "Bio­cul­ture Sem­i­nars", 24.02.2013

In 1850, married slaves Ellen and William Craft fled their owners in Georgia. After a period of hiding in Boston, the Crafts ultimately relocated in Great Britain, where they became celebrities on the speaking circuit. Why were these two fugitive slaves so appealing to the British public, who already read widely of slavery and slave escapes? In fact, the story of their escape was so daring and so destabilizing for conceptions of race and gender that crowds gathered just to see the Crafts in person. For they had escaped because Ellen Craft successfully passed as a white gentleman, and William posed as her black servant.

By now the story of the Crafts must be ringing certain bells for those of us who recently read The Mystery of Edwin Drood. This unfinished Dickens novel introduces us to two characters — Neville and Helena Landless — who appear to be in dialogue with the Crafts. Rather than a married couple, this fictional twin brother and sister are orphans from Ceylon, a former British colonial possession in modern-day Sri Lanka. Clearly racial others in the book, the dark-skinned Landless siblings are “both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed about them both . . . yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase.” Here the reference to the twins as “objects of the chase” recalls the figure of the Crafts and other fleeing slaves. Like the Crafts, the Landlesses are in what is, for them, apparently foreign land, and it seems that by their arrival in Cloisterham, at least, the chase is over.

Without ever resorting to a classification of the twins as native Ceylonese, Dickens’s descriptions make clear that the Landlesses are not white. Apart from the skin color, Neville is described as having “something of the tiger in his dark blood.” By bringing in the reference to the “tiger,” Neville’s racial status explicitly invokes the Eastern in a possible nod to his origins in Ceylon. Moreover, Edwin Drood taunts Neville by saying to him, “You may know a black common fellow, or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men.” Throughout this passage, it is evident that Drood regards Neville as not only non-white but also as unqualified to pass judgment on a white man.

Despite all of these descriptions of the Landlesses as racial others, nowhere is the comparison to the Crafts clearer than in their history of escape attempts. When Neville describes their past to Mr. Crisparkle, he notes Helena’s role in planning their flight: “Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man . . . I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off.” Like Ellen Craft, who passed for a white man, Helena Landless similarly tried to effect a gender transformation to aid in her own escape from the mistreatment that she and her brother faced as orphans. Since the Landlesses’ racial status is also in question, it seems possible that they were also passing for white as they made the transition to Cloisterham.

So what of the British interest in passing narratives (and slave narratives more generally), and why would this connection appear in this particular work? For one thing, the issue of passing frequently invokes the language of bloodlines — the same bloodlines that preoccupy so much Victorian fiction, in which title to property depends utterly on blood rights to inheritance and therefore estates. Indeed, even the name of Helena and Neville — Landless — evokes in Dickensian fashion their status as without land. This double entendre might refer to the fact that England is not “theirs” (they are from Ceylon) but also may be referring to their status as orphans. The inability to inherit would have left them landless, of course, and though slavery had been abolished in the United Kingdom in 1833, rights to own land rested instead largely on class.

These fraught bloodlines become particularly vexing for the Victorian imagination when phenotype mystifies either race or family resemblance in a way that one individual can “pass” for another. In this way, family lines, bloodlines, can be interrupted or cut off or, in another kind of mystification, phenotype and passing can reveal illegitimate children who resemble one parent but present as a racial other. Whether or not the Landlesses are actually re-animated versions of the Crafts is less important here. However, their appearance in the novel seems to be speaking to the same Victorian fascination and anxiety surrounding the instability of both race and gender.