The Trembling Hand
Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
Published on 31. July 2025
432 pages
978-0-241-99721-5 (ISBN)
Description
Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats - the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their work is associated with sublime passions, violent stormscapes and a questing search for the inner self. It is rarely associated with the racial politics of the transatlantic slave economy.
But these literary icons lived through a period when individual and collective resistance by Black people in Britain and her overseas colonies was making it increasingly difficult - and increasingly costly - to ignore their demands for freedom. A time when popular support for the abolition movement exploded across the country - and was met by a vehement, reactionary campaign from the establishment. A time when white supremacist ideologies were fomented to justify the abuse and exploitation of non-white 'races'. This cultural context is not immediately obvious in the canon of Romantic poetry. But that doesn't mean it's not there.
The Trembling Hand turns an urgent critical gaze onto six major Romantic authors, examining how their lives and works were entangled with the racist realities of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi pores over carefully preserved manuscripts, travels to the houses where these writers lived and died, examines the personal objects which survived them: a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair. Amid this archive, she searches for traces of Black figures whose lives crossed paths with the great Romantics. And she grapples with the opposing forces of reverence and horror as her fascination with literary relics collides with feelings of sorrow and rage.
But these literary icons lived through a period when individual and collective resistance by Black people in Britain and her overseas colonies was making it increasingly difficult - and increasingly costly - to ignore their demands for freedom. A time when popular support for the abolition movement exploded across the country - and was met by a vehement, reactionary campaign from the establishment. A time when white supremacist ideologies were fomented to justify the abuse and exploitation of non-white 'races'. This cultural context is not immediately obvious in the canon of Romantic poetry. But that doesn't mean it's not there.
The Trembling Hand turns an urgent critical gaze onto six major Romantic authors, examining how their lives and works were entangled with the racist realities of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi pores over carefully preserved manuscripts, travels to the houses where these writers lived and died, examines the personal objects which survived them: a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair. Amid this archive, she searches for traces of Black figures whose lives crossed paths with the great Romantics. And she grapples with the opposing forces of reverence and horror as her fascination with literary relics collides with feelings of sorrow and rage.
Reviews / Votes
Propelled by a voice that is urgent, exasperated and eager to share what it knows... Her account of Byron shows why she wrote this book, and also her ability to argue with herself, to dramatize her own doubts. That's a rare gift for any critic... [Her] passion, and [her] learning, ensure that one will never look at these poets in quite the same way * The New York Times * Powerful, revelatory... Mathelinda Nabugodi performs what she calls "an act of historical recovery," re-examining British Romanticism's beloved literary superstars through the debris they left behind... A masterpiece about how history is made, maintained, and remembered, while also including what history forgot - with trembling hands, she admits - and with power and ferocity * Boston Globe * Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter -- Colm Toibin, author of 'Long Island' An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics-and race * Kirkus Reviews * Mathelinda Nabugodi reveals the racial wounds behind the pristine face of British Romanticism. Her journey-part scholarly excavation, part personal pilgrimage-takes readers through abandoned archives and hallowed homes, where she confronts not just history but her own complex relationship with poets whose words shaped her life even as their era sought to erase people who looked like her... Nabugodi shows us how to hold two truths at once: beautiful craft and painful context, literary genius and racial violence. Her reckoning is a love letter written in disquiet, a map for those seeking the unvarnished truth of our literary inheritance, and a gift for anyone who values personal storytelling that illuminates our shared past -- Professor DJ Lee, author of 'Slavery and the Romantic Imagination' A viscerally bold, challenging and often uncomfortable study of our major British Romantic writers. Based on extensive archival research and highly sensitive to the lived experience of Black people, their real but often effaced or distorted presence in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain, this study will redefine our understanding of British Romanticism and its troubled relationship to slavery and colonial for years to come -- Peter Kitson, author of 'Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter' The Trembling Hand offers a crucial corrective to the ways in which Romanticism has often been taught and positioned in British culture, confronting the aspects of Romanticism that have been hidden amidst the shared cultural project to make Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and the Shelleys into British national treasures. Nabugodi unearths new contexts for the study of Romanticism and also considers the ethical debates and dilemmas surrounding some of the most well-known poems in the period -- Dr Amelia Worsley, co-editor of 'Romanticism, Abolition and Anti-Slavery Literatures' With intellect, precision and empathy, Mathelinda Nabugodi speaks to the shadows hovering at the archive's edges, the presences that most have ignored. These presences are those Africans who travelled alongside Europeans, affecting - and creating - history. We needed Nabugodi's courage in writing this history: Now, we do see and we do hear - and may the ancestors be pleased -- Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, author of 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois' The Trembling Hand is an unflinching account of the racist cruelty and nonsense regurgitated by canonical Romantic poets alongside their greatest poetry. Interweaving archive encounters, biography and haptically close reading, Mathelinda Nabugodi shares searingly personal experiences of hate and love, the taste of words and the feel of paper. It is a strong and moving work of resistance that has changed how I see Romanticism -- Prof. Jane Stabler, author of 'Byron Poetics and History' Ferociously intelligent, lyrical, and true, The Trembling Hand is a hero's journey through the beauty of poetry and the nightmare of history-and sometimes the other way around. Nabugodi has done something at once wholly original and utterly Romantic. This book marks the advent of a new criticism, or should -- Anahid Nersessian, author of 'Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse'More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
File size
1,15 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-241-99721-5 (9780241997215)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
approx. 07/2026
Penguin Books Ltd
€15.50
Not yet published
Book
07/2025
Hamish Hamilton Ltd
€25.00
Available immediately
Person
Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. Previously she was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she researched the literary archive of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a Research Associate in the Literary and Artistic Archive at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
She completed her doctorate at UCL, where she was the first person ever to be awarded a PhD in Creative Critical Writing by the university, for her thesis on Shelley and Walter Benjamin. She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic, and has edited Shelley's translations from Aeschylus, Calderon and Goethe for The Poems of Shelley, as well as the essay collection Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing.
The Trembling Hand is her first trade book. Its research was partly funded by a Whiting Creative Non-fiction Grant.
She completed her doctorate at UCL, where she was the first person ever to be awarded a PhD in Creative Critical Writing by the university, for her thesis on Shelley and Walter Benjamin. She is the author of Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic, and has edited Shelley's translations from Aeschylus, Calderon and Goethe for The Poems of Shelley, as well as the essay collection Thinking Through Relation: Encounters in Creative Critical Writing.
The Trembling Hand is her first trade book. Its research was partly funded by a Whiting Creative Non-fiction Grant.
