From peasant to physician: Trotter’s poetic aspirations

Trotter’s place in the developing canon of eighteenth-century labouring-class poetry is yet to be properly established. This is likely a legacy of his own success: having been promoted in 1794 to ‘Physician to the Channel Naval Fleet’, Trotter’s background, his literary writing and his struggles for social and professional recognition have received far less attention than his medical achievements. That said, Vale and Edwards offer an overview of Trotter as an ‘amateur poet and dramatist in the British-Scots tradition’, situating his early verse amid ‘the emergence of rustic or peasant poets’ like Stephen Duck (pp. ix and 199). Trotter’s earliest verses would seem to support this contextualisation. Though excluded from Trotter’s late-life collections of verses, Sea Weeds (1829, p. viii), some fourteen of his early poems survive in print under the pseudonym ‘T.T. Melrosensis’, focusing on rural scenes and the beauty of his native Melrose; these were published in 1778 across several issues of Walter Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Advertiser, which invited contributions from young poets. Trotter’s entry into print was by no means guaranteed: some poems were evidently excluded by the editor, such as the ‘Mourning Shepherdess’ (Ruddiman, p. 48). Trotter was more successful with strategically timed odes to winter, spring and autumn, as well as churchyard poems, love poems and elegies.

These early poems offer some of the ‘private’ detail which is unfortunately absent from biographical treatments of Trotter, given the lack of a surviving diary or letters (Brockliss). Although Vale and Edwards do not discuss these poems, Trotter may have excluded them from Sea Weeds for the same reason that his ‘relatively humble origins […] needed to be concealed rather than celebrated’: this ‘reticence’ about revealing his social origins was ‘probably typical of men who achieved distinction in their chosen professions, but who lacked the wealth and aristocratic connections normally necessary for success in the late eighteenth century’ (Vale and Edwards, pp. 202–3). If Trotter was uncomfortable about disclosing his rustic origins (as the son of a village baker and, possibly, small-scale farmer),³ he may also have been concerned about his early poems’ incongruity with a career of patriotic naval service.⁴ Take the closing lines of his ‘Ode to Autumn’:

The pregnant grape its load resigns,

The goblet foams with mellow wines,

While Winter nips the flow’ry spray,

On Tweed’s steep banks they die away.

Ye banks that now I bid adieu,

To seek far hence some distant shore,

No more I strain the reed for you,

I go where Britain’s thunders roar.

Adieu! ye fields that nurs’d my days!

Ye banks that heard my youthful lays,

Farewell, fair Tweed, your streams and springs!

While harvest home the village rings.

Offering a poignant farewell to Melrose in view of his departure for the sea, where ‘Britain’s thunders roar’, this was the final poem Trotter published in Ruddiman’s magazine.

Trotter continued writing verse in the navy, with – perhaps unsurprisingly – a more patriotic tone: having completed his seasonal set with ‘Ode to Winter’ (published in January 1781 in the Westminster Magazine), he wrote rousing ballads like ‘The Origin of Grog’, just days before the Berwick’s engagement against the Dutch; when stationed in Deal, he wrote witty verses prompted by an incident at a musical entertainment, ‘presumably in order to make a name with the young ladies’ (Vale and Edwards, p. 46). This writing in low and high(er) registers neatly reflects Trotter’s rapid promotion through the warrant-officer class, becoming a full surgeon the following year. While Trotter has been compared to other physician or ‘psychologist poets’, such as the weaver-turned-physician Thomas Bakewell (Faubert, 2009, p. 10), perhaps a more pertinent category is writers ‘who worked at sea’, as recent bibliographical work indicates (Keegan, 2023, p. 270). The demands of a life spent working at sea (or stationed on shore) explains the insistently mobile and occasional nature of Trotter’s poetry; indeed, his ability to write ‘amid the hurry and incommodiousness of a seafaring life’ was admired by contemporaries (Beddoes, p. 46). Described in Sea Weeds as a means of ‘relaxing his mind’ from ‘human misery’ or ‘alleviat[ing] a pensive moment!’ (p. xxvii), the connection between his line of work and his poetry becomes even more profound. Ironically, this characteristic of his verse means Trotter compares poorly to Romantic-period poets of greater magnitude, as Vale and Edward’s description of him as an ‘amateur poet’ perhaps reflects. If the demands of work acted to compress his poetic compositions, this is also what makes his verses so interesting, being rare and insightful forms of imaginative expression produced within (and increasingly against) Trotter’s occupational commitment to British imperial dominion.

Censure and censorship: ‘Ladies Walk’ in a local and literary context

Trotter’s ‘Verses Written in the Ladies Walk at Liverpool, in January 1783’ is a case in point. Though a short poem, its six chain-rhymed quatrains achieve a great deal in a small space, representing an important early stage in the development of his anti-imperial stance (compare Harrison, ‘Albion’s coast is sick’, pp. 237–55). What is more, these lines were produced against a backdrop of broad social acceptance of slavery (in Liverpool) and a still broader glorification of British commerce, both of which Trotter confronts.

Trotter’s navigation of the difficulties of contesting slavery in the early 1780s becomes more visible when we consider his contemporaries. Thanks to Franca Dellarosa’s landmark study of Edward Rushton (1756–1814), a blind, former slave-ship sailor and poet, we are now aware that Liverpool produced some of the most vocal labouring-class critiques of slavery in this period – despite the chilling effect of the slaving interest there (2014, p. 17; pace Faubert, 2023, p. 140). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was those who had worked in (or adjacent to) this central sector of Liverpool’s economy, who issued some of the most radical expressions against slavery and empire. Rushton published his West-Indian Eclogues in 1787 and was followed by his friend and collaborator Hugh Mulligan (1746–1802) with Poems, Chiefly on Slavery and Oppression in 1788. This publication gathered together Mulligan’s ‘powerful cycle of eclogues’, two of which were first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in late 1783 and 1784 (Dellarosa, 2014, pp. 143, 146). Both poets were likely inspired by the ‘African Eclogues’ of the Bristol-born charity schoolboy and apprentice clerk, Thomas Chatterton (1753–70), who had creatively adapted the eclogue form to address slavery.

While the years 1787 and 1788 saw an explosion of antislavery verse in Britain and the formation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), in 1783 there were few precedents for poems which explicitly attacked Liverpool’s, or for that matter Britain’s, involvement in slavery. At this stage the only poem to shine a light on Liverpool’s role in slavery was William Roscoe’s anonymous Mount Pleasant (1777). As the title suggests, the poem seeks to venerate Liverpool. It begins by evoking the busy cityscape and docks, where ‘In loud confusion mingled sounds arise, | The docks re-echoing with the seamen’s cries’ (p. 9) and stresses Liverpool’s fame across ‘the wondering world’ (p. 12). This view of a global Liverpool is, however, soon upset by a twenty-two-line passage lambasting slavery, with an appeal to freedom not unlike Trotter’s: ‘Shame to Mankind! But shame to Britons most, | Who all the sweets of Liberty can boast’ (pp. 13–14). For this trampling of the rights of men, Roscoe blames avarice and the enervating power of ‘Luxury’; he laments that before ‘Foreign Climes’ were known, ‘Our drink, the beverage of th’ Chrystal flood, | [was] Not madly purchased by a Brother’s Blood’ (p. 15).

While the passage indicts slavery, however, it carefully avoids attacking Liverpool’s affluent classes, a moderation likely due to Roscoe’s aspirations in civic society. It should be remembered, too, that Roscoe continuously anonymised his antislavery verse, something common for abolitionists cautious about reprisals or impacting their business interests in Liverpool (Baggett, pp. 48–52). Roscoe was the son of a market gardener and a successful social climber, later achieving renown as a leading banker, lawyer, abolitionist and MP. Importantly, therefore, in Mount Pleasant, the only active agents of trade identified are those hard-working seamen and dockers handling the goods – elsewhere, the ‘bloated monster, Commerce’ (p. 16) is abstracted. Subsequently, the poem’s eye retreats from these cacophonous scenes and finds a surer footing in celebrating Liverpool as a ‘blest retreat’ of the Arts (p. 18). While to Roscoe slavery was no doubt a stain on the town’s reputation, his principal aim in Mount Pleasant was, as Roseanna Kettle argues, to temper Liverpool’s obsession with gain and to ‘reinvigorate [its] cultural status and to instate himself as a key figure in its cultural renewal’ (p. 75). In praising the architectural beauty and ‘social amenities’ on offer to the more privileged local populace, the poem thus ‘shows little interest in connecting these institutions to the sources of wealth upon which they are founded’ (p. 86).⁵

Trotter’s highly focused repudiation of slavery, by contrast, realises the hidden links between Liverpool’s civic assets and the outwardly violent and inwardly corrupting institution of slavery, targeting particularly those elites who benefited most from both. As mentioned above, the setting of ‘Ladies Walk’ foregrounds the intimate material connection between the port’s polite spaces and the scenes of slavery that it subsequently evokes. Stressing, ‘For thee the Negro, robb’d of Nature’s right, | Bleeds from the lash’, Trotter countermands the conventional dislocation of the profits of slavery from the means of their production. He also considers other ways in which this wealth was maintained by unequal distribution of risk and labour, asking of the ‘tyrant’ planter, ‘Did he for wealth e’er tempt the waves or wind?’ – as Trotter had, and thousands of young men like him, by going to work at sea. This builds into the fourth stanza, depicting intoxicated, punch-fuelled entertainments at the Town Hall and Exchange, as the ‘massy bowl | Pours riot staggering from a midnight flood’. Concluding ‘Each drop that glads the haughty owner’s soul, | Cost Afric’s sons a torrent of their blood!’, Trotter’s attack is far more personal and pointed than Roscoe’s, gothically presenting the consumption of colonial products as a kind of cannibalism.

While Trotter’s unsparing assault on Liverpool’s slave-based wealth distinguishes him from other poets in this period, his less overtly critical response to empire shares features with Rushton’s early verse. As mentioned above, Trotter’s evocation of the notion of ‘British freedom’ contributes a second strand to his antislavery argument. However, his tone suggests a degree of uncertainty about the well-trodden concept of freedom-bearing British ‘commerce’, which ‘blest the nations where she stretch’d her sail’. By situating this idea in a ‘golden age of yore’, he negates its present existence implicitly. A comparable displacement is visible in Rushton’s The Dismember’d Empire (1782), which, written towards the end of the American war, warns of the prospective demise of Britain in the face of colonial rebellion. As Dellarosa argues, at this stage in his poetic development Rushton was ‘fully entangled in a pro-imperial stance, and still unable either to question the parent-offspring logic of empire or articulate any unease regarding the practices of colonial economy and society, as founded on human enslavement’ (2014, p. 133). Indeed, in his brief depiction of the sugar islands’ abundance, he downplays the realities of slavery – a far cry from his sympathetic vindication, even encouragement, of slave rebellion in his 1787 West-Indian Eclogues (p. 76). That said, The Dismember’d Empire concludes unconventionally, imagining not Britain’s triumph but its ultimate ruination, which creates an uneasy sense that ‘all there is to reap from this relationship [with the colonies] is disconnection and loss’ (Kettle, p. 125). Comparing Rushton and Trotter’s 1782–3 verses therefore illuminates a shared strategy for encoding disquiet about British empire at this time. If Trotter implies the fictiveness of liberty-exporting British commerce by displacing it to a mythic past, Rushton reflects the fragility of Britain’s greatness by imagining its desolate future state.

Ironically, the very forthrightness of Trotter’s verses may explain their invisibility in scholarship today, being absent from all modern anthologies of British antislavery verse (Richardson, 1999; Basker, 2002; Wood, 2003). Though it is hard to be certain given the destruction of Liverpool’s newspaper archives (Clare, p. 101), it is highly unlikely that Trotter’s verses were published in 1783. The commercial and conservative leaning of the town made it very difficult for newspaper editors to accept contributions of a liberal or reforming nature, barring a brief interlude in 1788–92 (involving, as it happens, Rushton and Mulligan’s brief editorship of The Herald) before the onset of war with Revolutionary France (p. 118). Whether rejection, self-censorship or merely the demands of naval life prevented Trotter from publishing his verses during the 1780s, ‘Ladies Walk’ should nevertheless be recognised as an important example of early antislavery verse, and part of Liverpool’s ‘isolated undercurrent’ of antislavery (Dellarosa, 2005, p. 20).

Embedding antislavery: Trotter’s Observations on the Scurvy (1786)

Reading Trotter’s early verses in this way – as written against the tacit cultural acceptance of the business of slavery, into which he would himself subsequently be drawn – prompts us to think more carefully about the form that his antislavery activities took in the years following his voyage on the Brooks. The experience no doubt played an important role in shaping Trotter’s onward life and career. For one thing, it provided a far more direct, experiential dimension to his abhorrence of slavery, and to the slave trade specifically. However, to claim that ‘Trotter quitted the ship a dedicated abolitionist’ (Vale and Edwards, p. 57) risks glossing over the challenging contexts for antislavery expression in this period: though in 1790 Trotter would testify before the House of Commons Select Committee (and simultaneously publish ‘Ladies Walk’ in the European Magazine), in 1784 there was no centrally organised abolition movement to stand behind. There were pioneers like Granville Sharpe who had long battled slavery in the courts, but it would be another three years until SEAST was established; it was later still that former slave ship physicians and sailors, and the formerly enslaved, would be encouraged to recount their harrowing experiences of the trade (Falconbridge, 1788; Stanfield, 1788; Equiano, 1789). In the mid-1780s, by contrast, witness accounts of the Middle Passage were extremely rare. Those which did make it into print were elusive and brief, such as an anonymous 500-word ‘Report’ published in Anthony Benezet’s Short Account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes, and the Manner by which the Slave-Trade is Carried On (Philadelphia, 1762; London, 1768). This ‘searing denunciation’ has recently been attributed to John Newton (Coffey, p. 13) – a finding that challenges the traditional view of a late-life religious conversion inspiring Newton to reject slavery in 1788. Rather, as Coffey suggests, Newton had long been critical of slavery but withheld his name in the 1760s to avoid ‘antagonising powerful slaving interests in Liverpool’, where he was already struggling to gain ordination (p. 14).

If Trotter’s departure from Liverpool removed one repressive context for publicising his antislavery views, the conservatism of the naval establishment might still have made him, like Newton, wary of appearing as an ‘agitator […] against the iniquities of Britain’s imperial expansion’ (Coffey, p. 15). Promotion within the navy required the nurturing of patronage relations as well as the favour of the Admiralty Board (Vale and Edwards, p. 38), and owning his opposition to the slave trade would have put Trotter at odds with both. His principal patron was the retired vice-admiral Robert Roddam, a Northumbrian potentiate who was crucial in helping Trotter establish his ‘riding practice’ as a surgeon-apothecary in Wooler (p. 74). He also later ensured his return to the navy (and promotion) as surgeon of The Edgar in 1788. Though little is known of Roddam’s later views, receipts show he purchased several slaves in Jamaica in 1756 (Paplay). More generally, the navy was practically if not ideologically committed to the defence of British overseas territories and interests; colonial commerce was considered a ‘nursery for seamen’ – in other words, a training ground for sailors which ensured Britain could defend itself in wartime. As naval historians now concur, this ‘connection between colonial trade, naval strength and the preservation of national sovereignty […] made abolitionism appear dangerous’ (Petley, p. 107). It comes as little surprise therefore that the Admiralty was resistant to the nascent abolitionist cause: indeed, in 1783, they refused Sharpe’s plea to prosecute the crew of the Zong for the murder of 132 enslaved Africans, who had been thrown overboard when the ship was stranded at sea (Faubert, 2018).

At just twenty-four, Trotter was at the very beginning of his naval career. Consequently, the Admiralty’s general aversion to abolitionism seems an especially pertinent and persistent context for considering the nature of his subsequent antislavery activities. For one thing, this background may help to explain the unusual and unassuming form that his writing took on this topic. Trotter’s first publication after his return to the north-east was Observations on the Scurvy (1786), a medical study which drew on his experience at sea – including his 1783–4 voyage on the Brooks – as a novel source of evidence for the possible causes and treatments of the scurvy. While this practical, experiential approach was itself innovative (Vale and Edwards, p. 69), arguably most striking was Trotter’s arresting depiction of the conditions that the captive Africans faced, just a few pages in:

It will be proper to observe here, that these poor wretches are chained two and two by the wrists and ankles: such as are suspects of doing mischief, are likewise chained to the deck during the day. The rooms below are from five to six feet in height, according to the size of the ship; and besides the number that can lie on the deck, half as many lie on a platform that runs along each side of the ship, raised about two feet and a half from the floor, equal in breadth to the length of a man. Here they are stowed spoonways, as it is called, and so close locked in one anothers arms, that it is not possible to tread amongst them. (pp. 31–2)

Further depicting the lack of air and the intense heat of the ship’s hold, as well as the gruesome physiological details of the scurvy’s progress and Trotter’s activities in assisting the afflicted, the work offered a meticulously detailed, start-to-end account of a slaving voyage – preceding by some two years the ‘flurry of parliamentary (and abolitionist) activity’ to gather such evidence (Webster, p. 72).

Trotter, however, nowhere calls for abolition in his aptly titled Observations, nor rejects slavery as a practice (as he had previously done in ‘Ladies Walk’, where he asserted freedom as ‘Nature’s right’). In this instance he is far more circumspect, writing self-consciously as ‘A Surgeon of His Majesty’s Navy; and Member of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh’. Indeed, when he momentarily breaks from the narrative to offer a reflection on the psychological as much as physical torment of slavery, he conveys his opinion indirectly – through negation, not assertion:

I can by no means suppose the Negro feels no parting pang when he bids farewell to his country, his liberty, his friends, and all that is to be valued in existence. In the night they are often heard making a hideous moan. This happens when waking from sleep, after a dream that had presented to their imagination their home and friends. (pp. 37–8)

While understated, this is recognisably proto-abolitionist in its stress on the ‘exquisite sensibility’ (p. 38) of Africans,⁶ a capacity which was frequently denied in justifications of the trade (Gikandi, p. 221).

Focusing on effects rather than causes, however, Trotter stops short of any direct critical comment on the institution, the interests it served, or the government that supported it. More broadly, Trotter is careful to introduce the work by stating his patriotic commitment to Britain, stating that the work was written ‘in view of the naval and commercial interest of these realms’ (p. iv). In this practical vein, he also notes that ‘commercial interests’ would be served by reducing African deaths from the scurvy (p. 22), recommendations towards which he concludes with (pp. 103–4).

Occupying the authoritative, objective voice of a naval doctor, Trotter arguably balances the expectations placed upon him – his service of British interests – with an ulterior, proto-abolitionist motive. Carefully avoiding the outcry and anger of ‘Ladies Walk’, Trotter presents the facts of slavery in a way unloaded of explicit moral judgement. While we might justifiably assume that Trotter made this modulation with his career in mind, we might also consider that this refusal is what makes the text so effective in his contemporary context. He was no doubt aware that he was pushing at the boundaries of public knowledge and propriety. While some critics expressed a wish that Trotter had ‘treated the subject on the usual theoretical level’ (Vale and Edwards, p. 69), others had more profound problems: as the Critical Review concluded, ‘Mr. Trotter is well acquainted with his subject, and speaks from experience; but we are sorry to add, that his language is very exceptionable’. The reviewer is curiously silent as to what made Trotter’s ‘language’ so offensive. It is not difficult to imagine how discomforting the revelations he imported into the text were, however, exposing what had hitherto been kept out of sight and mind: the sheer brutality of the Middle Passage. In this respect, it is intriguing that the Brooks would be selected two years later – by two separate abolition committees – to illustrate the ‘regulated’ packing of ships (Webster, p. 153). Future research will hopefully tell us more about why the Brooks was chosen for illustration, and the part that Trotter’s 1786 account may have played in it.

Notes

1. 1.  The following issue included poems which had been written by Trotter in or after 1786, suggesting a possible pause in his compositions between 1783 and 1786.

2. 2.  The strikingly different trajectory of fellow Scot Sir Gilbert Blane is instructive in this regard, revealing the social and economic structures which assisted naval promotion. From a wealthy merchant family, Blane had the contacts and capital to establish a private practice in London and was awarded an honorary degree in 1778. By this route, he became the personal physician of Admiral Rodney and hence, within just a year, Physician to the Fleet (Rolleston, pp. 154–5).

3. 3.  Trotter’s father was apparently ‘a baker and portioner’ (my emphasis, Porter, p. 155) – in Scots law, an owner of a small plot of land (usually of a few acres) subdivided from a larger estate. Dictionary of the Scots Language, 2004. Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd. http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/portioner

4. 4.  Trotter may also have been mindful of critical expectations of marine poets. A contemporary review of Sea Weeds in the Athenaeum (pace Vale and Edwards, p. 208) was damning: ‘There is room for a magnificent and original volume of poetry on sea-subjects. We are sorry we cannot say that Dr. Trotter has fulfilled what might have been wished for’.

5. 5.  Roscoe would duly correct this evasion in his later and more critical, again anonymous, Wrongs of Africa (1787–8).

6. 6.  See ‘exquisite (adj.), sense 6’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2024: ‘Keenly sensitive to impressions; acutely susceptible of pain, pleasure, etc.; delicate, finely-strung’.

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