Shining a Light on Leicester's Spirited Crusader

Pukaar magazine

Author Jocelyn Robson featured in The Guardian

The Guardian

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I had never heard of Elizabeth Heyrick before and was engaged with her story, it was really well written and enjoyed the historical research going through this. Jocelyn Robson has a great writing style and can't wait for more from them.

NetGalley, Kathryn McLeer

One of the more striking aspects of Jocelyn’s Robson’s ground breaking and absorbing book is that, having read it, one feels, despite being largely erased from history, that one has begun to know Elizabeth Heyrick, not just as a campaigner but as a complex and courageous woman. The story of ‘Our Elizabeth’, as she is often referred to within the book, is vividly brought to life by Jocelyn Robson through her meticulous research into family archives, diaries and letters which highlight Elizabeth’s personal circumstances: her religion, her family background, her early ‘toxic’ marriage, her ‘dark and serious disposition’. At the same time, her commitment to social justice reverberates through Jocelyn’s exposition of Elizabeth’s own words from her pamphlets which passionately expose not just the causes and beliefs that she held dear, but also the problems she identified, and the solutions she proposed.
The book is divided into chronological sections that chart both Elizabeth’s life and the history, politics and pressing social issues of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but in doing so this story resonates with contemporary significance. Although she was compelled to write anonymously since men at the time, including William Wilberforce, considered activism ‘unsuited to the female character’, this did not undermine Elizabeth’s bold condemnation of cruelty to animals, or her fierce denunciation of the 1824 Vagrant Act against which she argued with determined logic for more humane treatment of those labouring ‘for a scanty, wretched and precarious subsistence’, while vilifying a parliamentary act that ‘branded misfortune as a crime’. In fulminating against social injustice, Elizabeth was articulate in her criticism of a society where the rich ‘have never supported the poor but the poor have first supported them’, and dogmatic in her questioning of a laissez faire ‘spirit of trade’, while arguing in favour of trade unions and a minimum wage.
Elizabeth’s ardent commitment and clarity of vision are demonstrated just as fiercely in her stance on the abolition of slavery heralded by the title of this book. In highlighting her pamphlets on the subject, quoted in the struggle long after her death, Jocelyn Robson reveals the powerful and unacknowledged role of women in the condemnation not just of slavery but also of an exclusively male anti-slavery coalition which proposed only a ‘gradual abolition’ of the slave trade. Elizabeth was combative in her campaign and political in her strategy when she argued through her pamphlets for ‘immediate, not gradual abolition’. Recognising the powerful lobby and vested interests which opposed this, Elizabeth marshalled not just moral, ethical and religious argument, but also an economic justification by focusing on the subsidies given to West Indian sugar, without which it would fail to be competitive.
Elizabeth’s passionate activism: her fierce condemnation of slavery and of racism; her denunciation of profit over humanity; her advocacy for the poor and disempowered; her promotion of workers’ rights; of decency even in relation to animals situate her timeless humanity and fierce intelligence in a way that speaks across two centuries. Jocelyn Robson tells us that Elizabeth’s pamphlets ‘electrified the country’, there is little doubt that, in sharing Elizabeth Heyrick’s story in the way that she does, Jocelyn Robson’s book will electrify her readers.

Professor Emerita Ann Harris, The University of Huddersfield

Someone who fought against slavery, challenged the leaders of the abolitionist movement for not demanding its immediate end, demanded better conditions for workers and did all this as a woman in 19th century Britain deserves to be celebrated and remembered. Especially as what she fought against -- slavery and exploitation of workers -- remain problems even in our time. Jocelyn Robson has performed a valuable service in writing this biography of Elizabeth Heyrick and it deserves a wide readership.

Eric Lee

Dr Robson’s is the first biography of Elizabeth Heyrick, one of the group of women – many like her based in provincial cities - who made an impact on the campaign for the abolition of slavery during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Making use of some hitherto unavailable family sources, it tells how Heyrick, a Quaker based in Leicester, worked determinedly to shift the movement from the Wilberforce belief in ‘gradual’ to a demand for the ‘immediate’ abolition of the inhumane institution. Her particular contribution to the success of the campaign was as a writer; in the composition of pamphlets written with an uncompromising moral force and clarity the outstanding one of which, ‘Immediate not Gradual’, is reproduced in the book. This is a substantial and valuable addition to our knowledge of the movement – and of the life and times of one of its most important activists in her provincial setting; a moving and informative read enhanced by a number of particularly interesting illustrations.

Bill Bailey, Freelance Historian