Buying Oroonoko in Salem

Abstract

This chapter maps the reception of John Hawkesworth’s theatrical adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1760s, explaining how the literary representation of what Ramesh Mallipeddi calls the enslaved person’s “spectacular suffering” shaped both anti-slavery sentiment and the appropriation of that sentiment by Anglo-American patriots complaining of being enslaved by Britain. It situates this contextualization within the central space of reading in the city, the Salem Social Library, a proprietary subscription library founded by men made wealthy by the slave trade and related enterprises like fish, sugar, molasses, and rum distilling. The reading habits of these men are mapped by reference to the library’s surviving 1760s circulation ledger. Methodologically, it argues that sequential borrowings of volumes of a title, and the velocity of their circulation to members, should count as evidence of the reception of works. It also discusses Massachusetts patriot and abolitionist activity in the 1760s.