The Charles Dickens of Jamaica

The chapter explores the life of Henry Garland Murray, the first black author of Creole literature in the English-speaking Caribbean. Murray was a popular performer of dialect sketches in post-Emancipation Jamaica who eventually published his dialect sketches in book form. The chapter discusses Murray’s travels to Panama and to Boston, where he performed at the famous Lyceum. It investigates the historical moment in the post-Emancipation Jamaica in which Murray authored his stories, particularly the nationalist bent of Jamaicans across racial lines who sought a “native literature” and identified Creole stories as the basis of that literature. It interprets the stories as balancing racist white nostalgia for slavery with an emergent literary nationalism.