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So I'm reading The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies, by Matthew Parker, about which there will be much more when I finish.
But it reminded me of a small thing that niggles me whenever I re-read Georgette Heyer's Venetia.
The young would-be romantic rival of the neighborhood, whose name escapes me as names often do, at one point mutters darkly to Venetia about how he's "seen things" in the world, due to his recent travels in the Caribbean.
He's sort of an unpleasant character in the story - brash, pushing kisses where they're not wanted, challenging the hero to a duel for no good reason, etc. But I always pity him. He's 17 or so. He just got back from the Caribbean. By golly, I bet he had seen things that would shake poor Venetia's soul. Maybe done some of them too. I always think of him as having some kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - he's running around all moody and sad and angry and confused because he's supposed to learn how to cope with the polite surface world of 1800s English society, and he hasn't been able to process the many horrors of slaveholding plantation world at all.
(And ok, yes, his erstwhile victims in the Caribbean doubtless deserve more of my sympathy...and part of why this moment niggles in my brain is that Heyer never admits that part textually. Austen, if my dim memory of Mansfield Park isn't being too much overwritten by the movie version, did at least sort of admit the rest textually.)
But it reminded me of a small thing that niggles me whenever I re-read Georgette Heyer's Venetia.
The young would-be romantic rival of the neighborhood, whose name escapes me as names often do, at one point mutters darkly to Venetia about how he's "seen things" in the world, due to his recent travels in the Caribbean.
He's sort of an unpleasant character in the story - brash, pushing kisses where they're not wanted, challenging the hero to a duel for no good reason, etc. But I always pity him. He's 17 or so. He just got back from the Caribbean. By golly, I bet he had seen things that would shake poor Venetia's soul. Maybe done some of them too. I always think of him as having some kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - he's running around all moody and sad and angry and confused because he's supposed to learn how to cope with the polite surface world of 1800s English society, and he hasn't been able to process the many horrors of slaveholding plantation world at all.
(And ok, yes, his erstwhile victims in the Caribbean doubtless deserve more of my sympathy...and part of why this moment niggles in my brain is that Heyer never admits that part textually. Austen, if my dim memory of Mansfield Park isn't being too much overwritten by the movie version, did at least sort of admit the rest textually.)
