Covid-19 and metaphors

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, metaphors have been widely used, reflected upon and critiqued as a tool for communicating about the virus and its consequences. There are good reasons for this.

Metaphors involve talking and thinking about one thing in terms of another, on the basis of perceived similarities or correspondences between them. As such, we use them to make sense of and communicate about new, complex, abstract and sensitive experiences in terms of more familiar, simpler and intersubjectively accessible ones. For example, the virus has been described as an enemy to be defeated, a mugger to be wrestled to the ground, a tsunami on health services, a marathon to be endured, and even glitter in soft furnishings after a party.

Metaphors can become controversial because they have framing effects: each metaphor highlights some aspects of the topic and backgrounds others, and therefore influences people’s reasoning, evaluations and emotions in particular ways, as many experimental studies have shown. For example, war metaphors, which were widely used at the start of the pandemic, have been criticised for inappropriately personifying the virus as a malevolent opponent, creating unnecessary anxiety, dangerously legitimising authoritarian governmental measures, and implying that those to die did not fight hard enough. Research has shown that war metaphors can actually be useful in some contexts (for example, to convey the need for urgent collective effort), but they can also discourage self-limiting behaviours, such as refraining from our usual activities and just staying home.

As the weeks and months have gone by, and more and more metaphors have been adopted for different aspects of the pandemic, an international group of researchers (of which I am part) has been collecting alternatives to military metaphors from around the world, as part of the #ReframeCovid initiative. We know, from research in areas as diverse as education and healthcare, that a range of different metaphors is usually needed for complex topics, and the #ReframeCovid collective has taken the kind of non-prescriptive approach that is part of the professional ethos of researchers on language use: it aims to collect a wide variety of ‘naturally occurring’ metaphors as data for research and as potential resources for communication and thinking, but without endorsing one or more as better than the others.

Nonetheless, those of us who study metaphors for a living are regularly asked for an expert opinion about what metaphor or metaphors are most appropriate for the pandemic, and it is in fact possible to provide some answers on the basis of previous research on what makes a ‘good’ metaphor and of systematic analyses of communication about the unfolding pandemic. In this blog post, I explain how and why I got to the conclusion that fire metaphors, and specifically metaphors involving forest fires, are particularly appropriate and useful for communication about the pandemic.

Finding fire metaphors

My initial observations were based on the #ReframeCovid collection of metaphors, which, as of 30^th June 2020, included five fire metaphors from five different languages (Dutch, English, Greek, Italian and Spanish) as well as visual images involving metaphorical flames or fires. In addition, I identified 37 different examples of fire metaphors for Covid-19 in the Coronavirus Corpus, which, at the time, consisted of about 400 million words of news articles in English from around the world, dating from January to June 2020.

[A little more detail for linguists: I searched for ‘coronavirus’ or ‘covid-19’ in a span five words to the left and five words to the right of ‘fire’ in the Coronavirus Corpus. That generated 696 concordance lines. I used the MIP procedure by the Pragglejaz Group to identify metaphorical uses of fire-related vocabulary. I included fire-related similes and other ‘direct’ metaphors. I excluded fire-related metaphors for topics other than Covid-19. In what follows, all English examples are from the Coronavirus Corpus, while examples in other languages are from the #ReframeCovid collection.]

What fire metaphors can do

Even out of context, forest fires are a suitable area of experience for metaphorical exploitation. They are vivid, or image-rich; they are familiar, even when not experienced directly; they have multiple elements (trees, fire-fighters, arsonists, victims, etc.); and they have strong evaluative and emotional associations.

In the specific data I have collected, fire metaphors are used flexibly and creatively for multiple purposes, particularly to:

• convey danger and urgency;
• distinguish between different phases of the pandemic;
• explain how contagion happens and the role of individuals within that;
• justify measures for reducing contagion;
• portray the role of health workers;
• connect the pandemic with health inequalities and other problems; and
• outline post-pandemic futures.

Danger and urgency

Forest fires spread quickly, are hard to control and can therefore grow very large, causing irreparable damage. These characteristics can be exploited to convey the dangers posed by the coronavirus, and the need for urgent action. For example, in June 2020 a Pakistani minister described the coronavirus as ‘spreading like a fire in the jungle’ in the rural areas of the country, while the director of the Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota  talked about a ‘forest fire that may not slow down’. In a Spanish example from the #ReframeCovid collection, the coronavirus is described by an anthropologist as needing to be approached as ‘un gran fuego’ (‘a large fire’).

Different phases

The life cycle of forest fires can be exploited metaphorically to distinguish between different phases in the seriousness of the pandemic, in terms of numbers of new infections and success or failure in reducing those numbers. In April 2020, when new daily infections were increasing fast on Rhode Island, a New York Times article described it as a ‘a state where the coronavirus is a fire raging’. In contrast, in May 2020, the Irish Prime Minister combined fire and war metaphors when he stated that, in Ireland, the coronavirus was a ‘fire in retreat’ but ‘not defeated’, adding: ‘We must extinguish every spark, quench every ember.’

References to metaphorical embers are particularly useful to suggest that danger still persists even when the number of infections has substantially decreased.

How contagion happens

Explaining how contagion happens is a particular challenge in public health communication about the coronavirus: the process is not just invisible, but it also involves asymptomatic people and takes place during the most ordinary daily activities. There is also a fine balance to strike between persuading people to reduce the chance of being in danger, or being a danger to others, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, avoiding excessive blame on individuals. Here fire metaphors can be particularly useful.

In a semi-technical explanation in Medscape from late March 2020, people are trees that provide fuel to a forest fire driven by wind:

1. Think of COVID-19 as a fire burning in a forest. All of us are trees. The R0 is the wind speed. The higher it is, the faster the fire tears through the forest. But just like a forest fire, COVID-19 needs fuel to keep going. We’re the fuel.

In other forest fire metaphorical scenarios, people are ‘kindling’, ‘sparks being thrown off’ (when infecting others) and ‘fuel’ (when becoming infected). In these cases, fire metaphors convey the dangers posed by people being in close proximity to one another, but without directly attributing blame: people are described as inanimate entities (trees, kindling, fuel) that are consumed by the fire they contribute to spread.

A variant of this metaphor, from March 2020, involves an urban fire:

1. Think of the coronavirus pandemic as a fire ravaging our cities and towns that is spread by infected people breathing out invisible embers every time they speak, cough, or sneeze. Sneezing is the most dangerous—it spreads embers farthest—coughing second, and speaking least, though it still can spread the embers. These invisible sparks cause others to catch fire and in turn breathe out embers until we truly catch fire—and get sick.

Here the reference to ’invisible embers’ is a particularly vivid way to portray the danger posed by something as seemingly innocuous as breath.

How containment measures can help

The use of fire metaphors to explain how contagion happens often sets the scene for explaining how new infections can be stopped. The extract from Medscape above (extract 1), for example, where people are ‘trees’ and ‘fuel’, goes on to exploit the forest fire scenario to convey the effectiveness of quarantines and social distancing:

1. A few fire lines—quarantines and social distancing measures—keep the fire from hitting all the trees.

Similarly, the metaphor where people breathe out ‘invisible embers’ (extract 2) is used to justify face masks as an effective measure against the spread of the virus:

1. If we could just keep our embers from being sent out every time we spoke or coughed, many fewer people would catch fire. Masks help us do that. And because we don’t know for sure who’s sick, the only solution is for everyone to wear masks. This eventually benefits the wearer because fewer fires mean we’re all less likely to be burned. My mask protects you; your masks protect me.

Protecting healthcare workers

Within fire metaphors, healthcare workers are inevitably positioned as firefighters who ‘run into raging blazes’ for the sake of everyone else. This emphasizes the risks that healthcare workers run, and can therefore be used to stress the need to respect social distancing rules and/or wear face masks. For example, the description of the importance of face masks in extract 4 is followed by: ‘Plus, our firefighters would no longer be overwhelmed’.

Making health inequalities and other problems worse

Fire metaphors can be used to emphasize the additional vulnerability of people who live in cramped conditions. For examples, in June 2020 a South African commentator pointed out that the virus could spread particularly fast in informal settlements: ‘Look at how shack fires happen: you light one fire, and the whole place burns down.’

In a few cases, fire metaphors are used to suggest that the coronavirus is making existing problems or crises worse. In these cases, the metaphorical fire was already burning, and the coronavirus ‘add[s] fuel to the fire’ or ‘throws gasoline on the fire’, for example in the context of pre-existing tensions in US prisons.

The future

Fire metaphors can also be adapted to paint different pictures of a post-Covid-19 future. Italian commentator Paolo Costa includes a reference to the future in a lengthy forest fire metaphor:

1. Non solo ci sono continuamente focolai da spegnere e, quando la sorte si accanisce, giganteschi fronti di fuoco da arginare, ma è dovere di tutti collaborare quotidianamente alla bonifica del terreno affinché scintille, inneschi, distrazioni più o meno colpevoli non provochino adesso o in futuro disastri irreparabili.

Not only are there constant outbreaks to extinguish and, when our luck gets worse, gigantic fronts of fire to control, but it is everyone’s duty to collaborate daily in the reclamation of the soil, so that sparks, triggers, and more or less guilty distractions do not cause irreparable disasters now or in the future.

Here the idea of collective responsibility for soil reclamation to prevent new fires suggests that lifestyles will have to change long-term in order to avoid future pandemics.

Ultimately though, no silver bullet

Fire metaphors are vivid, flexible and very well suited to capture different aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic. They also seem to occur across linguistic and cultural boundaries, as the #ReframeCovid collection suggests. Of course, no metaphor can cater for all aspects of something as complex and long term as a global pandemic, nor for all contingencies and audiences. We will therefore still need marathons, tsunamis, battles (in moderation) and even glitter in our metaphorical tool-kit. But fire metaphors are undoubtedly one of the most useful metaphorical tools at our disposal.

Elena Semino, 30^th June 2020

In my current position, funded by the Aziz Foundation, in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences at Lancaster University, I am investigating the representation of Muslims and Islam in the UK press. Previous research has revealed the major press representations of Islam and Muslims between 1998 to 2009 and between 2010 to 2014 in order to assess how much has changed. One of my aims in this project is to develop and extend that research in order to assess if the major press representations of Muslims and Islam from January 2015 to December 2019 have changed or stayed the same since those time periods investigated. That research is very much under way and I am looking forward to writing up the results and sharing them with you. But (and I am sure it is the same for anyone else looking at the representations of different social phenomena or groups in the media), it already feels like so much has happened since December 2019 and I felt it was important to address this.

When I started the project I was quickly introduced to the Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB) Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) team. At our first meeting we sat around a table at their offices in White Chapel and spoke about our aims for the project. We immediately found similarities of approach and a shared purpose – to identify negative trends and promote positive practice in the media’s representation of Islam and Muslims. They asked me how I had become interested in this research and I remember mentioning how infuriated I was with Boris Johnson’s opinion piece in the Telegraph on Denmark’s banning of the burqa. In that piece he positioned Muslim women who choose to wear the burqa as being in a ‘catch 22’, whereby they can never be ‘free’ for as long as they wear a burqa because even if they choose to wear it, according to Boris, it is still a ‘dehumanising garment’. I drew parallels with rape victims who are interrogated and accused of ‘asking for it’ by the cross-examiner for wearing a dress that falls above the knee and/or high heels. We each shared our own frustrations and I suddenly realised that whilst I was aware of many problems in the reporting of Islam and Muslims, I was about to fall down the biggest rabbit hole, where I would never be able to look at a report on Muslims or Islam without seeing some form of bias or misrepresentation.

During this COVID-19 global pandemic, I have found myself reading and/or listening to the media far more than I have before. With an increased sensitivity to the media and being 6 months deep into this rabbit hole, I have noticed that reporting on Islam and Muslims has shifted.

In previous research investigating the representation of Islam and Muslims, it was found that much had stayed the same since 1998-2009 when reporting on Islam and Muslims between 2010-2014; however there were cases where things had changed and reporting had become more careful in trying to represent what had happened accurately and fairly. For instance, there was a growing acknowledgement that Islam has several different denominations. Between 1998 to 2009, these different denominations were rarely referred to or distinguished in the press. However, press reports concerning Islam and Muslims during 2010 to 2014 were referring to the different denominations more often than before. This was a positive improvement as it promoted religious literacy and better represented which groups of Muslims were involved in an event, rather than ascribing the event to all Muslims.

Despite these attempts at trying to include as much detail as possible to avoid misrepresentation, during the pandemic careful reporting appears to have been de-emphasised. A report’s accuracy now comes second to the spectacle of sensationalist reporting that fits a familiar narrative. In other words, the press have gone backwards.

Whilst I have noticed many instances of problematic reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is one consistent narrative that ties many of them together. This narrative is affiliated to the “Us versus Them” dichotomy, especially the positive presentation of ‘Us’ and the negative presentation of ‘Them’. However, the reports extend this to present ‘Us’ as rule-followers and ‘Them’ as rule-breakers, where ‘Them’ are Muslims who have been scapegoated as a threat to ‘Us’ – the rest of society (i.e. Non-Muslims). In the rest of this blog, I will contextualise and describe a very specific example of this discourse and attempt to articulate the effects of such careless and reckless reporting.

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan happened during the COVID-19 pandemic from 23 April 2020 to 23 May 2020. During Ramadan, many Muslims fast between dawn and sunset as a way to show their devotion to their faith and come closer to God. There is also a special festival at the end of Ramadan called Eid al-Fitr, which means the festival of the breaking of the fast. Ramadan is a time for spiritual reflection, prayer, doing good deeds and spending time with family and friends. It is a time where Muslims make a special effort to connect with their communities and help those in need. Of course, during the pandemic with worldwide lockdown restrictions, Ramadan, and many other events, happened a little differently.

The PM of the UK Boris Johnson announced on 23^rd March 2020 that people in the UK must stay at home and that they can only leave to:

• shop for basic necessities,
• exercise once per day
• provide care to a vulnerable person
• attend to a medical need or
• travel to work but only where necessary and if it can’t be done from home.

In addition, Boris Johnson ordered places of worship, restaurants, cafes, pubs, clubs, and a number of retail stores to close. Large gatherings were banned and many other rules and restrictions were put in place to try and curb the spread of the virus. Such restrictions and lockdown measures meant that normal and traditional Ramadan festivities could not take place. Muslims couldn’t go to the mosque to pray, they couldn’t break their fast or celebrate Eid with their communities, family members or friends living in different households.

Before these restrictions even came into place and before Ramadan began, the Muslim Council of Britain had urged all mosques to close and they set out specific guidance for Ramadan during this unique time. This guidance provided details of how to adhere to the government’s lockdown restrictions and take part in this holy month of Ramadan. It also reassured Muslims that it was not necessary to go to the mosque to pray. Despite this very clear, explicit guidance that adhered to the government’s restrictions, the media were nevertheless focused on presenting Muslims as a threat to the rest of society because they either were going to break the rules during Ramadan, or may do so. For example, on the 12^th April 2020 the Sunday Times had the headline:

“Experts fear spike in cases when families gather for Ramadan”

This headline is problematic for several reasons. First, it is factually incorrect. There was one ‘expert’, not more than one, as denoted by the plural Experts. In the context of this story, one might imagine that an expert would be someone who is an epidemiologist (one who studies the spread of infection) or mathematician (one who models and predicts the spread of infectious diseases). Yet the expert referred to in the Sunday Times is a consultant transplant nephrologist (someone who deals with kidney transplants). Given that the spread of COVID-19 cannot be cured or prevented by a kidney transplant, it can be argued that the expert selected was not appropriate as they were not an expert in this context.

Second, the headline makes assumptions, which misrepresent the truth. The clause “when families gather for Ramadan” presupposes that families will gather for Ramadan in ways that do not abide by the lockdown regulations (i.e. gathering with your family members from different households). This headline consequently problematised Muslims before Ramadan had even begun. It suggested that Muslims may be intending to break the rules wilfully for Ramadan. Muslims were therefore positioned as a threat to the rest of society as they were scapegoated for a potential spike in cases of COVID-19.

Following critique from the Centre for Media Monitoring, The Sunday Times corrected their headline:

“Expert fears a spike in UK coronavirus cases if communities gather for Ramadan”.

Although the expertise of the expert was not addressed, the change from the WH-clause to the conditional clause “if communities gather for Ramadan” makes this headline far less accusatory and presuppositional. Instead, it positions a spike in UK coronavirus cases as a potential consequence if people are to gather for Ramadan. Whilst the assumption that communities could gather for Ramadan is still present, in the new version it is not assumed that all Muslims will ignore the rules and gather for Ramadan.

Even though the Sunday Times made these corrections, it is important to note that the major problem with this report is that the scapegoating of Muslims in the UK press is unfair and disproportionate. Good Friday and Easter Sunday also fell during the tight lockdown restrictions. However, an article that implied that all Christian families and communities would break the rules in order to gather and celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, or to take their families on Easter Egg hunts, did not appear in the Times or the Sunday Times. Christians make up more of the UK’s population than Muslims and so on numerical grounds alone they pose a greater risk of spreading the infection and causing a spike if they were to break the rules. Therefore, the focus on and scapegoating of Muslims is unfair.

Overall, the underlying narrative ‘Muslims as rule breakers’ is an articulation of the “Us versus Them” dichotomy, where Muslims are “Them” positioned in opposition to “Non-Muslims”. In the context of COVID-19, ‘Them’ are rule breakers, who are threats to the health of society, and so once again we find the UK press demonising Muslims and marking them as threats to society.

So many people and organisations are helped by Muslims in their charity work throughout the year and especially during Ramadan, when Muslims make a special effort to help those in need. This charity work has not stopped during the pandemic, but it has just taken different forms. For example, mosques in Liverpool have launched a helpline for the whole community to provide support during the pandemic. Additionally, volunteers from Newcastle Central mosque have launched a COVID-19 support group by delivering essential supplies, such as food and medicine to those in need and who are self-isolating. These emergency parcels are delivered for free and funded by the One Ummah charity. There are so many more examples of positive work being led by Muslims than there are negative, but these positive stories tend to be reported in the local as opposed to national press.

During these unprecedented times, it can be very easy to look for people or groups to blame, and when the press consistently demonise particular groups, those groups are even easier to accuse. This small blog is a call to go back to striving towards careful and accurate reporting. Let us change the narrative. #PositivelyMuslim

Last month, Tony McEnery and I completed a study which looked at changes in the representation of slavery in a prominent provincial newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury, throughout the nineteenth century. This will appear in the book Time in Languages, Languages in Time (Čermáková et al, forthcoming) which brings together a collection of articles reflecting on language and time: how language changes over time and how time is perceived across various languages. In this blog post we give a sense of the main findings of our work.

Using Usage Fluctuation Analysis (UFA, McEnery, Baker and Brezina, 2019) we searched almost two billion words of newspaper articles from the Liverpool Mercury to see how words linked to slavery changed their usage in the nineteenth century. While the chapter we wrote covers much in the way of method, in this brief blog post we want to focus on one aspect of our work by showing, through the lens of the Mercury, how nineteenth-century Liverpudlians felt about the traffic of enslaved Africans, their city’s association with the slave trade and how these feelings changed over time, if at all.

Our study has proven to be topical. A few days ago, it was reported in the press that the University of Liverpool had made the decision to rename a halls of residence known as Gladstone Hall. The former British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, had strong family links to the transatlantic slave trade and early in his career made a speech against its abolition. His father, John, owned a number of sugar and coffee plantations in Demerara (now part of Guyana) and Jamaica. Like other men who profited from the slave trade, John Gladstone matched his economic success with political clout – he served as a Tory member of parliament for three different constituencies and he partly owned the newspaper Liverpool Courier.

The city of Liverpool, where the Gladstone family lived, was one of Britain’s principal trading ports, sitting at the corner of the so-called ‘golden triangle’ which drove the transatlantic slave trade. Vessels from Liverpool are estimated to have carried 40 per cent of the entire Atlantic slave trade and controlled up to 60 per cent of the British trade (Sherwood and Sherwood, 2007: 26) and the historian Brian Howman (2007: 277) has explained that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the livings of most Liverpudlians were bound up with the slave trade. Importantly, through the trade in cotton and manufactured goods with the United States, Liverpool retained strong economic links to a slave-owning economy for most of the nineteenth century. So, while emancipation of slaves occurred in the early part of the century throughout the British Empire, Liverpool retained a strong economic interest in slavery.

UFA helped us to make sense of a large volume of data by showing the changing usage of words like slave, slaves and slavery over the course of the century. Based on that, we were then able to downsample and explore the corpus, using techniques such as collocation analysis and close reading, to see how the discussion of slavery varied over time. What the UFA, and our follow up analysis, shows in the Mercury are three broad phases of discussion – the early part of the century is dominated by debates relating to abolition in the British Empire, which we will not discuss here. Instead, in this short blog post we will focus on the second phase of the debate, when it widened as a desire to end the slave trade beyond Britain increased. We will also note the third and final phase of the discussion, in which slavery slipped into historic memory. Let us begin with an exploration of phase two, which we call ‘a widening debate’.

A widening debate – doing more to oppose slavery

In the second phase of discussion the Liverpool Mercury did not shy away from discussing the slave trade. Within its pages, Liverpool’s past involvement in the traffic of enslaved black Africans was acknowledged and journalists conveyed a determination that any further participation must not be tolerated. The newspaper gave the impression that the vast majority of the inhabitants of the city were united against slavery. Indeed, when William Gladstone received the freedom of the city in December 1892, the Mercury reported an older, more liberal, Gladstone as saying that “we all look back with shame and sorrow” on the traffic of Africans.

However, there were also suggestions that Liverpool should be active, or more active, in opposing the slave trade. On 3 November, 1868, the newspaper carried a speech by the Bishop of Oxford who declared that Liverpool’s strong connection with the slave trade meant that the city must “be connected with the act of undoing it”. Occasional reports berated Liverpool for not speaking out to a greater extent. For instance, a letter published on 12 October, 1875 condemned the city for not protesting against the Slave Circulars – contentious instructions to ships captains that fugitive slaves should be returned to their former masters:

While other towns are protesting against the atrocities and illegal actions of the Tory       Government, how is it that Liverpool is silent?

The newspaper also acknowledged that Liverpool was struggling to throw off its associations with the slave trade entirely. An article of 4 June 1862, for instance, condemned American slave traders who had established themselves in Liverpool. The slave ship, Nightingale, was reported to have been fitted out in the city. The reporter asserted that the people of Liverpool “are interested in discovering and bringing to justice ruffians who attempt to turn a British port into a slave-trading station”.

A widening debate – the geographic dimension

As the debate shifted from abolition in the British Empire, reports in the Liverpool Mercury revealed how Britain struggled to persuade other countries, particularly other empires, to agree to abolition. Articles detailed an array of diplomatic overtures – draft treaties, international assemblies, and outright bribes – designed to achieve this which were often unsuccessful. In the earlier part of the second phase of discussion, reluctance by France, Portugal and Spain to agree to abolition tended to be highlighted. Later the focus shifted to Cuba and Brazil, colonies of Spain and Portugal respectively. For instance, on 23 September, 1853 an article stated:

The commercial advices from Cuba state that the question of the slave trade continues to give constant trouble to the official representatives of the British government in that island. Open violations of treaty are almost of weekly occurrence, and, under the active connivance of the Spanish authorities, the traffic is obviously increasing.

In later part of the widening debate phase, countries such as Egypt and Turkey were cast into the spotlight with drafts of treaties with both countries being reported, while a number of articles referred to an alliance with the Sultan of Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said, aimed at curtailing the slave trade .

A widening debate – anti-slavery opinion

Many articles about the slave trade in the Liverpool Mercury throughout the second phase we identified were pessimistic in tone. The newspaper frequently reported that slavery was actually growing in strength in the nineteenth century.

Just as we care about the origins of our food, people in the nineteenth century expressed alarm over the origins of one of the most important products produced by slaves – sugar. Some abolitionists pushed Britons to abstain from the consumption of slave-grown sugar and the Liverpool Mercury carried a number of articles about the consequences of removing high protective tariffs on imported sugar and molasses. In stark contrast to the present day, sugar was presented as both “wholesome and nutritious” (article of 7 April, 1843) and an item which poorer people should be able to afford.

Britain had prohibited the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807 but the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery itself in the British Empire, was not put in place until 1833. Articles in the Mercury suggest that the British public felt impatient with the process of emancipation. In May 1823, the newspaper wrote about public petitions by the inhabitants of Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle for the abolition of slavery. Indeed, the abolition campaign has been called the first popular movement and was characterised by mass meetings and petition campaigns (Thomas, 1998: 12 and Drescher, 1994). A letter of 28 March, 1823 to the editor of the Liverpool Mercury lamented the material condition of enslaved Africans in stark, emotive language:

We do not hear the groans of the slaves: we do not behold the uplifted arm of the insulting and brutalized driver: the smack of his whip does not resound in our ears… Our best feelings are not shocked by the sight of his lacerated body; nor are we horrified by exhibition of instances which have been attested to exist in the West Indies, of persons, in whose neglected wounds even maggots have bred. We do not witness the rupture of all ties of domestic relationship: we do not see the violation of all the tender charities of life; the child torn from its parents; and the wife carried away from her husband, to be subjected to the brutal lust of a tyrant.

Journalists also employed emotionally charged language in writing about the slave trade – words such as miseries, atrocities, inhumanity, injustice, abomination and victims were all very common. In the first decades of the century, newspaper articles described shocking incidents where slaves had been deliberately thrown from slave ships by crew members who wanted to avoid being detained with slaves on board. However, as the century progressed, expressions such as horror/s of the slave trade and evil/s of the slave trade had become stock phrases, employed by reporters in order to demonstrate, very quickly and conveniently, their repulsion at the notion of the enslavement of humans. These reporters did not go on to elucidate why the trade was horrible; there was simply no need – by that time, the British public overwhelmingly despised the slave trade and was well aware of the horrors it entailed.

The final phase – the slave trade passes into history

Towards the end of the century, the discourse in the Mercury enters a third phase made distinct by an increase in mentions of works of art and literature which referenced the slave trade. Articles mentioned busts of early abolitionists, Graville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, books about the slave trade and implements of the slave trade, such as timber yokes and iron shackles, being put on display. The slave trade was passing into memory during this period – its early opponents were being honoured, it was being represented in art and literature, and objects used to enslave black Africans had been removed from ships and plantations and placed in museums.

Conclusion

News articles in the pages of the nineteenth-century Liverpool Mercury reveal a sense of shame and regret at the city’s involvement in the slave trade. Perhaps journalists working for the newspaper hoped their frequent condemnation of slavery might partially atone for their city’s former enthusiastic participation in it. Although there were some suggestions that a very small number of Liverpudlians had continued their associations with the slave trade, the newspaper gives us the impression that the vast majority of the city’s residents had turned away from it entirely and, moreover, regarded the traffic and ownership of human beings with utter revulsion. By the end of the century, the discussion of slavery is rooted firmly in the past.

References

Čermáková, A. , Egan, T., Hasselgård, H. & Rørvik, S. (Eds, forthcoming) Time in Languages, Language in Time. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Drescher, S. (1994), ‘Whose abolition? Popular pressure and the ending of the British slave trade’, Past and Present, 143, pp.136-166.

Howman, B. (2007), ‘Abolitionism in Liverpool’, in Richardson, D., Schwarz, S. and Tibbles, A. (eds.), Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp.277-296.

McEnery, T., Brezina, V. and Baker, H. (2019) ‘Usage fluctuation analysis: a new way of analysing shifts in historical discourse’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 24 (4), pp 413-444.

Sherwood, M. and Sherwood, K. (2007), Britain, the Slave Trade and Slavery, from 1562 to the 1880s. Kent: Savannah Press.

Thomas, H. (1998), The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870. London: Papermac.