13

Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840):

Towards a Dialectical
History Painting
Leo Costello

J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon

coming on, also known simply as The Slave Ship, was first shown in the
annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1840 (see Figure 13.1). It has
since acquired one of the most extensive and colourful critical histories
of any of Turner’s paintings.1 As was often his practice, Turner attached
a verse-tag, which he wrote himself, to the painting’s entry in the
exhibition catalogue. Along with the lengthy title, the verse-tag, to
which I shall return below, made the painting’s relevance to the issues of
the slave trade and abolition very clear. Exactly how the visual content
of The Slave Ship relates to these issues, however, is much less certain.
Indeed, since the middle of the last century, a number of scholars have
sought specific sources and meanings for the painting’s rather enigmatic
imagery. This research has produced a great deal of important informa-
tion about Turner’s artistic practice and several very sophisticated inter-
pretations, but still the precise nature of Turner’s comment on slavery
and abolition remains a matter of debate. In this essay, my point of con-
tention with these scholars will lie not so much in the question of which
sources are most relevant to the painting, but rather in how Turner’s
conception of slavery and abolition, and historical change more gener-
ally, can be understood, particularly in relation to other artistic and
literary representations.
Central to this discussion will be the models of historical time which
have been applied to The Slave Ship. Scholars have generally seen this
painting as representing a single historical incident or episode in the
slave trade, an approach which has led them to view Turner’s vision of
history as progressive and linear. On the contrary, I will demonstrate
that this painting depicts more than one point in time and was thus a
more complex statement on the questions of slavery and abolition than

209
B. Carey et al. (eds.), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2004
210 Leo Costello

Figure 13.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), The Slave Ship (Slavers
throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon coming on), 1840.
Source: Photograph © 2003, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

has yet been realized. Calling into question the linear progression of
time and civilization, Turner’s painting prompts a reading which con-
siders the interplay of past and present and places the burden of inter-
pretation on the viewer, whose own time is implicated. Painting in
1840, Turner refused to locate British involvement in slavery and the
slave trade purely in the past, showing instead how it persisted even in
the wake of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Furthermore, this
non-linear temporal model resists presenting an optimistic vision of the
future. As a result, I will refer to The Slave Ship as a dialectical history
painting, as its conception of historical change is based in this constant
negotiation of past and present.
One of the historical incidents that scholars have identified as a
source for Turner’s painting is the notorious incident of the slaver Zong
from 1781.2 That incident is recounted in Thomas Clarkson’s history of
the British abolition movement, originally published in 1808, but
printed in a second edition in 1839, the year before Turner’s The Slave
Ship was shown at the Royal Academy. As Clarkson describes it, during
the Middle Passage, the Zong’s captain, facing a shortage of water,