Air Makes Free: the 1772 Somerset Case and the Poetics of England’s ‘Pure Air’

This paper explores the key poetical and legal metaphor of slaves breathing the ‘free English air’, which was famously asserted in the Mansfield Judgment of 1772 in the case of Somersett vs. Steuart, and popularized by the English Evangelical poet William Cowper in his long poem The Task, 1785. Legal historians of slavery have often made brief reference to this ‘free air’ metaphor, and I will be summarizing this research. But the full cultural contexts and longer histories of these phrases have not previously been elaborated, and I argue here that by considering the ‘air’ aspect of them more seriously, we can understand more deeply the significance of environmental metaphors in the history of political thought, and indeed the environmental underpinnings and ecological consequences of relationships of human domination, signally slavery.

Rowan Boyson is a Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at King’s College London. She has published widely on air, the senses, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and philosophers. She is working on a monograph provisionally entitled The Shared Air: Atmosphere and the Right to Breathe in Enlightenment Britain, supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship; recent articles include ‘Air and Atmosphere Studies: Enlightenment, Phenomenology and Ecocriticism’ (2022) and ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Right to Air’ (2021). Her first book Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure (CUP, 2012) won the University English Early Career Book Prize, and she co-edited The Poetic Enlightenment: Poetry and Human Science, 1650-1820 (2013).