[Post-emancipation Life]

This arresting collection of six color lithographs shows an idealized version of the labor routines of sugar plantation workers in the early nineteenth century Caribbean. Although the collection was published by the Ladies' Society for Promoting the Early Education of Negro Children within a few years of the British 1833 Abolition Act, the images themselves were taken from a collection of ten aquatints that had been published a decade earlier, while slavery was legal. The artist, William Clark, spent three years in Antigua, and based the images on his experiences there. The lithographs, therefore, carry contradictory messages: they are both a romanticized representation of legal slave labor, and - with the patronizing and moralistic instructional texts added after their 1833 publication – a would-be guide for the children of newly-emancipated cane workers.