S.J. Celestine Edwards: Placing Anti-Racism in Victorian Print Culture

Abstract In the 1890s, a Dominican named S.J. Celestine Edwards (1858–94) became the first black editor of a British periodical. In fact, he edited two. Having established himself as a popular speaker in east London, where he defended Christianity against rising atheistic belief, in August 1892 he created a weekly newspaper promoting the Christian Evidence movement, titled Lux. The following July, he took over the editorship of the Society for Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man’s monthly magazine, which had previously been called Anti-Caste, and which he retitled Fraternity. In Fraternity, he helped combat prejudice and violence predicated on racial and cultural difference. This article explores how these two ostensibly separate causes were interlinked in Edwards’s thought, as well as his editorial and networking activities. Analysing both papers alongside contemporary press reportage, I observe that Edwards placed the emerging cause of anti-racism before audiences both textually, in editorials and in advertisements and other columns of Lux that announce Fraternity, and geographically and temporally, in lecturing about racial and imperial violence in the afternoons in cities where Edwards had spent the morning speaking on behalf of Christian Evidence. I find it is restrictive to view Edwards’s anti-racist credentials in isolation from his anti-atheism. With regard to Victorian culture and society at large, Edwards’s strategies highlight the potential for other aspects of thought and debate to intersect with anti-racism. With Edwards, we can see the late-Victorian period anew, as one defined not simply by its racism but by its potential to challenge racism.