The End of Empire

This fifth episode investigates, how from its inception, the English novel was closely bound up with the dynamics of colonialism and marched along to the British Empire's rise, decline and fall. Using performed readings and with contributions from contemporary novelists and critics the series explores the power that novels had in the past and continue to have on readers today. Robinson Crusoe, the hero of the first ever novel published in English, in 1719, was a slave trader. Slavery, which predated the empire, but was an inescapable part of it, and is the subject of two famous American novels more than a century apart - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The legacy of slavery is also at the heart of one of the most famous novels of all, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and its 'prequel', written a century later - Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.