Venue: Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, St. James’s, London W1J 9LE
Time: 6.30-8pm
Booking: through Eventbrite here
Michael Bundock won the 2008 Daily Mail-sponsored Biographers’ Club Prize (now the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize) for his proposal for The Fortunes of Francis Barber (later published by Yale University Press), a life of Samuel Johnson’s black servant. His second book, set in the same period and also published by Yale, is A Meeting on Mincing Lane: The Story of Granville Sharp and the Fight Against Slavery.
In London, 1765, Jonathan Strong was bludgeoned half to death by his enslaver. As the injured Strong staggered towards a doctor on Mincing Lane, he was noticed by the civil servant Granville Sharp (1735–1813) – a chance meeting which would set in motion a lifelong fight for justice.
Appalled by the violence of slavery – a system with at the time some 900,000 victims in North America alone – Sharp took up the abolitionist cause with a zealous sense of moral duty. He taught himself law to challenge slavery in the Somerset case, wrote Britain’s first antislavery tract, publicised the horrors of the Zong massacre, and was integral to the establishment of the free colony of Sierra Leone.
Michael Bundock is a barrister and historian with a particular interest in 18th-century social and legal history, and an honorary research fellow at University College London.
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