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The Trembling Hand

Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Bracing and essential, a radical reframing of British Romanticism through the lens of Black experience – for fans of David Olusoga, Gretchen Gerzina, Saidiya Hartman and Emma Dabiri

Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats – the Romantic poets are titans of English literature, taught and celebrated around the world. Their work is associated with sublime passions, violent stormscapes and a questing search for the inner self. It is rarely associated with the racial politics of the transatlantic slave economy.
But these literary icons lived through a period when individual and collective resistance by Black people in Britain and her overseas colonies was making it increasingly difficult – and increasingly costly – to ignore their demands for freedom. A time when popular support for the abolition movement exploded across the country – and was met by a vehement, reactionary campaign from the establishment. A time when white supremacist ideologies were fomented to justify the abuse and exploitation of non-white 'races'. This cultural context is not immediately obvious in the canon of Romantic poetry. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
The Trembling Hand turns an urgent critical gaze onto six major Romantic authors, examining how their lives and works were entangled with the racist realities of their era. Mathelinda Nabugodi pores over carefully preserved manuscripts, travels to the houses where these writers lived and died, examines the personal objects which survived them: a teacup, a baby rattle, a lock of hair. Amid this archive, she searches for traces of Black figures whose lives crossed paths with the great Romantics. And she grapples with the opposing forces of reverence and horror as her fascination with literary relics collides with feelings of sorrow and rage.

© Mathelinda Nabugodi 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Art & Literature Authors European Literary History & Criticism Poetry World Literature Social justice Greek Mythology Ancient Greece

Critic reviews

Propelled by a voice that is urgent, exasperated and eager to share what it knows… Her account of Byron shows why she wrote this book, and also her ability to argue with herself, to dramatize her own doubts. That’s a rare gift for any critic… [Her] passion, and [her] learning, ensure that one will never look at these poets in quite the same way
Powerful, revelatory... Mathelinda Nabugodi performs what she calls “an act of historical recovery,” re-examining British Romanticism’s beloved literary superstars through the debris they left behind... A masterpiece about how history is made, maintained, and remembered, while also including what history forgot — with trembling hands, she admits — and with power and ferocity
Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter (Colm Tóibín, author of 'Long Island')
An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race
Mathelinda Nabugodi reveals the racial wounds behind the pristine face of British Romanticism. Her journey—part scholarly excavation, part personal pilgrimage—takes readers through abandoned archives and hallowed homes, where she confronts not just history but her own complex relationship with poets whose words shaped her life even as their era sought to erase people who looked like her… Nabugodi shows us how to hold two truths at once: beautiful craft and painful context, literary genius and racial violence. Her reckoning is a love letter written in disquiet, a map for those seeking the unvarnished truth of our literary inheritance, and a gift for anyone who values personal storytelling that illuminates our shared past (Professor DJ Lee, author of 'Slavery and the Romantic Imagination')
A viscerally bold, challenging and often uncomfortable study of our major British Romantic writers. Based on extensive archival research and highly sensitive to the lived experience of Black people, their real but often effaced or distorted presence in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain, this study will redefine our understanding of British Romanticism and its troubled relationship to slavery and colonial for years to come (Peter Kitson, author of 'Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter')
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