Nic Revel: A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land
Nic Revel: A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land
An English gentleman sold into slavery. That's the audacious premise driving George Manville Fenn's muscular Victorian adventure, a tale that inverts the era's assumptions about who gets to be free and who gets to be property. Nic Revel is a young man of good family in Devon, comfortable in his father's estate until a skirmish with poachers sets off a chain of catastrophic misunderstandings. Mistaken for a runaway sailor, he's press-ganged into naval service, a brutal fate for anyone, but especially for a sheltered country gentleman. From there, things only grow worse. Sold into bondage in the antebellum American South, Nic finds himself in "Alligator Land," working plantations while aching for home and the friends he left behind. Fenn, who wrote extensively about travel and adventure, brings vivid texture to Nic's ordeal: the heat, the hardship, the humiliation of being stripped of everything that marked him as a gentleman. But this isn't mere melodrama. By casting an English aristocrat as a "white slave," Fenn asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of freedom and the arbitrary cruelty of class. For readers who like their adventure with a dark, subversive edge.
