collection Desert Elegy; and An African in Imperial London, which won the High Plains Book Award for Nonfiction.
Jones applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race and the Dreadnought Hoax, and reported the following:
A reader opening The Girl Prince at page 99 will find herself immersed in the Great Naval Review on the Thames: a 1909 extravaganza orchestrated to whip up enthusiasm for all things Royal Navy. This intoxicating spectacle of entertainment, pageantry, and technology ran for a full week and drew massive crowds from Westminster to Southend, wherever the mighty vessels were anchored.Visit Danell Jones's website.
Disturbingly, Black mariners were invisible in the news coverage of the Review although they had been serving the Royal Navy for hundreds of years. Since the seventeenth century, men—and sometimes even women—had worked a variety of jobs on Navy vessels as pilots, cooks, servants, or translators. That changed with the rise of pseudo-scientific ideas of race in the nineteenth century that classified people of African descent as inferior. Such ideas meant Black sailors were relegated to the grunt work of hauling and shoveling coal in the cramped, scorching engine rooms of steamships.
During the 1909 Naval Review on the Thames, the ship in the place of honor at the front of the fleet, the ship whose name every man, woman, and child knew as well as their own, was the H.M.S. Dreadnought.For the entire week, the Dreadnought teemed with visitors. Ordinary citizens lucky enough to get aboard eagerly inspected its innovative turbine engines, gawked at the sailors’ hammocks in their sleeping quarters, inhaled the scent of bread wafting from its bakery, and ogled the twelve-inch guns. The smooth gray decks, it turned out, provided the perfect surface for roller skating, and the sailors enjoyed showing off their mastery of the latest popular craze. As the Commander-in-Chief’s flag ship, the Dreadnought offered fewer visiting hours than the other vessels, but when it was open, it hosted a never-ending stream of guests.If people want to understand the significance of the Dreadnought Hoax, they must keep in mind that just seven months after this dazzling display of naval power on the Thames, Virginia Stephen (the 28-year-old aspiring writer was not yet Virginia Woolf) and her friends masqueraded as African princes and conned their way on board the famous ship. When they did so, they were not just playing a practical joke, they were stepping onto an international stage.
Page 99 provides a tantalizing glimpse of The Girl Prince. Although Virginia Woolf doesn’t appear on this page, it nevertheless creates a rich portrait of her world and captures the spirit of the book by considering Africans and Black Britons as part of the larger life story of the famous writer. In The Girl Prince, I explain how photographs taken by Woolf’s great aunt Julia Margaret Cameron connect Woolf both to the tragic life of an Abyssinian prince who was ripped from his homeland and brought to England as well as to a Jamaican swindler who impersonated African royalty and became a folk hero. Readers may be surprised to learn that Woolf had African neighbors in Bloomsbury, some of whom would go on to play crucial roles in the dismantling of empire. And it was Jamaican journalist and playwright Una Marson, who would rewrite the Dreadnought stunt for an anti-imperialist, anti-racist comedy. Woolf may have lived in an almost exclusively white social circle, yet Black lives edged and echoed her own, and whether she acknowledged them or not, they contributed to the rich fabric of British life and culture. One of the main points of The Girl Prince is that the story of the hoax is inseparable from talking about the lives of Black people in Britain.
--Marshal Zeringue
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