nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is author of the award-winning Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street.
Shannon applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Billy Waters Is Dancing pitches the reader straight into the opening of the chapter called ‘Overboard’, about a third of the way into the book. It asks: ‘The gates of Haslar closed behind him: what would Waters do now?’. It’s only a short page of text because of the chapter title, but it gives some indication of the story being told, and the type of biography this is. A reader lighting on this page learns that we’re in the Regency period, that the setting is Britain although Waters was American, that he was in the British Navy but now has to leave because he has lost a leg, and that his pension was alright but not adequate for comfortable living on land. We also get a sense of the style of the book: a pacy life story of one man which also tells the story of the wider cultural history of the early-nineteenth century. What we don’t get, however, is any discussion of race on this page (Waters was Black). So the book’s investigation into the intersection of race, disability, and culture in the Regency era is hidden from the reader. There are also no pictures on this page, which for a book with 86 of them gives no sense of its visual richness.Visit Mary L. Shannon's website.
That’s a real loss. First of all, it’s in paintings, caricatures, prints, and drawings made of Waters that memories of him mostly survived. Secondly, any reader might ask: did the problems Waters is clearly facing on page 99 affect him in particular ways given that he was a Black man? Thinking about how race and disability and poverty were inter-related challenges was crucial for me throughout my writing process, as I wanted to be sensitive to fact that in his lifetime and beyond the book’s protagonist was rarely in charge of his own image. Billy Waters Is Dancing uncovers the life and adventures of William ‘Billy’ Waters, once a famous Black busker in Regency London, born in America in the dying years of the eighteenth-century, but for all his fame now largely forgotten. Sailor, immigrant, father, lover, and extraordinary talent, exploring the life of Billy Waters allows us to celebrate his creativity and to understand a diverse transatlantic Regency world.
Waters had a hit song, a famous street performance, a well-known costume and was depicted in a play that toured Britain and America. He was a Black, disabled, poor man in an era when to be any of those things was at best challenging, and usually downright dangerous. Yet Waters shaped his life on his own terms as far as he could – he joined the British Navy, got promoted to a petty officer, turned the accident which disabled him into the start of new career as a performer, and fought hard to defend his family and his livelihood. Waters was a versatile and skilful man. Page 99 gives a sense that this is someone who has faced continuous challenges, but it doesn’t show the reader how Waters overcame any of them. It doesn’t show how his celebrity status first helped him, and then destroyed him. It doesn’t give any detailed backdrop to Waters’ life, or explain how his story helps us to rethink what we know of the Regency period. For that, a reader needs to begin with the Prologue: ‘Enter Billy Waters, dancing’.
--Marshal Zeringue
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