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J.W. Orderson, Creoleana: or, Social and Domestic Scenes and Incidents in Barbados in Days of Yore and The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black or, A Cure for the Gout, edited and with a new introduction by John Gilmore. Oxford: Macmillan Education (Caribbean Classics), 2002, viii + 264 pp.
Besides being series editor for the Macmillan Caribbean Classics series, John Gilmore goes a step further to illuminate the earlier literature of the Caribbean by editing J. W. Orderson's novel Creoleana (1842), together with his comedy, The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black, or, a Cure for the Gout (1835), giving us an affordable and teachable pair of texts. Orderson's novel provides one of the earliest prose fictions by a native of the West Indies, and it is also the earliest West Indian historical novel: the historical circumstances with which it deals relates to the late eighteenth century. Reviewers so far have remarked on the value of Creoleana as a record of life in Barbados during the last throes of slavery. However, they have as yet not called attention to the value of the text as an historical novel, and thus as a text that contributes importantly not only to the recording of Barbadian culture, but also to the creation of a self-consciously distinct culture.
The novel tells the parallel stories of two half-sisters. One of them, Caroline Fairfield, the legitimate daughter of a sugar planter, after various mishaps winds up marrying Jack Goldacre, her heart's content, and (as the last line of the novel states), "In a month after [their marriage], the happy couple sailed for England" (p. 156). The other half-sister is Lucy, the daughter of the same father by an enslaved woman. Predictably, her love life is less happy, ending in...