Four of these poems were republished in Poems, which came out the following year. Naturally enough, the preface makes much of the sisters' youth. Its anonymous author calls them "lisping Sapphos" (iv), and refers to their achievement in terms of natural abilities and persistent study. Their skill with poetic conventions suggests that they were avid readers. The preface also classes the sisters with Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, Hannah More and Anne Barbauld, and indeed, the classification seems apt, if a little heavy-handed. Not only did Seward and Williams support the volume, but the Falconars' thematic concerns echo those of other women poets, although with less worldly savvy or comic, ironic vision. Lyrics dominate the volume. There are series about flowers, birds, the seasons and times of day. The most lurid and perhaps immature of the narratives, a ballad by Maria called "Alfred and Ethelinda," reveals that the author was familiar with gothic motifs. The poem exploits, with quite a bit of relish, the conventional setting of the convent and recounts a plot of mistaken identity, murder and remorse.

There is a sense in this volume that the Falconars are producing "safe," uncontroversial poetry, short descriptive lyrics, pastoral elegies and short narratives. The limited subjects combined with the lack of depth makes Poems the least interesting of the Falconars' three publications. The sisters are moralists, but moralists without the scathing irony or worldly experience of other pens. And yet, there is an unpretentious quality to the Falconars' work, a suggestion that the young authors will not stray out of their range. Much poetry by younger authors merely imitates that of their adult models, and comes to sound affected. The Falconars show considerable skill as well as authenticity, and for this reason, the book is superior to those of other child poets.

The quiet conventionality of Poems gives little hint that the Falconars would shortly venture into the controversy surrounding the slave trade. It is possible, however, that the funds raised for Poems went to support Poems on Slavery, which was published the same year. In fact, Joseph Johnson, who published both books, had subscribed to twelve copies of Poems. Moreover, an oblique connection between the books can be seen in the Dedication to the second edition to Sir William Dolben, the man who proposed what became known as the Dolben Act, a law passed the following year which was the first Parliamentary attempt to regulate conditions on slaving ships. The prose dedication is muted about his specific accomplishments, but the abolitionist affiliation would have been unmistakable. Further, 1787 had seen the publication of one of the first slave-narratives in English, Quobna Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Cugoano, an ex-slave and a friend of Olauhdo Equiano, was at this time working as a servant for Richard Cosway. Given the immediacy of abolition within their social circle, the Falconars surely had more than a passing interest in the issue, and in the problematics for British national identity that it raised.

The year 1787 had been a watershed in the history of abolition in Britain. Thomas Clarkson and a network of Quakers around the country founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Clarkson was the first to set out to document the slave trade, and while it would be another thirty years before Parliament would actually restrict the trade, the Society's first accomplishment was mobilizing popular opinion. Petitions, sugar boycotts, and a new awareness of the ways in which English luxuries perpetuated the slave trade were the result of the Abolition Society's work. The response was so strong that, in 1788, Parliament organized a special committee to investigate the slave trade (see Walvin).

The literary response to the nascent anti-slavery movement was unprecedented. In 1787-8 alone, Falconar sponsors Roscoe, Williams and More (if indeed she was a subscriber), along with Anne Yearsley, William Cowper and many others published poems about slavery, and many more followed throughout the 1790s (see Richardson, Slavery). The Falconars' poems should be seen as an important contribution to that debate. Generally, abolitionist literature by white Europeans sought to engage readers' sympathy for the slave, some of it dwelling with high-pitched sentimentality on the agonies of parents torn from children or with almost prurient detail on the physical tortures that victims of slavery had to endure. The anti-slavery discourse relied on the ideal of liberty, equality and the rights of man that had emerged from the American Revolution. It also sought to expose the contradiction between the slave trade and Christian feeling (see Mellor; see Richardson, "Darkness"). Anti-slavery authors, particularly those who were suspicious of the discourse on rights, found themselves in a rhetorical predicament: how to mobilize popular sentiment against government-sanctioned practice and a complicit public without arousing radical passions. This became all the more urgent in the wake of the French Revolution, when the fear of sedition was at its height and any anti-government statement could be taken as treasonous. Because of this, the image of England that frequently emerges from these poems on slavery is curiously double-sided: on the one hand, English practice is indicted as the worst of evils and the English public deeply complicit; on the other hand, England is represented as the envied example of liberty and justice. In the discourse of many of these anti-slavery poems, an erring England corrects its ways and thus becomes Africa's savior.

The Falconars deploy precisely this rhetoric in their slavery poems. Their language is passionate, assured and angry. At the same moment that they indict British practice, they exhort the reign of King George and Queen Charlotte, thereby stabilizing any subversive critique, and holding up the royal family as potential saviors. It is a bold move for two young unknowns. Both poems show a remarkable understanding of the economics of slavery and the terms of the debate. Perhaps to offset any backlash, the title page proclaims the authors' young ages, and daringly takes its epigraph from Deuteronomy in which death is assured to slave-traders. The poems are quite similar in terms of imagery and organization. Deliberately, they both call on a sovereign to stop the trade (Maria calls on the king while Harriet calls on the queen), and both recount an allegorized history of Britain in which Catholic "Superstition" is defeated by the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century England, the implication is, has sadly fallen out of step with the progress foreshadowed by its glorious history, and the slave trade is the result of "avarice" generated by unchecked commerce. Harriet's poem is by far the stronger in this regard, and again, the boldness of her critique and the range of her understanding are remarkable. Harriet suggests that modern-day England lacks the patriotic fire of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift and Newton: "These were souls that Britain once possessed, / When genuine virtue fir'd the patriot's breast" (21). Not only does she imply that "virtue" has fled the contemporary scene, but she also positions the anti-slavery movement within England's progressive intellectual tradition, and thus identifies it with a patriotic, nationalist narrative. In a move that she probably could not have made if she were writing after the French Revolution, Harriet suggests that if the nation does not heed abolitionist pleas, the wronged people of Africa will be avenged:

When o'er your heads th'avenging thunders roll,
And quick destruction seems to snatch the soul;
When last around the dreadful lightnings fall,
And guilt shall hear th'incens'd Almighty call;
Then will his wrath destroy the life he gave,
And justice snatch the soul that mercy could not save. (23-4)

Harriet's language of violent, divine retribution is surprising given some of the aristocratic and government figures who supported Poems. Anna Seward, for example, had cooled in her support for abolition when she heard the story of a Mr Ashwell, a West Indian planter, who, along with his nephew, was murdered by his slaves (29-30). In daring to invoke divine retribution for the national sin of the slave trade, Harriet was probably shielded by her age, which was noted on the frontispiece. However, her statements reveal that the public sphere was a far more permissive space before the French Revolution created fears of violent, anti-government plots and curtailed anti-government statements.

Maria's poem, the shorter of the two, is structured like an argument, and the narrating voice moves from addressing readers directly to addressing an allegorized figure of Freedom. It is a strongly worded indictment that all but taunts readers to think about their complicity with the slave trade:

Ye foes of heav'n, and Britain's dire disgrace,
Unjust oppressors of an injur'd race,
Tell us, who form'd the slave you thus deride,
The sport of insult, indolence, and pride? (6)

Maria prays to the "goddess of Freedom" to make the liberated slave "sing the glories of a George's reign" (13), at once praising the king's powers and expanding his dominions. Simultaneously, she draws attention to his refusal to act. This brilliant rhetorical move is a way of using the language of nation against national practice. In it, we can see how the anti-slavery debate contributed to the articulation of the language of empire. Maria retains a sense of England's greatness despite present practice, and her argument (and Harriet's) turns on the fact that the country has betrayed that greatness. The figure of George III becomes a synecdoche for this great tradition, he who will put the nation back on its progressive path. In Maria's poem, we see the extent to which abolitionist rhetoric is embedded in an image of English national identity. In order to make the argument against slavery, Maria must posit a national ideal to which the country can return. That ideal accepts that imperialist expansion is a necessary consequence of enlightenment, and an essential component of British superiority. Paradoxically, the expansion and wealth of the empire is both a reward for British industry and a symptom of its avarice.

What's refreshing about the Falconars' contribution to the anti-slavery debate is the fact that they avoid the incipient racism that pervades much abolitionist writing by Europeans. As Alan Richardson has noted about Bristol abolitionist poetry, while well-intentioned, much of it assumes the inferiority of Africans while appealing for an end to slavery based on common humanity ("Darkness," 38). The Falconars avoid this trap by focusing on national history rather than attempting to justify, in enlightenment terms, the common humanity of black Africans. This is not to say that the Falconars' vision is not without its ideological trappings. The expansion that they imagine involves a coming together of nations for the mutual recognition of England. Such a vision, of course, retains England in the ascendancy (see Mellor). It is this vision that ultimately grounds the poem and the book as a whole as a patriotic exercise, at once an indictment of British avarice as a deviation from enlightenment values and a celebration of the British empire as an agent of those enlightenment values.

The Falconars surely could not, and perhaps would not, have written such a scathing indictment of government practice after the French Revolution of 1789. In fact, the Revolution dampened the abolitionist movement in England by associating it with jacobinism and more radical reform movements (Walvin 66-7). The Revolution occurred between the publication of the Falconars' first two books and their third, and it becomes provocative to imagine precisely how that event affected their budding literary career. By 1791, they may have wished to distance themselves, if not from the abolition movement, then from the radical associations that were accruing to it. Perhaps in consequence of this, their third book, Poetic Laurels for Characters of Distinguished Merit, pays tribute to some of the most highly placed people of the day. It is dedicated to the Prince of Wales, and opens with a rather fawning poem on his recent recovery from an illness. While Poetic Laurels is not significantly different in tone from Poems, it is, more than their first book, a nationalist project that celebrates king and country.

The Falconars pay tribute to a who's who list of important people from a variety of fields: Queen Charlotte, the Duchess of Devonshire, the Earl of Caithness, Richard Sheridan, Lord Heathfield,, Richard Cosway, Philip de Loutherbourg, and John Palmer. They celebrate military conquests, extoll patriotic feeling, and praise English values as they articulate themselves in the theater, in battle, in literature and in art. In the process, they paint a portrait of a nation full of "characters" who have, in their own ways, contributed to its ascendancy. The Scottish native Lord Heathfield was the battle hero who preserved Gibraltar for Britain against France and Spain in 1788. Sheridan and Palmer have ennobled British theater. Cosway and de Loutherbourg have enhanced British arts. The Duchess of Devonshire, to whom they had dedicated Poems on Slavery apparently without personal acquaintance, is praised for her personal qualities. The effect of this book when taken in tandem with some of the stronger statements in the slavery poems is to offer a rehabilitated vision of the contemporary scene. Harriet had implied that modern Britain lacked "true virtue"; here individual virtues contribute to the whole. Following as it does their passionate attack on slavery and coming two years after the French Revolution, Poetic Laurels deliberately sounds a unifying note in what was a divided, volatile public sphere.

The "Prefatory Epistle" sets a satirical tone that is not borne out in the rest of the book. This rather slapdash poem, whose author is not specified, comically imagines the reaction of reviewers to yet another book of women's poetry. In the process, it casts the literary marketplace as a marriage market, and book reviewers as panders: "These modern Sapphos are conceited creatures, / They sport their thoughts as others do their features" (ix). Not only do they imagine critics' responses, but they vow to stop writing if reviewers will help them find husbands. "Assist us, dear Messieurs — have you no friend, / Your sons, perhaps yourselves, to recommend" (x). Like the slavery poems, this epistle is remarkably bold, but its attitude is difficult to determine. They could be mocking women writers, masculinist reviewers or themselves for pursuing a literary career. Since neither of their previous books was much noticed in the press, an address to reviewers seems beside the point. Nevertheless, it was apparently effective, as two of the five reviews that briefly noticed Poetic Laurels mentioned the poem. Taking his cue from the epistle, the reviewer for the Critical Review said, "if a true representation is given of them in the pretty frontispiece, where they sit so amicably cheek by cheek together — give us the fair authors, and a fig for their odes in quarto!" (354-5) Whatever its thrust, the poem certainly shows that the Falconars were aware of the problems encountered by women writers, and of their distinctive position as particularly young authors.

Only one poem explicitly engages controversy. Harriet's "A Short Epistle of Advice from Westminster-Hall" is addressed to the Whig satirist "Peter Pindar" (John Wolcott). It is written in anapestic tetrameter, which adds a mock-heroic quality to the verse. However, the poem is soundly anti-satirical since it criticizes Pindar for his attack on the king in "The Lousiad" (1785-1795). Harriet praises Pindar's satire, but suggests that he goes too far when he ridicules "the weak foible of Age" (68). She concludes by warning the satirist that in doing so, "The world must suppose you far meaner than they" (68). The strong monarchist view is consistent with the book's dedication to the Prince of Wales, but it can also be taken as a poetic credo of sorts, a resistance to some of the more personal, vitriolic satire that circulated so widely. It is certainly a retreat from political critique. On another level, this poem reveals something about how the Falconars wanted to position themselves in the literary marketplace. Whereas satirists like Pindar wrote to tear establishment figures down, the Falconars write to build them up, and in the process, to paint a portrait of the nation that was unified under its sovereign.

Interestingly, the list of subscribers for Poetic Laurels was considerably shorter than it was for Poems; the famous names that supported their first book do not appear in the third. The authors explain this by saying that exertions were not as great. It is possible the sisters wished to throw off such extensive patronage and try the market. However, as Dustin Griffin has claimed, the stigma of patronage in the later eighteenth century was not so great at scholars have traditionally thought, so there is no reason to suppose the Falconars would have naturally resisted it. The more relevant question is why the Falconars did not publish another book. The Preface to Poetic Laurels carries the suggestion that they may not have been interested in literary careers. They write:

Our motives for continuing the literary career we advantageously began, are too uninteresting to be advanced: they are such as would by no means justify the confidence of fastening on the public opinion, subjects treated so as to disgust its propriety — but will perhaps, tend to soften the rigour of critical delicacy, and take away the sting of being thought intruders on the favour of the world. This may be conventional prefatorial modesty, or it may have deeper meanings: reluctance, lack of interest, the need to write for money, all of these are possible reasons for their subsequent silence.

Despite their youth and the short three year-span of their careers, the Falconar sisters deserve some reconsideration. Those three years were some of the most fraught in English history, with the controversies over the slave trade and imperial expansion, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. In the progress of the Falconars published work, from scathing criticism of government to laudatory tributes to figures of national import, we see how the language of opposition could become absorbed into mainstreamed language of nation and empire. Their contribution to the debates about the English participation in the slave trade, about national self-representation, and about national identity should secure them critical attention in years to come.

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