Six images from William Clark’s Ten Views of the Island of Antigua, originally published in 1823, were re-used to create this folio, also known as “Post-emancipation Life” published by the Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Early Education of Negro Children in London, around 1833. The slave trade had been made illegal in Britain under the Abolition Act of 1807, but slavery itself remained legal in the British Caribbean until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which came into effect on August 1, 1834, a date now celebrated as Emancipation Day. In practical terms, this change was implemented gradually. The new law freed individuals under the age of six, while others were required to continue working for the landowners as “apprentices” for six more years.

The colored lithographs in this folio, accompanied by 12 leaves of large-type text likely intended for classroom display and reading, originally depicted enslaved people working on a plantation. A decade later, the folio repurposes these images to represent workers under the apprenticeship system, which closely mirrored the conditions of enslavement. While the illustrations romanticize labor and are paired with moralizing lessons promoting the value of work, the text describes the depicted individuals as emancipated, blurring the line between enslavement and freedom.

The images depict Delap’s Estate on the Island of Antigua, southeast of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, which had 268 enslaved people in 1832. The first illustration, titled “Hoeing a Cane Piece,” shows enslaved people tilling the soil in squares marked by sticks, assisted by their children. A portion of the accompanying text reads:

Some [men and women], you see, have not been working so diligently as the rest. They lost half-an-hour in idle gossip this morning; and though they are now working very hard, I fear they will not be able to get up with the rest. It is a sad thing to waste time! Look at these good little boys who are trying to make themselves useful. (…) Poor people, how hard they work, and how tired and warm they look! The sun is so hot, and the pretty cocoa-nut trees are too far off to shade them from the heat. But they do not seem to mind it, and all are cheerful and happy.

This folio serves as a poignant document of how visual and textual representations were employed to obscure the harsh realities of the transition from enslavement to apprenticeship, idealizing labor while masking how little the situation changed for those who had been enslaved.