The Trembling Hand

by Theodora Johanna (Foth) Koob · 1960

The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive is a provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines how the trans‑Atlantic slave economy shaped the lives and works of the era’s most celebrated poets. Mathelinda Nabugodi, a Whiting Award‑winning scholar, follows a trail of personal artifacts—a scrap of Coleridge’s handwriting, Wordsworth’s sugar‑stirred teacup, Mary Shelley’s hair bracelet, Percy Shelley’s gilded baby rattle, Keats’s death mask, Byron’s silk‑lined boot—to uncover the hidden Black figures and the racial violence that underpinned the Romantic imagination. Blending archival research with personal reflection, she offers an urgent, new reading of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats and others, arguing that Romanticism cannot be understood without confronting its complicity in slavery and its moments of resistance, beauty, and joy.