Dora Richards Miller’s “Recollections of a West-Indian home and slave-insurrection”: An introduction including a linguistic discussion of her Crucian English Creole texts

Abstract

This article presents an introduction to a diplomatic edition of a manuscript written by the Caribbean-born writer and educator Dora Richards Miller (1835–1914), finalized around 1886. The diplomatic edition is published as Miller (this issue), edited and annotated by the authors of the present introductory study. Miller’s Recollections contains an account of her memories of the 1848 slave uprising on St. Croix, which resulted in the emancipation of the enslaved population in the Danish West Indies (today’s US Virgin Islands). In addition to providing an overview of the life and work of Miller and contextualization of her Recollections, we offer a discussion of the account as a central source for Virgin Islands language history in the 19th century. The document contains a considerable number of quotations as well as the lyrics of an 1848 song in a historical form of Crucian English Creole. Miller’s Recollections can be considered, we argue, the earliest substantial source for the study of Anglophone sociolinguistic variation in the Virgin Islands.