What to modern eyes seems incongruous is that in the age of the scientific racism it was not the scientists but the novelists and poets who defended the massacres in Jamaica and the pseudo-scientific racism that was deployed to defend Eyre’s actions. On the Eyre Defence Committee were some of the most eminent of the Victorians: Charles Dickens, the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and Westward Ho!. Also supporting Eyre was John Ruskin, the critic and virtual arbiter of artistic taste in mid-Victorian Britain.
