After making the US a little to warm for his own comfort, anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass took a two-year trip to the British Isles. He was quite taken aback by the novel sensation of being treated as what he was, an equal, by everyone from Irish labourers to the servants in an English nobleman’s home.

Frederick Douglass’s British tour returned from Ireland to England, and here too he found nothing but respect and courtesy. The only failings in this regard came from visiting Americans plainly discomfited by the welcome shown to the runaway slave, and but for a sense of duty to his homeland Douglass might have been tempted to stay.

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