This porcelain plate has a transfer print in the centre, showing a chained female slave, naked from the waist up, kneeling in prayer. She is about to be flogged. The legend around the border reads ‘The effects of American slavery/ whipped for wanting to live a Christian life’.

Objects and images like this were circulated in Britain after the ending of slavery in the British Empire to remind people of its continuation elsewhere in the world. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared slaves free in Confederate-held territories; slavery was definitively abolished in the United States in 1865.