In his Journal of a West India Proprietor, Matthew Lewis documented numerous encounters with the people he enslaved. Guided by Wedderburn’s argument that the provision grounds must be guarded “above all” for Black liberation, this chapter argues that tensions over provision grounds permeated Lewis’s encounters. After granting an additional day per week on the provision grounds as “a matter of right,” Lewis documented that enslaved people were growing poisons, unleashing fires, harboring crowds of destructive livestock, and providing sustenance for self-liberated Black people. Despite noticing these dangers, Lewis wrote to William Wilberforce detailing a plan for emancipating the people he enslaved by giving them his plantation, a proposal feared to be “dangerous to the island.” Lewis’s Journal recorded that his plantations were undermined, not by overt rebellion, but rather by the success of the Black ecological project: The botanical and animal ecologies of the provision grounds were anticipatory abolitionist commons that would be drawn upon in the coming emancipation.

The conclusion moves beyond Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Edgeworth to demonstrate the wide-ranging ramifications of networked authorship for other authors during the period.It was not necessary to be a member of an underprivileged group in order to be situated within an authorship network.Three of their well-educated male contemporaries were influenced by literary networks that inspired significant revisions to their most famous novels: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794).The case studies of these three novels show that revision was a major tool of eighteenth-century composition practices and was linked to networked authorship, overturning spontaneous, individual conceptions of literary production during the period.The larger consequences of this study are for the categories of novel and author: by concentrating on revision, we can understand the mutability of the novel form and the networked nature of authorship.