Dick Whittington

Dick Whittington appears in John Agard's "Checking Out Me History" not as a fully rendered character but as a cultural artifact — a piece of English folklore that the Speaker was made to absorb in place of his own heritage. The historical Dick Whittington was a real medieval merchant and Lord Mayor of London, yet what circulates in popular culture, and what Agard references, is the fairy-tale version: a poor boy who travels to London with his cat and rises to civic greatness. Agard invokes precisely this mythologised, sanitised iteration. Whittington exists in the poem as a name, a shorthand, a slot in a curriculum — and that deliberate flatness is the point. He is given no voice, no interiority, no heroic action within the poem itself. His power lies entirely in the institutional authority that decided he was worth teaching.

Whittington has no arc in the poem because he is not a person here — he is a function. He does not change, grow, or act. His "motivation," if one can call it that, belongs instead to the colonial educational system that chose him: a system motivated by the maintenance of a particular cultural order in which English folklore occupied the centre and Black and Caribbean history occupied nothing at all. By grouping Whittington with Robin Hood and Old King Cole, Agard signals that these figures belong to the same category — nursery-rhyme England, comfortable mythology, stories harmless enough to be fed to schoolchildren across the Empire. Whittington's presence in the curriculum is not the result of malice on his part but of systemic selection, and Agard aims his critique at that system rather than at the folk figure himself.

The most significant moment for Whittington is the mere fact of his being named. In a poem structured around the contrast between what the Speaker "was told" and what he "checking out" for himself, Whittington's name lands on the "was told" side of the ledger. He appears in the company of Robin Hood and Old King Cole, a trio of legendry that collectively represents the trivial, Anglocentric material filling the hours that could have introduced the Speaker to Toussaint L'Ouverture or Nanny de Maroon. The listing technique Agard uses — stacking these names together without ceremony — is itself an act of critical reframing: by placing Whittington in a list alongside nursery-rhyme figures, the poem strips him of the educational authority he was once accorded and exposes the absurdity of his curricular prominence.

With the Speaker: The Speaker harbours no personal animosity toward Whittington, but resents what his presence represents — a curriculum that treated an English folk legend as more educationally essential than the history of the Speaker's own people. Whittington is one of the figures used to construct the Speaker's miseducation, and the act of "checking out" history is partly an act of evicting him from the place of unearned authority he was given.

With Robin Hood: Whittington and Robin Hood function as a matched pair of English myth, both recruited by Agard to illustrate the pattern rather than an isolated incident. Together they demonstrate that what was taught was a genre — folk heroism, English national story — rather than any single defensible choice.

With Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nanny de Maroon, and Mary Seacole: The structural logic of the poem places Whittington in implicit, damning contrast with these three figures. A folk hero of debatable historicity was taught; a leader of the Haitian Revolution was not. A character with a cat was taught; a Maroon warrior who fought for the freedom of enslaved people was not. A fairy-tale mayor was taught; a pioneering Black nurse who served in the Crimean War was not. Whittington does not confront these figures — the poem refuses to grant him even that dignity — but his presence in the curriculum is the precise measure of their absence.