Dick Whittington

Dick Whittington appears in the poem as a cultural artifact — a piece of English folklore that the Speaker was made to absorb in place of his own heritage. Agard references the fairy-tale version of Whittington (a poor boy who travels to London with his cat and becomes Lord Mayor), using his deliberate flatness to expose the absurdity of his curricular prominence over genuine Black and Caribbean history.

Agard includes Whittington to symbolise the Eurocentric, colonial curriculum that prioritised entertaining English myth over substantive, liberatory history. By naming him alongside Robin Hood and Old King Cole, Agard frames Whittington as part of a pattern — nursery-rhyme England fed to schoolchildren across the Empire — rather than as an isolated or defensible curricular choice. The critique focuses on the system that chose him, not on the folk figure himself.

Whittington represents cultural erasure and systemic neglect — the comfortable mythology of the coloniser taught instead of the true history of the colonised. His presence in the curriculum measures what was absent: revolutionary leaders, Maroon warriors, and pioneering Black nurses were overlooked while a legendary English folk hero was deemed educationally essential.

The Speaker harbours no personal animosity toward Whittington, but deeply resents what his presence represents — a curriculum that treated an English folk legend as more important than the history of the Speaker's own people. The act of "checking out" history is partly an act of evicting Whittington from the place of unearned authority he was given, marking the Speaker's shift from passive recipient to active agent in recovering his heritage.

The structural logic of the poem places Whittington in implicit contrast with both figures: a folk hero of debatable historicity was taught widely, while a leader of the Haitian Revolution and a Maroon warrior who fought for the freedom of enslaved people were not. Agard refuses to grant Whittington even a direct confrontation with these figures — their absence is itself the argument.

Agard groups them together to demonstrate that what was taught was a genre — folk heroism and English national story — rather than any single defensible choice. The listing technique stacks these names without ceremony, stripping Whittington of the educational authority he was once accorded and exposing the pattern of miseducation through sheer accumulation rather than lengthy critique.

Whittington has no arc because he functions not as a person but as a symbol. He does not change, act, or speak anywhere in the poem. Any "motivation" belongs instead to the colonial educational system that selected him — a system motivated by maintaining a cultural order in which English folklore occupied the centre and Black and Caribbean history occupied nothing at all.

No — Agard is careful to direct his critique at the system that chose Whittington rather than at the folk figure himself. Whittington signifies systemic neglect rather than personal malice; he is a slot in a curriculum, not an active oppressor. This distinction is central to the poem's political argument: the problem is institutional selection, not the legend's own content.