Like so many well off young Englishmen of his time, [[Matthew Lewis]] led a comfortable life without any real occupation on income from his father's business. True, he had been an MP and was a popular playwright, but until the time of this journal, his entire adult life had been dominated by one thing. When Lewis was nineteen, he had published [The Monk], a book that was a scandalous sensation, one that earned him the sobriquet "Monk" Lewis.

However, it is one thing to live the easy life and another to see how the wealth that supports it is generated. In 1812, when Lewis was thirty-six years old, his father died. Lewis inherited a considerable fortune, much of it based on revenue from two sugar plantations in Jamaica. He decided to travel to Jamaica to visit these plantations. At that time, the British West Indies in general were crucial to the British economy, constituting one third of the North Atlantic Triangle. Despite their economic importance though, few Europeans wanted to live there, defeated as they so often were by climate and disease.

On his initial voyage, it took almost two months to sail to Jamaica. Lewis was desperately sea sick. As a way to try to distract himself, he wrote the long poem The Isle of Devils, not transcribed into his diary until the journey home. This poem starts with a quotation from [The Tempest]. Lewis takes the play one step further. In his poem, a beautiful young woman is shipwrecked on the isle from which none return. There she is guarded by a fiend, who manages to do what Caliban could not. Two children are born: one an abomination, the other a finely formed babe. The poem progresses from there. In her introduction to the Journal, Judith Terry suggests this poem arose from Lewis's deep seated fears of both the sea and the African origins of his slaves. Despite his often overwrought imagination, he was not an adventurous soul, and this voyage for him seemed perilous.

Like most Europeans, Lewis knew nothing of the actual operation of a slave based enterprise. Emancipation was twenty years in the future and did not seem like an entirely sure prospect. Trading in slaves had been abolished in 1811, but ownership was still legal. It is exceedingly difficult from a twenty-first century perspective to write of a slave owner in a positive way. Looked at by his contemporaries though, Lewis was considered a good slave owner, perhaps even an indulgent one.

This idea of indulgence arose from Lewis granting more days off than required by law, from his toleration of other religions than Christianity on his estates, and from his ban of corporal punishment for all but the most egregious offences. His writing however indicates a practical motivation for all this. Lewis had written "Every man of humanity must wish that slavery, even in its best and most mitigated form, had never found a legal sanction". Yet the thinking and imagination of his time seemed unable to come up with a different system and Lewis was stymied. With the trade in slaves abolished, there was no way for Lewis to augment his work force other than with children born on his estate.

Lewis writes at length of infant and childhood mortality, writing sympathetically of the mothers who saw their children die. He went so far as to establish a separate hospital on one of his estates for maternity cases, and gave nursing mothers at least a year off. Yet at the same time, in his writing about this, the reader gets the feeling that Lewis viewed his slaves more as units of production than as people. Unfortunately, increasing the number of these units was the only way to keep the estates going.

The two estates were at opposite ends of the island. Lewis visited both on each trip and writes entertainingly of the difficulties of travel. He is cautious in writing about the colonial administration and society. Instead, he writes of everyday life: folklore, the food, household administration, the production of sugar, rum and molasses. All of these details combine to make this journal into a travelogue as well. This too helps to develop Lewis's perspective, one where stories of slaves and stories of travel have equal weight.

However, the descriptions of the ocean voyages do bring home just how dangerous travel was in those times. On the first return voyage home, the course was set to avoid pirates lurking in the area. The vessel was blown off course, into the pirate routes, but although a corsair was sighted, there were no encounters with it. On the second voyage to Jamaica, it took from November 5 to December 7, 1817, just to sail from London out into the Atlantic at Plymouth, due to gales.

The journal ends on May 2, 1818, two days before Lewis left Jamaica to return home a second time. This final entry is strange reading, for the reader knows what Lewis could not; he would fall ill with yellow fever and die at sea two weeks later. The final entry shows a man at ease with himself, one who had managed to overcome his fears. The last sentence is I only wish, that in my future dealings with white persons, whether in Jamaica or out of it, I could but meet with half so such gratitude, affection, and good will."

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Lewis does not write of his life between voyages, but in the Chronology, Terry says he wrote a codicil to his will, witnessed by Byron, Shelley and Polidori, which was designed to protect his slaves after his death.