Romantic Diasporas: French emigres, British Convicts, and Jews (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Rom a n t ic Di a sp or a s

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identit y, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés, British Convicts, and Jews, by Toby R. Benis FORTHCOMING TITLES: Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Periodicals, by Alberto Gabriele From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian

Romantic Diaspor as: French Émigrés, British Convicts, and Jews Toby R. Benis

ROMANTIC DIASPORAS

Copyright © Toby R. Benis, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61065–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benis, Toby R., 1963– Romantic diasporas : French émigrés, British convicts, and Jews / Toby R. Benis. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives & letters) ISBN 978–0–230–61065–1 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Romanticism—Great Britain. 3. Exiles in literature. 4. French— Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Jews—Great Britain— History—19th century. 6. British—Australia—History–19th century. 7. Emigration and immigration in literature. 8. Jewish diaspora in literature. 9. National characteristics, British, in literature. I. Title. PR457.B34 2009 820.9⬘145—dc22

2008045139

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Michael

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C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

“Boundless, yet Distinct”: The Émigré Experience and the 1790s

25

The French Connection in Frances Burney and Mary Shelley

59

Beyond the Convict Taint: George Barrington and the Colonial Cure

85

4

The Scottish Martyrs and the Reform of Narrative

107

5

Edgeworth and the Jews: Diaspora and Political Control

131

2 3

Notes

161

Works Cited

181

Index

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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

My life and circumstances have changed immensely since I began

this project, and I have often felt, in writing about diaspora, that I was living it as well. I owe much to those who have seen me through these changes in location and fortune. Marilyn Gaull’s faith in me has never wavered, placing me among a very fortunate generation of younger scholars sustained by her friendship, optimism, and extraordinary good sense. I have buttonholed a number of mentors and colleagues over the years to read parts of this manuscript, and they have responded with invaluable suggestions and criticisms. These readers include Jeffory Clymer, Steven E. Jones, Karl Kroeber, Peter Manning, Caroline Reitz, Sheila Spector, Anne Wallace, Phyllis Weliver, and the members of the Eighteenth-Century Salon at Washington University in St. Louis. For years, my trusty colleagues at the Saint Louis University Research Group—Georgia Johnston, Sherry Lindquist, Colleen McCluskey, Hal Parker, and Annie Smart—provided crucial encouragement and strategic prodding. Frederic Biélaszka-DuVernay generously helped with French translations, particularly the lengthy and challenging De Par le Comte d’Artois, Roi de Botani-Bay, Aux terres Australes et peuplades de malfaiteurs échappés de l’échaffaud et des galères anglaises. The staff of the British Library and the Bodelian Library helped me navigate the archive of émigré and convict materials; research at both institutions was funded in part by a Summer Research Award from the Graduate School of Saint Louis University, and by Mellon Grants from the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Provost’s Faculty Research Leave. Portions of Chapter 1, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 were published separately in European Romantic Review, Australian Literary Studies, and Criticism.

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I n t roduc t ion

I

n 1799, a satirical pamphlet aimed at French émigrés and those inside the republic who sympathized with them appeared in England. Claiming to be produced in London, the text was framed as an appeal from the Comte d’Artois, Louis XVI’s youngest brother, calling on the “cowards who fled France and to all those who have been banned from France—princes and valets, traitors and bandits, princesses and prostitutes” to join him in the British penal colony of Botany Bay: “a new country made especially for them” (De Par le Comte d’Artois 1). Styling d’Artois the “king of Botany Bay,” the writer characterizes Australia as a de Sadian refuge for the worst elements of both Britain and the ancien regime, bequeathed by the British government to the emigrant Prince and his circle to rule. A historical curiosity, this document nonetheless points to a political and social dimension to exile in the Romantic period. During this era, poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth were drawn to the figure of the iconoclast or the outsider. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley chose to live out what proved to be the last years of their lives on the continent, embracing the idea of self-exile dramatized by Byron’s itinerant Childe Harold. Yet for many, exile was not an aesthetic or a political pose, but a brutal historical reality. Romantic Diasporas focuses on how French émigrés, Australian convicts, and Britain’s Jews embodied this state for Georgian society. To literary scholars, the French Revolution explains aesthetic, political, and social changes in England. By contrast, I am interested in what René Chateaubriand called the “external France,” the France of the Emigration, which made London its capital and which this study argues represented the first group of modern exiles.1 The average Briton was far more likely to encounter these individuals than to cross the channel and observe events firsthand, as Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth did, or to live among those who recalled invading continental armies, as Byron and Shelley would. Fleeing persecution

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and civil war at home, French refugees included individuals from all professions, classes, and sects, a testament to how revolutionaries aimed at nothing less than a complete restructuring of society and government.2 Accounts of and about those who emigrated to Britain, often published in English for British audiences, demonstrate the significant role that perceptions of the period’s exiles played in ongoing debates on a number of questions, including the nature of British identity and women’s rights.3 Although Britain and France were long-standing political rivals, blood, marriage, and a common passion for the latest Parisian fashions connected their upper classes. This historically ambiguous relationship became yet more complicated as thousands crossed the border between Britain and the rest of the world. The unprecedented influx of French aliens and the middle class’s remarkable charity toward them established Britain as the first liberal European state, a nation generous, and secure, enough to grant asylum to its enemies. As the tract by the “Comte d’Artois’ reminds us, however, Britain’s ambivalent hospitality to the émigrés was the mirror image of the merciless exportation to Australia of criminals deemed too dangerous to free, but not dangerous enough to hang. The appeal from “d’Artois” explicitly connects French Emigration and convict transportation. On one hand, this link reflects the mistaken view that all émigrés were aristocrats who fled like criminals when their oppression was finally overthrown.4 But this identification of French émigrés with Botany Bay convicts also, by extension, accuses British aristocrats. They shelter French libertines, the author contends, in spite of their tacit understanding of émigré crimes and treachery—which explains why, according to the pamphlet, British patronage only translates into a willingness to ship émigrés to the newest penal colony. The highly uncertain provenance of the appeal from “d’Artois” is a useful entry point into the confusion and ambiguity émigrés imported into British society during wartime. This pamphlet appeared in the same year as the Seditious Societies Act, passed when anti-Jacobin panic in Britain was at its height. Parliament intended this act to regulate printed material by making printers accountable for the political content of what they circulated; under the law, printers had “to record their imprint (that is, their own name and address) on every piece of printed matter they produced, however short” (St. Clair, Reading Nation 311). The pamphlet on émigré transportation virtually glories in its refusal to conform to these regulations, listing only a city of publication that may or may not be accurate. William St. Clair helps put this gesture in context when he observes

Introduction

3

that even after the 1799 law was enacted, some booksellers tried to evade or simply ignore the law. One ruse was to claim an illegal book was imported, while “numerous books of doubtful legal status claim to be ‘Printed for the Booksellers,’ who remain unnamed” (315). This appears to have been the path chosen by the anonymous printer of the d’Artois pamphlet, who merely attributes its distribution to “tous les marchands de nouveauté” or “all merchants of novelties.” Authorities designed the new rules on printing to police the circulation of controversial ideas, just as the Alien Act of 1793 aimed to regulate the movement of potentially subversive refugees. A text about the criminality of Emigration that itself flagrantly violates British law, a pamphlet that may have been printed in London, Paris, or somewhere else altogether, the satire by “d’Artois” embodies the proliferation of meaning associated with Romantic exile.5 This study will throw into relief the significance of and similarities between representations of the French Emigration and convict transportation during the Romantic period. I am not arguing that British authorities themselves necessarily viewed the Emigration and the 1788 revival of transportation (which had ended with the American Revolution) as related phenomena, or that they resumed transportation in response to the influx of émigrés; Britain’s First Fleet of convicts bound for Botany Bay sailed a year before the Bastille fell and well before the Reign of Terror swelled the numbers of French refugees. Rather, my point is that responses to émigrés and convicts divulge how these two very different diasporas, overlapping in time, shaped Britons’ understanding of how nationality and national identity were changing in the Age of Revolution. In the end, the arrival of French refugees—like the British convicts whose voyage out they enacted in reverse—helped fuel a sense of the British ruling classes as different: different from that of their continental neighbors, different from Britain’s own criminal parasites and lower-class, uneducated workers, and different from colonial subjects. The evolution of this series of differences, and by extension of national identity as it is understood today, was inextricably linked in Britain with the concomitant arrival, and departure, of the French émigrés and the earliest Australian convicts. In the Romantic era, nation-states increasingly defined themselves in terms of the historiography of a tribal past situated within distinct geographical borders. A key counterpart to this conception of the nation was the modern notion of mass expulsion based on a revisioning of society that attempted to rule out questionable allegiances, ideology, and behavior. Martin Thom has explained how this process worked

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with regard to nineteenth-century France. The émigrés’ experience of exile during the French wars undermined the cosmopolitanism often espoused by France’s intellectual leadership: the émigrés’ heightened awareness of Europe’s cultural differences, sharpened by their experiences outside France, played a “crucial role” in consolidating French nationalism during the Bourbon Restoration (Thom 196). Romantic Diasporas traces how reactions to the French exiles on British soil, and the establishment of a new penal colony at the antipodes, produced a similar dynamic in Britain. Depictions of the émigré and the Australian convict helped shore up a sharp awareness of national differences. Ultimately, Romantic-era representations of convicts and of their uncanny doubles, the émigrés branded as counter-revolutionary criminals in France, disclose a double role for conceptions of exile. On one hand, these conceptions helped shape norms underpinning nationalist ideology. At the same time, many of the texts explored here destabilize the culturally useful distinction between foreign and native, female abjection and patriarchal privilege, and lower and upper class. In his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1998), Franco Moretti reminds us of “how weak national identity still is, in nineteenth-century Europe” (37, italics in original). The persistence of conflicted, weak “heros” in historical fiction in particular (such as Scott’s Waverley) bears out Moretti’s view that the novel as a form does not suppress but rather dramatizes this weakness. While Atlas of the European Novel does not discuss work on émigrés, this thesis helps explain why émigrés in literature frequently vacillate, brood, and wander with little sense of direction or purpose.6 The indecision of English characters in texts about émigrés—for example, Charlotte Smith’s Ellesmere, Frances Burney’s Harleigh, and Mary Robinson’s St. Clair—evidence how easily the exile’s contagion of confused identity can infect other, more grounded nationalities. The avoidance of these subjects in scholarship on British Romanticism can be explained, in part, through disciplinary boundaries situating the literature of the Emigration within the realm of French history and literature, even though much of this material was published in English for British audiences. The same outlook with regard to the earliest accounts of Australia and the penal colony at Botany Bay has left criticism on these texts to scholars of Australian literature and culture. Such classifications fail to account for literature produced, not only by the exiles, but also by British authors. Literary categories defined by nationality (e.g., the “French novel”) have overlooked texts about locations such as “the spaces between France and England,” which Michael Wiley terms “Channel literature” (8).7 Such

Introduction

5

suggestions point the way to an understanding of Romanticism incorporating the transatlantic, the imperial, and beyond. When Australian convicts and Jewish Europeans (and their middle-eastern origins) join this mix, what comes into focus is a Global Romanticism: a truly vast network of literary experiments and explorations reflective of the reach, and the resistance to, the views of the globe circulating in Georgian Britain. There has been a contributing factor to past scholarly oversights, in the case of émigré literature at least. Long stereotyped as a united block of reactionary aristocrats, the émigrés constitute a politically less savory topic for critics than idealistic revolutionaries who made Wordsworth, among others, feel that “France [was] standing on the top of golden hours / And human nature seeming born again” (Prelude, VI. 353–354). But while Wordsworth celebrated the revolution abroad, organizers in Britain were launching a government effort to assist impoverished émigrés. The émigré condition became a cause célèbre among members of the British aristocracy (to whom some refugees were related); émigrés formed regiments and drilled, awaiting the day of their return across the channel to restore order; and the worrisome possibilities raised by their numbers inspired the first piece of immigration control legislation in British history. The notion of diaspora, which I will draw on at points throughout this study, offers a nuanced rubric for understanding this dynamic. Once confined to discussions of Jews, current scholarship on diaspora takes in a range of migratory experiences, including, for example, those of subcontinent Indians who moved to Caribbean Islands under British rule.8 Diaspora frames the complex collective nature of exile for both the French and their criminal British counterparts, since as Avtar Brah points out, “Diasporas are places of long-term, if not permanent, community formations” (193). Even in exile, the dispersed dream of returning “home,” a dream realized by most émigrés, and even some lucky convicts who lived to return from Australia. Émigrés and transported convicts felt very much alone, isolated from their homelands, or their proper social and economic sphere, and also part of a group sharing similar dislocations and disorientation. In these texts, community is frightening, since one group’s desire for unity and homogeneity fueled the impetus for the exile’s expulsion from the place of origin. Yet community is also precious; diasporic communities provide exiles with an ongoing sense of belonging and a shared past. In addition, the lens of diaspora studies possesses advantages over the recent critical focus on cosmopolitanism in this era. Some characterizations in works I will discuss do appeal to a cosmopolitan

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universality, but the concept of diaspora as articulated by theorists like Brah provides us with a mode for understanding the responses to the exiles that are often the main focus of works about émigrés and convicts. Whether they are written by the exiles themselves or by British observers, these productions document responses by a range of groups to both kinds of exiles. The depictions of such reactions, even (or especially) in texts that sympathize with the exile’s plight, are as important, or even more important, than the symbolic value the exiles themselves possess within the narrative. In turn, and for the purposes of this study just as importantly, diasporas call into question the status of the native in a way that the figure of the cosmopolitan does not necessarily do; accordingly, Brah identifies “diasporic space” as that in which “the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native” (208–209, italics in original). My own analysis of representations of convicts and émigrés dramatizes how diasporic identity can easily become pathological, metastasizing throughout the exile’s place of tentative residence to affect the construction of the host country’s self-representations. The texts explored here document how diasporas upset and decenter not only the physical bodies but also the social, economic, and psychic condition of those displaced. In their case study of Franz Kafka, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari seize on the linguistic, geographical, and cultural dislocations in Kafka’s work: a Czech Jew from the countryside writing in German in urban Prague, Kafka’s experience embodies what they call deterritorialization, which is “the first characteristic of minor literature” (16). A major assumption of Romantic Diasporas is that deterritorialization is a signal trait of diasporic discourse, articulated by those who are cut adrift from a specific culture and geographical point of origin that nevertheless continue to exert enormous influence in defining the group’s own identity and how others respond to it.9 Their social superiors viewed convicts as alien even before they departed for Australia; like émigrés, criminals called into question received views of what it meant to be British. The expulsion to Australia of a range of undesirables, from pickpockets to parliamentary reformers, conveys transportation’s sharpened importance as an official tool for authorities clinging to political and social control. Once in Australia, however, these same criminals could become part of what Kim Butler calls more generally “an imperial or conquering diaspora” (191). The Australian penal colony served a dual function: a dumping ground for social pariahs, and a territorial foothold in the East Indies to check the growing power of continental rivals. In this

Introduction

7

way, Britons transported to the antipodes recall the status of Roman slaves shipped out to the edges of the empire, whose social abjection at home did not prevent them from acting as agents of Roman political, economic, and cultural authority in the far provinces. A similar, contemporary example is provided by ethnic Russians living today in the now-independent countries of eastern Europe such as the Baltic states, whose ongoing presence there testifies to the Soviet desire to dilute the linguistic and cultural base of nations intended for incorporation into a greater Russia. The relationship between social and political developments and narrative form is the other central preoccupation of this study. On one hand, the novel’s incorporation of a variety of literary forms, including poetry, drama, reportage, memoir, and speech, reflects and unifies the nation’s inherently polyglot nature and appeals to multiple classes at once.10 The novel provides a model for difference brought together within a greater whole. But the stories I examine here chart the limits of that power to unite, when it is set against the stress of social upheaval and revolution. My thinking about the shape of émigré and convict stories is informed particularly by Hayden White’s contention that narrative form relies on stable social structures. Frequently inhabiting a setting in which such structures are under siege or entirely in abeyance, representations of émigrés and convicts tend to possess a chaotic and self-subverting structure. If these authors seek to convey the plight of the convict and the émigré, they often conclude that such experiences are impossible to fully communicate in narrative form or to be processed by outsiders. Accordingly, I repeatedly return to the question of how the structure of these Romantic-era narratives are shaped, and destabilized, by the awareness and experience of diaspora.11 Depictions of the émigré and the convict blur received valuations of the familiar and the foreign, the criminal and the victim, working in complementary and surprising ways to shape the evolving sense of British identity. This theoretical framework offers a helpful supplement to recent critical explorations of this material. Adriana Craciun’s British Woman Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (2005) includes a long-overdue chapter on émigré literature by women, and argues that émigrés and their sympathizers serve as powerful symbols of a persistent transnational cosmopolitanism during the French wars. This kind of cosmopolitan frame, however, frequently operates alongside profound uncertainty in these texts about the actual power afforded by such a position. The authors addressed here remain undecided about what Mary Anne Perkins, in a different

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context, calls “a vague cosmopolitanism . . . which avoids the duties, responsibilities of commitment to the particular and the concrete” (200) and offers no substantial ideological alternative to the nationalism it is said to oppose.12 It also bears noting that theorists have criticized the “arbitrary, unspecified, fairly free way” in which diaspora itself as a theoretical concept is employed by contemporary scholars (Baumann 325). What distinguishes Romantic diaspora from other forms of migration and travel, this study argues, is its specific context amid the rise of the nation-state, when national identity emerged alongside perceptions of exiled groups. Unlike the scattering of enslaved Africans, the diasporas I explore here are groups exiled or marginalized by centralized nations as a way to consolidate identity and maintain existing social formations. Martin Baumann points out that diaspora was first applied to communities of African origin in the 1960s, to underwrite a larger sociological critique of white Western culture: “A unity of those once enslaved thus was and is constructed: a mythical relation of all overseas ‘Blacks’ with an idealized ‘Africa’ arose: and politically, former and present power relations were pointed out and questioned” (322). This study will consider poetry, fiction, and memoirs; some material written in the early 1790s, others, near the end of the Regency; some by women, some by men. Some of these texts have a storied critical heritage; others are only now becoming an object of scrutiny. But they have not been viewed together, in part because scholars have viewed the French emigrant and the Australian convict as peripheral to the Romantic period. By focusing on these figures, we come closer to the experiences and concerns of everyday Britons than the perspective afforded by better-known writers can claim to do. To this extent, Romatic Diasporas accords with that quintessentially “Romantic” objective articulated by poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge to document quotidian existence. To group these texts together is to gain a clearer sense of the cultural history of Georgian England.

Reflections on the French Emigration Between 1789 and 1794, over ten thousand Frenchmen and women descended on southern England fleeing the radical politics and lifethreatening dangers of their homeland. They were aristocrats and bishops, domestic servants and poor priests, merchants and tradesmen, journalists and teachers, and children. Rather than a coherent block of royal subjects, these exiles, like the revolutionaries themselves, were far from holding a unified view of almost anything. The

Introduction

9

divisiveness of counter-revolutionary politics helps explain why members of the Emigration were so singularly unsuccessful in reclaiming their country themselves—and perhaps why they had lost it in the first place. The disastrous Quiberon Bay expedition of 1795 aimed to establish a counter-revolutionary foothold on the Breton peninsula of Quiberon, and to then incite royalists in France itself to full-scale rebellion. Instead, virtually all the would-be invaders were massacred, in no small part because of “the inability of the royalist émigrés to work on an equal footing with their social inferiors, the chouans, who took their name from the owl-call they had once used as a signal” (Carpenter, Refugees 90). Had most émigrés been the hard-line supporters of the Bourbons they have been portrayed as, most would not have returned before the Restoration. In fact, virtually all came home by 1802, when Napoleon offered them amnesty from revolutionary laws condemning returning émigrés to death. Most who had fled “desired nothing more than to return to their homes and assess the damage,” accepting the Emperor’s forgiveness without hesitation (128). During their stay across the channel, the French supported themselves in a wide variety of ways. Straw hats and embroidered muslin dresses were popular items of fashion in Britain, and many exiles produced and sold such items or other handicrafts. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s miserly Fanny Dashwood, for example, gives the Miss Steeles each “a needle book, made by some emigrant” (222) as a gift of favor. Such items frequently were bought by the wealthy out of charity for the impoverished French, and Fanny’s purchase of them may be one more reflection on her willingness to help any women other than her own husband’s struggling half-sisters, Elinor and Marianne.13 Some educated émigrés made their living as commercial artists for celebrated artistic impresarios like Rudolph Ackermann, who called attention to his employment of French “nobles, priests, and ladies of distinction” during the French wars (qtd. in Bermingham 159). Émigrés made money by tutoring the young or establishing schools, or even by publishing literature aimed at educating British youth about the trials and fortitude of their French counterparts.14 In the daily struggle to survive, some supplemented the government’s handouts in surprising and creative ways. The flamboyant journalist Jean Gabriel Peltier emigrated in September 1792. Capitalizing on the English fascination with the guillotine, Peltier “commissioned a miniature mahogany guillotine with which he both offered a macabre show and slaughtered his dinner. For a crown for a front seat or 1 s. for a bench at the rear, a daily audience could watch him behead a goose” (Burrows 48). Peltier soon

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was employed as an editor, and by the mid-1790s there were several émigré gazettes and periodicals published in London with the latest news on the war and French politics. Émigrés ran ice cream parlors, bookstores, and interior decorating firms catering to the English rage for French fashion and design. According to Kristy Carpenter, a M. d’Albignac made his fortune tossing the salads at fashionable parties. There are several versions of this story but at least one individual made such an entertainment of tossing the salad that he became sought after and very soon needed an assistant to organise and carry his condiments, different types of vinegars, caviar, truffles, anchovies, meat juices, yolks of eggs and so on, and he soon was able to afford a carriage. (Refugees 74)

During the brief Peace of Amiens in 1802, Marie Tussaud escaped to England with her young sons and some of the wax models she had made of victims of the Terror.15 Her waxworks museum quickly became, and today remains, one of the most popular destinations for visitors in London (Altick 333–335). Less glamorously, working-class émigrés benefited from the fact that, during the 1790s, it became fashionable to retain French servants, who were suddenly affordable and offered employers the chance to improve their French (Carpenter, Refugees 162). The diversity of political opinion and occupation among the emigrant population was in keeping with a larger historical problem: defining what exactly constituted an émigré. This was a recurring challenge for French legislators, who formulated a number of laws in 1792 and 1793 in an ongoing attempt to stop the hemorrhage of people and property across the frontier.16 The French government’s attempts, beginning in 1793, to compile lists of émigrés were famously idiosyncratic. The lists were to include émigrés’ names, “their rank, their profession, their last residence in France, and a brief description of their property” (Greer 5). This effort ended up including in some cases the dead, the executed, diplomats in state service, soldiers and sailors fighting for France, Austrian prisoners of war, deserters, “and above all, persons merely absent from their habitual domiciles” (8). But although the category of the émigré was a moving target for officials, the power of the label was undeniable. To be an émigré was to be a nonperson in revolutionary society. As Carpenter observes, “The émigrés therefore [found] themselves at the centre of a bizarre identity crisis. They had no doubts about their French nationality. The inhabitants of the countries who took them in had no doubt that they

Introduction

11

were French. Yet the Revolutionaries blotted them out of existence, sequestered their property and denied them the very human rights it prided itself upon” (Refugees 11). Some refugees responded, predictably, by appropriating the idea of the nation for themselves. The émigré rallying cry “Ou sont les fleurs de lys là est la patrie” (where the fleurs de lys are, there is the homeland) (Greer 30n) relocated “France” from its geographic boundaries to a group of royalists beyond the borders.17 But the various European coalitions formed against the revolutionaries did not consistently embrace this idea, and the court in exile of the comte de Provence, later Louis XVIII, labored for formal recognition until virtually the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. Louis was allowed to live in Britain after 1807, but he was not permitted to live closer than fifty miles to London, and he was formally referred to only as the comte de Lille—though the Prince of Wales, adhering to his practice of opposing his father in everything, swore in 1808 to restore Louis to the throne (Mansel 15). Louis XVIII’s claim to embody France in his person was complicated by his twenty-year exile; he was so shaped by his experiences abroad that, according to Weiner, his later letters from England “are so full of English phrases and quotations that it is hard to decide if they were written primarily in English or in French” (97). The discourse of and about the émigrés grappled with multiple identities that strained against exclusive associations with particular classes, ideologies, and even nationalities. On the part of the British who harbored so many refugees in their country, the Emigration was a contentious issue, particularly in the 1790s. On one hand, Britons organized charities for émigré relief, and succoring the émigré became something of a cause celebré among some sections of society. Appeals for assistance targeted aristocrats, Anglican clergyman, and progressive reformers alike. On the other hand, the Emigration was a direct cause of the 1793 passage of the Alien Act and the creation of an embryonic bureaucracy aimed at policing foreigners and deporting those deemed undesirable. Part of my objective is to honor the complexities and contradictions of this situation.18 The many literary representations touching on the Emigration during the 1790s in Britain are aimed at all social classes and give diverse testimony to the divided response French exiles inspired. The anonymous author of La Curiosité; or, the Gallanté Show (London, 1797) portrays emigrants as devious aristocrats who fled the country they ruined only to siphon off charity better directed at the British poor: “Blush! Britons, blush! Nor be it said, / Your paupers starve whilst these are fed!” (37). John James Mathias, writing

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in 1796, views the increased Catholic presence in Britain with alarm and plainly hints that émigrés seek to create a Papist theocracy. The broadside “Jolly Jack of Dover; or, the French Importer” (1800?) takes a more practical view of the situation, as Jolly Jack complains that the French he has ferried to safety in Dover have failed to pay up upon arrival. Yet émigrés also had powerful and persistent British defenders. Hannah More and Frances Burney were among the many who published on behalf of the emigrant clergy in particular, and fast days were held for the priests’ relief.19 Prominent conservative John Gifford translated Bishop Lally-Tolendal’s extensive Defence of the French Emigrants addressed to the People of France (London, 1797) into English and supplied a supportive introduction to the printed text; notwithstanding its title, Lally-Tolendal’s text clearly addresses both British and French audiences. In keeping with the legal confusion over what exactly constituted an émigré, he argues that the Jacobins have made exiles of all of “THE TRUE PEOPLE OF FR ANCE,” whether they actually left the republic’s shores or not. Émigrés seek only to return home without fear of execution, as the average Frenchman understands all too well: “you remembered that nature had united us by the tie of one common country, and, after having defended or avenged the authors of our days, dared publicly express a hope that a period might at least be put to our separation, if we could not receive compensation for our losses” (18). Ultimately, the debate over the Emigration was a debate over what it meant to be British. Writers sympathetic to the émigrés proclaimed that charity toward and protection of the foreign outcast was a central characteristic of the British character. A 1795 play about émigrés in London repeatedly calls attention to this belief: in one exchange between the French servant and his English counterpart, the French valet argues that charity to foreigners is as much a national trait as the notorious British reserve. . . . on your first acquaintance you are as cold as ice, you appear to despise ceremony and common forms, as totally superfluous, and you part with your guineas with as much ease and indifference, as you would wish a person good night or morning. I wonder how many unfortunate beings of every description you afford an asylum to. (Emigrant in London 81)

Earlier in the play, the civic culture fostered by what Benedict Anderson has called print capitalism, a foundation of modern national identity,

Introduction

13

is explicitly paired with the émigré cause. Reflecting the preoccupations of its time, The Emigrant in London is replete with set pieces intended to demonstrate British traits, and one character portrays the typical Englishman as “a man holding in one hand a newspaper, and in the other, a purse of guineas for the distressed” (13). One Anglican bishop justified his appeal for émigré relief by arguing that French Catholics were in fact closer to British values than native-born dissenters. He contended that the French are More near, and dear to us in truth by far, than some, who affecting to be called our Protestant brethren, have no other title to the name of Protestant, than a Jew or a Pagan; who, not being a christian, is for that reason only not a Papist; persons who professing to receive our Lord as a teacher, as the very Mahometans receive him, call in question however, what is not called in question by the Mahometans, the infallibility of his doctrine; and under the mask of an affected zeal for civil and religious liberty, are endeavouring to propogate in this country those very notions of the sovereignty of the people, the rights of man, and an unlimited right of private judgment, in opposition to ecclesiastical discipline; those treasonable and atheistic notions, which in France have wrought the total subversion of the civil, and ecclesiastical constitution . . . . (qtd. in Welsh Freeholder viii–ix)

A Welsh author took fierce issue with this characterization of Unitarians; his published response lays bare the challenge of defining how British values and practices could be differentiated from foreign ones. For a Welshman, this point was particularly problematic since the author acknowledges that language is not a conclusive national marker in a land (Wales) where English may “not generally [be] understood” (vii). Similarly, Monsieur De Latocnaye’s Rambles through Ireland; by a French Emigrant (1798) presents its French author’s viewpoint as “uninfluenced by the [English] spirit of religious and political bigotry which rankles in our breasts” (iv). But the very vocabulary of this claim blurs the line between the British Isles and France, since the element that exempts émigrés from religious bigotry, their Catholicism, is part and parcel of the Irish identity. Though the 1800 Act of Union theoretically cemented the connection between Irish and British identity, practical resistance to that fusion would continue to the creation of the Irish Free State and beyond. This enduring complexity helps explain why the English literature of the Emigration is dominated by a sense that its narratives are fragmented, arrested, incomplete and in some cases, incompleteable. In this way, such texts participate in the larger challenge of describing exactly

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what was happening during the years of revolution. Perhaps most famously, Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) announces that the revolution is without precedent and resists comprehension: “All circumstances together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world” (92). Burke’s attack on liberal dissenter Richard Price begins by ridiculing the notion that the French experiment is another bloodless Glorious Revolution, a parallel invoked early on by French sympathizers, and as the Terror unfolded, this aspect of Burke’s argument became undeniable. If history offered no comparable narrative, then what exactly was transpiring in France, and how could it be articulated?20 In muchquoted formulation, Wordsworth in The Prelude laments how traditional accounts of nations and history have left him unprepared for the 1790s: “Oh, laughter for the page that would reflect / To future times the face of what now is!” (IX:176–177). Émigré stories, as narratives about individuals defined by the revolution’s chaos, participate in this sense of puzzlement. In the wake of such confusion, émigrés are often characterized—by both British writers and by émigrés writing for British audiences—as Hamlet-like figures who have no clear path laid out before them, and who are often prevented from acting by circumstances in France, laws and the political atmosphere in Britain, or both. Narrative poetry and novels concerning émigrés often represent figures who stand helpless before a veritable quicksand of political affiliations that seem to change by the day. As late as the fourteen-month Peace of Amiens (1802–1803), Louis De Bruno’s Lioncel; or, The Emigrant: An Historical Novel, gives a detailed, fictionalized account of one nobleman’s struggle to ascertain his duty during the days of the Terror. The title character begins by fighting for the Republic, only to cross over to the Royalist army when a deceitful agent of Robespierre persuades him that it is his duty. In a key argument, Lioncel refuses to desert his republican regiment, arguing “I cannot turn my back upon my country; the commands of my family withhold me” (1. 155).21 His false friend replies that this is not deserting his country, but rather serving its true leaders: “This is not abandoning [France], my friend; this is serving it; this is fighting to deliver it from the dreadful anarchy to which it is reduced” (1. 157). Later events virtually compel Lioncel to emigrate, after he becomes a wanted man for defending the Tuilleries during the September Massacres. Eventually saved by a republican soldier after falling in battle while with the émigré army, Lioncel does virtually nothing in the narrative that would qualify him as a firm partisan of either the Bourbons or the Jacobins.

Introduction

15

Multiple border crossings and assumed identities later, Lioncel, and the reader, still have no clear sense of where his true obligations lie, and the only connection that retains any significant motivating force for the protagonist is his love for a childhood sweetheart left behind in France. He wanders across France, Spain, and Germany with various émigré friends, who are “strangers to all the factions” (2. 19). Lioncel ends up less radicalized for the cause of either side than simply resigned to submitting to the key role chance, and what the narrator calls Fate or Providence, will play in deciding the outcome at various points. In this account, plans are made to be aborted, and stories are told only to be suspended indefinitely or amended unpredictably. In the end, the lesson embodied by the émigré in Lioncel is the lesson of waiting. Whatever happens will be determined by broader historical forces that the principals only dimly glimpse: as one character advises, “In a revolution every thing must be hoped for from time” (2. 16). The French Revolution is not a time that rewards, or even allows for, great actions or elevated philosophizing. Instead, the Terror is ruled by the whims of bureaucrats and the small gestures by well-wishers that allow more “time,” and the continuance of life. In one of the novel’s many justifications of its protagonist’s passivity, a compatriot of Lioncel counsels that he “Stop; the crisis is at its highest; sixty or eighty victims are murdered every day; it cannot continue in this way long; the tigers will soon devour each other. Let us wait . . .” (2. 20). By the time of this novel’s publication, the validity of this viewpoint not only for émigrés, but for Britons in general, would have seemed stronger than ever. The 1802 Treaty of Amiens was hardly a triumph; rather, it was a kind of formal recognition by Britain and France that, for the moment, no more was to be gained by either diplomacy or skill on the battlefield. The climate of stalemate and exhaustion in Britain resulted in a treaty more favorable to France than Britain that left several key issues unresolved. Henry Addington, William Pitt’s successor as prime minister, was apologetic about the Treaty’s terms but argued that a respite from war was essential. Throughout the truce, however, serious diplomatic friction with France persisted, fueled in part by émigré journalist Jean Peltier’s satires on Napoleon in the British press. Waiting—to see if the fragile peace would last— for the combatants to catch their breath—was the motif of the hour, as all Europe watched to see how long it would take for the agreement to disintegrate.22 Like Lioncel, Wordsworth’s poem “The Emigrant Mother,” composed in 1802 and published in the 1807 Poems, depicts waiting as a central émigré activity, and goes on to link the refugee state to broader

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problems in the creation and interpretation of narrative. The poem describes the familiar sight (to a reader of Wordsworth) of a poor, depressed woman obsessed with her child. Unlike Lyrical Ballads on this theme (“The Mad Mother,” “The Thorn,” “The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman”), however, this poem’s central figure appears to have been befriended by the community and the narrator, to whom her “big and lesser griefs” have been disclosed (3). The bulk of the text is an overheard dialogue between the woman and a local cottager’s baby girl, which reveals that the woman has left her own child behind in France and fears she will never see him again. But the narrator begins by freely acknowledging that the conversation is a fiction, that he has only seen her with the English child once, and that the poem is constructed “from what I heard and knew, or guessed” (13). The poem is a fragment hinting at other stories about the woman’s plight (why didn’t she take the boy with her? Where is his father?) yet we ultimately are given few facts, though the speaker claims to have “the workings of her heart expressed” (14). “The Emigrant Mother” gestures toward experiences that seem so alien they defy articulation “in our English tongue” (11), though the poet does his best to capture his subject’s sense of loss. This search for a way to convey émigré experience amid the conviction that such histories defy conventional modes of narrative expression is a recurring motif in the literature explored in the first half of this study.23

Transporting Subjects British authorities established a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had shaped the nation’s judiciary for a century: transportation. Before it was interrupted by the American Revolution, transportation had become a cornerstone of criminal sentencing, enabling the development of a legal code whose hundreds of capital crimes frequently were punished by the less severe judgment of exile. The British knew little about Australia beyond the sketchy reports produced by Captain James Cook’s voyage some seventeen years previously. Such ignorance did not deter a government bent on ridding the nation of a growing backlog of convicts dating from the 1780s, when crime rates soared amid economic crisis and military demobilization after the American Revolution. Convicts who in previous years would have been slated for transportation to the American colonies had nowhere to go; typhus epidemics caused by overcrowding in jails and in the Hulks, prison ships along the Thames, meant death sentences for many who supposedly had eluded capital punishment.

Introduction

17

In reinstituting transportation, the Pitt ministry believed it had taken a key step in stabilizing the legal and social status quo. The fact that the inaugural event of the French Revolution would be the storming of a royal prison underscores how gaols could become explosive symbols of the need for political change, and helps explain the urgency behind Britain’s own efforts to empty its notorious Thames prison hulks. In its sheer distance from Europe, Australia provided officials a penal colony underwriting a definitive separation between respectable subjects and criminals, who were certainly tainted morally and might be infected physically, and who were themselves often viewed in colonial terms. The number of convicts whom historians now classify as political prisoners seems to have been quite small.24 But authorities in the 1780s and 1790s did view the Australian project as a critical supplement to broader efforts to beat back social and political change in Britain when these forces seemed to be making alarming advances elsewhere. Transportation to Botany Bay assumed particular importance since its beginnings coincided with new challenges to British institutions brought on by the evolution of innovative forms of property and debt, by the struggles of political reformers, and by the American and French Revolutions. “The Convict’s Departure,” one of innumerable broadsides and popular songs connecting transportation to Botany Bay with broader social critique during the 1790s, declares that Laws which made the MAKERS shame! Every year want mending; When afar off about the GAME, There will be no contending; PHEASANTS, and DUCKS, and HARES, we’ll kill, All with the sport delighted, And not a soul, go where he will, Ever shall be indited.25

This view of the ideological function of transportation was enshrined in the historiography of the Australian penal colony early in the twentieth century. One of the earliest academic articulations of a commonplace in Australian culture—that Botany Bay was the destination for any who challenged arbitrary power and entrenched social injustice—appears in J. L. Hammond’s classic overview The Village Labourer: During the years between Waterloo and the Reform Bill the governing class was decimating the village populations on the principle of the Greek

18

Rom a ntic Di aspor as tyrant who flicked off the heads of the tallest blades in his field; the Game Laws, summary jurisdiction, special commissions, drove men of spirit and enterprise, the natural leaders of their fellows, from the villages where they might have troubled the peace of their masters. The village Hampdens of that generation sleep by the shores of Botany Bay. (239)

Similar perceptions in the 1790s, coupled with the new settlement’s remote location at the antipodes, reshaped popular responses to convicts and the penalty of exile that many received. Given the option of transportation to Botany Bay or death, eight convicts at the Old Bailey in 1789 chose death over “mercy on such terms” (qtd. in H. Anderson 14). The unique severity and finality of this ostensibly noncapital punishment was a crucial backdrop to the debate surrounding the first political prisoners sentenced to the colony. Conveying the shock Scottish advocate Thomas Muir felt upon being sentenced to fourteen years in Australia for seditious libel in 1793, Muir’s biographer Christina Bewley writes: “Transportation was virtually a death sentence. Some ships sank before reaching Australia. Many convicts died of dysentery or typhoid, more in the harsh conditions of the new colony. Almost none survived to return on completion of their sentence. There was hardly any communication with home . . .” (81). True to this characterization, only one of the five Scottish Martyrs, Maurice Margarot, served out his sentence and lived to return to a (vastly changed) Britain in 1810. Robert Southey’s poem “To the Exiled Patriots,” which openly designated the men “Martyrs of freedom,” was only one example of how liberal writers and politicians viewed transportation to Australia as a capital punishment and took up the convicted reformers’ cause. Seeking a middle ground between acquittal and the terminal force of the new transportation, prominent critics of Muir’s sentence, including Charles Fox and Lord Stanhope, tried to argue for a distinction between the legal penalty of transportation to a penal colony and mere banishment from the territory of Britain. One version of this contention first appeared in the Edinburgh sedition trial of Charles Sinclair, whose advocate argued that Banishment can never imply transportation, although transportation may imply banishment. Banishment only expels a man from the city or country where he is. And surely no person in court can be at a loss to understand the meaning of the word banishment, for all have in part felt it, insofar as they were involved in that which was pronounced against our parents when they were banished from the garden of Eden. But by this sentence they were surely not transported. . . . If banishment includes transportation, then it becomes two punishments. (State Trials 794)

Introduction

19

But the Pitt Ministry and other proponents of the Australian scheme such as Lord Auckland ignored these efforts. Lord Henderland, the first judge to speak at Muir’s sentencing, did recognize a conceptual difference between transportation and banishment, but argued that a convict dangerous enough to banish was surely too dangerous not to be transported: in Muir’s case, “Banishment . . . would be improper, as it would only be sending to another country, a man dangerous to any, where he might have the opportunity of exciting the same spirit of discontent” (233). Early representations of convicts bound for Botany Bay, of the passage to Australia, and of life in the colony thus address social and political developments in Britain as well as the nation’s colonial aspirations in the south Pacific. On one hand, early British accounts of Australia emphasize its utter strangeness. Historian Robert Hughes notes that new arrivals saw the continent as “a land of inversions,” where “summer” peaked in January; where trees lost their bark while keeping their leaves; and where native blacks roamed free, while European whites served their sentences out in chains (93–94). Almost overwhelming disorientation registers in early convict accounts in various, frequently contradictory, ways. For forger Thomas Watling, sentenced to fourteen years in the colony in 1788, Australia’s defining characteristic is a physical exterior that misleads observers about underlying realities: “The face of the country is deceitful; having every appearance of fertility; and yet productive of no one article in itself fit for the support of mankind” (23). Silversmith William Noah, convicted for stealing 2000 pounds of lead, was transported for life in 1798. Struggling to articulate the strangeness of life in the southern hemisphere, Noah explains that all is quite opposite to England & Every thing in Nature plainly appears so even the Moon is Top side Turvy your Summer our Winter & no settled Weather fine one hour the next with Thunder and Lightning Shocking to Hear with Heavy Rains. Still its remarkable Healthful Woman that never had Children in England gets familys & I have not seen a Deformed Child. (qtd. in Martin 113)

Basic sources of orientation, including the weather and the stars, here prove unreliable or exhibit themselves in reversed form. When it is freezing in June, it is summer or winter? Or both? This pervasive sense of inversion allowed for another consequence of transportation: the convicts who in Britain threatened social divisions and physical health could, in the topsy-turvy world of New South Wales, challenge the

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establishment anew: their successes in a world where basic realities are reversed argued that environment, not intrinsic moral failings, drove them to crime in Britain. The most essential divide of all, between the innocent and the guilty, consequently is imperiled. This is essentially the same argument William Godwin makes in Political Justice, comparing convicts to plants who fail to thrive in England because the political and economic climate is against them. Transportation, if practiced under Godwin’s terms, is better understood as transplanting: “Surely it would be better in this respect to imitate the system of the universe, and, if we would teach justice and humanity, transplant those we would teach into a natural and reasonable state of society” (754–755).26 Wordsworth picks up this theme in his 1796 poem “The Convict,” arguing that the man whom moral guilt and disease have weighed down in an English gaol can recover if the powerful “would plant thee where yet thou might’st blossom again” (52). The widespread sense that everything in Australia is symbolically, as well as geographically, upside down enables observers to use British conventions to describe transportation and the penal colony itself in ways that indict legal and social practices back home. By reinscribing the experience of crime and exile within the concerns of a world left behind, literature by and about convicts attacks injustice and its writers seek legal redress that may have eluded the accused in Britain. At the same time, this challenge to British judgment paradoxically often is couched in conservative terms. Writers may critique the “justice” that sent them to the antipodes, but they tend to do by defending their own patriotism, values, and experience.27 In other words, like the émigrés who made up the “external France,” exiled convicts grappled with the split subjectivity of the banished subject, whose very condition of exile helped testify to his or her inalienable national identity. The chapters that follow trace how these issues play out in literary works, public debates, and popular culture. Claudia Johnson began her study Equivocal Beings by observing that the fiction of the 1790s is one of the least loved, and least read, in the history of the novel. Johnson lays this response at the door of the “sentimentalism and gothicism” of the period’s fiction, in which “emotions are saturated in turbulent and disfiguring excess; . . . reverence, sorrow, even filial devotion—are always and obviously going over the top, and then some” (1–2). More than ten years later, Johnson’s remarks have yet to entirely lose their relevance: while more scholars have ventured into the field, particularly in the service of the gothic,28 these texts have yet to draw the kind of attention still lavished on later, and earlier,

Introduction

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novels.29 My first chapter focuses on two novels from the 1790s, one of which remains so unloved as to be out of print: both books offer key insights into how representations of the émigré condition, complete with all the affective excess that Johnson points out, speak to a range of personal (for the writer) and cultural developments. In Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man (1794) and Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac (1796), depictions of the émigré enable authorial expressions of political ambivalence, narratological confusion, and gender critique. The 1793 passage of Britain’s Alien Act was a watershed moment in modern political consciousness, demonstrating as it did both the desire for and obstacles to consolidating a British identity in the face of a refugee crisis originating in France—in the words of one of Smith’s characters, “a nation celebrated for deceit” (286). The émigré’s political allegiance was ambiguous, whatever his or her claims of victimization. This confusion drives the action in these texts, propelling their protagonists on their continental wanderings. Smith focuses on a lone French aristocrat crisscrossing Europe in search of a sense of purpose, as chaos in France and abroad perplex his attempts to ascertain what his duty is now and where he should perform it. His eventual attachment to an English family headed by a woman author, a double for Smith herself, allies female abjection with émigré disenfranchisement. Ultimately, the French émigré and friends from Poland, Britain, and Austria settle together in Italy, waiting out the tumult of war until their options and duties emerge in ways they can understand and act on. Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac focuses on a noble French family in flight from the Terror as they traverse Italy and confront their own role, for all their liberal pretensions, in the failures of policy and sympathy that led to the Revolution in the first place. In Hubert de Sevrac, characters come to this realization through their recognition that ancien regime absolutism suppressed the stories, along with the lives, of its victims, and in particular of the women and the economically disadvantaged it tyrannized over most. Chapter 2 follows the trope of the émigré through to the Regency, considering how Frances Burney and Mary Shelley use the symbol and the reality of the émigré condition to critique masculine power and to comment on the emerging dynamics of citizenship in a postrevolutionary age. Burney’s The Wanderer, written during her tenyear enforced residence in France under Napoleon, uses the travails of a female émigré in Britain to illustrate how the evolving intersection of marriage law and citizenship inevitably victimizes women, regardless of nationality. At the climax of Burney’s novel, readers witness the effects of an unholy alliance between a brutal French commissar

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and a tyrannical British aristocrat, united in their desire to force an unwanted marriage and French nationality on the daughter of an English nobleman. The vignette of the French De Laceys at the heart of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein similarly presents émigrés as victims, but as much of their own delusions as of the actions of others. Despite their avowed cosmopolitanism, the De Laceys retain an aesthetic chauvinism that structures their household along ideological lines recalling how nation-states systematically exclude the alien, most obviously in the form of the Victor’s creation. When we read Victor Frankenstein’s experiments against the vignette of the De Laceys, Shelley’s misguided scientist allegorizes the hubris of Napoleon, whose goal of a unified Europe wrenched from dismembered nation-states results in a failed and monstrous polity. The second half of my study returns to the 1790s to examine native Britons ejected from their homeland at the very time the country was host to growing numbers of foreigners. Chapter 3 views the new practice of transportation to Australia against changing social and political conditions in Britain in the late eighteenth century. After the American Revolution, increasing social mobility, evolving financial markets, and consumer consciousness made wealthy Britons anxious about the erosion of class barriers. New options for financing debt and new instruments of credit allowed the rich and middle classes alike to spend themselves into bankruptcy, all while appearing unshakeable fixtures of fashionable society. One of the most famous criminals of the late eighteenth century capitalized on this environment by playing the role of a man of fashion while making a living by picking pockets. George Barrington, the so-called prince of pickpockets, became a locus for fears about dissolving markers of wealth and respectability. His transportation to Australia in the early 1790s was symbolic of a broader effort by authorities to shore up divisions between classes, economic groups, and even between those perceived as healthy and those perceived as bearers of contagions. Ironically, Barrington’s wildly popular published account of his voyage to Botany Bay, which went through several editions in the 1790s, positioned his experience of exile as a kind of cure from the convict taint, and offered rehabilitated convicts like himself as the ideal ambassadors for British values and class consciousness at the antipodes. Chapter 4 focuses on the year 1792, during which the Emigration reached its peak and the first reform-oriented political societies appeared in Scotland. Unfortunately for the reformers tried in the famous Edinburgh sedition trials of 1793 and 1794, their activities coincided with increasing civil unrest in Scotland. Their convictions

Introduction

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were part of a systematic clampdown on reform in that country that was a preview of measures the Pitt ministry would implement in England. The press closely followed the trials and sentencing to transportation of the so-called Scottish Martyrs: Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerrald. The government’s success in prosecuting them emboldened Pitt to try several English members of the London Corresponding Society for treason in 1794. Discussions in Parliament and in reform circles of the Edinburgh trials all were colored by the knowledge that these men would be the first political prisoners sent to Australia, whose brutal environment was becoming notorious. In their trial defenses and personal accounts of their experiences, the Martyrs share some of the narratological tactics I observe in early émigré fiction, identifying the discourse of political legitimacy, and by extension their own political cause, with the authority of cultural, and specifically narrative, continuity. These same accounts associate crown arguments against reform with fragmentation and temporal confusion. Chapter 5 in some ways ends at the beginning, focusing on the one group that for centuries had served as the paradigmatic example of diaspora: Jews. As every Briton knew, the Jews had a homeland enshrined in myth but long unavailable in fact. The Semitic communities scattered across Europe represented a number of significantly different subcultures tinged by the national identities of their hosts. Expelled from England by Edward I in 1290, Jews were readmitted in small numbers beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. Well into the Romantic period, Britons viewed such individuals as Jews first and Britons second (if at all), and Jewish identity compassed a complex overlay of racial, religious, national, and cultural traits. Even those Jews long-resident in Britain were regarded as aliens and rendered ineligible for citizenship by laws requiring the taking of communion for full membership in civil society. Maria Edgeworth’s 1817 Harrington homes in on the decades between the “Jew Bill” controversy of the 1750s and the Gordon Riots of 1780s to show how, like the convicts slated for transportation, such marginal groups become convenient scapegoats for authorities seeking to deflect attention from their own failings and difficulties. In Edgeworth’s novel, the popular entertainment of ventriloquism becomes a trope for how the rich and powerful invisibly deploy anti-Semitism as a political strategy. Published as Lord Liverpool was using agent provocateurs alongside open shows of force to repress a resurgent reform movement, Harrington points to the difficulties facing any disenfranchised group seeking a voice in times of turmoil. In addressing these problems

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through the prism of the Jewish question, Edgeworth exposes the ancient lineage of Georgians’ suspicion of foreigners. In the process, she demonstrates that the putative division between dangerous foreigner and upstanding native is less obvious than Regency officials would have the populace believe. While the Jews had no autonomous homeland to which they could return, in the end the Emigration could be reversed for even the most intransigent royalist, as the events of the 1814 Restoration dramatized. Similarly, the convict sent to Botany Bay could, if he survived his sentence and could pay for the voyage, theoretically return to Britain, as Maurice Margarot would in fact do. But the debates over what the Emigration meant, the advent of transportation to Botany Bay, and the concomitant interest in Jewish culture and celebrities all occurred at a crucial period in the development of British national identity. How did so-called secondary characteristics, including gender, class, and religion, play into the aesthetic construction of this crucial individual characteristic? Who was native or foreign, how did one know, and why did it matter? These are the political questions posed by the debates explored below, in ways that puzzled, outraged, and in some cases cruelly victimized the participants.

Chapter 1

“Bou n dl ess, y e t Dist i nc t ”: Th e É m igr é E x pe r i e nc e a n d t h e 179 0s

T

he earliest literary representations of émigrés followed hard on the high tide of the Emigration to England, during the years 1792 and 1793. It was during this time that events in France became more chaotic, and that the actions that would culminate in the Terror were set in motion. The resulting tide of French subjects who were washed up on British shores prompted charity, sharpened the ongoing debate about the revolution’s benefits, and drew the attention of women writers, particularly. In this chapter, I will explore in detail how the works of two of the most prominent writers of the day, Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, confront this state of affairs. Smith and Robinson wrote both poems and novels drawing attention to the emigrant plight, and Smith actually became related by marriage to an aristocratic émigré during these years. Smith and Robinson now are classed usually as British “Jacobins” in that they publicly supported the ideals of the French Revolution and the cause of Parliamentary and legal reform at home. They chose to focus on the émigré experience in response to the hardening of political divisions between left and right both at home and in France itself. For these writers, part of the appeal of the émigré cause was its ongoing power to complicate political polarization at a time when fewer and fewer topics could claim to do so. An émigré point of view was among the few left that offered a viable venue for publicly expressing sympathy for the early ideals of political change,

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a sympathy that held out the possibility of transcending the increasingly noxious political divide between Jacobin and anti-Jacobin. In the hands of these writers, the émigré condition becomes a vehicle for working through the far-reaching mistakes that people—on both sides—had made, without necessarily forsaking the ideological commitments that had originally motivated British reformers. Critiques of traditional gender politics were key aspects of those commitments for both Smith and Robinson, and through its transnational scope émigré literature provided a valuable venue for expanding this critique to include cultures across Europe.

C H A RLOTTE S MITH ’S R EVOLUTIONA RY N A RR ATI V ES Although her mournful lyrics are more widely known today, Charlotte Smith’s novels from Desmond (1792) to The Young Philosopher (1798) all grapple with social and political effects of events across the English channel. The Banished Man (1794), however, is distinctive in its focus on the émigré experience. For Smith, this perspective is important in three ways. It identifies the unprecedented scale of the Emigration as an inevitable by-product of the multifaceted kind of revolution— social, political, religious, aesthetic—inaugurated by the French. This new kind of exile, in turn, creates the need (in both émigrés and those they encounter) for novel ways of categorizing, explaining, and performing a host of opinions and allegiances. Finally, the comprehensive abjection of the émigré, encompassing poverty, familial division, and national alienation, offers Smith a displaced point of view from which to continue her longtime critique of the patriarchal culture of British law. Smith was an early supporter of the French revolutionary government, and the émigrés she portrays in Desmond are aristocrat libertines who fly to England to escape justice and take up with their corrupt English counterparts. But from 1792 onward Smith began to defend the emigrants against their republican critics in her letters. She explains her nuanced position in detail, arguing that “Louis Capet” should be pensioned off, rather than prosecuted, while the nobility in exile “should suffer the loss of a very great part of their property & all their power. But they should still be considerd as Men & Frenchmen . . . [they should] not be turnd out indiscriminately to perish in foreign Countries and to carry everywhere the impression of the injustice and ferocity of the French republic” (Stanton 49). To do otherwise, she argues pragmatically, is simply bad public relations.

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Smith herself appears to have planned to emigrate in the opposite direction once she had completed The Old Manor House for its publisher; she writes in December 1792 that “I shall go to France as soon as I have fulfilld my present engagement with Bell and shall withdraw everything from England which can give me any trouble for three or four years, should I so long live” (54). Her connections to the émigrés deepened the next summer, when her favorite child, Augusta, accepted (with Smith’s blessing) a proposal of marriage from the exiled Alexandre de Foville, a development that led Smith to consult Charles Burney on how the recent marriage between his daughter Fanny and Alexandre d’Arblay had been arranged.1 Smith’s sustained engagement with the émigrés themselves soon translated into a commitment to publicly document their lives and significance. This ambition first found expression in her two-book 1793 poem The Emigrants, which explicitly and repeatedly compares the émigrés’ dispossession with her own as a female Briton. In the very breadth of its subjects—Catholic clergymen, male aristocrats, women with children—Smith’s poem shows the revolution’s wideranging effects on French society. Ideologically, she tries to stake out a complex position, at once sympathizing with victims of revolutionary violence and to some extent holding them responsible for their own situation.2 This double perspective is most pronounced with regard to those she first depicts—clergymen; bishops now in exile, for example, once lived in opulence as the poor starved. The one class that Smith exempts from criticism are Frenchwomen, whom she portrays as domestic creatures divorced from public political investments and struggling, whether in England or in France, to salvage their children in the face of masculine violence (like Smith herself). As her letters confirm, any condemnation of the emigrants en masse is, to this extent, misguided: “Their exile includes too that of a very great number of Women and Children who must be eventually not only a national loss but on whom, if the sins of the Father are visited, it will be more consonant to the doctrine of scripture than reason” (Stanton 49). Ultimately, the Emigration is important in this poem insofar as it suggests how the politics of left and right, in both countries, are equally rotten. A 1793 letter by Smith to her Irish friend Joseph Cooper Walker explicitly advertises the work as politically independent: “It is not a party book but a conciliatory book” (62). In the poem itself, Smith repeatedly criticizes “party” as a grouping of individuals who cloak revenge and injustice in the rhetoric of political virtue. Only those united by their sympathy for the emigrants escape

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this dynamic; in Britain, this cause stands out for its power to attract broad support across the political spectrum. The emigrants’ needs are forceful enough to draw Smith out of a lyric mode that typically had focused on her own troubles and sorrows. The result, as Sarah Zimmerman has remarked, is a socializing of the typically inwardlooking lyric impulse: Pensive I took my solitary way, Lost in despondence, while contemplating Not my own wayward destiny alone, (Hard as it is, and difficult to bear!) But in beholding the unhappy lot Of the lorn Exiles . . . (2. 5–10).3

Smith goes on to observe that “. . . every English heart, / Ev’n those, that highest beat in Freedom’s cause, / Disclaim as base, and of that cause unworthy, / The Vengence” directed against emigrants by the French government (2. 165–168, emphasis mine). This shared compassion points to a basic trait in the English temperament that, at least temporarily, transcends contemporary partisan divisions. . . . we for them Feel as our brethren; and that English hearts, Of just compassion ever own the sway, As truly as our element, the deep, Obeys the mild dominion of the Moon. (1. 359–363)

Kari Lokke argues that in Smith’s poetry, female transcendence, and the symbol of the moon Smith associates with it, results not in historical evasion, but in a detachment underwriting a thoroughgoing critique of male aggression and self-interested violence. Examining these lines on the moon, Lokke remarks that “transcendence represents the overcoming of nationalism and what Smith calls ‘party rage’ by the spirit of compassion . . .” (96).4 In addition, Smith seeks to replace superficial prejudice, dividing the British body politic into republicans and reactionaries, with a virtuous sense of national unity not dependent on victimizing others. In The Emigrants generally, the sea functions as a sign of separation; the exiles, and Smith herself, regard the channel waters as emblems of the changes dividing them from past comforts and security. Current conditions in France are so unpromising that Smith’s conclusion can only envision the émigrés’ return home in terms of a frankly idealized golden age of regulated liberty.5 In the passage above, however, the water becomes

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a representation of British community in response to the emigrant crisis, fluid but linked through fellow-feeling. Near the end of the poem, differences between Britons are submerged through representations of the landscape of Sussex; Smith explains that she has prayed, not amid “crowds,” But on these hills, where boundless, yet distinct, Even as a map, beneath are spread the fields His bounty cloaths; divided here by woods, And there by commons rude, or winding brooks, While I might breathe the air perfum’d with flowers.

(2. 392–396)

Like the ideal body politic, the British countryside accommodates diversity while also presenting a “boundless” whole, connected and segmented by natural forms and human use patterns (“commons”).6 In a similar vein, structurally The Emigrants operates as a series of sketches. In book I, fragmentary, episodic depictions of French families and priests living on the southern shore are interspersed with apostrophes to liberty, criticisms of British politics and law, and reflections of Smith’s own condition as a woman struggling to raise a large family on a limited income. The Banished Man takes up these subjects again in a different genre. The novel appeared at a time when the reversals of revolutionary fortune appeared particularly acute. As the Terror escalated and civil war broke out in France, the numbers of émigrés fleeing to England and Germany grew, and the Emigration reached its peak in 1793 (Greer 21). Worry over this influx of foreigners grew acute enough to inspire Britain’s first law to regulate emigration—the Alien Act. These circumstances underscored the challenge of representing both the events themselves and those who were fleeing them. Popular enough to merit two editions, earn Smith £200, and garner notices in the leading reviews, Smith’s work takes up this challenge through the character of Armand D’Alonville, an exiled French nobleman torn between his loyalty to the monarchy and his desire for love, friendship, and a settled life. One contemporary reviewer, seeing in the novel a recantation of Smith’s earlier republicanism, praised “the virtues of the Banished Man.”7 But like The Emigrants, Smith’s novel divides its attention between critiques of Jacobin excesses and of France’s opponents.8 As D’Alonville crosses Europe, he is ultimately in search of some way to resolve his internal conflicts and the aimless wanderings that are their physical manifestation. He comes to realize that received notions of honor and duty require frequent improvisation

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and recontextualization on the part of the refugee of this new kind of revolution. He finally resolves his ambivalence by (in a reversal of Burke) relocating to the home/domestic sphere the passion and commitment initially reserved for the cause of the homeland. D’Alonville’s uncertainty as to his best course of action finds a formal counterpart in the novel’s depiction of how linear, narrative modes of explication falter when political order crumbles. Part of the émigré’s burden, as D’Alonville discovers, is the continuing challenge of explaining to others who he is and what he is doing. This turns out to be no simple matter, given the current chaos that surrounds him. The ideological diversity amid unity that Smith can, as an Englishwoman, celebrate in The Emigrants is a luxury that the French protagonist of Smith’s novel cannot afford. Part of an Emigration that includes a spectrum of social classes, religions, and political affiliations, D’Alonville begins The Banished Man as a royalist with a long line of illustrious ancestors and an aristocrat’s sense of honor. But D’Alonville’s definition of principled action must yield to historical contingency: he finds that the narrative of his identity often must be presented in negotiated form or, in some situations, completely suppressed. He periodically is accused by other Europeans of being a Jacobin spy, though his behavior contradicts this reductive characterization; in this text, suspicions about refugee loyalties often are resolved by erroneously situating them within a revolutionary plot.9 D’Alonville’s recurring use of disguise as he crosses various borders, a common element of literature about the émigrés, serves as one index of how revolution requires us to revise established definitions of identity and how we articulate them. The new nature of France’s revolution, whose shock waves reverberate across Europe, means that D’Alonville’s unstable situation is shared in one way or another by many. He in the end lives among an international community of friends who have become estranged from their homelands, either by revolutionary instability or its mirror image, reactionary panic, and intolerance. This estrangement leads D’Alonville to express his perspective in ways that, like the historian’s annals, eschew the causal connections and sequential thinking of conventional narrative. For D’Alonville, this development marks his evolution from an inflexible youth to a more tolerant and worldly gentleman. Revolutionary instability has necessitated far-reaching changes in how individuals express private as well as public histories.10 The novel’s action begins just after the September Massacres and continues through the Terror, foregrounding how the extremities of revolution were displacing individuals and remaking political

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loyalties. After his father dies in battle in October 1792, the Chevalier D’Alonville leaves his émigré regiment fighting the republican French and begins to wander across central Europe. Along the way, he befriends a German family, the Rosenheims; the English aristocrat Edward Ellesmere; an exiled Polish reformer, Carlowitz (modeled on Kosciusko); and Carlowitz’s daughter, Alexina. Despite sharp political differences—Ellesmere is a liberal, D’Alonville, an unrepentant defender of French despotism—Ellesmere and D’Alonville become friends and journey together to the Ellesmere family estate. Nearby resides the poor authoress Mrs. Denzil, and her daughter, Angelina, with whom D’Alonville falls in love. His sense of duty, however, impels him to return to France disguised as a republican soldier to aid royalist insurrectionaries. He is captured in Brittany by republican forces that include his older brother. After Du Bosse, the brother’s revolutionary nom de guerre, fails to convert his sibling to the republican cause, he enables D’Alonville’s escape back across the French border. Abandoning his counter-revolutionary agenda, D’Alonville returns to England and marries Angelina. To support her, he tutors the boys of a Lord Aberdore, whose tense relations with the Denzils prevent D’Alonville from telling his employer he is married. When a guest of the Aberdores tries to seduce his wife, D’Alonville duels with and wounds him, revealing his marriage. Ultimately, D’Alonville and the Denzils move to Verona, where Ellesmere and Alexina, now Ellesmere’s wife, also plan to settle. Though D’Alonville remains skeptical of liberal values, his protracted association with Ellesmere, Carlowitz, and the Denzils moderate his contempt for political reform and increase his regard for the value of free association and debate. Mrs. Denzil, in turn, hopes that abroad she will escape the gossip and economic hardships that have plagued her family. The dramatic scenes that bookend the novel, a siege and a duel, establish D’Alonville as the author’s most energetic hero.

P LOTTING C ONFUSION D’Alonville begins the novel with a naive adherence to the old chivalric code to which his father has sworn himself and his family. From the beginning, however, it is clear that current events are playing havoc with traditional notions of conduct. Book 2 of The Emigrants touches on the battlefield confusion and uncertainty experienced by the émigré army as they negotiate unfamiliar terrain and contend with conflicting directions and commands. Similarly, interpretive difficulties come to the fore in the novel’s opening pages where, as

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Katharine Rogers notes, characters fleeing French invaders encounter “torrential rain that makes it impossible to see, marshy ground that they cannot depend on, and a river that they must cross without knowing where the ford is” (74). Confusion about the characters’ location—on land or water, behind enemy lines (which change by the hour as armies advance) or not—signals the broader challenge war’s chaos poses to notions of identity and political affiliation, whose viability depends in some measure on stable contexts. Confused about his own geographic location, D’Alonville is separated from his regiment on the battlefield and is briefly sheltered by German aristocrats, the Rosenheims. He resolves to help the heir to the family fortune, a young noblewoman whose claim to her inheritance has been threatened by the war. He wants, in other words, to be a chivalrous hero. But from the beginning, this aim is complicated by circumstance. The ignoble means he must adopt—the disguise of a peasant—affront the aristocratic sensibilities that urge him to embark on the mission at all. In what will become a pattern, D’Alonville reluctantly bends to present contingencies, performs a new identity, and goes behind French lines to retrieve crucial documents left at Rosenheim castle during its evacuation. The success of D’Alonville’s mission depends on more than just altering his appearance: he also has to lie. Although he is stopped several times once he crosses French lines, he reaches his destination through his capacity to tell “some plausible story to each as he was interrogated” (Smith 158). Dressed in the garb and speaking the language of the French invaders, D’Alonville has a harder time making the right people believe him when he tells the truth. A faithful Rosenheim servant left behind during the castle’s evacuation, the aged Rodolph, doubts D’Alonville when he reveals his true mission. Eventually, the two come to an understanding, since “it was impossible even for the cold caution of age to look at a countenance so ingenuous, or listen to a narrative so clear and simple, without soon losing all doubts of the integrity of D’Alonville” (165). For now, the uncertainties about D’Alonville’s intentions are suspended. What exactly is so “clear and simple” about the story he tells here? It seems to stem from D’Alonville’s familiarity with the Rosenheim family and their affairs, which finally wins over the skeptical servant. Although D’Alonville is out of place here as a foreigner, the story he tells is not. It is really the story of the Rosenheims rather than his own, and his errand is essential to securing the property of the Baron de Rosenheim to his only immediate descendant. As the novel progresses, the figure of the émigré devolves into a cipher whose significance is elusive, even (or especially) to other

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exiles. Volume 2 highlights this situation by beginning with D’Alonville’s journey to Berlin in search of another Frenchman. He has never seen this man, who travels under an alias, as the Count de Remesnil, supposedly to avoid Jacobin assassins.11 Upon arriving in Berlin, D’Alonville discovers his mission was in vain: the “Count” has already departed for a location destined to remain unknown. To some of the French, with whom he had been slightly acquainted (for none had known him before they saw him there) he had talked of going to Holland; others declared he had frequently spoken of seeking an asylum at Petersburg; and two or three had heard him enquiring about England. But whither he had directed his course, none had enquired; for every man was occupied with troubles of his own, or schemes to escape from them, and few thought of asking the intentions of a person whom they had never seen before, or might never see again. (221)

The “Count” passes through Berlin as a shadowy figure of unknown origins or intentions; he speaks of traveling to at least three different countries, with governments of wildly differing ideological orientation. Is he a French aristocrat? A Jacobin spy? Or someone else altogether? The conflicting accounts D’Alonville receives of him probably tell more about the people he hears them from than about the man he seeks. Smith’s protagonist travels far in search of this person who, he hopes, will give him guidance now that his father has died. The fact that he has left already, and perhaps never was the man D’Alonville sought at all, allegorizes the dead end that Smith implies is all the ancien regime now can offer. Rather than a clear direction or unity of purpose, all D’Alonville finds in Berlin are scattered and leaderless countrymen desperately focused on their own survival. This moment also gestures toward the significance of Britain’s Alien Act, passed to police the danger to stability represented by figures like the Count. Distinguishing the deracinated émigré from the covert insurrectionary proved difficult, and officials suspected that even initially grateful exiles might come to dislike, perhaps even subvert, the countries in which they sought asylum. The Count de Remesnil remains a mystery in Berlin perhaps because he desires to be so, but also clearly because there is no one who can spare the time or effort to pin him down. By contrast, the Pitt ministry during these years was determined to go beyond anecdotal evidence and conflicting reports when it came to the movements and intentions of aliens. Passed on 8 January 1793, the Alien Act began by citing “a great and unusual number of persons, not being natural born subjects of

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his majesty . . . or persons naturalized by the Act of Parliament, [who] have lately resorted to this kingdom” (Statutes 292). The law laid the groundwork for a comprehensive apparatus of documents and officials aimed at tracking aliens from their arrival through to their activities across Britain. Foreigners lacking the officially sanctioned story implied in the passport were slated for automatic deportation.12 Cataloguing the appearance and probable motives of émigrés, officials at the Alien Office were to record each person’s name, genealogy, occupation, and description. The act’s January deadline aimed to designate recent arrivals as more alien (and possibly hostile) in political culture and values than those who had come earlier in the decade. The Alien Act in and of itself demonstrates the enduring significance of the Emigration for British culture and law. According to Elizabeth Sparrow, the statute “was an entirely new concept in British legislation, inaugurated on the advice and recommendation of the émigré ex-French ministers” (Secret 19). The émigrés themselves often became agents (literally or figuratively) of British policy; the royalist Comité Français both organized secret agents in France during the war and surveilled “émigré republican elements,” while policeman Claude Antoine Rey—a confidante of Louis XVI—offered advice on the language of the Alien Act (25). Various émigré groups constantly watched each other for signs of their political sympathies. Were they constitutionnels or ultra-royalists? Smith reflects this reality when D’Alonville, once in England, avoids newly arrived exiles. A devoted royalist himself, he argues recent arrivals were likely to have “been too much connected with the men and measures of the first [part of the] revolution” (Smith 261). The challenge, for the British state and for characters in Smith’s novel, lies in stringing together information that will crystallize an émigré’s ideological valence when political loyalties and national boundaries are shifting by the day. When D’Alonville draws a clear distinction between different kinds of émigrés that depends on their time of arrival in London, for example, he invokes a linear model of perception that identifies certain events as causes, and other, later events as effects. Like the architects of the Alien Act, D’Alonville’s early attempts to segregate “good” émigrés from “bad” ones, based on time, divulge his initially sequential mode of apprehension. D’Alonville gradually discovers how this outlook fails to come to terms with post-revolutionary reality. The concept of the émigré or emigrant (like the much older term of exile) points to geographic dislocations over time, but its relation to politics is opaque.13 Martin Thom verifies Smith’s description of most émigrés as too grieving

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and self-absorbed to present any consistent ideological perspective: “Torn from their world, cast up in another place, they first of all enshrined what they had lost. A ritual consolidation of what was so deeply mourned led also to fierce disputes with fellow exiles, each brandishing their gloss on the catastrophe that had befallen them” (197). Under his own criteria, D’Alonville himself would be suspicious since he too is a newcomer to England, having spent recent months fighting republicans on the continent. Amid the intrigue and uncertainty of the émigré world, time lines resist clarification; disguises and aliases, like those used by the Count de Remesnil and D’Alonville, frustrate the identification of key actors. The workings of the Alien Office itself underscored this difficulty. For the office’s agents, effective surveillance of troublemakers demanded a repertoire of secrecy and disguise. Yet the Alien Act assumed a person’s origins and motives could and should be rendered transparent. The government’s use of agents provocateurs made distinguishing the (genuine) enthusiast from the (planted) spy difficult for radicals and, indeed, for modern historians as well. An agency authorized to police foreigners, the Alien Office’s own staff had a multinational composition that defied its originating logic: the chief clerk in charge of alien registers was a Swiss, and foreigners would be appointed to key positions in the office throughout its existence. The Alien Act’s proclaimed function was almost from the outset complicated by government practice.14 In The Banished Man, the opening sequence involving D’Alonville’s mission to the Rosenheim castle sets the tone for how the émigré’s very survival depends on flexibly adopting a range of masks that will, eventually, impinge on his “real” identity. D’Alonville’s skill at manipulating narratives—at lying—grants him mobility; he evades capture on spying missions and in other hostile situations. When he later tries to rendezvous with hidden royalists in the French countryside, D’Alonville knows that a key component of his peasant disguise is presenting a likely story. Interrogated by revolutionary officials, “He told a very plausible story of an old mother; and of his other brothers being all killed in the service; which was also believed, and he even received a certificate from the commanding officer of the town, granting him a furlough for six weeks, and describing him as Jacques Philippe Condé . . . who had desired leave to revisit his family before he returned to the service of his country” (Smith 307). As the political situation in Europe continues to disintegrate, the most vulnerable exile is the one who is unable or unwilling to perform a variety of personae, to manipulate public perception. In the absence of disguise, the exile does not project a “real” identity or loyalty but instead is

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defined through a composite of others’ fears, prejudices, and distractions. This seems to be the lesson of the Polish statesman Carlowitz, whom D’Alonville meets in Belgium. Carlowitz explains that he is arrested in Bruges en route to London, because on his arrival I was compelled to incur debts—and I found myself treated as a spy and a disaffected person. The poor have no friends; I was arrested and thrown into this dungeon about five weeks ago. The people here are too much engaged at this time to attend to the administration of civil justice, and I believe the reasons of my imprisonment have never been even enquired into. (380)

The wartime confusion that, earlier in the novel, creates proliferating versions of the Count de Remesnil’s plans remains powerful. In this respect, Smith’s novel anticipates historian Hayden White’s contention that virtually all coherent narratives, whether personal or political, must be underwritten by a stable political order: Where there is ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the status of the legal system, which is the form in which the subject encounters most immediately the social system in which he is enjoined to achieve a full humanity, the ground on which any closure of a story one might wish to tell about a past, whether it be a public or a private past, is lacking. And this suggests that narrativity . . . is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality we can imagine. (14)

For White, narrative is finally about authority, about determining connections between events and years through reference to a shared set of sociopolitical assumptions and conventions. However, secure authority and shared assumptions are in short supply in D’Alonville’s France; Carlowitz’s Poland, already partitioned twice and soon to be erased from the map by reactionary Russia, Prussia, and Austria, represents an even more extreme example of national instability. Their national identities destabilized along with their homelands, these exiles find they are viewed skeptically or hostilely, both at home and abroad. D’Alonville comes to recognize the ease with which he may be misrepresented as France grows more chaotic, and as he wanders through countries at war with the government now ruling his nation. This awareness comes to a head in London when Melton, a rival for Angelina’s hand, insults Ellesmere for the foreign company he keeps. Both Ellesmere and D’Alonville are implicated in the boorish Melton’s

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affront, and an argument ensues between the two friends over who will challenge him to a duel. The way in which Ellesmere finally wins this contest points to how his friendship with the émigré has crystallized his class standing and national (if not political) allegiance. He reminds D’Alonville of “the noise such an affair would make, the various ways in which it would be represented, and the great injury it might do to the French who had taken refuge in England . . .” (Smith 304). The death of France’s old regime, combined with D’Alonville’s foreignness in any other context, means that his actions are constantly in danger of being misread and that his conditioned desire to defend his aristocratic honor must give way to contexts that his father could not have imagined. The same series of events, by contrast, has made Ellesmere, for all his disaffection with British provincialism, more keenly aware of his own place as the son of a prominent English family, a legacy that gives him power in this situation. The ambiguities attendant on émigré existence are underscored by the means through which D’Alonville secures Carlowitz’s release from his Bruges jail cell. D’Alonville essentially buys his friend’s freedom, and he can do so because he has just come into possession of his mother’s collection of jewels. While staying in Paris in yet another disguise, he acquires these valuables from his brother. Sensing he is about to be purged from the revolutionary government, Du Bosse asks his sibling to smuggle the family jewels out of France. D’Alonville at first refuses to take any jewelry owned by his brother’s wife, a “decided republican” (364). Du Bosse replies that no part of what he intended to send away, were originally the property of his wife—but that whatever had the appearance of modern purchases were still what had belonged to the late Viscountess de Fayolles, who, having an uncle governor of Pondicherry, whose heiress she was, had inherited more of this portable species of riches than any other, some of which citizen Du Bosse had caused to be modernized for his wife, before these distinctions were become, by the new order of things, marks of incivism, and inimical to equality—Du Bosse convinced his brother of the truth of this, by shewing him jewels under another form, which he well remembered to have belonged to his family. (364)

This passage evokes Ernest Renan’s famous dictum that national identity is predicated on amnesia, on substituting a new myth of common origins for the historical relationships between diverse groups of people (15).15 The brothers try to “forget” the complex history of these jewels, seeing them as historical emblems of their family’s

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French, aristocratic power. From this perspective, D’Alonville can integrate these heirlooms into a conception of his family’s and his nation’s heroic past in isolation from the constructed identities rampant elsewhere in the novel. Profound changes augured by “the new order of things,” as Smith derisively calls the leveling impulses of fullblown Jacobinism, have not eroded the brothers’ capacity to recall the true provenance of these jewels. Yet Smith’s description of these ornaments renders the reader’s amnesia incomplete. The genealogy of the jewels problematizes D’Alonville’s claim that they ever completely “belonged to his family,” or to his nation. The mother’s fortune turns out to be foreign plunder from France’s colonial possessions rather than a uniquely “French” legacy. The fact that the French lost Pondicherry to the British in the mid-eighteenth century exacerbates our awareness that these jewels, like D’Alonville himself, are from a contested land whose governance has changed hands repeatedly. In the imperial drama, conquest of the indigenous population has been followed by the conqueror’s defeat at the hands of another foreign power. Not unlike Du Bosse or D’Alonville himself, the jewels circulate under a series of aliases that divulge the volatility of the hegemonic nation-state. Are the jewels Indian? French? Republican? Aristocratic? Perhaps even British (since they will be transferred to a British banker for safekeeping)? How can we tell the disguises from the genuine identity? Like the geopolitical events they allude to, the answers to these questions remain in flux. In this light, the change of the jewels’ settings, which Du Bosse explains away to his brother, turns out to be far more than incidental information. Indeed, from Smith’s point of view the jewels can only play a redemptive function—their sale will free Carlowitz and support D’Alonville—because, like the exiles of The Banished Man, they have a fragmented history testifying to violent and sudden changes in existing social formations. The old order worked to lacquer over this history, offering the ornaments as proof of an empire’s cohesion. The revolution, by contrast, has thrown historical ruptures into relief, emphasizing the fractured nature even of old French aristocratic identities. This converts the jewels from essential emblems of a family’s claims into alienable property whose cash value will enable the prosperity of that family’s lone survivor and the liberty of his foreign friend.

S ELECTI V E M EMORY This episode lays the groundwork for the novel’s investigation of an alternative form of reflection and expression to the narratives disrupted

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by the revolution. Smith develops this notion further in Volume 4, when D’Alonville encounters an old friend, De Touranges, during his second trip to England. D’Alonville’s journeys to England all occur during 1793, in other words at the time that the Alien Act passed through Parliament and English anxiety over émigrés was peaking. Accordingly, Smith observes that “It was the period when every foreigner was suspected of being a Jacobin” (226). Smith addresses the inadequacies of this reductive view when D’Alonville unexpectedly hears of an unhappy Frenchman staying at his inn. D’Alonville does not know who the man is until they actually meet; from the English innkeeper, he learns only that the unfortunate individual is “either a mad man, or a spy for the Jackybins” (390). The innkeeper also registers the authorities’ hostility toward aliens in Britain when he justifies his prejudices by observing that “if he should turn out a Jackybin, I should get into trouble” (389). The mysterious man’s ambiguous politics—is he a revolutionary or a royalist mourning Marie Antoinette’s recent execution?—find spatial realization in what onlookers call “his rambles,” “sometimes in one place, and sometimes in another; but chiefest, I think, by the riverside about a mile off—as he’ve been taken for a spy there two or three times” (390). To his surprise, D’Alonville discovers that the man is his old acquaintance De Touranges, who fears his pregnant wife and mother were killed in the September Massacres. Deranged by personal anguish and national shame, De Touranges represents an old aristocratic order literally driven mad by an inability to forget its blood ties to the Bourbons. With similar sentiments, D’Alonville’s own father dies at the novel’s beginning after being wounded in a clash between the revolutionary army and allied emigrant and German forces. D’Alonville’s father, the Viscount de Fayolles, equates the revolutionary appropriation of his fortune and ancestral lands with the erasure of his identity, making his physical death almost a redundancy. On his deathbed he exclaims, “Ah, wherefore to live! banished and a beggar! . . . No; Fayolles has no longer business in this world” (119). How, then, does his child D’Alonville ultimately manage to weather changes in fortune and circumstance that kill his father and older brother, and that derange De Touranges? A second son, he strikes a middle path refused by his family’s standard-bearers. His father locates identity in the overdetermined plot of primogeniture, while his elder brother completely rejects his past through self-interested defection to the revolution’s cause. D’Alonville achieves a balance between these extremes not exactly by remembering, or by forgetting, but by some combination of the two. By the novel’s conclusion, he has come

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to employ a flexible way of describing, and remembering, closer to White’s description of historical annals than to narratives seeking to organize complex experiences around nationalistic imperatives and stereotypes. One clue regarding this process emerges as he walks to meet the grief-crazed man he later discovers is De Touranges (another first son). On his way, D’Alonville leafs through “his pocket-book, and saw from the memorandums he had made in it, that it was the anniversary” of the day on which his father received his fatal wound (390). The memorandum book’s atomization of experience into discrete entries of dates and events discards attempts to impose connections between causes and effects, or to impose a unitary identity on its author. This moment is particularly revealing in light of the subsequent encounter with De Touranges. Like D’Alonville’s father, De Touranges is tormented by the idea of his lost lands and fallen king, and he is driven to frenzy because he is uncertain about the fate of his wife and their child, which represent the future of his family’s name and story. D’Alonville, by contrast, apparently has forgotten the precise date of his father’s death, though it occurred only a year ago amid traumatic circumstances. He has created a means of remembering that enables him to adapt to changing circumstances and cope with irreversible losses. In its fragmentary recounting of certain dates and events, D’Alonville’s pocket-book of memorandums expresses what White identifies as historical annals’ “absence of any consciousness of a social center” (11).16 In The Banished Man, there are two possible responses to the collapse of conventions emanating from such a center: an attempt to maintain them single-handedly, which results in a solipsism akin to madness (De Touranges), or a willingness to note events as they happen and to remember them later, without necessarily seizing on them as injunctions to act in accordance with a received social code. This is not to deny that D’Alonville sincerely mourns his father, and he continually condemns the revolutionaries who, in his view, have ruined France. But after he returns from France to England for the last time, he marries the Englishwoman Angelina Denzil and significantly ceases to use his honorific, “Chevalier,” in correspondence, since he says at the end of one letter that “I have now no country that I can call mine” (Smith 434). By the time he finds De Touranges, he has ceased to behave as if the France he knew exists anymore, or as if it could exist again. In place of the aristocratic identity grounded in the ancien regime, D’Alonville improvises a more fluid identity reflective of ongoing changes in French society. The central role of language in developing that identity—through the memorandum book, for

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example, as well as his many letters reproduced in the novel— creates a mutually constitutive relationship between nation and narration in The Banished Man: stories reflect their social situations, but they also can help create new contexts for understanding identity and nationality. This tactic recalls Franco Moretti’s point in An Atlas of the European Novel that the narratives of nineteenth-century fiction give meaning to the constitution of the modern nation-state, “a wider, more abstract, more enigmatic domain—that needed a new symbolic form in order to be understood” (17). A side effect of this change in attitude, and the exile that brings it on, is the softening of D’Alonville’s political conservatism. D’Alonville’s abhorrence not only of the Jacobins, but even of moderate reformers, begins to become more nuanced in what is perhaps the novel’s most transcontinental moment. D’Alonville and Ellesmere first encounter the Polish Carlowitz on the road from Prague to Berlin. The language of their conversation is French; the political principles that surface range from Carlowitz’s fervent republicanism, to Ellesmere’s more level-headed (in Smith’s view) advocacy of constitutional monarchy, to D’Alonville’s own defense of absolute royal power.17 Though the French aristocrat cannot agree with the “vehement enthusiasm” (Smith 214) of the Polish liberal, he is forced to concede that his own views are the result of cultural negotiations: D’Alonville concludes, “Had I been a Polonese, I might have thought and acted as you have done. Had you been a native of France, you would have seen her monarchy exchanged for anarchy infinitely more destructive and tyrannical, with the same abhorrence as I have done” (214). D’Alonville comes to recognize the contingency of his own views, though he does not abandon them; when he, Carlowitz, and Ellesmere are reunited hundreds of pages later, the interrupted argument continues: D’Alonville and Carlowitz had on this subject ideas so different, that it was impossible to bring them to agree on any one point. They argued, however, with that perfect good humour that arose from their esteem of each other as individuals, and Ellesmere was admirably fitted for an umpire in their friendly political disputes; for, while he adhered to that system of government as the best, under which his own country had become the most flourishing in the world, he seldom thought the bold assertions of Carlowitz were carried too far. (387)

It is precisely these sorts of exchanges that make fixing the novel’s ideological valence challenging.18 Arbitrating between continental

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extremes, Ellesmere in the passage above performs the role that Smith believed had been destined for Britain during the 1790s, had not xenophobia and political reaction won the day. This concluding dynamic of debate reproduces the democratic model championed by Ellesmere and Carlowitz. Yet the dispute occurs outside specific national political institutions, leaving all three men to confront their differences through their view of each other merely “as individuals.” Katharina Rennhak emphasizes Ellesmere’s role as Smith’s spokesman for constitutional monarchy; equally important is Smith’s insistence to the end that this debate is not definitely resolved and that the novelist’s final emphasis is on the process of debate, rather than the triumph of a particular outcome. The potential for such “candid discussion” to interrogate the legitimacy of political belief and national definition was, of course, a key reason for its unpopularity among authorities across Europe. This exchange also suggests how Ellesmere’s émigré friendships in turn help him understand and articulate his own investment in the putatively British values of liberality, tolerance, and openness. The fact that Ellesmere’s homeland has abandoned these qualities means that he paradoxically is better able to embody them by living on the continent than by returning home.19 By the novel’s conclusion, D’Alonville settles in Italy, which will lack a unifying narrative of nationality for decades, with his wife and friends from several countries. This ending is the culmination of several scenes that hold out hope for the outcast seeking community: creating a community of outcasts. In this work, exile paradoxically is a precondition for the establishment of genuine fellow-feeling and tolerance. When he listens to Carlowitz’s account from his Belgium jail cell, D’Alonville recognizes his own experiences and so predictably feels that “the story . . . was very simple” (379). Though they lack a common country or political orientation, the two men share an understanding of the contingencies that condition personal identity and political loyalties. Listeners unshackled by national bigotry, such as the Baroness de Rosenheim; her daughter, Madame D’Alberg; Ellesmere; and the English Denzils, hear D’Alonville’s “melancholy history” (204) with sympathetic belief. These characters sympathize with D’Alonville and Carlowitz because of their own various forms of exile. In her discussions of The Banished Man and of Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac, Adriana Craciun reads the similar endings of these works as the hopeful creation of transnational communities of characters united by sympathy and newfound cross-cultural tolerance.20 For Craciun, both novels in this way affirm the value of a Romantic cosmopolitanism, embodied in characters who have

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become newly enlightened “citizens of the world.” Any such affirmation, however, exists alongside a complex and highly ambivalent quality in these narratives. Empowerment resulting from this kind of “citizenship” is never dramatized in the texts themselves and at their conclusion, these figures seem as much in flight from the stillcrushing forces of national prejudice as at home in a self-fashioned identity as cosmopolitans. Truer to the tone of many of these texts is the assessment offered by Rennhak of the conclusion of The Banished Man, where she characterizes her protagonists’ stopping point in Italy as the “temporary hideout” of a group of exiles who continue to lack “practical investment in the future,” rather than a long-term alternative to European ideological polarization (585). The death of Ellesmere’s elder brother alleviates his poverty as a second son, but he is weary of reactionary England and his conservative family and elects to join D’Alonville in Italy. The impoverished Denzils’ departure from England also partly stems from their desire for a more liberal atmosphere undominated by the likes of their relative, Lord Aberdore, whose political aims consist of safeguarding elite interests.21 And the Rosenheims decide to leave Vienna for Verona when Count D’Alberg, Mme D’Alberg’s husband, resigns his military commission in disgust over his leaders’ incompetence—a stark change from his earlier chauvinistic confidence in his country’s superiority. For D’Alonville, allegiance to domestic order triumphs over loyalty to a past civil order. Angela Keane argues that the novel ultimately implies “the most significant impact of the Revolution and European war is the disintegration of the family and that the subordination of private family sentiment to the republican cause has destroyed the homes of Europe” (96). D’Alonville’s conclave of exiles at the story’s end attempts to stem this destruction, and Smith’s protagonist elects to be a husband and son-in-law rather than rejoin the émigré army. (De Touranges, despite being reunited with his wife and small child, does return to the frontier to fight again.) Ellesmere rationalizes his friend’s decision to sit out the war by pointing out the difficulties in ascertaining his current duty as a Frenchman. Till your king or his representative call on you—till you are convinced your arm is demanded for the restoration of law and order, or of some form of legal government in your country, I think as your Angelina does, that you should not leave her. The hour when you will be thus called upon does not seem to be at hand; and indeed, my dear Chevalier, the turn that affairs seem to take in France, makes it impossible to conjecture whether such a period will ever arrive. (Smith 473)

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D’Alonville ultimately accepts the disintegration of French political authority and ignores those who would view this occurrence as a call to arms. This decisive turn away from official narratives of national duty and toward domesticity also characterizes the behavior of Ellesmere—who leaves England at a time when men like him, arguably, are most needed—and the Count D’Alberg, whose wife openly rejoices at his resignation from the military since she is “much more anxious for the safety than the glory of her husband” (476, italics in original). These decisions create the transnational community of friends and loved ones who cluster about D’Alonville in Verona, a city that is home to none of them. This denouement is in keeping with the D’Alonville’s altered sense of identity as a man without a nation who has accepted how revolutionary upheaval has altered the trajectory of his own history. Likewise, the lives of D’Alonville’s expatriate friends have been transformed by social and political conflict.22 The final words of the Viscount de Fayolles to his son had expressed his faith that he had not “violated the allegiance I swore my king,” and “That in you [my] name will not be disgraced” through any disloyalty to the crown on D’Alonville’s part (131). This attempt to script his son’s future actions is the only inheritance Fayolles leaves D’Alonville, and its burden weighs heavily on Smith’s protagonist as he becomes torn between either returning to France to aid other royalists or marrying Angelina and essentially excusing himself from further action on behalf of the royal family or his country. Rather than moralize recent events through deductive references to obligation and blood ties (like De Touranges), D’Alonville ultimately derives a more open-ended lesson inductively based on his own experiences in “the school of adversity” (479) which has “instructed me to conquer prejudice, and to feel for the sufferings of others” (480). Similarly, the paradigm of the memorandum book preserves key events of the past, but does not tether them to chauvinistic confidence in a political or social center. A wise priest who was De Touranges’ tutor implies that the revolution has more generally called into question the human capacity to anticipate historical moments or assign responsibility for them; there are recent events “which no prudence can prevent, and for which no mortal is answerable” (238).

N A RR ATI V E W RONGS

A ND

WOMEN ’S R IGHTS

At the novel’s end, the unexpected liberation that grows from this response is expressed in a different register by the most intractably miserable character, Charlotte Denzil. Denzil’s gothic subplot

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concerns a woman who has been swindled out of a fortune, and consequently exiled from the class of her birth, by corrupt attorneys overseeing the settlement of her children’s inheritance. Clearly another salvo in Smith’s long-running assault on the trustees of her fatherin-law’s will, the Denzil storyline suggests in part why Smith is so interested in the émigré as a historical figure and as a fictional device. D’Alonville’s friendship with and eventual marriage into the Denzil family point to the fundamental similarity between the émigré perspective and Smith’s own. The story of the Baron de Rosenheim’s daughter, Madame D’Alberg, introduces the theme of female dispossession early on the text by pitting her title to her father’s estate against the competing claims of a distant male relation. Mme D’Alberg’s peril is averted through D’Alonville’s heroism in retrieving crucial family papers from the Rosenheim castle. Restitution is more elusive for Charlotte Denzil, and throughout much of the novel, she very much wants to make mortals “answerable,” to use the priest’s term, for her social and economic disenfranchisement. While the émigré has no court from which to seek justice, Charlotte Denzil’s Britain claims it does, and Denzil/Smith seeks restitution from the powerful and influential. The novel is replete with letters from Denzil to friends that reproduce Smith’s own troubled relations with truculent landlords and grasping booksellers. In unrepentantly tying her victimization to the abuse of male power, Charlotte Denzil is thus bolder than earlier Smith creations like Emmeline (Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle [1788]), who implicitly criticize their male tormentors only to “retreat to studied postures of conformity whenever they risk exposure to public censure” (Hoeveler 6). But for all her boldness, Denzil (and Smith) comes to understand that she is as powerless as the émigré to effect real change or right wrongs. While they seek to regulate the movements of emigrants, the English authorities even more effectively police their own native critics and control how they are perceived (as we shall see with the case of transportees). This dynamic comes to the fore through the Denzils’ troubled relationship with Lord Aberdore, whose grudging patronage finally becomes intolerable to Charlotte because it is represented so inaccurately. The story of her humiliations at the hands of the Aberdores reaches Charlotte Denzil through the channels of local gossip, but the plot is so altered from her own perceptions that it is unrecognizable, focusing solely on “how very good he has been to ‘poor Mrs. Denzil and her family’ . . .” (Smith 272). Significantly, it is the dissemination of this narrative, rather than Aberdore’s condescending behavior per se, that finally compels Charlotte Denzil to

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break off ties with the Aberdores, her relations by marriage. Denzil comments that “nothing is so difficult . . . as to judge the actions of another, when the motives of those actions cannot be known” (271).23 Her motives are precisely what the narratives that circulate about the Denzils exclude, since those stories are shaped by a structure of authority of which Aberdore is the embodiment. The complicity between Lord Aberdore’s self-serving paternalism and the ruling class’s broader claims to authority is illustrated by his political agenda: Aberdore’s sole aim seems to be in shoring up his interest in the vicinity of his estate. He appears oblivious to the fact that his wife is entertaining an admirer and that the principle tutor to his heirs is lazy and duplicitous. When D’Alonville finds employment as a second tutor to the Aberdore boys, his attempts to conceal his marriage fail after Brymore, a guest of the Aberdores, sets out to seduce Angelina. Brymore’s insults to Angelina echo Aberdore’s insults to her mother. Where Aberdore patronizes Charlotte Denzil to buoy his own philanthropic reputation, Brymore offers Angelina’s mother money for her daughter as an act of “charity” to her impoverished family.24 The sensational denouement to this episode, a duel, is part of what leads the Denzils and D’Alonville to leave Britain forever. Letters between characters are important particularly in the latter half of the novel, and Smith indicates in her own correspondence that these were part of a broader interest in The Banished Man in formal innovation. Writing to her publishers of the manuscript in progress, she states: “The work in question is to be call’d ‘The Exile’ and is a story partly founded in Truth, & as I beleive [sic] myself will be particularly interesting & somewhat on a new plan, for it will be partly narrative and partly Letters” (Stanton 88).25 The final pages of the novel are composed of a long letter written jointly by Charlotte Denzil and D’Alonville from the continent and addressed to Ellesmere. This letter, however, differs from earlier ones written by Denzil; rather than documenting another tale of woe brought on by her poverty, she now offers an extensive catalogue of interesting flora she has observed on her recent journey. This final communication reflects Smith’s own interest in botany and in particularized detail facilitated by a scientific nomenclature. Conscious that these scattered observations might interest her reader far less than herself, Denzil acknowledges that “. . . these, indeed, are the most minute beauties, and calculated to attract the botanist, rather than the landscape painter” (Smith 477). Judith Pascoe has situated Smith’s interest in botany alongside that of her male and female contemporaries; as Pascoe notes, Polwhele’s “The Unsex’d Females” identifies women’s interest in botany with

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sexual (and by implication, political) revolution. Smith’s turn in her later novels and “Beachy Head” toward detailed botanical description is for Pascoe evidence of a different attitude toward nature than that of male Romantics, an attitude that refuses “to reinscribe her contemporaries’ hierarchization” of the sublime over the beautiful, or male over female, or of the majestic over the minute (“Female Botanists” 204)—and of the national over the individual. Accordingly, Charlotte Denzil eschews the story of her woes, and she expressly declines to comment on the course of historical events, though she mentions she has traveled through the sites of recent battles. Turning from both personal and public narrative, Denzil’s botanical observations in some ways resemble D’Alonville’s memorandum book insofar as she offers only a set of facts and observations unconnected by any chain of causal reasoning or overt demand for specific action. Where the extended stories in her letters were a call to remember wrongs and, ideally, to right them, this new form of expression for her is explicitly presented as a way of leaving behind old scores that finally may never be resolved. While she will remember British friends and places, like D’Alonville she wants to develop a highly selective memory. In Italy, Charlotte Denzil “hope[s] to forget, at least to cease feeling so acutely, the calamities which made, for many years, my country unsupportable” (Smith 478). The idiosyncratic and fragmentary nature of Denzil’s new mode of self-expression and self-awareness means that although she ends an alien in a foreign land, her writing is no longer alienated labor. Marx defines alienated labor as external to the worker . . . he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. (110–111, italics in original)

Marx argues that certain kinds of work, specifically those governed by the rules of wage labor, constitute a peculiarly modern form of homeless consciousness or exile from the self. This formulation is helpful in understanding the more complicated facets of Charlotte Denzil’s sense of exile, though she lives in England. She vehemently complains that, as a novelist, she is a slave to the literary marketplace. Her work

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must satisfy reading customers who do not want to pay for what she really wants to write about: the economic distresses that drive her to compose amid household turmoil, “precious recipe to animate the imagination and exalt the fancy!” (Smith 275). Though she works at home, she is not at home when she works, because she must “not affirm but deny” herself—she cannot use the stories she writes for publication as a way of expressing her real feelings and thoughts. In escaping from Britain, then, she is distancing herself from the professional exile of novel-writing, where she is financially rewarded for suppressing the real story of her nearest concerns. Smith herself pointedly addresses this dilemma in asides and footnotes throughout the novel, bitterly noting that she has been criticized for fictionalizing incidents from her own life and disingenuously contending that the Charlotte Denzil plot is not her own. In alerting Charlotte Denzil to the possibilities of nonnarrative forms of expression such as cataloguing, her journey means escape from a paying public that is as demanding in its own way as the codes D’Alonville sets aside. At the same time, Denzil seems to recast the nature of her personal communications, her letters, by downplaying her story and its exhausting call for a reckoning she has come to believe may never arrive. This literary transformation demonstrates how for Denzil physical exile from Britain becomes an artistic and personal homecoming. For once, she writes for herself. The Banished Man’s ultimate significance lies in its sophisticated understanding of the intersections between exile, political authority, and narrative form, creating what is essentially a theory of narrative politics. Like Charlotte Denzil and Armand D’Alonville, Smith wants to believe that telling one’s story produces self-understanding and social justice. But the comprehensive nature of the émigré’s displacement and dispossession call for new ways to create and express personal identity and desire. For D’Alonville and Carlowitz, events in Europe severely restrict their ability to tell their own stories. For Ellesmere and the Denzils, the British elite’s self-interested defense of its own power is by turns depressing and oppressive, and the accounts of those on the margins are suppressed. Opposing political extremes in France and England—revolution versus reaction—each produce their own kind of émigrés, who reach their own individual accommodations with the ideals of duty, honor, and justice. Smith’s novel implies that in the debate over political orientation, intermediate ambiguities and long-term ambivalence are simply too commonplace during times of national crisis to repress. Throughout the long war with France, the Pitt ministry would struggle to enforce political conformity through the Alien Act, the 1794 treason trials,

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the 1795 Two Acts, and many other measures. The very fact that government efforts were ongoing underscores the official sense that the task was never complete, that the narrative of national consolidation was always imperiled before the fluctuating valence of individual political convictions. This is essentially Smith’s conclusion in The Banished Man as well, though she hardly views it with the government’s hostility. The bond between Carlowitz, D’Alonville, and Ellesmere depends on their willingness to cross the boundaries of nation and its ideologies, and to engage in ongoing political and social debates where there will be no victor, only the perpetual dialogue of refereed argument. Smith’s privileging of memoranda and fragments as modes of communication and understanding amid revolution is a formal symptom of this state of affairs.

M A RY R OBINSON ’S E MIGR ATION N ATION Along with Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson was the British writer during the 1790s most invested in the émigré cause, at least in print. Like Smith, who seizes on the emigrants as figures for her own, female dispossession, for Robinson the émigré issue provides a venue for anticipating Virginia Woolf’s claim in Three Guineas that “as a woman, I have no country” (99). Robinson’s female protagonists find no protection or restitution under either the old regime or the new republic. While her works include men maimed beyond repair by both despotism and the Emigration, her women endure the greater anguish of remaining passive spectators whose fate to the end rests on the decisions of others. For both men and women, Robinson sees in the Emigration an embodiment of a new kind of exile, whose totality generates an almost existential sense of loss and disorientation brought on by poverty and isolation. Like The Banished Man, Robinson’s novel of the Emigration, Hubert de Sevrac (1796), is set on the continent. It follows the wanderings of a French Marquis and his family in Italy. The de Sevracs flee revolutionary violence and initially seek asylum with Monsieur Ravillon in Milan. Ravillon was the son of the de Sevrac gamekeeper, and for reasons we are only gradually aware of, displaced Hubert as his father’s heir. Outwardly, Ravillon welcomes the de Sevracs, hoping to marry his son to their cherished daughter Sabina. Inwardly, he is a calculating and sinister character who will use force if persuasion fails. The de Sevracs take up residence in the old family chateau of Montnoir, owned by Ravillon but seldom used. De Sevrac spurns Ravillon’s plans for his daughter; at the same time, the family makes

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the acquaintance of a young Englishman, St. Clair, who is clearly more to Sabina’s taste and who reciprocates her interest. Thanks to Ravillon, de Sevrac soon finds himself accused of murder and narrowly escapes being executed in Milan. At this point, the family and St. Clair travel south together, pausing at various points only to inevitably be forced, by various circumstances, to continue for fear of ridicule or more forms of persecution. Eventually, seemingly unconnected scenes of persecution are understood to have been largely orchestrated by two men: Ravillon, still in pursuit of Sabina, and the Count de Briancourt, an émigré notorious for sexual and political depravity at court and de Sevrac’s most hated enemy. This unlikely partnership between Ravillon, a commoner of humble origins, and the aristocratic de Briancourt leads to multiple attempts to abduct Sabina and the successful abduction of another young heiress, who is forcibly married to Ravillon and then goes mad. In the end, de Briancourt and Ravillon both receive the violent deaths they deserve, Sabina marries St. Clair, and the de Sevrac’s poverty is helpfully remedied by the news that his wife’s English relatives have left her their fortune. As this summary suggests, Hubert de Sevrac offers a vast array of characters and adventures whose ultimate relationships to each other come to light only in extremely disjointed and partial fashion. For example, we are told at the outset that de Sevrac was disinherited in his youth when his father made Ravillon his heir. At various points in the ensuing pages, some characters insinuate that de Sevrac’s father, whose death years ago remains mysterious, committed suicide. Others imply that he died from grief over his son’s marriage to a “heretic” British woman. Only in the closing pages do we finally learn that the old Marquis murdered Ravillon’s father in a random act of rage; as compensation, he made Ravillon his heir. In turn Ravillon killed the Marquis, simultaneously avenging his father and appropriating the de Sevrac fortune. This pattern of presenting information about events in the past occurs repeatedly in Hubert de Sevrac. Characters continually confront people and situations that they understand only incompletely, usually because of suppressed or concealed information. His opaque behavior toward Sabina de Sevrac cannot help but make St. Clair’s surname ironic. Alternately enchanted by her and struggling to distance himself from her, the tormented St. Clair at last reveals in the closing pages that he is already married, to an Englishwoman of his family’s choice whom he loathes. Despite its generic designation as “a romance of the eighteenth century,” the action occurring in the

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novel’s present is quite scant. At several points, the movement of the narrative (as well as the travels of the itinerant de Sevracs) stalls completely. Contemporary reviewers repeatedly cited this pattern as a failing, attributing it alternately to wrong-headed liberal ideology or, in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft (writing for the Analytic Review), just bad writing. In writing the present romance Mrs Radcliffe appears to be her model; and she deserves to rank as one of her most successful imitators: still the characters are so imperfectly sketched, the incidents so unconnected, the changes of scene so frequent, that interest is seldom excited, and curiosity flags. After this account we shall not be expected to give the outlines of such an imperfect tale; the object of it is apparently benevolent, but it has no centre out of which the moral, that the vices of the rich produce the crimes of the poor, could naturally emanate. (523)

Like other reviewers, Wollstonecraft sees Robinson’s text as an imitation of Anne Radcliffe’s Gothic romances, and Hubert de Sevrac is replete with the machinery of the genre, from moldering castles and secret chapels to situations of apparently supernatural terror. But unlike in Radcliffe, Robinson’s situations (in Wollstonecraft’s critique) offer the reader no center, no moral. I am suggesting this is not a side-effect of sloppy composition, but instead a deliberate commentary on Robinson’s subject. These moments underscore that the de Sevracs are defined not by their quest for something, but by their flight from something—a state of affairs suggesting that the entire idea of an émigré romance is something of an oxymoron. This is consistent with Robinson’s more general, poetic subversions of romance that, as Jacqueline Labbe observes, abound in “tactical obfuscation, imaged through horrific dreams, narrative delay, or banality in place of climax” (Romantic Paradox 98). In similar fashion, the bulk of Hubert de Sevrac is dedicated to various characters unearthing, or confessing, buried stories that are fundamental in understanding their situations and responses. The most elaborate of these stories is disclosed by Hubert himself. At one point on their travels, a stranger gives Sabina a small ebony cross with the word “REMEMBER” engraved on it. The sight of this relic drives her father into profound depression, for reasons he refuses to explain, and the recurring motif of this cross becomes a kind of metaphor for the narratology of the novel itself. The characters are molded by events in the past, but we (and sometimes they) are

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ignorant of what those events are. We only know that all Robinson’s characters, in various ways, “remember” fragments of old crimes, injustices, and personal lapses. In the end, we find out that the cross was given by de Sevrac himself to the love of his early youth, a young plebian named Adelaide. She subsequently was separated from him by his father and then deflowered by de Briancourt, partly explaining de Sevrac’s mysterious hatred of the count. Adelaide de Fleury turns out to be the pivot upon which several of the novel’s histories ultimately turn, most notably an extensive subplot involving a young courtier banished from Paris before the revolution, who becomes de Sevrac’s most faithful friend in exile. In a sense, the disjointed nature of Hubert de Sevrac would seem to confirm Hayden White’s hypothesis; Robinson’s narrative is set immediately in the wake of the September Massacres of 1792 and the story’s interruptions, digressions, and accidental discoveries are of a piece with the chaos of the period. At the same time, however, it is only because of the revolution that many of these stories come to light at all, an element that looks ahead to Burney’s The Wanderer. Adelaide, we learn, sacrifices her virtue to Count de Briancourt in part to free her father from the Bastille, where de Briancourt has imprisoned him. This is a story not of revolutionary excess but of classic old regime libertinism. De Sevrac himself is parted from Adelaide, not by civil war or the Jacobins, but by his father’s refusal to allow his son to make a love match that crosses class lines—a familiar tale replicated in a different register in the story of St. Clair. The “REMEMBER” cross, with its perpetually missing signifier—remember what, exactly? or whom?—is in this sense emblematic of the narratives, not of the revolution, but of an absolutist regime whose survival depended on the suppression of the truth about its own policies and practices. De Sevrac acknowledges at one point that it was the silence of the people—a silence enforced by state codes of censorship and punishment—that directly lead to the revolution. “Had the tongues of my countrymen been at liberty, their swords had been unstained with blood! It is not possible, to shackle the mind and the body at the same moment; the one will work the emancipation of the other, unless the energies of nature are subdued . . .” (2. 208). In the wake of the monarchy’s disintegration, these stories finally come to light, albeit in confused and incomplete forms. Adelaide herself lives still as a nun, we are told at the conclusion, but she is never permitted to appear in the novel’s present, or to offer her own version of her story. In a novel full of reversed “deaths” and unmasked disguises, Adelaide’s burial in a convent by past evil

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cannot, in the end, be undone: her son-in-law reveals her existence to de Sevrac, but completes the erasure of her agency by deciding for her that she would prefer to remain unknown. He explains that her seducer allowed her to live in part because she swore not to publicly accuse de Briancourt; her son-in-law, d’Albert, perpetuates that silence. He discourages de Sevrac from seeking her pardon, advising: . . . do not awaken her from a dream of tranquility, to experience a new sense of sorrow. All her melancholy story, her sufferings, and their progress towards resignation, I have lately received by her own hand. Previous to her eternal seclusion, she returned to you a little cross, as an assurance that she was dead to the world, and devoted to that peaceful solitude, where every care would rest . . . . (3. 298)

We have good reason to wonder at d’Albert’s reasoning in light of what happens soon afterward. D’Albert’s own story also involves love lost to libertinism: his first sweetheart was married off to de Briancourt and reported to have died of grief subsequently. This report turns out not to be true, and Robinson strenuously engineers a reunion between d’Albert and Mme de Briancourt, now living in a convent and, unknown to herself, a widow at last. The denouement may well leave Hubert de Sevrac relieved that he does not seek Adelaide’s pardon after all. D’Albert tells Mme de Briancourt of her newfound freedom, and hails her as one “recalled from the grave, thou pure and gentle spirit” (3. 315). But her response is less spiritual than he might desire; she has never taken vows, and is now free to go and become . . . his wife. D’Albert, now married himself, “shrunk with agony—his hasty marriage had sealed the destiny of Madame de Briancourt” (3. 315). While Robinson concludes that “Fortitude and resignation, in time, subdued her hopeless affection for Mounsier D’Albert” (3. 317), de Briancourt’s widow is shut out from the fulfillment that romance promises. Critics have discussed how Robinson’s prose from the 1790s highlights the performative nature of subjectivity; describing the various scripts of female sexuality Robinson manipulated during her lifetime, Anne Mellor argues that Robinson “consciously created what we now call a ‘postmodern subjectivity,’ a concept of the self as entirely fluid, unstable, and performative” (“Mary Robinson” 253). Hubert de Sevrac, however, demonstrates how such fluidity for women often remains circumscribed by the choices of men. Madame de Briancourt would like to cast off the role of imprisoned matron and, like Robinson herself in her Memoirs, embrace a new identity after her dismal first marriage. But

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she is separated from her lover by his marriage, and Adelaide forever remains a nun, suggesting that in its essentials, patriarchal privilege continues unchanged after the Revolution. Second chances are largely reserved for men. Indeed, the only marriage at the novel’s end is Sabina de Sevrac’s, to St. Clair. Anne Close has hailed Sabina de Sevrac as a new kind of Gothic heroine who, with her mother’s rational support, “comes to understand that virtue does not require the sacrifice of knowledge, experience, and personal desire in the name of obedience to her father. She defies cultural expectations that require silence and innocence in young women as she openly chastises her father, Ravillon, and others who attempt to use her . . .” (179). Close’s almost exclusive emphasis on Sabina at the expense of the novel’s other young women overlooks the fact that in general, the novel’s conclusion gives little cause for female cheer. The tragedies of Adelaide and Mme de Briancourt are supplemented by the fate of Ravillon’s wife, an Italian heiress whom he kidnaps and forces into marriage. Although his death frees her from her husband, her sanity remains questionable and her rape irreversible.26 Robinson also portrays men who have been damaged beyond hope. Most notably, de Sevrac stumbles upon another member of the ill-fated de Fleury family, Adelaide’s brother. He fled France in the wake of his family’s persecution and has become the leader of a band of outlaw “exiled nobles, of all countries” wronged by corrupt rulers and autocratic states (3. 285).27 He commits suicide, a possible fate hovering over several of the Robinson’s characters, and his enduring sense of unredressed personal injury is presented as typical of times that do not admit of full disclosure: “if ever time should unfold the pages of secret history, there would be found many de Fleury’s . . .” (3. 294). Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac offers itself as one chapter in that secret history, and one only made possible by the upheaval of French society. But unlike his sister and Madame de Briancourt, young de Fleury at least is permitted to voice his own tragedy. Robinson’s women remain subject to the choices and characterizations of others, and in Adelaide’s case are never awakened to post-revolutionary reality. For the title character of Hubert de Sevrac, the challenge becomes whether he can manage the sense of personal alienation that historical events have thrust upon him. In exile, the one idea to which de Sevrac clings is that of his honor—a concept that itself is narrative in form, depending as it does upon a history of virtuous conduct as well as noble bloodlines. But he finds, or imagines he finds, his honor under

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repeated attack and struggles to defend himself in a world in which the old methods (e.g., dueling) for asserting one’s reputation are losing validity or simply seem irrelevant. Faced with this predicament, he repeatedly agonizes that he is “A stranger, poor and unprotected, my only treasure, my good name!” (1. 121). His most ruthless critic is probably de Sevrac himself, who is consistently portrayed as an essentially good man who nevertheless did little to rectify the abuses of the old France. He is intermittently tortured by the possibility that, had men like him acted in the public interest rather than stood by and done nothing, the revolution might have been unnecessary and its violence unrealized. This internal conflict explains why he does not, like others, join an émigré regiment and fight, and it also explains why he is persistently misunderstood by those he encounters. De Sevrac does not defend the monarchy, but neither does he praise the revolution; consequently, his views defy the received political opposition of reactionary émigré and revolutionary Jacobin. This ambiguity earns him the scorn of those affiliated both with the left and the right.28 Those who were zealous in the cause of freedom, taunted him with the long catalogue of past events; the sufferings of a groaning multitude, and the tyranny of their rulers. Others, who preferred the chain of a despot to the expanding wings of liberty, mocked his tame submission, and counseled him to unite with that phalanx, whose efforts were combined to manacle the human race, and to steep the chain of power in the blood of the struggling million. (2. 247)

More than once, his sense of self-division and loss reaches an existential level of doubt and fear, and he struggles to retain his sanity. Fearing in volume 3 that his wife and daughter have been kidnapped, de Sevrac feels “Alone in the vast universe, and driven from the sphere in which he had shone, like a brilliant constellation, every path was gloomy, and every thought distracting” (3. 4). Although self-acceptance may be possible for men like Hubert de Sevrac, the complexity of their situations is not one that can be made ideologically legible in the politically super-charged atmosphere of the times. De Sevrac finally labels himself a republican, in large part because his old friend d’Albert remains a friend to the revolution, despite its high personal costs to him. As a result, de Sevrac declares, “Hubert de Sevrac is the convert of liberty! The friend of human kind!” (3. 316). But given de Sevrac’s title and values, he would face a difficult reception should he try to return home, a fact underscored by the d’Albert’s situation. Though

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he suffers under the king and greets the revolution with enthusiasm, he finds his rank identifies him as “a pensioner of the court” and he is viewed as “no friend to the cause of freedom” (3. 95). After f leeing the machinations of Louis XVI’s court, D’Albert returns to France in the early 1790s. But he finds that he remains unwelcome, though for different reasons, and feels he has little choice but to emigrate a second time. William Brewer argues that de Sevrac must learn to forsake his aristocratic identity (and its unsavory elitism) to survive (119), but part of de Sevrac’s dilemma is that he lives in a time in which honor and liberty are, mistakenly, perceived as mutually exclusive opposites. Hubert’s final metamorphosis, based on that of his friend D’Albert, argues that in fact the ideal ideology would make room for both facets of his identity, each of which has its uses and is worth preserving. In her 1800 collection Lyrical Tales, Robinson would include works about vagrants and wandering women that are entirely typical of late eighteenth-century poetry in general and of her literary competitor Wordsworth in particular. But while Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads does not furnish a definitive explanation for how the women of “The Mad Mother” or “The Thorn” landed in their current state, Robinson is more specific: two poems in Lyrical Tales focus on French exiles in particular. In this respect, these poems resemble earlier Wordsworth compositions like the (then unpublished) Salisbury Plain Poems. Robinson specifies both the cause for and the condition of the wandering woman, giving a specific history for her characters via an omniscient third-person narrator. As in Hubert de Sevrac, Robinson generalizes the mental and physical effects of exile in terms of a post-revolutionary human condition characterized by loneliness, lovelessness, and mourning. In Lyrical Tales, both “Poor Marguerite” and “The Alien Boy” blame the émigré’s agony on unpredictable, random revolutionary violence that destroys ties of family and friendship. While there is a class undertone to these poems—both Marguerite and St. Hurbert seem well-bred and even aristocratic, as opposed to the “rabble” that kills the parents of Marguerite’s lover—both emigrants dwell in isolation now, estranged not only from France but also from their loved ones in England and even from parts of themselves. Like Charlotte Smith, Robinson naturalizes the alien plight to some extent through literary references. Smith’s title for The Banished Man is drawn from a Matthew Prior text that is itself an imitation of the medieval ballad of the “nut-brown maid,” who is rewarded for her devotion to her outlaw lover when she discovers that he is, in fact, no outlaw but

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a nobleman’s son. Similarly, Robinson’s Marguerite is identified as a “NUT-BROWN GIRL” (2), though her “reward” for fidelity to her dead Henry is death rather than marriage with worldly advantages.29 St. Hubert, the father in Robinson’s “The Alien Boy,” also may identify the exiles with the English insofar as St. Hubert was the name of an exiled chouan, or guerilla insurgent, who fought with the doomed emigrant army at Quiberon Bay in 1795.30 “Poor Marguerite” lives and dies alone, wandering along the coastline and pining for her lover, a suicide whose fate she seems to imitate. St. Hubert, by contrast, lives with his son, whom he has saved from revolutionary violence and raises alone. St. Hubert tries to keep his “alien boy” ignorant of his origins, but finds that he cannot relegate his own grief solely to the journal in which he records the past. . . . in their lone hut, A daily journal would Saint HUBERT make Of his long banishment: and sometimes speak Of Friends forsaken, Kindred, massacred;— Proud mansions, rich domains, and joyous scenes For ever faded,—lost! (38–43)

In this way the son, Henry, comes to understand something of his father’s loss, but not its devastating emotional impact. Henry’s ignorance of true mourning, however, comes to an end when St. Hubert drowns while trying to rescue a shipwrecked mariner. The fate of the “little boat” that father and son see breaking up on the rocks allegorizes the fortunes of the émigrés washed up on the shores on southern England, and the imagery of the ocean in the wake of St. Hubert’s own death identifies the wild sea with the unpredictable and merciless forces of history. St. Hubert and the victims of the Terror are conflated when Henry, an orphan now, believes that “the breakers, sounding low / Seem’d like the whisp’ring of a million souls / Beneath the green-deep mourning.” Like Marguerite, Henry on the death of his father confronts “the horror-giving chearless hour / OF TOTAL SOLITUDE !” and ends “a maniac wild,” living alone on the cliffside. Seafarers periodically land to offer help and company, but it is too late for Henry, who now exists only to provide the reminder that “. . . Man may bear / All the rude storms of Fate, and still suspire / By the wide world forgotten!” The all-encompassing isolation of the émigrés in Lyrical Tales suggests that, by the late 1790s, the émigré cause was no longer the charity of choice for prosperous Britons. Unlike Smith’s emigrants, pitied

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by a nation and succored by well-wishers, Robinson’s French exiles finally must struggle on in a foreign land, living and dying forgotten and alone. To some extent, this may reflect historical realities: most émigrés returned home by the end of the 1790s, and Napoleon’s amnesty for emigrants lured back all but the most die-hard Bourbon loyalists. In addition, the effective destruction of the political opposition in the mid-1790s by the Pitt ministry and the hardening of British conservative attitudes in the face of the invasion threat may have made emigrant relief less compelling as a cause that could attract both reformers and Tories. But as we will see, the émigré remained an important figure in the British imagination throughout the French wars, providing a perspective on class and nation that writers used to critique politics at home and abroad.

Chapter 2

Th e F r e nc h C on n e c t ion i n Fr a nc es Bu r n e y a n d M a ry Sh e l l e y

Breathes there the man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said This is my own, my native land . . . . —Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805; 6. 1–3)

K risty Carpenter summarizes one play about the Emigration

written by an actual exile as follows: the heroine’s father, a French noble, is secretly married to an English woman. When she dies, he marries again, while the child is from the first marriage entrusted to the dead wife’s brother, who puts her in a convent. During the revolution the child emigrates, comes to London, and after she succeeds in asserting her true identity, she claims her fortune and marries her English cousin. Carpenter explains that “this was a very typical plot” (Refugees 151). Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac conforms to significant contours of this outline; while de Sevrac is married only once, it is clear that he consummates his relationship with Adelaide and intends to marry her before his father thwarts him.1 Adelaide subsequently has a baby girl whose paternity is an open question: is she de Sevrac’s, or does she belong to the count who rapes Adelaide? De Sevrac later marries an Englishwoman, while Adelaide is herself placed in a convent from which she never emerges. In this plot, it is the legitimate daughter, Sabina, who

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marries the English St. Clair, and who claims her fortune (on her British mother’s side) at the novel’s conclusion. Another text that closely follows this pattern, as Carpenter notes, is Frances Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer (1814). Burney worked on this novel for more than a decade, beginning it in England in the hopes of making money to help support her new husband, the émigré Alexandre d’Arblay, and their son Alex. During the Peace of Amiens in 1802, d’Arblay, an aide to Lafayette before the Terror, returned to Paris to take up his commission again, but under the condition that he not fight against his wife’s country. Napoleon, predictably, found this condition unacceptable, and excused d’Arblay from service, but also informed him that to return to England immediately would be considered a betrayal. Burney and her son joined her husband in France for what was intended to be a year’s residence. When the fragile peace was broken in 1803, Burney found herself in exile from her own country, prevented by hostilities from returning home. Fortunately, Napoleon was an avid reader of Burney’s novels—he referred to Alexandre d’Arblay as “the husband of Cecilia”—and they were allowed to live quietly. During her ten years in Napoleon’s France, Burney did the bulk of her work on The Wanderer, a story thoroughly steeped in the problems faced by emigrants to Britain that foregrounded how gender complicated an already problematic condition. Out of print until the 1990s, the novel has received less attention than Burney’s other work, but critics who have studied it have largely left aside its status as an émigré novel. Both Margaret Ann Doody and Claudia Johnson have situated the text within the matrix of the British Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels, while Julia Epstein contends that “Class consciousness and class analysis hold center stage in The Wanderer” (182).2 Begun in the 1790s but not published until the Bourbon Restoration, for the purposes of this study the text is transitional not only chronologically but ideologically. Burney’s views fall between the more liberal sympathies of 1790s writers about the Emigration like Smith and Robinson and the reactionary sentiments of émigrés who returned in triumph with Louis XVIII to Paris in the later 1810s and who would, ultimately, experience a second defeat in 1830 during the July Revolution. In The Wanderer, Burney addresses the French Revolution, as its preface announces, and the empty pride of the British aristocracy. At the same time, the novel’s ideology and narratology are far more complex than that of the typical Jacobin, or anti-Jacobin, work. To see it specifically as a novel of the Emigration affords us a fresh way to comes to terms with this complexity and the contexts from which it

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emerged. Carpenter refers to Burney as “an honorary émigré” (135) because of her marriage and experience in France under Napoleon, and reminds us that Burney’s father worked for the emigrant relief effort in the 1790s and that her sisters welcomed émigrés in their homes. Susanna Burney Phillips in particular entertained the group of liberal émigrés that included the Comte de Narbonne and Madame de Staël at Juniper Hall in 1792 and 1793, when Susanna introduced her sister Fanny to Alexandre d’Arblay. The Wanderer employs many of the plot elements in Carpenter’s summary of the “typical” émigré storyline. The heroine Juliet is the product of a secret English marriage; when her mother dies, she is raised in a French convent until the time that her father, Lord Granville, will acknowledge her. In the meantime, he remarries, has two more children, Lady Aurora Granville and Lord Melbury, and then dies suddenly before claiming Juliet. In the interim, the revolution has started in France, and Juliet’s French guardian, a bishop, loses his house—and the documentation of Juliet’s birthright—to a fire-wielding mob. Juliet herself is blackmailed into marrying a revolutionary commissary, who wants her inheritance; if she does not marry him, he threatens to kill the bishop. She undergoes a civil marriage ceremony, after which the bishop is released; Juliet escapes France immediately afterward by gaining admission to a boat secretly leaving for England. Once there, she waits for confirmation that the bishop has safely landed in Britain; until he does, she cannot prove her claim to the Granville name, or fortune. Declaring her identity independently also risks the bishop’s life if he has failed to escape from France. Most of the novel consists of Juliet’s desperate attempts to play for time, as she waits for news from the continent that does not come and tries to maintain a status befitting her rank without benefit of even a name she can or will own. She is by turns a harp teacher, a “humble companion” to an irascible widow, a seamstress, and a clerk in a London shop. The almost unbelievable contempt showered on her by the English constitutes a bitter critique of wealthy complaisancy and snobbery in the face of obvious, if distressed, female merit. The most peculiar aspect of the text is its structure. For most of the novel, the reader has no knowledge of Juliet’s origins or even her name, much less why she fled France and why she cannot identity herself. For hundreds of pages, the narrator calls her simply the Incognita; later, characters dub her “Ellis” since they know only that she waits for a letter to be delivered to “L. S.”—the letter supposed to reveal the bishop’s fate. As Doody notes, “The reader is not even let in on the heroine’s central anxieties, but must give allegiance to the

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character before knowing what she conceals” (319). Juliet’s British tormentors attempt to unravel her mystery by alternately petitioning and threatening her. She claims she is English, but she speaks with a French accent; she accepts the story made up by Mrs. Maple for the public that “she was a young lady of family, who came over with them from France. . . . in a manner which, to the attentive Harleigh, clearly indicated that it was true . . .” (89). Otherwise, only her dignified, modest bearing and obvious accomplishments testify to her upbringing and rightful status. Repeatedly, those who think well of Juliet must fall back on an indefinable “something” that vindicates her in a society that equates her namelessness with female ruin and shame. A British Admiral in her boat to England justifies his good impression of her, in spite of her refusal to explain herself, by admitting, “I must own there’s something about you, which I don’t over-much know what to call, but that is so agreeable, that it goes against me to think ill of you” (38). Variations on this formulation appear throughout the novel, and the good intentions they manifest are all that keep Juliet from sinking to the level of a laborer, or worse, during her extended stint of “female difficulties” (the novel’s subtitle). To some extent this kind of narrative trajectory reflected social realities; many French nobles were connected by blood and/or marriage to members of the English aristocracy, and émigrés with relations in England often sought help from them during the war. Carpenter accounts for the frequency of French/English marriages in émigré plots through the quite genuine gratitude most émigrés felt toward the country that had taken them in. Yet, neither explanation explains the hidden or secret marriages pervasive in émigré narratives. The Wanderer, whose foundational secret is Lord Granville’s marriage and the child he fathered in France, carries the effects of this motif to an unprecedented level, as critics have remarked. Juliet’s silence about her origins sets the stage for Burney’s criticism of British society; this technique also resonates with the general emphasis in the émigré novel on deferred storytelling and polyvalent identity. Miserable in France in 1803 at the prospect of renewed war between the countries of their birth, Burney and d’Arblay were, according to a visitor, “in the greatest agitation. This approaching war seems quite to overset them, so linked as they are to both countries that to separate from either is ruin and to hold both impossible” (Journals and Letters v 440n). Juliet has a similar problem. Her difficulty is not that she has no country of which she can say, along with Scott’s masculine speaker in this chapter’s epigraph, “This is my own, my native land.” Rather, as a woman raised abroad by an adoptive family whom she loves, she has one native land

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(or at least one possible national identity) too many, a state the revolutionary age has made untenable. In the eighteenth-century novel, the heroine (or hero) with mysterious parentage or suppressed geneology is a commonplace.3 Juliet’s situation differs in that (unlike, for example, the heroine of Evelina) she knows the facts of her ancestry; her burden is to make sure that no one else knows them until the time is right—if ever that time comes. This peculiar backdrop stems from the specific circumstances of the novel. In other words, Juliet’s particular plight is historicized by Burney to explain the way The Wanderer and its heroine withhold information. Burney had called attention to the necessity of female anonymity before in conjunction with the émigré context; her 1793 Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy appealed for charity for French priests even as it declined to name the “ladies who have instituted this scheme”: “such delicacy is too respectable to be opposed, and ostentation is unnecessary to promulgate what modest silence may recommend to higher purposes” (Johnson, Hannah 5). The Wanderer makes female anonymity a matter not only of policing “delicacy” but also of survival in the face of ferocious historical oppression. Albert Harleigh, Juliet’s admirer in spite of her nonposition in society, defends his preference and her situation by reference to the times. Acknowledging his response is not “rational,” he persists: “. . . there are now and then uncommon causes, which, when developed, shew the most extraordinary situations to be but their simple effect.” He adds, “I can defend no single particular [about her], even to myself; but yet the whole, the all-together, carries with it an indescribable, but irresistible, vindication” (30). Harleigh has been roughly handled by some critics who see in him another weak and effeminate Burney “hero,”4 but in this instance his analysis proves to be completely correct. Juliet’s “extraordinary” situation does, in fact, turn out to be the result of a most “uncommon cause”—the revolution itself—that makes the old stories equating female silence with shame simply irrelevant. The Admiral voices a cultural commonplace when he maintains that a woman with a secret must, by definition, be unrespectable, for “what is fair loves to be above board” (36). While this maxim may hold in ordinary times, Juliet is well aware that her times, the times of the Terror, are quite different. For Claudia Johnson, the historical specificity of the novel works against any progressive agenda, since Juliet’s plight originates in “causes and constraints so exceptional that they cannot be considered to be the basis for social criticism” (168). This observation somewhat misses the point, for it is precisely historical

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context that makes the novel’s injustices legible in the first place. The unprecedented nature of Juliet’s situation actually means that to explain her plight would be as socially damaging as to refuse all discussion, as Harleigh observes: “should their curiosity and suspicions work upon her spirits, till she were urged to reveal, prematurely, the secret of her situation, they would themselves be the first to condemn her for folly and imprudence, if breaking the mystery of her silence should affect either her happiness or her safety” (87). Given this state of affairs, Juliet aspires to a social invisibility where she is seen but not noticed, where her claim to identity is continually deferred until her patron can re-place her.5 If we think of social relationships in narrative terms, Juliet as a character is a fragment, cut off from a clear cultural or political context. When she finally receives a letter from abroad, the reader is allowed to read only this portion of it: In your present lonely, unprotected, unexampled situation, many and severe may be your trials; let not any of them shake your constancy, nor break your silence: while all is secret, all may be safe; by a single surmise, all may be lost. But chiefly bear in mind, what has been the principle of your education, and what I wish to be that of your conduct and character through life: That where occasion calls for female exertion, mental strength must combat bodily weakness; and intellectual vigour must supply the inherent deficiencies of personal courage; and that those, only, are fitted for the vicissitudes of human fortune, who, whether female or male, learn to suffice to themselves. Be this the motto of your story. (220)

Like its recipient, this fragment is divorced from its context as a letter and as a part of what is presumably a larger exchange between two people who know each other well. As a result, what promises to be moment of dramatic disclosure does not tell us anything we do not already know; we know that Juliet is alone, that she has a secret she dare not avow, that she has received a good education in female accomplishments and social graces, and that she has by this point in the story already had several occasions to show how “mental strength must combat bodily weakness.” The most useful piece of information, the author, is omitted, and the passage seems almost gratuitous in its own uselessness as a clue to Juliet’s situation. The only value of this excerpt seems to be its equation of textual fragmentation with human isolation and, to use the language of the letter, imposed self-sufficiency. To this extent, this passage can be said to express “the motto of [Juliet’s] story.” The émigré’s narrative, cut off from

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its historical and political origins, always threatens to dissolve into a loose affiliation of fragments, suspicions, and hopes. When Juliet’s story does begin to emerge, almost two-thirds of the way through the novel, the manner of that emergence dramatizes how completely self-knowledge and self-expression are destabilized when one is burdened with the émigré “identity.” After some time, she discovers another émigré, her childhood friend and French noblewoman Gabriella. Raised in the same convent, Juliet and Gabriella emigrate separately, and Juliet spends much of the first half of the novel seeking Gabriella. They subsequently work in a small haberdashery shop in London, where the aged Sir Jasper Harrington discovers them. Jasper, like many others, has had a prurient curiosity about “Ellis” ever since meeting her in the boat from France and has tried, in a way that is both touching and grotesque given his advanced age, to offer aid. His inappropriate sexual interest in Juliet is always clear, yet it is this seventy-year-old half-crippled bachelor who, as Doody remarks, perversely ends up playing the part of hero by freeing Juliet from her French “husband’s” clutches. Sir Jasper is the first to hear Juliet’s story. The backdrop for this scene, however, is consistent with the larger confusion over Juliet’s excruciating but unavoidable selfcensorship of her aims and situation. Jasper learns the story of Juliet’s parentage not from her own lips, but from Gabriella, who explains in French to Jasper that the marriage of Juliet’s parents was “legal, though secret” (640). Gabriella proceeds to explain that Juliet’s maternal grandfather was “an insolvent man of business,” and that Lord Granville feared to own his wife to his famously proud, imperious father. The couple lived together in France until her death, at which time Lord Granville returned to England and left his infant daughter to be raised abroad. Gabriella also explains that Juliet’s claim is opposed in Britain by Lord Denmeath, the brother of her father’s second wife. Denmeath wants Juliet to remain in France, a secret and unacknowledged member of the Granville family: “. . . she shall be portioned; but she shall never be received nor owned in England” (645). Juliet’s guardian, the bishop, was to escort her to press her claim in England when the revolution prevented his journey; more than that, Gabriella does not know herself. During the relation of Gabriella’s detailed narrative of Juliet’s story, such as she knows it, the subject of her tale remains in an adjacent room, overhearing the conversation without breaking into it. The narrator offers various reasons for Juliet’s silence: she wants to hear her mother praised by Gabriella, she hopes Gabriella may

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make Jasper into a “useful friend” for her situation, she thinks that eavesdropping may gain her some “useful intelligence” (641). These rationalizations cannot conceal the extremely odd character of this scene, in which much of the information Juliet has been desperately suppressing comes to light, and to a man of questionable motives and character, through the aegis of a third party. Juliet finally interrupts the tê.te-a-tê.te to defend her half-sister and brother, Lady Aurora and Lord Melbury, from Jasper’s disgust, explaining that they (like everyone else) do not know her story and so are not guilty of shunning her. She does not, however, reveal her forced marriage to either Gabriella or Jasper, and this information surfaces only near the novel’s end. As she listens to Gabriella tell Jasper the story of her youth, it is almost as if Juliet does not know it herself, as if her physical and social dislocations have robbed her of the ability to verbalize her bizarre situation. When she is (repeatedly) asked after her crossing what her name is, her frequent answer is along the lines of “Alas! I hardly know it myself!” (58). Poignantly lamenting her ongoing placelessness later in the novel, Juliet cries, “O when may I cast off this veil of humiliating concealment? When meet unappalled the fair eye of open day? When appear,—when alas!—even know what I am!” (673, emphasis mine). On one hand, this passage suggests that Juliet’s persistent reticence interrogates the Romantic novel’s insistence on psychological legibility at the level of character: “Burney undermines the very claim that interiority can be fully represented or ‘completed’ by the interpretive work of readers” (Park 309). On the other hand, the issue in The Wanderer is less any access to Juliet’s interior self than a fairly simple recital of historical facts and personal connections. The upheaval of the revolutionary era mire this kind of account in protracted obscurity and resistance. Before the revolution, the path to resolve this dispute would be fairly straightforward—the Bishop and Juliet, in fact, were planning their trip to validate her claim, with written evidence, when political events overtook them. But the revolution has destroyed evidence of her parcentage and disrupted their plans. Context, then, explains her silence. The revolution has forced her to act as a woman cut off from the patriarchal markers that would situate her culturally and socially. She is not a (recognized) Granville, nor does she herself adopt the surname of her French “husband” as her own—and tellingly, he remains unnamed in Burney’s own text, even when he appears at the end to try to force her back to France. Unnamed and unknown, Juliet can be a subject of narration only in a limited way, and cannot articulate her own story.

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If we take Juliet’s liminal condition as a sign of the negotiations inherent in Burney’s notion of British identity itself, it is significant that only a Frenchwoman can begin the process of voicing Juliet’s situation. Juliet lives in an era that, more than most, yokes an individual’s identity to other, alien identities.6 Where Lord Granville’s residence abroad recalls the historical connections between England and France, Burney’s life—married to a Frenchman and resident in his nation while composing this novel—shows how connections between France and Britain survive revolution. Burney’s 1793 pamphlet on the emigrant clergy expands on the significance of this dynamic, denouncing the view of the British and French as “a distinct race of beings, [rather] than as merely emulous inhabitants of rival states” (13). In Burney’s pamphlet, the best evidence for British difference would paradoxically be generosity toward the émigré poor. Burney concludes by imagining a future, not in which the emigrants have become integrated into (or infiltrated) British culture, but in which their homeland has become stable enough for them to return. On their voyage home, she speculates, those succored by British charity will offer a striking benediction: “Farewell, they will cry, ye friends of the unhappy! Ye protectors of the houseless! Ye generous rich, who thus benignly have worked for us! Ye patient poor who thus unrepiningly have seen us supported! Blest be your kingdom! Long live your virtuous sovereign!” (Emigrant Clergy 19). What will truly consolidate British identity, and safeguard national borders? Not laws like the Alien Act, but national unity inspiring enough confidence to assist foreigners and historic enemies. The narratology of The Wanderer complicates the assumptions canvassed in chapter 1 about narrative and authority. On one hand, Juliet’s story is suppressed by the forces of revolution itself—she withholds her name until she knows the bishop is safe. Burney herself, writing of her decade in France, criticizes a friend who expresses admiration for Napoleon. During her exile, she states that she was always aware of “his unlimited power, & under the iron rod of its dread,” which forced her into a silence of “retiring timidity.”7 Yet equally key to Juliet’s silence is the British establishment. Burney’s most damning portrayal of the British elite comes in the person of Lord Denmeath, who is all too willing to return Juliet to France and consign her to the husband she hates. When Juliet finally meets Denmeath face to face, he is the first person in the novel to state, “I know the whole of your situation!” (616). He ridicules any plan by her to “renew those old claims so long ago vainly canvassed” (616) to the Granville name and fortune, and demands she return to France voluntarily or be deported: “. . . you

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will do well to return, quietly and expeditiously, to the spot whence you came. You may else make the voyage less pleasantly!” (616).8 To his mind, her departure with her husband and a small portion would constitute an “amicable” conclusion to an affair he is eager to suppress. This unholy alliance between the brutal revolutionary commissary and the amoral British aristocrat conspires to silence Burney’s heroine, whose desires and happiness become completely irrelevant. Sir Jasper dryly observes that Denmeath’s behavior, rather than an aberration, is entirely predictable in any “worldly man . . . in putting to sleep his conscience for the better keeping awake his interest. This is simply in the ordinary course of things . . . .” (649). In this way, the novel’s criticisms of female heartlessness through chillingly cruel, wealthy widows like Mrs. Maples and Mrs. Ireton are underwritten by patriarchal selfinterest; far from lacking “any authoritative males” (Johnson 174), the novel’s link to France throws into relief the despotic men in control of English and continental society.9 It is also relevant that the silence over Juliet’s status began not with Denmeath, but with her father, Lord Granville, who perpetually deferred acknowledging her birth. The bishop, landing safely in Britain in the closing pages, explains that Lord Granville “had an unfortunate indecision of character, that made him waste in weighing what should be done, the time and occasion of action” (869). This and similar defenses of Granville at the novel’s conclusion cannot erase the impression that he was a self-absorbed, negligent father cowering from the reception his first marriage would likely receive from his own father, a status-conscious aristocrat in the Denmeath mold. The suppression of Juliet’s story is rooted both in the patriarchs of the old order and the tyrants of the new regime. The character who incarnates these opposites likewise ignores the émigré’s story. Elinor Joddrell, the spoiled heiress with an avowed passion for revolutionary ideology, hypocritically exhibits no solidarity with those she encounters who are actually oppressed. As Burney’s caricature of a 1790s female radical, Elinor wants to know Juliet’s story more than anyone else, but only because she suspects her as a romantic rival for Harleigh’s attentions. All that Elinor’s hysterical pursuit of personal fulfillment enables her to hear is not Juliet’s real story, but a projection of her own worst fears that Harleigh is in love with someone else. Burney portrays Elinor’s inability to tolerate romantic uncertainty or competition as a by-product of the ideological upheaval originating in France. Elinor begins the novel in the same boat with Juliet, leaving France for England. And though Elinor is an English heiress, she is in some respects the most French

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character in the novel and her return to Britain as much an emigration as a homecoming. From her first speech, her fondness for theory identifies her with the revolutionary impulse: she welcomes the “Incognita” as a source of “conjecture—the only nourishment of which I never sicken!” (13). But conjecture for Elinor is only attractive insofar as she can impose resolution upon it, no matter how ungrounded that resolution may be. Immediately after Gabriella’s disclosure about Juliet to Jasper, and to the reader, Juliet is nearly apprehended by agents of her husband and flees London in panic. The French commissary finally overtakes her in the very same inn where Harleigh is staying. Observing her terror, the tormented Harleigh feels powerless to act for Juliet unless she authorizes it. Juliet cannot do this, and throughout the entire scene she responds to Harleigh’s pleas, and the Frenchman’s demands, only with silence. This silence, a product of the revolution, is only broken through the intervention of a state apparatus created to manage the revolution’s fallout. Jasper arrives with a peace officer to apprehend and deport the commissary under the terms of the Alien Act, and he then addresses her as “Miss Granville” (735), restoring her (never owned) maiden name and rhetorically separating her from the hated quasi-husband. The process of her naming and acknowledgment set in motion, Juliet now regains her voice. She relates to Jasper the conclusion to her story in France, including the forced marriage and her worries for the bishop’s safety. To say that Juliet ever actually gains control of her story, however, would be overstatement; Burney’s complex denouement depends on Jasper’s relating it to various men who can validate Juliet’s claims and install her in her rightful place. This scenario was borne out in Burney’s own life when she struggled to leave France in 1812 with a copy of The Wanderer in manuscript. She was able to overcome objections at the custom house to conveying the novel when a French official was “assured, upon [Alexandre d’Arblay’s] Honour, that the Work had nothing in it political, nor even National, nor possibly offensive to the Government, he took the single Word of M. d’Arblay, whose noble countenance, & dauntless openness of manner were guarantees of sincerity that wanted neither seals nor bonds . . .” (Journals and Letters vi, 716). The text of Burney’s novel was itself only allowed passage across the channel, and consequent expression via publication, through d’Arblay’s sponsorship. It is this kind of open-hearted male help that Juliet spends much of the novel in want of. The bishop—the equivalent of Burney’s own husband, left behind during her 1812 passage as a kind of hostage to Napoleon’s regime—is the emblem of benevolent paternalism crippled

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by historical change. Even well-intentioned men in the novel with the power to act barely allow Juliet to voice her viewpoint, though on occasion she seems willing to do so. When she discovers the identity of her mother’s long-lost brother and makes herself known to him, he is so busy telling her the story of her parentage that Juliet’s part in the narrative is almost entirely suppressed. Acknowledging that he ceased to look for her in France “upon hearing that his niece, known by the appellation of Mademoiselle Juliette, was married to a French monsieur,” her uncle finishes up what the narrator revealingly calls “his narrative,” since in many ways it is not Juliet’s (841). Juliet’s story, by contrast, continues unknown and unvoiced, even to her uncle the Admiral, Burney’s symbolic representative of British government. Juliet knows he will disapprove of her plan to return to the continent, just as he never really understands the dire circumstances that led to her “marriage.” But she believes now that only her return to France will save the bishop’s life, though at the cost of her own, so she “ultimately decided to set out upon her voyage, with her story and misfortunes unrevealed” (844) to the Admiral. Despite their differences, the Admiral and Lord Denmeath both suggest how the British establishment works to undercut the émigré voice with its contradictory affiliations. Juliet’s dramatic liberation from the commissary reinforces how fundamental the émigré question is to the plot’s conclusion. Burney makes clear the time span of the novel’s events, from December 1793 to August 1794. The story begins, and ends, on the edge of the shore, and resolving Juliet’s marginal status as a Briton as well as a Granville is essential to the denouement. While both Sir Jasper and Harleigh dismiss the idea that her forced marriage could be considered binding, only the commissary’s death really frees her from the commitment in her own eyes. Elinor Joddrell serves as Wollstonecraft’s stand-in in the The Wanderer. But Juliet follows Wollstonecraft’s Maria Venables in attempting to divorce her abusive husband herself. Like Maria in The Wrongs of Woman, Juliet removes her own wedding ring, not giving it back to her husband (as Maria does) but more conclusively throwing it into the ocean during her channel crossing with the benediction “Sink, and be as nothing!” (14). Yet Juliet worries that her act does not free her from the prison of her marriage, and she later wonders if she accidentally tossed over her money purse at the same time that she cast her ring away, symbolically connecting her finances and marriage. As she says to Harleigh, “little as I feel I belong to the person in question, I cannot consider myself to be my own. ’tis a tie which, whether

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or not it binds me to him, excludes me, while thus circumstanced, from all others!” (779). At the heart of Juliet’s dilemma is the shifting nature of marriage law, gender, and citizenship in France in the 1790s. The commissary, Lord Denmeath, and Juliet all to some extent regard the forced, civil marriage as binding. At the time of the novel, this would make Juliet not only an eloped wife but a French citizen (the title by which the commissary addresses her) and, ultimately, an émigré.10 In the chaos of 1793 and 1794 such a classification would be possible, placing Juliet in an extremely vulnerable position, from the standpoint of French and British law. Potentially, the order to deport her legal husband would by definition include her (as the commissary clearly expects).11 In this way, Sir Jasper might unwittingly be doing Lord Denmeath’s work for him. A return home would mean her execution at the guillotine, and not merely as a function of the commissary’s revenge, but also because, as a returned émigré (or a person considered as such legally), the automatic punishment in France was death. The commissary’s plan to drag her back to France is tantamount to seeking her execution, a plan that seems perfectly acceptable to Lord Denmeath. In mulling over her situation near the novel’s end, Juliet remains “uncertain whether her rights might ever be proved: and the six thousand pounds proffered by Lord Denmeath, she was well aware, would never be accorded but to establish her as an alien” (850). This problem, which preoccupies the final third of the book, demonstrates how the marriage market can work in tandem with citizenship law to punish the alien, or any woman who might be taken for one. Denmeath, in other words, is willing to pay the commissary something in the first place because only one person has the right to seek a dowry—a husband. Paying off the commissary will validate the marriage in Britain and, consequently, make Juliet eligible for deportation. Thus, the commissary triumphantly tells Juliet that “I have informed your family of my rights. Lord Denmeath has promised me his assistance and your portion,” but Denmeath “will only pay your portion to your own signature” (729). After this, Juliet understands that her “husband” intends to make her “over to the guillotine . . . as an example” (749). What saves Juliet from the tangle of questions surrounding her status as wife, émigré, and/or Briton ends up being the proposal of marriage tendered by the besotted and undeniably English Harleigh. Even as the news of her husband’s death arrives, Juliet’s situation could remain unresolved, at least in the eyes of those to whom it most matters; consequently, “Lady Aurora . . . learnt with enchantment the

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purposed alliance [to Harleigh]; not alone from the prospect of permanent happiness which it opened to her sister, but also as a means to overcome all possible opposition, on the part of Lord Denmeath, to a public acknowledgement of relationship” (863). What definitively resolves Juliet’s ambiguous national affiliation into British respectability can only be another marriage, this time within a British framework to an Englishman of unimpeachable character and verifiable fortune. This denouement nationalizes the courtship plot with unique force and peculiar urgency. The Wanderer, like Hubert de Sevrac, ultimately casts the émigré’s crisis of identity not only as a historical problem, but as an existential one. Like de Sevrac, “alone in the vast universe,” Juliet Granville at one point finds herself at Stonehenge, whose mysterious fragments of stone remind her and us that “we are not at home in the universe . . . we are not known to ourselves or each other” (Doody 367). In this novel, the émigré must struggle to survive as another kind of fragment, cut off from the past, from family, from nation, in a world where such coordinates ground meaning. As Doody implies, this sense transcends the immediate situation taken up in Burney’s novel. But Burney herself, in the preface to The Wanderer in 1814, explicitly positions the novel’s broader themes within the long shadow of its historical backdrop: “to attempt to delineate, in whatever form, any picture of actual human life, without reference to the French Revolution, would be as little possible, as to give an idea of the English government, without reference to our own: for not more unavoidably is the last blended with the history of our nation, than the first, with every intellectual survey of the present times” (6). The Wanderer offers the émigré as nothing less than the type of bewildered humanity confronting the social and political realities of a modern, post-revolutionary Europe. It was a world both completely changed and yet changed not at all—a contradiction Juliet’s situation embodies.

F R A NK ENSTEIN and the Aesthetic of the Nation In Burney the worst monsters are men, created by specific sets of social expectations (Denmeath), or, in the case of the commissary, a seemingly intrinsic savagery given fatal scope by a new lawlessness. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another product of the 1810s, takes up the question of émigrés in a more abstract way that ends, however, with a similar result: for Shelley, as for Burney, the émigrés occupy an ideologically polyvalent middle ground that complicates their

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identities, actions, and prospects.12 While the political progressives of Shelley’s tale are well-intentioned, they nevertheless cannot—indeed they see no need to—cast off some of the most exclusionary, and dangerous, attitudes of social and aesthetic convention. Juliet succeeds in stabilizing her own national and class identity because she has the assistance of others. The monster seeks but never finds such a patron, and his fate suggests the limitations of the emerging entity of the nation-state and the kinds of subjects it can legitimate. Like Burney’s novel, Frankenstein possesses structural oddities, most notably the concentric narrative circles that culminate in the monster’s account of his education at the hands of the émigré De Lacey family. His observations of this family form the core of the monster’s conception of domestic life and its promises, and his exclusion from these promises drives him to torment and murder. The version of domesticity the monster surveilles is far from an isolated idyll, however; it depends on a powerful constellation of nationalist associations and ideological overtones. For example, his introduction to the home is concomitant with his gradual mastery of language, first from overhearing Felix De Lacey read the comte de Volney’s The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empire and then from himself stumbling upon The Sorrows of Young Werther, Paradise Lost, and Plutarch’s Lives. Presumably all of these texts, including Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch, are read by Frankenstein’s creation in French, for he tells the elder De Lacey that “I was educated by a French family, and understand that language only” (Frankenstein 161). If French is the official language of Frankenstein, it is the unequivocal “Frenchness” of the émigré De Laceys and their plight that both structures and deforms the monster’s subjectivity. The De Laceys are only in Germany because they have been banished from France. But although living in exile, their attachment to the culture and ideals of their homeland runs deep, dominating their thoughts and many of their activities. Presumably they supported the early stages of the revolution; if not, they would hardly have used a text by Volney—himself a deputy in the National Assembly—as a reading and philosophical primer for Safie, Felix’s Arabian love interest. Although the monster claims that “The father of Safie was the cause of their ruin” (150), this formulation misconstrues the circumstances of their exile. In fact, the growing corruption of the revolutionary courts, a corruption the De Laceys contest, is the source of their ruin, and they become an example of how the Revolution devoured its own. When Safie’s father, a Turkish merchant, is unjustly imprisoned and condemned to death because of “his religion and wealth” (150), Felix

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obtains false passports for the Turk and his daughter and personally escorts them in disguise beyond the French frontier. The monster concludes, “The government of France were greatly enraged at the escape of their victim, and spared no pains to detect and punish his deliverer. The plot of Felix was quickly discovered, and De Lacey and Agatha thrown into prison” (153). Felix returns to France to join his family in confinement; they are all tried and then “deprived . . . of their fortune, and condemned . . . to a perpetual exile from their native country” (153). The monster observes the De Laceys through a harsh German winter as, poor and alone, they labor to survive in a foreign country. These details become central during the monster’s all-too-brief conversation with the elder De Lacey. During what the monster knows will be a pivotal encounter, for good or ill, he introduces himself to De Lacey as a man without a country, outcast by all. Old De Lacey, literally blind to his visitor’s ugliness, responds with all the progressive rationality of an eighteenth-century French liberal: “. . . the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly love and charity” (161). And though he understands that his visitor is not French, De Lacey explicitly compares his family’s situation as hapless émigrés with that of the monster: “I also am unfortunate; I and my family have been condemned, although innocent: judge, therefore, if I do not feel for your misfortunes” (162). In this novel to be a social exile is, in some sense, to be (or to identify with) the French—even if one is not aware of it. The inclusion of Volney’s The Ruins alludes to this dynamic; despite his stature in the early Republic, Volney was imprisoned as a suspected royalist for opposing the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror, and after his release went to the Ohio river valley in America from 1795 to 1798 in what appears to have been intended as an emigration scheme.13 He returned to France when America did not prove as liberal as he had hoped; he found himself suspected by Americans as a French agent, and by the French as a political subversive.14 He also came under attack for his religious skepticism when Joseph Priestly publicly declared him no better than “a Chinese or a Hottentot.” Neither conservative enough for France’s enemies nor radical enough for the leadership of his own country, Volney returned to France, having nowhere else to go, and lived quietly in a kind of internal exile under ensuing changes of regime and ideology. Like Volney, the progressive De Laceys are persecuted as a result of the revolution’s growing fanaticism. At the same time, Safie’s father intends to cheat Felix out of his daughter’s hand in marriage; in other words, the De Laceys are manipulated by an orientalized “Eastern”

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despotism in the form of a Turk who betrays their liberal trust and cosmopolitan ideals just as much as they are betrayed by increasingly nationalist French revolutionaries.15 When French radicals and Turkish tyrants independently turn against them, the politically moderate De Laceys (not unlike Juliet) find themselves people without a country. This is the backdrop for the monster’s own coming to consciousness as a social being. From an early age, Mary Godwin appears to have been interested in how émigrés were represented and received in Britain. What seems to have been, at least to some extent, Mary Godwin’s rhyme—Mounsier Nong tong paw (1808), an entry in her father’s juvenile library publishing venture—was part of an ongoing dialogue about the presence of the French in England, and vice versa. In 1797, popular musician Charles Dibdin published (the first) “Mounseer Nong tong paw,” a short ballad that gently satirizes John Bull’s inability to speak or understand French during a visit to Paris. Replying to Dibdin’s song became a popular pastime, somewhat like answering Christopher Marlowe’s Passionate Shepherd in early modern England, though in this case with distinctly nationalist overtones. To take one example, J. Nelson’s 1800 “Retaliation, or an answer to Mr. Dibdin’s song of Mounseer Nong tong paw” presents several English ladies mocking a French émigré who offers to teach them continental manners and customs. The women respond to the émigré’s overtures with the contemptuous refrain, “What Monkey have we here!” What appears to be Mary Godwin’s first published literary production—the 1808 Mounsier Nong tong paw—returns to Dibdin’s perspective and extends John Bull’s linguistically challenged adventures in France, again for comic effect.16 Frankenstein, of course, offers a more complex picture of the traveler. At the center of the novel, the émigré vignette of the De Laceys both validates their cosmopolitan credentials and shows their limitations. For we come to understand that for all their liberal rhetoric, the De Laceys’ intuitions about community and social bonds are aligned with the conservative aesthetic convictions of their antitype, Victor Frankenstein. In an extension of Edmund Burke’s view of the family as the “little platoon” whose affections ground patriotism, the De Lacey’s home is a microcosm of the liberal nation that France tried, and failed, to become. French revolutionary nationalists rallied around the unifying myths of shared language, ancestry, and customs;17 to some extent this is true of the seemingly cosmopolitan De Laceys. For both the De Laceys and the French revolutionaries, shared aesthetic and cultural values created domestic unity, at the

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level of the home or the nation. Revolutionaries attempted to craft a secular national consciousness in part through artistic representations of classical scenes of republican virtue and sacrifice. Paintings such as Jacques-Louis David’s “The Oath of the Horatii” sought to identify civic merit not with religious morality or dynastic affiliation, but with the masculine integrity of ancient Roman leaders.18 Similarly, in Frankenstein the story of the De Laceys suggests how the aesthetic itself can be constructed like the nation. Performing music is a central pursuit in the De Lacey home. The first activity the monster observes through his chink in the wall is the “old man, who, taking up an instrument, began to play, and to produce sounds sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale” (136). During this initial exhibition the monster begins to understand what he is excluded from in lacking a home, or a homeland of which the family is a model; the music draws tears from Agatha, and affirms her father’s love for her as he “smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature: . . . I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions” (136). Unable to understand their spoken language at first, the monster longs to join them in no small part because of the beauty of community implied in how others (and he himself) respond to the musical language of De Lacey’s guitar. De Lacey’s blindness underscores the importance of music, of the aesthetics of sound, as a way of demonstrating bonds within a home that will include multiple cultures and languages. Initially, the monster is less an exile than a no-man, a moral and intellectual child who has no nationality because he does not even know nations exist. Walter Scott’s epigraph to this chapter states that to lack a sense of national feeling is tantamount to death, and this lack appears to be one consequence of the monster’s origins in graveyard “vaults and charnel houses” rather than the womb (80). The monster tells Frankenstein that it is as he overhears the Felix’s reading Volney to Safie that he comes to understand “the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood” (147). He adds, The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. (148)

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If, as Ernest Renan argues, nationalism is predicted on a kind of forgetting or cultural amnesia—before we can imagine ourselves as part of a larger “patrie” we must forget local or communal sources of identity that may conflict with the construction of that larger entity— amnesia is literally the monster’s condition in this passage. He has no idea of the history of his bod(ies) or his place in the world. Like the nations Renan gestured toward at the end of the nineteenth century, the monster is composed of individual physical pieces that his creator has tried to force into unity. In Frankenstein, the monster is a failure to his creator because, to him, that unity is not convincing. The source of the monster’s maligned “ugliness” seems rooted in the fact that individual parts do not appear to anything other than that. Struggling to articulate his sense of failure, which arises with the monster’s first breath, Frankenstein explains: His limbs were in proportion , and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (86)

The individual components of the creature were, and still are, “beautiful,” which is to say they retain their identity as exemplary incarnations of various body parts. But precisely because of this individual beauty and distinctiveness, the parts do not come together visually as a convincing whole; he appears less a person than what he in fact is, a physical collection of assorted fragments that are, when juxtaposed, the opposite of beautiful. Before his creature’s animation, Victor already perceives the creature when taken as a whole as “ugly”: “I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then.” Animation only throws into relief that ugliness by reducing the creation to a series of “muscles and joints . . . rendered capable of motion” (87).19 There are beautiful people in Shelley’s novel, but they are represented as virtually devoid of flesh—as being angelically transcendent, even in their (theoretically) earthly forms. The best examples of this kind of dynamic are the descriptions of Elizabeth Lavenza, Frankenstein’s intended. From the first, we are told that “Her imagination was luxuriant, yet her capability of application was great. Her person was the image of her mind; her hazel eyes, although as lively

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as a bird’s, possessed an attractive softness. Her figure was light and airy; and, though capable of enduring great fatigue, she appeared the most fragile creature in the world” (65). Elizabeth, obviously, is the exact opposite physically of the monster, though both have “luxuriant” aspects.20 Her bodily aspects cohere so well that her physical form serves as a transparent and frictionless conduit between the subjective and the objective, the mind and its external foci. Thus, Victor states that “her capability of application was great.” In this depiction, the physical form essentially vanishes in the observer’s field of perception, leaving only the eloquence of her “celestial” spirit.21 It is this quality, evident from the entrance of Elizabeth into the novel, that accounts for her adoption/naturalization into the foreign Frankenstein household and her betrothal to Victor.22 Created rather than born, the monster’s working parts dominate the field of perception and prevent Victor’s consideration of him as anything other than a random collection of parts that refuse, to use Renan’s terms, to “forget” that they do not belong together.23 When he sees himself in the water of a “transparent pool” (142), the monster himself feels a stark discontinuity between his visual image and the psyche developing within him. When he looks at himself, the body refuses to give way to or reflect what lies inside, stubbornly claiming attention in its own right as a collection of individual pieces. “At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification” (142). As the editor of the Broadview edition notes, along with many other critics, this scene both identifies the monster with Milton’s Eve and with her deformed other, Satan. Yet Eve falls in love with herself, so to speak, because her image is so thoroughly consistent with who/what she feels herself to be. The monster, by contrast, must labor to overcome his initial conviction that he has no connection with the reflection he spies in the pool. The monster’s physical failure to “come together” and simulate an organically unified whole prefigures his persistent inability to integrate himself into any of the communities or groups that he encounters. Deirdre Lynch has argued eloquently of the monster, “Not to be born but to be made is, as the etymology of nation (from natio) suggests, native nowhere. A misfit of this sort strains against the system of familial, civic, and territorial categories that human beings have developed to identify one another and to speak themselves” (“Nationalism” 207). My point is somewhat different; the monster

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is not “born free of history,”24 a critical position that undergirds Lynch’s analysis, but rather comes incarnating so many histories as to fall outside any useful rubric for fixing historical reference. Lacking, as Lynch observes, a definitive “relation to the apparatus of citizenship that organizes the nineteenth-century nation-state” (208), the monster’s mere appearance generates visceral reactions in others that are the antitheses of either national acceptance or cosmopolitan generosity.25 The sight of him makes women faint and drives men, without exception, into a vicious rage—responses to him, in other words, establish and confirm an unbridgeable division between the mind and body, and by extension between individuals and nations. He is, in today’s parlance, a “stateless actor.” He responds by attempting to earn, as it were, nationality in the Republic of De Lacey. Fred Randel has meticulously traced the revolutionary associations behind the actual locations used as settings in the novel. Lacking a fixed place or origin, Victor’s creation wanders through a stunningly wide range of politically charged landscapes, none of which he can identify with or interpret. But the bigger problem Shelley addresses through the geographical range of her settings, from the Orkneys to Russia, is how the French wars have created a new Europe, defined not by national borders or affinities but by the memories of continent-wide conflicts. The monster’s patchwork of a body, itself the product of corpses wrenched from their original context, is a trope for the conception of post-revolutionary Europe Shelley creates through the novel’s abrupt shifts from location to location.26 The novel’s powerful motif of familial adoption is often coupled with questions of nationality; Elizabeth Lavenza, the adoptive Frankenstein daughter, is Italian, and Justine, the servant whom Elizabeth takes on, is Catholic and may herself not be a native of Geneva. But Safie, from the De Lacey vignette, is the novel’s most dramatic instance of fusing a change in family with a change in nationality. Safie’s own nationality, we should note, begins as a rather confused affair: her mother is a “Christian Arab,” her Turkish father’s slave until he marries her. She manages to overcome any confusion, or fear, engendered by this ambiguity through a physical appeal firmly grounded in her aesthetic qualities. Relating his first glimpse of her, the monster explains: “Her hair [was] of a shining raven black, and curiously braided; her eyes were dark, but gentle, although animated; her features of a regular proportion, and her complexion wondrously fair, each cheek tinged with a lovely pink” (144). Predictably, Safie’s induction into the De Lacey’s household routine is solidified by her musical talent: like De Lacey himself, her playing brings tears to the

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eyes of her auditors, and “she sang . . . like a nightingale of the woods” (146), the same simile applied to the elder De Lacey’s singing. Safie initially cannot communicate with the De Laceys through language, but the effects of her musical abilities “naturalize her” insofar as she sings like a European songbird associated with the British literature of Mary Shelley’s childhood. The aesthetic at work overcomes difference to produce coherence and community, even between individuals of wildly varying backgrounds and culture. Safie’s successful “naturalization” into the De Lacey household is due in no small part to such aesthetic considerations; Felix’s love for her dates solely from his appreciation of her natural beauty. The monster explains that although Felix is too “delicate” to accept Safie as explicit barter for her father’s freedom, “yet when he saw the lovely Safie, who was allowed to visit her father, and who, by her gestures, expressed her lively gratitude, the youth could not help owning to his own mind, that the captive possessed a treasure which would fully reward his toil and hazard” (150). Though he possesses some key traits to French nationality—he speaks their language like a native27—the monster already understands that he lacks the aesthetic qualifications to join this household. Like many emigrants, he attempts, consequently, to find another route to acceptance: labor. When he returns from his nightly rambles to gather food, “as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow, and performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix. I afterward found that these labours, performed by an invisible hand, greatly astonished them; and once or twice I heard them, on these occasions, utter the words good spirit, wonderful; but I did not then understand the signification of these terms” (142–143, italics in original). The De Laceys, like Frankenstein himself, have trouble recognizing a connection between (less than perfect) bodies and the minds or spirits inside them. They do not actually witness their benefactor performing his works, so this otherwise rational group of individuals amazingly mystify the monster’s labor as disembodied aid from above. The monster, who understands all too well the connection between the spiritual and the material to which he is chained, does not, as he says, “understand” this reasoning, hoping instead that through manual work as a “hand” he might gain recognition, as he bitterly relates later, for trying to help “restore happiness to these deserving people” (143). The De Laceys, people of fortune and rank in France, presumably know what servants are, and indeed after Safie arrives with money they employ some of their own. But unfortunately for the monster they are less “deserving” of his freely offered service than he imagines.

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From Felix De Lacey the monster learns of betrayal and irrational violence: when Felix returns home to find the creature conversing with old De Lacey, he transforms into a Gothic villain. “With supernatural force [he] tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick” (162–163). To no small extent the De Laceys, though they do not know it, have created the monster up to this point, instilling in him crucial hopes and expectations; as he contemplates revealing himself to the family, the monster explains that “I dared not think that they would turn . . . from me with disdain and horror. The poor that stopped at their door were never driven away. I asked, it is true, for greater treasures than a little food or rest; I required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it” (159, emphasis mine). But after the family’s response, the monster declares “everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who formed me” (164). In his ensuing war against humanity, the monster targets women whose physical beauty has enabled them to traverse the divide of nationality and family and be accepted as native, or nearly the same as native, in foreign environments. Justine Moritz’s beauty, which Elizabeth compares to that of the heroine of Orlando Furioso, helps her to win the heart of Victor’s mother and enter the Frankenstein home as a refuge from her own, abusive one. This change of residence, in turn, enables her to capitalize on the fact that “the republican institutions” of Geneva allow more intercourse between servants and masters than in neighboring France (93). Justine’s admittance to the Frankenstein household is conflated, in the letter from Elizabeth that Frankenstein reads at Ingolstadt, with Justine’s quasi-naturalization as a citizen of Geneva and a member of the upper classes. Not coincidentally, Justine is the first person whom the monster intentionally works to kill.28 His last victim, Elizabeth herself, likewise traversed the boundaries of household and nationality, since she is the child of an Italian nobleman and spent her childhood in the environs of Milan. In other words, the monster finds himself crushed, like the De Laceys themselves, between seemingly opposing forces that actually share crucial objectives and sensibilities. Like Victor Frankenstein, Felix De Lacey cannot, for all his ideals, escape the model of identity, registered in the novel through conventions of beauty, that Shelley allies with the rise of modern nationality, a conception that privileges a supposedly organic unity at odds with the monster’s own physically obvious fragmentation. In this, the educated and cosmopolitan Felix is not unlike William Frankenstein, who sees his brother’s creation as the

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incarnation of monsters from his childhood fairy tales. Felix explains to the owner of the cottage that they must leave abruptly, since “the life of my father is in the greatest danger, owing to the dreadful circumstance that I have related. My wife and sister will never recover their horror. I entreat you not to reason with me any more” (165). The monster’s reaction to this conversation is instructive. He too abandons his investment in reason—“for the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them; but . . . I bent my mind towards injury and death” (165)—and uses the firewood he has gathered to aid the French family to destroy their cottage. Refused acceptance in the De Lacey’s microcosm of a republican state, he knows he will also be refused it everywhere else: “every country must be equally horrible” (166). This includes, of course, the domain of his creator. Though he looks to discredited pseudo-science as his inspiration (Paracelsus, for example), Victor also is a revolutionary of sorts who not coincidentally relies on the latest French-sponsored discoveries. When his professor at Ingolstadt explains to Victor that “Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made,” he is gesturing toward the pioneering work of French revolutionary scientists like Lavoisier (77). Similarly, the most dramatic claims for Galvanism, which Shelley cites in her 1831 preface for the novel, were made by Galvani’s nephew, John Aldini. Aldini’s 1803 publication An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism acknowledges the input of “Commissioners of the French National Institute” in observing his experiments and offering suggestions and correctives. Increasingly conservative ideologically even as his experiments grow ever more radical, Victor is happy to build on the science of the revolution but is famously repulsed by the results.29 Like the monster, Victor’s narrative is made up of, found, stitchedtogether pieces.30 Although Victor would sandwich the monster’s account of his development in between Victor’s own story and that of the De Laceys, a final act of containment that is also deforming, Shelley subverts this construction of narrative aesthetic. The embodiment of the alien, and the alien aesthetic, the monster, refuses to remain within his narratological cell, appearing at the end after his creator’s death. Explaining his evolution to Walton within sight of Frankenstein’s corpse, he references the De Laceys one last time: “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing

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forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal” (245). Received aesthetics, which in this novel underwrite available post-war constructions of community and, by implication, the nation, would segregate the monster’s story as a prelude to expelling it, and him. Shelley, however, offers up a hybridized art that incorporates not only received notions of unity, purity, or beauty, but also the unavoidable realities of rejection, alienation, and the material world from which, finally, we all come. 31 The monster’s world will not, he knows, allow that a man like him exists—a man who so clearly bodies forth the ways in which all subjects, and all subjectivity, are fragmented from their creation, and bound together only by acts of will and imagination. He consequently is all too happy to take on the work on his own physical destruction, anticipating a state of being where that body will no longer define perceptions of who and what he is: I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell. (247)

The reviewer of Frankenstein for Edinburgh Magazine explicitly commented on the novel’s political significance, comparing Victor’s rise and fall to Napoleon’s military victories and subsequent exile to “a remote speck of an island, some thousands of miles from the scene of his triumphs.”32 This comparison goes some distance toward comprehending the multinational dimension of the novel that I have been trying to trace. Like Victor, Napoleon sought to create unity— in Napoleon’s case, empire—out of a range of individual countries, languages, and traditions. Napoleon overreached himself when he sought to include the Other whose geographic distance, and cultural difference, exceeded his grasp: the Slavic east. Victor’s attempt at amalgamation is both less and more transgressive—the creation of a single man who crosses the line between households, nations, and ultimately between the living and the dead. But while Victor’s flaws are, from virtually the beginning, evident to the reader, the monster seems to have been intended for better things, like France itself, in early days of revolutionary promise and moderation. The hope of those early times is fulfilled for neither the country, whose monarchy returns to Paris in 1814, nor the creature. Timothy Brennan reminds us that the discourse of nationalism casts light on

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representations of the “literary” exile, dividing him from the territorial, financial, and political “winners” of the homeland (61). The relevance of this observation would likely have seemed ever more clear in 1831, when Mary Shelley published her second edition of Frankenstein. Scholars have debated the virtues of the 1818 edition versus the 1831 version,33 but while some parts of the novel undergo significant change it is striking that the émigré center, or the De Lacey interlude, is virtually untouched. During Louis XVIII’s relatively peaceful reign, the issue of reparations for previously wealthy emigrants, by returning to them lands and property confiscated during the revolution, remained a constant and unresolved problem. When Louis’ more conservative younger brother took the throne in 1824 as Charles X, he set out to once and for all redress what he saw as this injustice. Charles’ refusal to forget the cause of restitution for formerly rich émigrés would be a major cause for the “July Revolution” of 1830, which sent him once more into exile and spelled the end of Bourbon absolutism in France. Charles X’s failure to maintain an equilibrium between the forces of reaction and “progress” would be replicated in regime after regime in nineteenthcentury France. The July Revolution was a reminder of the failure of earlier promises of moderate reform and rational progress. This may help explain why the De Laceys’ story and its effect on the monster remains, in 1831, so little changed: revision might have seemed tragically unnecessary. The monster’s significance as an incarnation of liberalism’s promise and betrayal begins with Frankenstein’s story of the émigrés. In their confused mix of progressive ideals and conservative reactions, the De Laceys embody the contradictions of the revolution that rejects them.

Chapter 3

Be yon d t h e C on v ic t Ta i n t : George Ba r r i ngt on a n d t h e C ol on i a l C u r e

T

he unprecedented influx of French emigrants into Britain during the 1790s was the mirror image of another forced migration: the groups of convicts transported to Botany Bay, Britain’s first imperial venture instituted solely as a means of containing and punishing its criminal classes. After American independence ended transatlantic transportation, a backlog of convicts in the 1780s overcrowded gaols where disease and alarms over prisoner uprisings were endemic. This problem assumed even greater urgency in the 1790s, when authorities came to see the lower orders in general as poised to move against their betters and duplicate the French revolutionary experiment at home. The solution for disposing of the criminals created by economic and political crisis in the later eighteenth century became Australia; as historian Frank McLynn notes, “The fleet that sailed for Botany Bay in 1788 took with it the prisoners who had been in limbo since 1784, men not dangerous enough to hang but too much of a social menace to pardon. Some were veterans of the Woolwich hulks like George Barrington, who had fulfilled the direst prophecies about future recidivism by graduating from petty pickpocketing to the more skilled variety at racetracks” (293). While the cases of the transported Scottish Martyrs, the focus of my next chapter, were well-known in Britain and continued to generate discussion for over forty years, the representative Australian convict was a different kind of criminal, one convicted of crimes deemed capital under English law but in practice

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often commuted to transportation as evidence of the state’s capricious mercies.1 Political prisoners like Thomas Muir and Thomas Fyshe Palmer were by-words for noble men who suffered for high ideals; felons like George Barrington represented a very different, and more typical, kind of transportee. Although the texts at the center of these chapters have gone largely unnoticed by recent criticism, they suggest the range of experience and meaning associated with transportation during the Romantic era. Like the French Emigration, the exile of convicts to Australia brought to the fore public anxieties about the nature of British identity, the nation’s political future, and its class structure. Even as émigrés were landing on English shores by the hundreds, the government was apportioning scant public resources to create a refugee camp of its own, on the opposite side of the globe. This chapter will focus on representations of convicts like Barrington. Although virtually forgotten today, during the 1780s and 1790s his celebrity was, according to his most recent editor, “without precedent” in his time, making him “one of the eighteenth century’s most talked-about law-breakers” (Rickard 3, 4). A pickpocket of notorious skill, George Barrington gained access to the best society by assuming an elegant alias (his birth name was apparently Waldron) and posing as a gentleman, earning him the moniker “the prince of pickpockets.” The press closely followed Barrington’s long criminal career and his exploits inspired memoirs, broadsheets, and other unofficial histories. After being transported to Botany Bay in 1791 for stealing a gentleman’s watch at the Enfield races, Barrington was credited with writing the wildly successful Voyage to Botany Bay, an account probably edited heavily by London publishers. Later in the decade A Voyage to Botany Bay Part II as well as the History of New South Wales were attributed to him. A Voyage and its sequel were “two of the most popular books—if one can judge by the number of contemporary editions—among readers at the very end of the eighteenth century”; editions appeared in London, Manchester, Dublin, Cork, Paris, New York, and Philadelphia (Walker i). Scholars examining A Voyage to Botany Bay have tended to focus on either Barrington’s sensational life history or on differentiating what was actually written by him from what was plagiarized or added by others. Critics of Australian literature generally agree that the celebrated thief had little, if anything, to do with the later productions that bore his name, which were probably written by hacks trading on his notoriety.2 My interest lies in mapping what the British reading public of the 1780s and 1790s saw in his life, which spawned so many memoirs and biographies, and in his experience of transportation,

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that made them mesmerizing. The British traditions of picaresque and true crime literature, including the cases taken up by the many editions of The Newgate Calendar, partly explain the phenomenal popularity of the Barrington chapbooks.3 And sales of A Voyage to Botany Bay, combining the excitement of mutiny with that of travelogues about the south Pacific, probably benefited from the ongoing controversy over the mutiny on the Bounty.4 But Barrington’s story, both before and after his transportation, is very much a tale of convict life at a particular historical moment as well. As the first extended convict narrative to emerge from Australian transportation, Barrington’s A Voyage to Botany Bay to some extent develops its own conventions and themes. The popular Georgian genre of criminal biography had repeatedly taken up the lives of those transported to America, but according to A. W. Baker it “provided no precedents for describing life at the antipodes” (5), where the weather, reversed seasons, and natural environment presented entirely novel problems and opportunities for representation by Europeans. Baker contends that early Australian convict writing differs from previous criminal biographies written in Britain primarily in its tone, specifically registering a “notable sourness and sullenness” (7). Paul Carter’s more theoretical paradigm contrasts the earliest convict stories with official narratives like that of the first colonial governor, Arthur Phillip: where official accounts seek to contain and manage the penal colony’s disorder, convicts persistently imagine Australia as a space that cannot be completely mapped by official rhetoric, and that consequently offers opportunities for escape. Barrington’s Voyage is noteworthy for how uneasily it fits into either Baker’s or Carter’s models. This text stubbornly fails to conform to the opposition established by Baker between British crime literature, which emphasizes the convict’s skill and daring, and Australian productions, which tend to convey defeated resignation. A Voyage to New South Wales is silent on the fabled ingenuity of its subject, and ultimately treats transportation less as a punishment than as an opportunity. Consequently, it is unsurprising that Baker skips over A Voyage to Botany Bay to identify the 1817 Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux as the first text to really represent Australian convict experience. Barrington seems relatively uninterested in the kinds of escape that fuel the convict fantasies analyzed by Paul Carter. Barrington allies himself during the voyage, and even more so after his landing, with representatives of British authority. Rather than freedom, he seeks official recognition of his talents and respectability. In part, this probably reflects one of the realities of convict life in early Botany

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Bay; one dramatic difference between being transported to America and being sent to Australia was the likelihood of escape. Making the journey in the first place was a speculative venture; death rates were high on the early long voyages, and some ships sank. The chances of returning home, before it became illegal in the Victorian period for convicts to return, were virtually nonexistent. By the mid-eighteenth century, the practice of American transportation had come under attack for a variety of reasons; as Philip Rawlings explains, a central problem was “the apparent ease with which offenders returned from transportation before the term had expired . . . and the failure of the criminal justice system to identify those who returned” (81). At least one eighteenth-century convict biography contained an entire section on the many ways in which convicts could circumvent the law and obtain passage back to Britain from America (169). The sheer distance between Australia and Britain negated this threatening (to authorities) possibility in the colony’s early years. The first official historian of the settlement, Lieutenant David Collins, opens his account of the first convict fleet by conveying his amazement that the voyage out had been safely completed: in eight months, the ships had undergone “a voyage which, before it was undertaken, the mind hardly dared venture to contemplate, and on which it was impossible to reflect without some apprehensions as to its termination” (Kitson 249). Arriving alive in early Australia was itself an achievement. Returning home after a seven-year sentence seemed impossible.5 A preoccupation with authority—what constitutes it, and how to claim kinship with or defy it—permeates the relics of the early colony, as well as writings of and about convicts sentenced to Botany Bay. The colony’s first official seal arrived from Britain in 1791. One side was engraved with the king’s arms. The other, according to Collins, featured “a representation of convicts landing at Botany Bay, received by Industry, who, surrounded by her attributes, a bale of merchandise, a beehive, a pickaxe, and a shovel, is releasing them from their fetters, and pointing to oxen ploughing and a town rising on the summit of a hill, with a fort for its protection” (Collins 179).6 The iconography of the seal, intended for use by Governor Phillips, summarizes the official conception of the colony’s mission, and anticipates William Godwin’s argument that transportation ideally offers prisoners denied honest work at home the hope of a fresh start elsewhere. But such idealized depictions of life after transportation had to vie for significance with very different kinds of medals, most notably the tokens and memorabilia executed by convicts on the Thames Hulks as they awaited passage to Australia. Metal tokens intended as sentimental keepsakes

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had been fashioned for much of the later eighteenth century, primarily for and by sailors taking leave of their families before voyages out. With the advent of Australian transportation, whose finality was stunningly clear to felons and their families, convicts began to create their own kind of keepsake for those left behind. The preferred base for these tokens was the cheap copper of pennies, whose images were polished away to make room for painstakingly engraved images and messages of farewell. As Timothy Millett remarks, “Whether they are marked by pin-pricking or standard engraving, the best examples must have been done by a professional, or at least, a trained hand. The high incidence of forgery at the time meant that there were always new ‘unofficial’ craftsmen around capable of such work” (17).7 Where objects like the governor’s metallic seal sought to convey a government presence in the colony that was fair and protective, convict love tokens (as Millett calls them) presented a different picture of families and friendships torn apart by the distance to Botany Bay and the virtual certainty that one would not live to return. The very creation of such a token was arguably an attempt by convicts to leave behind a physical substitute for the body that, upon his or her death, would not be available for memorialization by loved ones back home. These tokens were created by erasing the images of the king and Britannia stamped on coins at the time, evidence of a counternarrative to official representations that replaced recognized authority with plebian sentiment: . . . it is worth remembering that every one of them is made on a more or less defaced penny piece; the head of the king has been erased, and so have Britannia. One may take this to be a simple piece of adhoc flexibility—what else would the convicts have used in the circumstances? Pennies were cheap, plentiful and relatively easy to work with, and were small enough to smuggle out in a hem or pocket together with “real” coins. But we are entitled to wonder whether this erasure of the Crown and symbols of British power had a significance beyond the instrumental. The Crown was using British imperial power to erase the convict; that the convict should use his enforced idleness to erase the Crown is an act which surely speaks for itself, even when no other subversive remark or image is involved. (43)8

In the accounts of transportation explored here, the pervasive fear of mutiny aboard convict transports is a focus for the ideological battle over who will dictate the meaning and significance of enforced exile. In A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795), the mutiny is real and the convict narrator almost single-handedly circumvents it. Barrington

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represents his role in suppressing this uprising as freeing him from the convict taint—a term denoting the criminal’s putative moral corruption and, potentially, medical infection—in official eyes this long-sought vindication prepares him to become a colonial supervisor and cross-cultural negotiator with aboriginal natives. Refuting the commonplace that a convict could never be fully reintegrated into respectable British society, A Voyage to Botany Bay seizes on transportation’s new colonial context at the geographical antipodes to critique the assumption that convicts, damned at home in perpetuity, could only hope to regain society’s trust abroad after years of punishing hardship. This text argues that, for some, the convict taint can go into a kind of remission through the experience of transportation. Barrington’s Voyage is a significant intervention in the popular fear of convicts as carriers of social contamination and physical disease, as well as the implicit association of criminals with colonial subjects who needed to be physically segregated from Britain to ensure a stable domestic order. Barrington’s unprecedented success in infiltrating fashionable society confirmed popular fears that lower-class criminals were violating social and economic boundaries. But the voyage to the penal colony can offer the genteel criminal the chance to recraft his reputation: Barrington’s Voyage represents transportation as a process that clarifies the boundaries between loyalty and mutiny, innocence and guilt, and health and illness, reestablishing social, moral, and medical divisions that authorities believed criminals jeopardized in Britain. The redemption of Barrington’s criminal character in the crucible of exile sets up his unexpected ability to serve colonial authorities as they oversee the conquest of Australia. Transformed by his experience first as a sufferer, and then as a convalescent, from the convict stigma, he emerges at the end of his memoir with a kind of symbolic immunity to the consequences of the crossings between cultures and classes that can prove dangerous, even fatal, to others in the new colony. In contrast, the accounts regarding the Scottish Martyrs, and in particular Thomas Fyshe Palmer’s Narrative of the Sufferings of T. F. Palmer and W. Skirving during a Voyage to New South Wales, 1794, implies that rumors of a conspiracy to mutiny aboard ship threatens to contaminate his reputation as a gentleman and intellectual. Palmer rebuts this accusation by casting the official suspicions against him as fragmentary and illogical, while his vindication of his own behavior takes on the power and legitimacy of coherent narrative form. When accounts like these describe or allude to mutinies, they implicitly exhibit a broad engagement with assumptions about authority and

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force that were on trial in Britain. Mutiny or the fear of it on convict ships becomes a means of confronting more general anxieties about political and social struggles at the heart of Georgian culture.

The Prince of Pickpockets The early stages of Barrington’s career reinforced the most extreme popular fears about the increasing fragility of barriers between criminals and their respectable prey. Nicknamed “the Prince of Pickpockets,” Barrington made his name not only by stealing, but also by convincingly acting like a gentleman. There were other socalled gentleman pickpockets in the late eighteenth century, but none enjoyed Barrington’s success in dressing, behaving, and speaking like a well-bred man.9 As a result, he was admitted into good society for some time after most knew his real profession; he repeatedly evaded punishment by the courts, even when his guilt seemed clear; and when convicted, he invariably experienced less severe penalties than those he could have been sentenced to. Richard Lambert remarks that Barrington’s “life is a life that could only occur in a period of transition or revolution” (14). As this statement implies, Barrington’s success in impersonating a member of the gentry was made possible by broader social forces, and in particular by growing uncertainty in Georgian society as to what exactly constituted a gentleman. The commercial society of the eighteenth century had made wealthy entrepreneurs with genteel pretensions out of coarse commoners, while a well-born man might be no better than a scheming pauper in disguise. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the treacherous Mr. Elliot tells his cousin Anne that “good company” requires only three characteristics: “birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice” (142). That Mr. Elliot, a fashionable man of excellent birth and impeccable manners, proves to be a financially ruined rogue is one manifestation of the public anxiety that even a “gentleman” could be a villain in disguise. Barrington was received in good society for so long, and retained the reputation of a gentleman even after accounts circulated about his humble origins in Ireland—he was said to be the son of a struggling silversmith and a seamstress—in part because his lack of legitimate wealth did not necessarily distinguish him from other fashionable men. Essential to his persona were Barrington’s practices of staying at good inns, buying expensive clothes, and living in “singular splendor,” though he had no independent income (8).10 In this, Barrington was little different than other Georgian gentlemen whom the new credit economy enabled to live

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far beyond their means; such men could continue a brilliant existence though they were technically bankrupt.11 Barrington himself was said to have made this point in one of his eloquent trial defenses: Sovereigns seize on the territories of neighboring princes whenever they think doing so suits their purposes, without scruple or remorse; people of fashion run in debt and never pay their creditors; bankers and brokers are seldom restrained by conscience in the interest they take, or the charges which they make; merchants, and traders of all kinds, are not more scrupulous in the profits which they exact of their unwary customers; and as for lawyers of every denomination, their boundless rapacity is proverbial. The mode then of appropriating property to oneself, and not the act of doing so, is the sole difference between the most noted pickpocket and the most powerful prince or the most opulent merchant. (24)12

Eventually, however, Barrington’s luck ran out; lawmen came to know him by sight, and repeated appearances in the dock meant that even he began to feel the touch of the convict taint. His society acquaintances gradually deserted him, and his isolation from respectability was finalized by a 1777 conviction for theft. Since transportation to America had just ceased, Barrington was sentenced to three years in the prison Hulks on the Thames. He served less than one year before being released, but no belief in his good character could survive such an experience, and at this point any inclination toward reform on his part would have been futile. In accounts of his subsequent defenses at various trials, Barrington repeatedly lashes out against the bias instilled in juries by his (now criminal) reputation. As the accusations mounted over the years, this defense predictably became less and less effective. Barrington continued to make it, however, and at his final trial in 1790, he pointedly replied to the judge who lamented how such a talented man could turn out so badly. Convicts like him found it impossible to find legitimate work because they were viewed as irrevocably contaminated by their criminal pasts: he explains, “. . . the world should also consider that the greatest abilities may be so obstructed by the ill-nature of some unfeeling minds, as to render them nearly useless to the possessor” (Barrington 18).13 Representations of Barrington after this point designate him as a social and even a political menace. Perhaps most provocative is the eventual association of his crimes with the agenda of reformers like Palmer, who in the 1790s found their activities criminalized as sedition and treason. When he was arrested in 1787 for stealing a purse containing 23 ½ guineas from a London alderman, Barrington

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escaped from the inn where he was confined. As a result, he was pronounced an outlaw—if caught again, he could be automatically sentenced to death without a trial. After traveling throughout northern England in a variety of disguises, he was apprehended in Newcastle. Barrington spent the next year and a half seeking to overturn the sentence of outlawry and undergo a formal trial for the theft of the purse. Barrington’s legal maneuvering was widely covered in the London press, and his arguments anticipated the objections reformers would make after Habeas Corpus was suspended in the 1790s: “I have had no trial, though I have strained every nerve to obtain it,” he complained in a letter to the Morning Chronicle (qtd. in Lambert 157).14 Ultimately, the outlawry was reversed because, Lambert speculates, “outlawry proceedings smacked of arbitrary government. . . . No one liked what the Morning Post stigmatised at the time as ‘that invidious mode of punishment’ ” (156). Even as reformers were beginning to campaign for a more representative Parliament, Barrington was holding up for scrutiny an outdated British procedure that denied the accused fundamental rights. Such challenges to the law did not help Barrington’s reputation in the long run, as demonstrated by Lambert’s belief that “there was certainly a touch of Jacobinism, not to say Socialism, in Barrington’s views about property” (34). A parody of The Times appearing on 6 September 1794 contained news from the “British national convention” for reform held two years earlier in Edinburgh that “Citizen Barrington” picked the pocket of the convention president on “principles of equality.” Barrington himself sarcastically makes comparisons between his own crimes and grave offenses against his country. During his voyage to Botany Bay, he writes to a friend that he forgives a world that has denied him opportunities for honest work. He then adds: You, virtuous Europeans, I hope, will not be less generous than a poor banished sinner; you will pardon me, I trust, the many ruffianly deeds I have done, the many friends I have betrayed, the many houses I have fired, the many murders I have committed, and the many treasons I have conspired against my sovereign and the nation. To be serious, Sir, I left England and Europe without a spark of malevolence in my mind against any creature whatever . . . . (Bladen 2. 783)

This passage ridicules the logic behind the convict taint, which confounds important distinctions between crimes and makes the offender a scapegoat for whatever anxieties are foremost in the nation’s consciousness. In this way, a simple pickpocket can find his crimes against property equated with the most serious offenses against the state.

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Barrington’s 1777 stay in the Hulks was said to have ruined his health as surely as it ruined his reputation. He arrived during the worst years of the prison ships, when bad sanitation and overcrowding coupled with a complete lack of government oversight meant that typhus (“gaol fever”) and other illnesses raged among inmates. Here, he was exposed to “such fatal diseases as he had never before felt,” in addition to being subjected to hard labor (Barrington 12). Such conditions were not confined to the Hulks: during the 1770s and 1780s, typhus raged in gaols across the country packed with convicts who in previous years would have been sent to America, leading to public fears of an outbreak of disease beyond prison walls.15 After apparently trying to commit suicide by stabbing himself, Barrington survived but was reported to contract “a consumption” (13). Alan Bewell, among others, has explained how fevers and other illnesses were connected to the colonial experience in the British Romantic imagination.16 Debbie Lee points out that yellow fever, in particular, was associated with the slave trade and Britain’s sugar plantations in the West Indies, where it decimated seamen and colonists but was believed to spare the Africans shipped as cargo. Invoking Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Lee examines medical and literary descriptions of slavery and tropical illness to show how these accounts represented the repressed side of the colonial project. The repressed returned to plague British attempts to segregate European bodies, and culture, from an empire whose negative effects in the form of disease refused to stay overseas. This analysis has striking implications for the early years of transportation to Australia, and for Barrington’s account of his own passage. Lee contends that medical accounts of yellow fever sought to reinstate proper boundaries between colonized and colonizer, boundaries that were eroded by the slave traders’ susceptibility to tropical pathogens. This same logic helps explain the Georgians’ persisting faith in transportation as a criminal punishment. Exile was a way of shoring up divisions (which offenders like Barrington so daringly challenged) between respectable subjects and criminals, who were certainly tainted morally and might be infected physically, and who themselves were viewed in colonial terms. Though the criminals were British, to the authorities who sentenced them and the public who read about them, most convicts seemed foreign. An urban area famed for its criminal inhabitants, such as London’s East End, seemed to authorities like an undesirable colonial possession, “a foreign country of crime”; sending its denizens to Australia seemed “like sending them from one disagreeably fabled land to another” (Hughes 25). William Paley implies a fundamental similarity between the criminal and the alien

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when he criticizes transportation’s effectiveness as a penalty. Such a sentence could be no real punishment to individuals already cut off from meaningful social and moral ties in Britain: “. . . exile is in reality a slight punishment to those, who have neither property, nor friends, nor reputation, nor regular means of subsistence at home; and . . . their situation becomes little worse by their crime, than it was before they committed it” (Paley 543). The fact that Barrington was believed to come from a notoriously troublesome colony, Ireland, would make him a potent focus for this point of view. Similarly William Eden, Lord Auckland, writing on the eve of the First Fleet’s departure for Botany Bay, contends that the criminal’s already extant disassociation from British society is so extreme that transportation to the antipodes might be no real punishment at all: . . . every effect of banishment, as practiced in England, is often beneficial to the criminal, and always injurious to the community. The kingdom is deprived of a subject, and renounces all the emoluments of his future existence. He is merely transferred to a new country; distant, indeed, but as fertile, as happy, as civilized, and in general as healthy, as that which he hath offended. It would not be incredible then, if this punishment should be asserted in some instances to have operated even as a temptation to the offence . . . . (xxix)

The equation of transported convicts with colonized subjects was reinforced by the frequent comparison between Australian exiles and slaves. Australia’s first colonial governor, Arthur Phillip, claimed to disagree with this parallel: writing in 1787 about Botany Bay, he stated that “there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves” (Bladen 1.2, 53). But the term “slave” is never clearly defined and seems to have operated in a variety of registers in this debate. Hughes maintains that Phillip “thought of the convicts essentially as slaves, by their own fallen nature if not in the strict terms of the law” (68); a nineteenth-century governor of Van Dieman’s Land (current day Tasmania), Sir Arthur George, was open in his own opinion that, “Deprived of liberty, exposed to all the caprice of the family to whose service he may happen to be assigned, and subject to the most summary laws, the condition of a convict in no respect differs from that of a slave” (qtd. in Hugh Anderson xxx). Many writers identified this as the official view from the period of the earliest settlements. Thomas Watling, sentenced to fourteen years exile in 1788 for forging Scotch banknotes, complained that a skilled man was less likely

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to be pardoned after arrival than one with no talents, making the knowledgeable convict into chattel: “If a man’s abilities are good, they are his bane, and impede his emancipation. He must abide upon the colony and become the property of some haughty despot; or be lent about as an household utensil to his neighbours . . .” (35–36). The first governor of the remote satellite colony on Norfolk Island, Lieutenant King, initially tried a different approach; Collins explains that “from the peculiarity of his situation—secluded from society, and confined to a small speck in the vast ocean, with but a handful of people,” King had “drawn [the convicts] round him, and treated them with the kind attentions which a good family meets with at the hands of a humane master” (Kitson 275). After a failed insurrection, King adopted the harsher, more conventional style of his mainland counterparts. When George Dyer publicly deplored the sentences of the Scottish Martyrs, he chose Slavery and Famine, Punishments for Sedition for the pamphlet’s title and quoted from official accounts of the colony describing backbreaking labor in a sterile land where no food would grow.17 Thomas Fyshe Palmer’s final unwelcome surprise after being transported to Australia concerns Francis Grose’s (Arthur Phillip’s successor as colonial governor) view of the Martyrs’ sentences once they land in Port Jackson. Palmer argues that “our sentences imply no services, they are not hinted at; the Scotch judges declared on the Bench of Justice that our sentences were fulfilled by our arrival at New South Wales,” but he observes with dismay that Grose believes “ourselves and our services were adjudged to him, for the purpose of cultivating the land until the expiration of our sentence” (57). And in the “Botany Bay Eclogues” of his 1797 Poems, Robert Southey’s “Frederic” presents the transported felon as a “poor outcast slave” (15). Watkin Tench, a military chronicler of the colony’s earliest years, tacitly compares convicts to slaves when he voices his own disapproval of Britain’s trade in Africans. The ability of European convicts to endure amid Australia’s climatic extremes discredits the common view that “the wretched Africans are indispensable for the culture of our sugar colonies . . . [because] white men are incapable of sustaining the heat of the climate” (Tench 110).18 In arguing against slavery for blacks, Tench implies that transported white convicts can and should take their place. The perception of convicts as aliens infesting Britain justified the resumption of transportation in the 1780s—making it seem as much a deportation of foreigners as the banishment of native Britons. Convicts shared the status of French émigrés in British society: both were viewed as foreign minorities. At the same time, this minority

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status also enabled the notion that expelling such individuals was the best way to solve the problem of their existence. The resumption of transportation in the late 1780s prepared the way for the deportations of aliens first codified in legislation like the Alien Act in the early 1790s. Postcolonial theorist Aamir R. Mufti explains how the designation of some groups as minorities within the nation-state is the first step in making banishment of the alien a possibility: “whenever a population is minoritized—a process inherent in the nationalization of peoples and cultural practices—it is also rendered potentially movable. Minority . . . is always potentially exile, and exile an actualization of the threat inherent to the condition of minority” (13, italics in original). Transportation to Australia was represented as a symbolic process that could safeguard the rest of the nation from the dangers, the illnesses, and the sheer foreignness of criminal and convict life. In some ways, Barrington’s A Voyage to Botany Bay concurs with this assessment. The opening scene describing the procession from Newgate to the ship casts other convicts as debased savages: they are “scarce a degree above the brute creation, intoxicated with liquor, and shocking the ears of those they passed with blasphemy, oaths and songs, the most offensive to modesty” (Barrington 20). But from the beginning, Barrington makes it clear that he is among those shocked. The experience of transportation offers him the chance to prove this to government officials. Through the intervention of a “particular friend,” he may walk above deck unchained. He sleeps and eats with the boatswain; the other convicts are stowed in the hold. The efforts of this mysterious, but powerful, benefactor set up the rehabilitation of Barrington’s reputation. At least one influential observer believes this particular convict is not some kind of foreigner hopelessly beyond the reach of amendment. The most important consequence of this belief is Barrington’s spatial segregation from the illnesses and conspiracies that fester below deck. The fact that Barrington lives above deck with the crew from the outset of the voyage means that he is exempt from the physical debilitation that strikes other convicts. When the ship arrives at Rio, Barrington notes in passing that the death rate has been low; only five convicts have died, in spite of “their confined state, change of climate, and unwholesomeness of living so long entirely on salt provisions” (31). The prince of pickpockets, in contrast, walks the deck freely and receives mealtime presents of fresh meat from the captain. By the time the ship finally docks at Sydney, conditions below deck appear to have deteriorated: the surviving prisoners come ashore “looking truly deplorable, the generality of them being emaciated by

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disease . . .” (49). The conditions that bred typhus and other fevers on the Hulks existed on transports to Botany Bay, and the Second Fleet in particular had been ravaged by infection as well as by the starvation caused by scanty and inedible provisions. Barrington’s accommodations ensure his insulation from another kind of contamination, the animosity toward authority that is percolating among other convicts. Soon after his ship, the Albemarle, is out of port, a group of prisoners unsuccessfully stages a mutiny. Two of [the convicts], Americans, who had some knowledge of navigation, prevailed upon the majority of their comrades to attempt seizing the ship, impressing them with the idea that it would be easily effected, and that they would carry her to America, where every man would not only attain his liberty, but receive a tract of land from Congress, besides a share of the money arising from the sale of the ship and cargo. (23)

In Barrington’s version of this uprising, he and the helmsman are alone on deck when the other convicts finally execute their plan and rush out of the hold; he single-handedly contains the mutineers until the captain and officers emerge and drive the convicts back below deck.19 His choice of loyalty over mutiny is the moment in his narrative when the stigma of his past is put behind him. The captain subsequently credits him with “saving the ship” (25), and his heroism on this occasion effects a revolution in the way he is treated and viewed from this moment afterward. By refusing to join the mutiny or conspire to steal the ship, Barrington reforms his reputation as a thief; the fact that the instigators of the mutiny are Americans further allies Barrington with the political status quo, rather than upstart colonials or British sympathizers with the American cause. As a result, he is allowed to go ashore with crewman during landfall at the Canary Islands, Rio de Janairo, and the Cape of Good Hope. At the latter stop—the final port of call before the ship reaches New South Wales—the captain gives Barrington a draft of 100 dollars, which he uses to buy stock and provisions that he (rightly) anticipates will be scarce and expensive in the new colony. The categories that in accounts of Barrington’s life had been endangered in England—gentleman versus scoundrel, loyalist versus traitor, health versus infection—have been clarified during the experience of transportation. Once he arrives in Australia, Barrington’s rehabilitation continues. Although Alan Walker tries to explain the popularity of A Voyage by arguing that Barrington, unlike Phillip, Collins or others, adopts an

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unofficial tone, Barrington’s perspective is allied far more with that of the authorities than with that of his fellow convicts. Virtually from the moment of his arrival, Barrington is singled out by Phillip, who does what no one in England will: he trusts him. Phillip makes him superintendent of convicts at the settlement of Parramatta on the strength of his behavior during the voyage out. David Collins notes that from the beginning, “the want of proper overseers” enable convict idleness and crime in Botany Bay. To fill the vacuum, Governor Phillip elevated several well-behaved convicts, like Barrington, to positions of power. While Collins complains that these are “offices to which free people alone should have been appointed,” he acknowledges that “there were none but convicts” (Kitson 267). The prisoners under Barrington’s supervision are notified that they must obey his orders as if “they proceeded from the governor himself,” and although he fears that other prisoners will recognize him, most of them don’t and those that do behave “in the most respectful manner” (Barrington 52, 53). The tale of Barrington’s swift rehabilitation in the colony can be said to condense into one narrative, and one lifetime, what Paul Carter calls the “positivist chronology” of imperial mythmaking in Australia, which authorities conceived of as a linear progression from convict to pioneer to loyal subject (293). Barrington’s unofficial activities, however, may provide the best evidence for his release from stigmatization. The common tactic among early Western commentators of describing Australian landscapes and situations through reference to “familiar European stereotypes” (Hughes 3) assumes new importance in Barrington’s hands. Hughes notes that one high-ranking officer compared early Sydney to a deer park because its extensive grasslands were devoid of brush cover. Barrington carries such comparisons farther, in ways that directly reflect on his newly elevated standing. When making the rounds of settlers’ cottages, he pointedly remarks that kangaroos are “about the size of a common deer” (Barrington 56). He adds, Having had several young native dogs given me from time to time, I take great delight in kangaroo hunting; it is not only an agreeable exercise, but produces a dish for the table, nearly as good as mutton; and, in the present dearth of live stock, is not an unacceptable present. (57)

This passage centains a feat of rhetorical legerdemain characteristic of Barrington’s exploits in Britain. The pickpocket becomes as an approximation of an English gentleman, out with his “dogs” (dingos) and hunting his “deer” (kangaroo) or butchering his “sheep.” The

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missing element is a horse, which Barrington’s comment about livestock helps to excuse; in New South Wales, even many “real” gentlemen do not have horses, so Barrington’s expedition on foot isn’t a particularly significant social marker. Hunting for pleasure as much as for food—it is “agreeable exercise”—Barrington resembles the genteel sportsman of the British countryside rather than his criminal counterpart, the poacher, who hunted without the property qualification and by the late eighteenth century was likely to sell his game for profit. Early rules in the colony reflected the social importance of hunting; only the soldiers, and convicts given permission by them, were entitled to hunt the kangaroo (Bewley 124). Making a present of game to friends is just another sign of Barrington’s metamorphosis into a colonial gentleman—and of how what was essentially the same behavior in Britain and Australia had vastly divergent ideological associations. For poaching was a crime against property widely associated with transportation. In the anonymous nineteenth-century ballad “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” the sentencing judge opines, You’ll have no chance for mischief then, Remember what I say, They’ll flog the poaching out of you Out there at Botany Bay. (17–20)20

In other words, Barrington’s personal history is important because Australia turns out to be land where, like Britain, basic boundaries are liable to blur. Such confusion is typified in British accounts by disorientation over appearances and seasonal reversals, and by uncertainty over how to classify the flora and fauna of the new continent. The most essential divide of all, between the innocent and the guilty, consequently becomes negotiable. This is essentially the same argument William Godwin makes in Political Justice, comparing convicts to plants who fail to thrive in England because the political and economic climate is against them. We can imagine the mixed reaction of authorities to the possibilities called up by such logic. On the one hand, the colony needed to become self-sustaining in order to continue to serve as a dumping ground for Britain’s criminal refuse. But how could outnumbered officials effectively control a flourishing colony of criminals? Barrington’s memoir presents him as the perfect man for this task; his status as a convict whose moral contagion is in remission, possessed of official responsibilities and privileges, precludes the danger of recidivism once he is ensconced at Parramatta. His history grants him what we might call a resistance to

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confusion about his intentions amid the colony’s somewhat tangled lines of authority and interpretation. Phillip appoints convicts like Barrington to positions of power because he simply does not have enough officers to supervise all of the prisoners. This practice would seem to confound the line between criminal and jailer; Lambert notes that Barrington’s duties in the colony, which included conducting night watches, arresting suspects, and generally maintaining order among the military as well as convicts, were “analogous to those of the Bow Street Runners in London” (231). But his memoir claims that rehabilitated convicts like Barrington are capable of straddling this divide without automatically descending back into vice. This behavior resembles that of colonial subjects who practice what Homi K. Bhabha calls mimicry, whose social practices create “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Location 122, italics in original). Barrington’s emulation in Australia of the rituals of British gentlemen allies him with British interests. At the same time, his attitudes and activities (a dingo is not, in the end, a dog, nor a kangaroo, a deer) remind the reader that he is “not quite” an authentic member of the gentry, but an imitation of one, whose position flows from the authorities controlling the penal colony. Barrington’s ability to manage boundaries carries over into the realm of cultural authority, contributing toward his ability to relate to a crucial constituency for the British colonial project: the aborigines. The last portion of A Voyage is taken up with early encounters between the colonists and various groups of natives. Arthur Phillip believed that good relations with the aboriginals were key to the colony’s success. He sought to secure their friendship by making cultural go-betweens out of natives that he ordered to be kidnapped and then trained in English language and customs. The accounts of this plan, in A Voyage and other documents, show the repeated failure of this attempt to assimilate aboriginals to British values and culture. When Phillips’ officers give the aborigines clothing, they wear it only to later cast it off; they do develop a taste for bread and wine, which during its early, starvation years the colony can hardly spare, but they do not imbibe an understanding of or respect for the royal authority that is responsible for the presence of such items on Australian soil. A Voyage dramatizes this failure through the story of Banalong, 21 a tribesman who is kidnapped and trained in English language and customs only to escape back into the bush. Banalong is later sighted on a beach, and Phillip, anxious to reestablish a tie with a potentially valuable cultural ambassador, sails out to meet him with peace offerings

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of bread, wine, and clothes. When the British finally come face to face with their old protégé, they do not initially recognize him, “so much was he altered” (74). Banalong’s ability to identify the wine convinces Phillip that it is Banalong after all, even as this moment divulges how ineffectual British attempts to domesticate him have been. . . . a bottle being shewn him, and being asked the name of it, he readily answered, “The king”; having observed when at the governor’s house, his majesty’s health drank in the first glass after dinner, and had been taught to repeat the word before he drank his own glass, he imagined the liquor was called the king; and when he afterwards came to know it was [called] wine, yet he would frequently call it king. This convinced the gentlemen that he was no other than their old acquaintance Banalong . . . . (74–75)

For Banalong, “king” is an empty term except insofar as it refers to a concrete item, wine. He does not acknowledge that drinking wine in a toast signifies loyalty to or respect for the British monarch. This refusal on Banalong’s part to see the consumption of wine as a part of a ritual involving deference to a foreign ruler prefigures the violent denouement of this episode. Back on the beach, Phillip approaches another aborigine whom Banalong points out to him; what Phillip interprets as a friendly overture, however, turns out to be a trap. The strange aborigine seizes a spear concealed in the grass and hurls it at Phillip, who is struck in the shoulder and has to be carried back to the boat. Phillip survives the assault, but it is followed by an epidemic of attacks on colonists and convicts by natives. The extent to which, for all the governor’s efforts, the natives and the British are still virtual strangers to each other is demonstrated by Banalong’s subsequent attempt to return to Sydney. When Phillip refuses to see him, Banalong grows “savage and insolent.” Such behavior, according to Barrington, “would have met with instant punishment in any other person; but they wished to bring him to reason, without having recourse to violent measures; and the governor was very unwilling to destroy that confidence he had been at so much pains to create in Banalong, which the slightest punishment would have done” (95). Had Banalong’s treachery been committed by any Briton, punishment would have been swift and unforgiving. But in Phillip’s encounters with the aborigines, it is difficult to say what constitutes a crime, and what activities merit punishment. Who, exactly, is the criminal in such an encounter? The whites who initially kidnapped the aborigines?

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The aborigines who subsequently ambush the whites? Both sets of men? Conventional British justice does not provide a helpful response to this kind of situation, as Phillip understands. Is there any kind of code—or individual—who might? In the closing pages of A Voyage, Barrington ventures to answer this question by positioning himself as the ideal cultural negotiator whom neither the aborigines nor the British have been able to provide or train. As a reformed convict, Barrington is, like the renegade aborigines, associated with rebellion against British authority even as he also comes to be identified with service to the British penal colony. His uniquely mixed background goes along with an ability to appreciate and communicate with the aborigines in ways that his narrative does not attribute to other whites. Barrington’s history of successfully crossing social and moral boundaries allows him to relate to the aborigines. His newly renovated and stabilized character prevents encounters with the natives from contaminating his sense of loyalty to the British. His meeting with the aboriginal woman Yeariana is a kind of allegory of this process. Barrington encounters Yeariana after losing his way on one of his kangaroo hunts; she is nursing her brother, who has fallen ill. Barrington’s serving boy urges him to abandon the couple, sensing danger. Barrington ignores this advice, however, responding to “the imperative call of humanity” that crosses racial and geographic divides (115). With Barrington’s help, the brother survives, and like Phillip, Barrington moves to seal a connection with these aboriginals through gifts from the west. The next morning I set him on his way home, giving him a hatchet for himself, and string of beads for his sister, whose image had made a strong impression on my mind, being the most interesting I ever saw; with a form that might serve as a perfect model for the most scrupulous statuary; her face and hair unlike any thing I had ever seen in this country; the first of a perfect oval, or Grecian shape . . . the latter long, and of a shining black; she was likewise of a much lighter colour than any of her countrywomen, and might easily have been taken for a beautiful Oriental Creole. (117)

The episode blossoms into romance between the aboriginal woman and the white gentleman-convict. Yeariana is presented as the cultural hybrid that the white authorities have been unsuccessfully trying to cross-breed, a woman who incarnates the very opposites of East and West, savage and civilized.22 Barrington discovers, recognizes, and befriends her without losing sight of his duty to the colony or to the

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aesthetics and cultural values of Europe. This vignette, coupled with Phillip’s departure from the colony and return to England, closes Barrington’s narrative. However, the very conjunction of these two events—Barrington’s budding romance and Phillip’s return home— sets up Barrington as the governor’s heir in pursuing a policy of enlightened engagement with the natives. The difference between the two whites is that Barrington looks likely to succeed where Governor Phillip failed. The exchange first of trinkets and tools, and later (Barrington hints) of Yeariana herself, will “cement that friendship which had just taken root” (119) between Yeariana’s band of natives and Barrington’s own settlement. Convict imperialism, in this account, becomes a driving force for the consolidation of national identity, both for the character of Barrington and for his many readers in the British isles.23 The world’s largest penal colony, Botany Bay emerged during a transitional period in the history of crime. The crude physical punishments inflicted on convicts in early Australia gradually gave way to an ideal of rehabilitation, as Stephen Garton explains. In this new social script, convicts redeemed themselves by informally policing other, wayward individuals and in turn served as informal state servants. European colonization of Australia is inscribed in the history of punishment. Colonization began as an open gaol, and these colonies were an important point of transition between two economies of punishment: from one predicated on the deterrent effect of public spectacles focused on the body to the rationalized, panoptic, more reform practices of modern imprisonment. The penal colonies represented the last gasp of the older political economy of punishment. In its worst manifestations—notably special punishment colonies (the secondary convict colonies) for refractory convicts such as Norfolk Island, Port Arthur, and Moreton Bay—the Australian penal system represented the apotheosis of the brutal physical tortures symbolized by the Tyburn Tree. But as the new ideals of imprisonment gained ground in Britain, so the Australian colonies changed and new model prisons began to be built in the colonies, often in the colonies of secondary punishment, from the 1840s. (Garton 281)24

Barrington’s memoir anticipates this transition from punishment to discipline. Setting out a process of change that few Britons considered possible, A Voyage to Botany Bay demonstrates the malleable focus of the convict’s power. A pariah in Briton, the transported criminal’s voyage takes him to a world where not only the seasons, but also assumptions about guilt and innocence, are reversed. Perceived as

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more incurable than typhus, the dreaded convict stigma in Barrington goes into remission, a process that benefited Britain’s leaders as they searched for methods, and personnel, to establish the struggling colony in the south Pacific. Convicts regarded as foreigners at home can, according to Barrington’s example, become more like true Britons abroad, spreading the empire’s cultural values and defending its physical outposts. In this way they become self-policing, even as they serve as emissaries of European authority and managers of its military, commercial, and culture interests.

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Chapter 4

Th e S c o t t ish M a r t y r s a n d t h e R e for m of Na r r at i v e

During Barrington’s passage to Botany Bay, the tainted, mutinous

prisoner is relegated, literally and metaphorically, to an area below deck and out of sight; he or she is available to the reader only through the narrator’s fragmentary observations and abbreviated comments. The “cured” convict, Barrington himself, alone merits a continuous story focusing on his sensibility, his courage, and ultimately his triumph as a valued British subject. This aesthetic choice is in keeping with how other famous convicts of the 1790s would present their own experiences of conviction and exile. Four of the five Scottish Martyrs—Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, and Maurice Margarot—experienced transportation through the prism of mutiny.1 All four men sailed for Australia together, aboard the royal transport the HMS Surprize. While Barrington sided with the authorities against potential mutineers, however, the Surprize’s captain became convinced that Palmer and Skirving in particular were collaborating with other convicts to seize control of the ship. Margarot and Muir were drawn into the volley of accusations during the long voyage, the former as an accuser and the latter as a defender of their fellow reformers. Taken in its most general sense, as a rebellion either against powerful groups or against ideas claiming particular validity or legitimacy, mutiny is one way of categorizing the crimes for which these political prisoners had been sent from Britain in the first place.2 This chapter will explore how, in trial records, personal accounts, and other public forums, transported seditionaries and their sympathizers seek to recast their activities

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as legitimate, and the real mutineers—against political justice, human sympathy, and British values—as the authorities responsible for their conviction and exile. The Scottish Martyrs thus share the rhetoric of French émigrés and their sympathizers; authorities cannot deny or nullify the national affiliations of those forced into exile. Rather, the claims to legitimacy of those in diaspora challenge imposed definitions of nationality from authorities who recognize only one geographical base, or one set of ideological allegiances, to the exclusion of all others. On a formal or aesthetic level, texts concerning these convicts tend to present the opposition between mutiny and legitimacy in terms of fragmentation versus continuity. Crown officials and their critics agree that descriptions and justifications of mutiny have a fragmentary, disjointed structure. The discourse of ideological legitimacy, in contrast, is characterized by the cause and effect sequencing of narrative convention. Defenders of royal policy and their opponents share a belief that there is a valid narrative that explains political and social conditions, and that the opposition can offer only fragments in return, fragments whose authority is specious and whose relationship to each other is nonexistent or, at best, muddled. Like Barrington, the Scottish Martyrs discover in the experience of transportation an opportunity to redraw the line between innocence and guilt with particular clarity. During the 1790s in particular, criticism of the government became identified with the punishment of transportation; as a result of the 1793 Edinburgh sedition trials, one historian of crime has argued that fourteen years in Australia came to seem “the normal sentence for routine sedition cases” (McLynn 335). In large part because of the well-known hardships of the new colony and its almost unimaginable distance from Britain, this sentence was felt by nearly all observers to be a completely disproportionate response to the level of political opposition at issue. If the object of the authorities was to deter further organizing through these trials, then William Godwin argued in a letter to the Morning Chronicle that the sentencing of these men would likely have the exact opposite effect. . . . a punishment that exceeds all measure and mocks at all justice, that listens to no sentiment but revenge, and plays the volunteer in insolence and cruelty—a punishment the purpose of which is to inflict on such men slavery, degradation of soul, a lingering decay and final imbecility—can do nothing but exasperate men’s minds, and wind up their nerves to decisive action. (Paul 123)

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The first governor’s seal for British Australia, mentioned above in chapter 3, was an example of the kinds of official representations deployed to counter images of early colonial Australia like Godwin’s. Representing Industry greeting convicts to establish the new colony while a fort stands in the background, the seal seeks to quell the popular image of Australian transportation as punitive beyond all justification. Yet, the ambiguities inherent in such an enterprise are divulged through the image of the fort, double-identified with protection and coercion. Whom, exactly, does it protect, and from what? Does it defend the British from potentially hostile natives or other foreigners? Or is the fort there to keep in line the very convicts seemingly being released from their fetters? This confusion is to some extent managed by our awareness of what is on the other side of the seal: the royal coat of arms. Read as a kind of narrative, the seal shows how convict prosperity will proceed from royal policy. The king’s authority, embodied in his colonial viceroy, will underpin the development of a social order facilitating convict rehabilitation. But read as two separate images, or not as a sequence, but as fragments, the representation of coming ashore places the prisoners and the fort designed to protect, or oversee, them, in an uneasy dialogue. In this way, the colonial governor’s seal reminds us of the ongoing debate as to how one should read and represent the early history of Australian transportation. The ambiguities of the seal call to mind a question today’s historians continue to contest: was the colony primarily intended as a disposal site for convicts, or was its remote location designed to further other policies, such as the development of a base from which to expand and supply Britain’s eastern empire?3 Like modern scholars, Georgian Britons puzzled over whether the early colonization of Australia should be viewed as part of a coherent narrative about political ideology, about criminal justice, or about imperial expansion, or a fragment, a development that had no defensible contemporary cause and that could only look toward an uncertain and perilous future.

Trials and Tribulations Reformers’ representations of their own trials and experiences of transportation struggle to appropriate the power of narrative to structure interpretation of a variety of situations and political viewpoints. Reading Phillip’s seal “correctly”—as the validation of royal authority it was obviously intended to be—depends on approaching it as a narrative construct, on establishing a clear causal relationship between

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the king’s arms and the colony’s development. Critics of crown policy, in turn, cast their opponents as misguided villains who subvert the intentions of good men by creating specious links between opinion and outcome, or by misrepresenting opinion in the first place. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecturing in Bristol in 1795, employs this rhetorical strategy repeatedly in his condemnations of the government conduct during the French war. Singling out the crown’s reliance on informers to detect popular opposition, Coleridge complains that “These men are plenteously scattered among us: our very looks are decyphered into disaffection, and we cannot move without treading on some political spring-gun” (Lectures 60). Informers, in other words, mislead by using the words and even the looks of others to construct false stories about the beliefs and actions of those they observe. They take away agency from those they spy on, and we are robbed of our capacity to tell our own stories by the “political springgun,” an automatic chain of reactionary reasoning we may inadvertently become enmeshed within, with potentially fatal consequences. Transforming the popular association of prisoners with communicable disease, Coleridge goes on to present this distortion of logical sequence as the real illness of the times, a fever spread not by convicts or reformers but by the authorities themselves. Informers and their masters, the real criminals, have disseminated a pestilent atmosphere that debilitates the judgment and well-being of virtuous men: “We have breathed so long the atmosphere of Imposture and Panic, that many honest minds have caught an aguish disorder; in their cold fits they shiver at Freedom, in their hot fits they turn savage against its advocates; and sacrifice to party Rage what they would have scornfully refused to Corruption” (60). For Coleridge, the justification behind transportation in the 1790s is perhaps the clearest expression of this sort of perversion of the relation between cause and effect. War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve: they must either pick their countrymen’s Pockets—or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures, because they are Jacobins. If they chuse the latter, the chances are that their own lives are sacrificed: if the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive views of Ministers, who having starved the wretch into Vice send him to the barren shores of new Holland to be starved back again into Virtue. It must surely charm the eye of humanity to behold Men reclaimed from stealing by being banished to a Coast, where there is nothing to steal, and helpless Women, who had been Bold from

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despair and prostitute for Bread, find motives to Reformation in the sources of their Depravity, refined by Ignorance, and famine-bitten into Chastity. (68–69)

Following Godwin, Coleridge offers a sociological explanation for the crime wave of the mid-1790s: inflation, unemployment, and nearfamine conditions brought on by bad harvests naturally have driven British men and women to steal. In a bizarre turn, the government’s solution to this injustice is to send these offenders to a land (New Holland, or Australia) where conditions are just as bad. The crown appears to assume that while starvation and inequality produce vicious behavior in England, these same conditions will create the reverse (“virtue”) at the antipodes. But a switch in geographic location does not reverse the progression of effect from cause. The hardships of life in the infant colony clarify, rather than obscure, the illogic of policies in the mother country thousands of miles away.4 The circumstances of the decade’s most famous political transportation cases expand on the stakes of Coleridge’s logical and aesthetic distinctions. In trials from August 1793 to March 1794, the five men popularly referred to as the Scottish Martyrs were all convicted in Edinburgh of seditious libel and sentenced to transportation. The trials of William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerrald were all connected through the men’s participation in the British convention for reform organized in Edinburgh in October 1792; Skirving had been the convention’s secretary, while Margarot and Gerrald attended the gathering as representatives of the London Corresponding Society. The two other men, Thomas Muir and Thomas Fyshe Palmer, were convicted for a variety of activities, ranging from talking about and distributing Paine’s works to writing or editing allegedly seditious handbills and generally inciting popular discontent with the status quo. The year 1792 was both the climax of the reform movement in Britain, and a year of great hardship and unrest, particularly in Scotland. The summer was wet and cold, the harvest poor, and corn prices hit a ten-year high. Hunger was exacerbated by the Scottish Corn Law enacted in 1791, and crowds burnt Home Secretary, and fellow Scot, Henry Dundas in effigy. There were strikes in Aberdeen and Leith, outside Edinburgh, by miners and sailors protesting low pay and working conditions, and small farmers rioted in the north, fearing (rightly) that their landlords were contemplating replacing them with sheep. In June before the king’s birthday, a pro-reform protest in Edinburgh turned into a riot. His legal defense of one

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of the Birthday rioters afforded young advocate Thomas Muir the first forum for demonstrating his reformist sympathies, even as he condemned violence as a means to effect change. Muir and William Skirving, a farmer and former divinity student, soon became prime movers in the establishment of the Edinburgh Friends of the People in July 1792. The eroding political situation in France, coupled with the pronounced domestic unrest in Scotland, led the government in London to begin surveillance on reformers in Scotland and on the Friends of the People in particular, which it quickly came to regard as a political threat. As would soon be the case in England, the spies the ministry employed in lieu of professional police were paid by the information they submitted, so it behooved them to submit “inaccurate and lurid reports which grossly exaggerated the strength and violence of the aims of the Friends of the People” (Bewley 35).5 Meanwhile Muir, Skirving, and others continued to organize new chapters of the organization throughout the autumn, and by November Dundas called out the militia in Scotland, claiming rebellion was imminent. As this confluence of events suggests, Muir’s most active period of political endeavor coincided with economic and political crisis in his homeland. This backdrop helps explain why, by the time of the first convention of the Friends of the People in December 1792, authorities were poised to see Muir and his fledgling organization in the worst possible light. Though the convention proceeded in an orderly and peaceful manner, the kinds of sentiments Muir voiced were hardly designed to calm official concerns. Perhaps his main contribution to the Scottish reform movement, and one of the reasons why he was viewed as so dangerous, was his willingness to make common cause with activists in Ireland who, like the Scots, had good reason in his view to question the benefits that union had brought them. In a gesture that would haunt him during his trial, Muir read an address from the United Irishmen to the convention delegates expressing solidarity with their cause, and asserted each country’s right to defend its own interests against the larger national power structure. Muir contended that “We cannot consider ourselves as moved and melted down into another country. Have we not distinct courts, judges, juries, laws, etc. . . . ? The people of Ireland will have a reform. The Scotch will have a reform” (qtd. in Bewley 44). Muir was supported at the convention by, among others, Thomas Palmer, an English clergyman of good family who had given up his Cambridge fellowship to become a Unitarian minister in Scotland and an advocate for reform. In no small part because of Muir’s organizing abilities during this period, this was, according to Muir’s biographer, “the first time Scottish

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artisans had formed societies through which to give their views public expression. Muir was helping to lay the basis of the first working men’s political clubs, to create the foundations of a labour movement in Scotland” (34). After this, officials moved quickly to reign in the activities of the Friends of the People in general, and of Muir and Palmer in particular. Muir was the first to be arrested, in January 1793; he posted bail and then, in another decision that would complicate his prospects at trial, promptly went to France on 15 January. He was arrested on his return via Ireland to Scotland in July, having missed his scheduled trial in February and, perhaps, never intending to have stood in the dock at all. Muir chose to defend himself during his sixteen-hour trial on 30 August 1793. Accounts of the proceedings were soon published, and they indicate that he tried to repel the prosecution’s accusations of sedition by arguing that they depended on a fragmentary understanding of his views, his activities, and the reform movement in general. Where Coleridge charges that the government reverses cause and effect, Muir contends that it ignores them altogether. Muir begins his defense by arguing that whatever he has done can’t be classed as sedition because the consequences of such a crime haven’t surfaced: “Has property been invaded? Has murder walked your streets? Has the blood of the citizens flowed? Oh no! But it is said, although the effects of sedition have not taken place, the attempt was meditated” (Trial 80). Similarly, Muir defends Paine’s works from the charge of sedition because the prosecution presents only excerpts in the indictment. Read in this fragmentary manner, any series of words, including, Muir claims (in a comparison sure to antagonize his Tory judges) the Bible, “may be made to contain sedition” (85). Sedition is defined by context: when we fail to appreciate the backdrop to a remark, we cannot properly label it sedition. The prosecution’s lengthy criticism of Muir’s trip to France in January, weeks before Louis XVI’s execution, is similarly presented by the defendant as ignoring context. Christina Bewley contends that it is unclear what Muir’s real intentions were in going to France in 1793, and whether he ever actually intended to return to stand trial given the extant political climate in Scotland, or instead planned to take up residence for a time in America (63–65). But at his trial, Muir turns his situation into another example of the government’s ideological legerdemain. Muir maintains that he went to try to argue the doomed French king’s cause, rather than rejoice at his impending execution. He squarely blames his delayed return on the very government who accuses him: it is all “the effect of the Alien bill, which rendered it necessary for me to procure a passport from

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England, a thing I attempted, but found impracticable” (82). In keeping with the intent behind legislation like the Alien Act, new restrictions on travel imposed during the French wars really would have made it difficult to return to England directly from France, assuming that Muir had tried to do so. Bewley explains: In the eighteenth century civilians were little restricted by warfare and could travel freely behind the battle-fronts, but Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, had passed an order on 8 January by which no one could enter England unless he had a passport from the Principal Secretary of State, who could refuse an entry permit on the grounds that the applicant was a dangerous revolutionary. In retaliation, no British subjects were allowed to travel across France or embark at ports unless they had a passport from the Department of Foreign Affairs. (58)

Caught between the early efforts of nation-states to rationalize the definition and control of their borders, Muir finds that his own government tries to cut him off, or make him a kind of political fragment, though he is a bona fide British subject. Prevented from return to his native national setting, which is all that he claims he desires, he must return home indirectly: he goes first to America and then to Ireland before landing in Scotland. If this is evidence of sedition, it is forced on him by his own government. Muir’s legal attacks on his prosecutors were an objection to a particular kind of legal fantasizing. As John Barrell has noted of the trials of Skirving, Margarot, and Gerrald, in the crown’s hands the idea of imagination became a powerful tool against political reform. By constructing a fictitious chain of possible outcomes produced by one verifiable event, figured as a cause—such as the distribution of handbills, or attending a political gathering—prosecutors claimed the power not only to interpret, but also to create, effects. In response, other Scottish Martyrs would follow Muir’s strategy of accusing the prosecution of fabricating connections that did not exist or results that never came to pass. Maurice Margarot criticized his accusers of connecting insignificant facts and events together until they reached “a sum total of such a size, as shall seize upon your imagination, and make you believe a mountain of guilt, where, in fact, there is not a molehill of imprudence” (qtd. in Barrell 161).6 In his analysis of Joseph Gerrald’s trial proceedings, James Epstein focuses on Gerrald’s “ambivalence about history, a hesitation about moving wholly outside the realm of custom and relying solely on the persuasive force of natural reason” (31). Gerrald explicitly appealed to historical institutions

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in his celebrated defense statement, positioning his activities as part of a long political narrative stretching back to Anglo-Saxon assemblies that relied on community consensus and were responsive to public needs. Gerrald seemed to contradict Paine and Godwin’s view that history was no help to reformers, that “there was no story to be retold, nothing worthy of remembering” (24). In other words, Gerrald shared Muir’s rhetorical objective of redeeming his putatively seditious politics by orienting them within a larger continuum that made them seem positively patriotic. In the case of Gerrald, in particular, such an argument was aimed partly at mitigating the penalty of transportation, since his advanced consumptive condition certainly would make it tantamount to a capital sentence. In the end, Muir, Gerrald, and the three other men were all convicted and exiled to Australia; the conservative composition of the bench and the hand-picked jury ruled out any other verdict. In addition, the audience seems to have influenced the outcomes of these trials, though not in the way the reformers may have hoped or intended. In her analysis of the 1794 treason trails of Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke, Judith Pascoe emphasizes the theatricality of the proceedings, insofar as the principal attorneys and defendants played up their reactions to testimony, dressed in somber, conservative fashions, and (in Hardy’s case) deliberately invoked the death of his wife to court the sympathies of both men and women in the audience. Such sympathies presumably were aimed at showing that accused men had strong connections to a broader British community who valued their ideas and respected their actions. Courtroom theater operated in the 1793 trials, but not in the same ways. According to accounts of the proceedings, the sympathies of the audience were on Thomas Muir’s side in his trial, but their audible support for his defense did not work in his favor. The grueling length of Muir’s proceedings, coupled with psychological burdens of defending himself, left him, he openly admitted, nearly exhausted by the end, an admission in keeping with the famous courtroom swoons of English advocates like Thomas Erskine. To the end Muir insisted on the justice and virtue of his acts: reform is “a good, a just, and a glorious cause; a cause that will sooner or later ultimately prevail, and which must one day be the salvation of this country” (Trial 96). In the 1794 treason trials in London, Pascoe has argued that “it could not hurt to have a large crowd laughing at one’s jokes and hissing at an opponent’s parries” (Romantic 57).7 But the hand-picked nature of the Scottish juries and the control judges could exercise over sentencing there meant the rules were significantly different. The thunderous cheers that met

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the conclusion of Muir’s defense visibly antagonized his judges, and was cited by Lord Henderland as part of the rationale behind the sentence of transportation: “The indecent applause which was given to Mr. Muir, last night, at the conclusion of his defence, within these walls, unknown in that high court, and inconsistent with the solemnity which ought to pervade the administration of justice, and which was insulting to the laws and dignity of that Court, proved to him, that the spirit of sedition had not as yet subsided,” and allowing Muir to remain in Scotland would only fuel such agitation (State Trials 232). To the extent that Muir was not already a kind of political exile from the Scottish mainstream, the judge’s reaction focused on the ongoing danger Muir posed to stability rather than his right to be considered a well-meaning member of society. Showcasing the plaintiff’s relationships to women and female sympathy would prove particularly important in the way Thomas Erskine conducted his defense of Thomas Hardy in 1794. Hardy’s wife died in childbirth while he was in prison awaiting trial. Hardy wore mourning clothes throughout his trial, and testimony repeatedly invoked the death of his wife and the child she was carrying at the time as the cruel cost of defending his principles. Pascoe argues this rhetoric was designed to invoke pity among the trial’s extensive female audience and, by extension, among the male jurors. These kinds of female attachments as a kind of trope for broader connections to British values and life were unavailable to the first two defendants in Scotland. Muir and Palmer had never married, and although Muir’s age might help explain situation (he was twenty-eight, and yet to earn his fortune), Palmer was in his forties when he was tried. On the voyage to Australia, Palmer was accompanied by a young student and protégé of his, James Ellis, who went as a free settler but perhaps as something rather more. Whether their bond was sexual or not, Palmer was much attached to Ellis and left him all his property at his death; on the transport that carried them to Botany Bay, Palmer would be accused by the captain of sodomy (Bewley 104). In other words, neither Muir nor Palmer could lay claim to the sentimental kind of female attachments that advocate Thomas Erskine would use so effectively to elicit compassion at the London trials a year later. Instead, the first two trials of the Martyrs, which set the tone and expectations for those that would follow, featured men whose lack of womanly affiliation presumably did nothing to bolster their chances in court and that implicitly accorded with the crown’s view that these men had placed themselves beyond the pale of social bonds and British values.

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William Skirving, the third man to be tried, was married with a large family, but this fact was invoked at his sentencing only as a reason why Skirving should have carefully considered his actions, in light of Muir’s and Palmer’s convictions.8 Joseph Gerrald was a widower with two small children, but his family seems to have only figured into the public response to his situation when he awaited the moment when he would board ship for Australia. Several publications assert that he was not told the precise time of his departure, and in one case stated that the ministry gave reason to expect that, until the last minute, his sentence would be commuted: “A person of consequence in opposition, who was the friend of Mr. Gerrald, spoke to Mr. Dundas on the subject . . . willing that he should not be kept in a painful uncertainty. Mr. Dundas’ answer was: ‘There is no intention of sending Mr. Gerrald at present; and, if it depend upon me, he will not be sent.’ Such unnecessary duplicity and cruelty are almost incredible” (Gerrald 24). Gerrald’s abrupt departure in particular was cast as an offense to fatherhood, since according to one account he was taken from his jail cell, informed of his immediate departure, and even refused the consolation of saying goodbye to the infant daughter who was staying with him at Newgate.9 The fact that Gerrald was the sole living parent to his children is vividly portrayed as aggravating the burden of his sentence,10 but it does not appear to have been much discussed or alluded to at his trial. In justifying Thomas Muir’s sentence of fourteen years exile, presiding judge and notorious Tory Robert MacQueen made it clear that for conservatives, the master context for the reformers’ activities was the French Terror. Muir had sought to disguise his true intentions by distinguishing his efforts from those of the Jacobins. Noting that Paine’s works had been ruled seditious by some courts in England, and that “Sedition in England, Gentlemen, must be sedition here” (89)—a point Muir had contested earlier in the trial—MacQueen articulated the crown’s understanding of its exclusive guardianship of the national narrative of the Britain’s destiny. Every challenge was an impropriety, a presumptuous fragmentation of unified authority that by right belonged to no one but the king.11 As we will see in more detail below, the Scottish Martyrs certainly considered themselves gentlemen whose stories had no meaningful connections to the semiotics of ordinary convict discourse. Yet, Thomas Muir’s story during and after his transportation underscores some striking connections between the seemingly divergent conditions of French émigrés, ordinary convicts like George Barrington, and political prisoners like the Martyrs. In January 1796 Muir escaped

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from the penal colony with little more than the clothes on his back, aboard an American trading vessel bound for the Pacific northwest. Writing to his old law professor John Millar after his voyage across the Pacific, Muir contemplates telling his own story using the rhetoric of accounts of South Sea exploration popular at the time: “My life since I left you has been a romance. . . . If I publish my voyages and travels, as I think I will, I smile, when I think that a man of the gown must make his first Debut to the world, as a Navigator. . . .” (qtd. in Bewley 151). However, the authorities consciously treated the Martyrs after their convictions in ways aimed at situating them within the conventional convict paradigm. The severity of their sentences alone stunned both the defendants and the public that closely followed their trails; in England, men found guilty of seditious libel could expect no more than a few weeks imprisonment. Ironically, it was their very status as educated members of the middle class and, as William St. Clair has phrased it, “leaders of opinion” (Godwins 110), that brought down the full weight of the Scottish judiciary on their heads and classed their offense as tantamount to that of the most inveterate murderer. Mary Shelley noted in retrospect that at Joseph Gerrald’s trial, the judge stated that the defendant’s claim to have acted from disinterested public motives made him more, not less, culpable: “. . . he became a more dangerous member of society than if his conduct had been really criminal, springing from criminal motives” (Paul 125). Muir and Palmer, as the first of the five men to be convicted, spent months confined in the prison Hulks along the Thames where they were chained along with thieves and murderers, “except when taken ashore for hard labour in chain-gangs on the riverbank” (St. Clair, Godwins 110). William Godwin visited the men during their confinement and was outraged to discover that aboard the Hulks, Muir and Palmer benefited from no distinctions as men of letters or birth: “. . . stores of every kind and books have constantly been denied admission. The principle which has been laid down again and again by the officers of Government is—that they are felons like the rest” (Paul 121, italics in original). Like so many other convicted felons (including George Barrington), Muir and Palmer’s health suffered long-term damage from their confinement. Thomas Muir contracted a respiratory ailment while incarcerated that he labeled consumption, while Thomas Fyshe Palmer lay ill for weeks with a fever from whose effects he never completely recovered (Bewley 104). Joseph Gerrald, ill with tuberculosis even before his conviction and dead within four months after arriving in Australia in 1795, seems to incarnate the ideological connection the authorities perceived between crime, radicalism, and infection.

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In addition, if convicts—especially those sentenced to transportation—were considered aliens on British soil, it is worth emphasizing that crown prosecutors at the Edinburgh trials very much identified the two defendants from England as foreigners. The crown’s lawyers condemned Margarot and Gerrald at their trials for being willful interlopers in Scottish affairs when they had no stake in that country’s politics or history. Joseph Gerrald was born on the Caribbean island of St. Christopher to a family of Irish extraction (his last name was a shortened form of the patronymic Fitzgerald) and emigrated to America to practice law before eventually finding his way to London. Maurice Margarot, as his name suggests, had French antecedents, and although he was born in England he had grown up on the continent; he actually was living in France when the Revolution began in 1789. While the terms of her observation are dated, Christina Bewley’s characterization of Margarot as “a lively, elegant, dark little man; in appearance and manner an Englishman’s idea of a Frenchman” (89) helps explain the particular animus to Margarot that emerged during his trial. These unusual aspects of Gerrald’s and Margarot’s biographies complicated the ostensible point of their mission to the Edinburgh convention, which was to test whether the Scots courts would dare to treat an Englishman in the same way they had treated their own countrymen. The sentences of the Scottish Martyrs ultimately affected, one could argue, two Scots, an American, a Frenchman, and one English dissenting minister—Thomas Palmer. The fact that none of these men were typical representatives of British values and experience made them particularly vulnerable defendants, and casts their subsequent transportation as something in between enforced exile and the deportations associated with the Alien Act. In this light it is perhaps not surprising that Godwin explicitly compares the decision to transport the Martyrs with the creation of a refugee class by French revolutionaries who had expelled their own political opponents: “Never was the principle of taking lessons from an enemy so extensively adopted as at present. We declaim against the French, and we imitate them in their most horrible atrocities” (Paul 123). Finally, Muir’s story in particular suggests how, as Martin Thom has argued, the experience of exile can fuel incipient nationalism at the expense of a search for broader communities and political consensus. The initial fervor in Britain after the French Revolution had its roots in the Enlightenment ideals of progressive human improvement and transnational commonalities. Muir’s escape from Botany Bay in 1796 was fired in part by his desire to continue to work for reform in America, if not at home. His journey turned out to be more

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complicated, however, than he possibly could have foreseen, involving imprisonment by the Spanish in Cuba and a head injury incurred in a naval battle between the Spanish and British from which he never really recovered. Muir’s mishaps were much complicated by the global reach of official fears of reform and social change. His incarceration in Havana and subsequent deportation to Spain was the result of a Spanish law seeking to insulate New Spain from the influence of foreigners in general and Protestants in particular. Muir’s sufferings during a journey from Australia that ended in Paris seem to have caused his cosmopolitan optimism in human perfectibility to collapse into a hardened national chauvinism. By 1798, living in Paris as a putative advisor to the Directory and to die within the year, Thomas Muir had become a virulent Scots nationalist, convinced of the depravity of the English and the empire that they, in his view, lorded over their Celtic neighbors. In a memorandum to Tallyrand, “Muir made a sound comparison between French émigrés and British radicals. Émigrés traveled round European courts proclaiming that the French people would support them. Now, as in 1793, Muir had run across his compatriots in Parisian cafes who claimed that the English would welcome the French and help establish a republic” (Bewley 170). Muir offered this comparison in part to prove how wrong those English expatriates were. Like the émigrés in England still waiting for a Restoration yet to come, English radicals who had taken refuge in France awaited a day they would never see, since their countrymen back home lacked the backbone to really overthrow their oppressors. In ways he could not appreciate, however, Muir himself had become the mirror image of the French émigré, situated in what Bewley calls “the twilight world of refugees” (183), his opinions pushed ever farther from the political mainstream by hardships and injustice that few of his countrymen could imagine, must less experience.

The Voyage Out Thomas Fyshe Palmer’s Narrative of the Sufferings of T. F. Palmer and W. Skirving during a Voyage to New South Wales, 1794 elaborates on Muir’s accusation that the crown offers fragments rather than a coherent picture of reformers and their agenda. Palmer’s narrative deals almost exclusively with what happened after his September 1793 conviction, but his account is essentially a thinly disguised retrial in which he and Skirving are exonerated of wrongdoing in a supposed mutiny plot by the paranoia of officials who are unwilling or unable to give an account justifying their positions. Aboard the

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aptly named Surprize, Palmer and Skirving are shocked to find themselves accused of conspiring to mutiny against the transport’s captain, Patrick Campbell. Like Barrington, Palmer understands and fears the all-encompassing power of the convict taint and writes this account in an attempt to cleanse his reputation of it. His avowed mission in this pamphlet is to establish his innocence so that, should he return to England, he will do so as a man of honor. To return as anything other than a gentleman—in other words, to return as a would-be mutineer—“would afford no consolation” since it would mean a perpetual moral, if not physical, exile from his proper sphere in British society (iii–iv). From the beginning, the Narrative presents the government’s agenda as inconsistent and chaotic. Palmer is taken to the Surprize along with a convicted forger, John Grant, and it is Grant who first accuses him of intending to mutiny, probably hoping such intelligence will secure him a pardon. That this charge originates with a forger is testament, in Palmer’s view, to its falsity; the fact that Grant is reputed aboard the Hulks to be a government spy is the first indication that the authorities forge truths just as Grant formerly forged banknotes. Once aboard the Surprize, in Palmer’s account his and Skirving’s situation rapidly deteriorates. From the start, Campbell is antagonistic toward them, and Grant tries to lure James Ellis, Palmer’s protégé who accompanies him on the voyage, into a supposed plot among the soldiers to mutiny and take the ship to France. As the voyage progresses, accusations fly between Palmer and Campbell: Palmer accuses the captain of denying him access to his own money and of cheating him of the individual cabin he has paid for. When Campbell disciplines six soldiers for an alleged plot to mutiny, Palmer and other passengers ask the captain for evidence, but this is never forthcoming. Campbell for his part accuses Palmer of demanding shipboard amenities to which he is not entitled, and of conspiring to overthrow his command. In the debate over the Edinburgh convictions in the House of Lords, the liberal Earl Stanhope objected to Muir’s sentence primarily because Scottish law unfairly allowed the prosecution to improvise, or to add accusations and produce new witnesses at any point in the trial even if these were not listed in the indictment. Stanhope explained that “. . . any facts (or supposed facts) not particularly set forth as crimes in the indictment may, on the following day, for the first time, and without notice, be suddenly brought out in evidence upon the trial against the defendant” and lead to a conviction (51n). In other words, the prosecution need not stick to the

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same story throughout the trial, which made a coherent and compelling defense virtually impossible. In his remarks, Stanhope expressly identified the shifting stories of Scottish prosecutors with the autocratic legacy left by the vanquished Stuart kings: “Such proceedings (whether supported or unsupported by any old Scotch statute passed in arbitrary times) ought, I conceive, to be revised” (51n). Similarly, Joseph Gerrald at his trial criticized the scant protection of individual civil and legal rights afforded by Scotch institutions by contrasting them with “a British libertarian heritage framed in distinctly English terms” (Epstein 39). Campbell will follow in the tradition of Scotch jurisprudence that Stanhope criticizes when he hides the reasons why he suspects his crew of mutiny. In Palmer’s account, throughout the voyage, Campbell makes accusations one day only to deny them the next, substituting new suspicions (and victims) in their stead. In place of a cogent explanation for his fears, Campbell offers a performance of them; he sets up heavy armed watches and walks about with loaded guns in an act that “would have done credit to any stage” (Palmer 24). What makes this a bad performance, from Palmer’s point of view, is the complete absence of any believable motivation for Campbell’s responses. When he states that Campbell is “accoutered like a perfect Robinson Crusoe” (25), Palmer places the captain in the role of an eccentric castaway, whose self-imposed isolation aboard ship is exemplified by his refusal to adhere to established legal standards for court-martialing or confining those under his command. At last, Palmer and Skirving are placed in the brig for their alleged conspiracy. Still seeking an explanation, Palmer writes, “We demanded a speedy and rigorous trial,” adding that “I despised [Campbell’s] mercy, and demanded only justice” (30). Palmer eschews the arbitrary and capricious workings of leniency; in seeking justice, he is seeking above all a story that will result in a reasoned charge of his criminality. And this is the one thing Campbell cannot or will not provide. When Muir himself confronts Campbell as to the accusations against Palmer, Campbell disingenuously responds, “There is no defense necessary; there is no court of Justice here. I have nothing to do with Mr. Palmer further than to carry him to New South Wales: I am not his prosecutor” (46, italics in original). Muir responds that in confining Palmer without cause, he is violating the fundamental British constitutional guarantee of Habeas Corpus: “Every jailor is obliged to give a copy of the charges against the person he has charge of” (46–47). What Muir and Palmer could not know when Palmer wrote his account, but what was quite true by the time Palmer’s narrative was finally published in Britain in 1797,

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was that Habeas Corpus could indeed be ignored by authorities anxious over domestic unrest. Habeas Corpus would be suspended by Parliament for the last half of the 1790s. In an anticipation of this development, Palmer and Skirving were never tried on the Surprize, nor would they ever receive a warrant justifying their singular treatment while on board. Eight days from landing in Port Jackson, the infuriated Palmer tries once more to secure, “as my right, a copy of the charges exhibited against me, and a copy of the warrant of my commitment” (45, italics in original). Campbell’s refusal, “for reasons of his own,” leads other passengers “to be convinced that the pretended conspiracy was all a fiction” (45).12 Against Campbell’s refusal to provide any kind of narrative justifying his actions, or even to acknowledge that he should provide one, while still aboard ship Palmer begins “a record of my sufferings” (36). In keeping with Campbell’s hostility toward any coherent, much less a written, account of his actions, he demands this document once he learns of its existence. Palmer is bullied into giving up his record, but he first uses his seal and wax to seal them up. To Campbell’s irritation, Palmer refuses to disclose who gave him the ink, pen, and paper in the first place. He then adds: What was taken away was only a part of what I had written, and the figures on the pages shewed the deficiency. After some days the Serjeant came, and told me that it was the Commodore’s orders that I should deliver up the pages of my narrative antecedent to such a number, this proved to me that my seal had been broken, and my papers inspected. Irritated with this, I replied, “tell Campbell that he who had the baseness to destroy all confidence between man and man, by violating the sacred security of a seal in breaking open the second set of papers, may hunt after the first, for I will tell him nothing about them; and indeed,” I added, “I do not know where they are.” Campbell sent me word back that I lied, “tell him,” said I, “that I am a prisoner, or he would not dare to use such language.” The fact is, I had secretly conveyed the former papers to a friend, who I afterwards learned had thought it prudent to destroy them. (37, italics in original)

Like the official seal Governor Phillip takes with him to New South Wales, Palmer’s personal seal is supposed to be a sign of authority. Palmer tries to use his seal to reestablish what his conviction for sedition has dismissed: the right of a principled man to dissent from the opinions of those in power. Campbell perceives this act as yet another kind of mutiny, and moves to seize all accounts of the voyage.13 When Palmer complies, he gives Campbell only part of what he has written,

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a fragment. He has written a more complete account of what has happened; he can, in other words, provide a narrative. Campbell is forced to acknowledge this when he demands the rest of Palmer’s account. Palmer’s record will only look like a fragment to anyone who sees Campbell’s copy because the captain has violated the code of honor existing between gentlemen when he broke Palmer’s seal. Having failed this test, Campbell naturally will not receive from Palmer anything else, including the rest of the record or the name of the man he gave it to (Palmer does not disclose this name to the reader either). Campbell’s own mutiny against the rules governing genteel behavior, a crime he compounds by later accusing Palmer of lying, will reduce Palmer’s first record to a fragment, since the part Campbell does not possess will be destroyed. But Palmer’s second record, the account published in London in 1797, painstakingly recounts Palmer’s acts and points out that his enemies are the ones whose capricious acts and fits of temper stem from no justifiable motive. Palmer’s published articulation is not mutinous insofar as it attempts to reestablish standards of good breeding, as well as rational argument, amid the chaos of Campbell’s paranoia. Similarly, Coleridge in his lectures explicitly invokes a shipboard conceit to explain why public debate over government policy is no mutiny in the turbulent 1790s. Crisis changes the definitions of sedition and public duty: “When the Wind is fair and the Planks of the Vessel sound, we may safely trust every thing to the management of professional Mariners: in a Tempest and on board a crazy Bark, all must contribute their quota of exertion. The Stripling is not exempted from it by his youth, nor the Passenger by his inexperience” (Coleridge, Lectures 33). While Palmer portrays Campbell as an increasingly isolated figure who seems to be in the throes of a nervous breakdown, the author himself emerges as a man who, even at the antipodes, has defenders in Britain who will labor to clear his name. Though at the other end of the world, he retains a sense of context as a British intellectual and gentleman encouraged by a close-knit community of well-wishers. This is very different than the fate of Campbell’s most reviled, and unlikely, accomplice on the voyage: Maurice Margarot. In perhaps the Narrative’s most bizarre twist, Margarot becomes Campbell’s confident during the voyage and a kind of double agent, dining with other convicts and reporting back to the captain on their conversations, communicating in whispers, hints, and innuendo. Seizing the moral high ground from the beginning of Narrative, Palmer’s editor reprints a letter signed by Muir, Palmer, and Skirving summarizing Margarot’s behavior to explain why he “stands a man rejected and

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expelled from our society” (xi, italics in original). The power to exile, finally, belongs to those who understand in true Godwinian fashion that “principles are eternal, and events the most disastrous, have a tendency only to accelerate their march, and to operate upon their purification” (xii). The authorities who willfully disregard the orderly progression of these principles are the real criminals. Palmer presumably intended his account to help vindicate the reputations of the reformers sent to Botany Bay. Its effects ended up being more complex and varied. When the incidents of the voyage became known back home, they caused an uproar among political liberals to whom the narrative seemed to present an image of the supposedly unified reform movement falling apart before the pressure of competing personalities and agendas. Thomas Hardy, Margarot’s friend and ally at the London Corresponding Society, could not believe Palmer’s account of how badly Margarot had acted on the voyage and later would ask Francis Place to make a thorough assessment of the extant documents and depositions about the incidents aboard the Surprize. Bewley speculates that, to the extent that Palmer, Skirving, and Muir were “so closely involved, they did not appreciate that their quarrel with Margarot would cause great distress among the reformers and amusement to their enemies. When Palmer’s account was published it further damaged Margarot’s reputation. It is a lively piece of propaganda” (117). The task of separating representations of this voyage from the reality have continued to prove a challenge. Palmer’s portrayal of Margarot as an unscrupulous turncoat who became willing to do anything to curry favor with the authorities is hard to reconcile with accounts of Margarot’s mercurial, highly independent personality. Certainly once the Surprize landed at Botany Bay, Margarot quickly resumed the kind of rhetoric that had so aggravated the establishment back home. Palmer “quickly decided that concern for politics would be altogether out of place in New South Wales” and became a pragmatic and successful speculator in rum and other goods (Roe 77). In contrast, Margarot was repeatedly disciplined for offending colony administrators with his radical views. By 1805 he had become a sufficient irritant to be retransported to the notoriously isolated and harsh secondary penal colony on Norfolk Island and then again to Tasmania (Van Dieman’s Land); by 1806 he was relocated again, this time to another outer settlement where he was “threatened with hard labour and flagellation should he misbehave further” (75).14 The vast distance between Australia and the rest of the Anglophone world served the function British officials had hoped for in that it

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prevented by a variety of means the return of most of the convicts discussed in this study. George Barrington never saw Europe again; after a decade of apparently faithful service to the British crown, he died at the settlement of Parramatta, reportedly insane, in 1804. His birth year remains dispute (like so much else about him), but he was probably about forty-nine years old. Among the Scottish Martyrs, only Maurice Margarot lived to see Britain again, returning penniless in 1810 after being beggared by the expenses of the voyage back and dying five years later at the age of seventy. Despite his heroic attempts to reach the newly independent United States, Thomas Muir died ill and alone in Paris in 1798. Joseph Gerrald and William Skirving died within days of each other in Botany Bay in 1796, weakened by illness and travel to Australia. Thomas Fyshe Palmer’s quiet and industrious life upon arriving at Sydney earned him a full pardon, a reward Barrington eventually received as well. The learning and intellectual curiosity that had gotten Palmer into trouble in Britain turned out to be his undoing in the south Pacific, although in a different way. Drawing on his reading in the colony’s only encyclopedia, he went into shipbuilding, a career that was halted by his shipwreck in the East Indies as he tried to sail back to England. Taken into custody by the Spaniards, Palmer died of cholera—a variety of fever he had managed to elude while incarcerated in England—in a colonial jail in 1802. For the acquitted defendants of the 1794 London treason trials, Pascoe explains, “Their arrests and trials became over time the defining moments of these men’s lives. They return to 1794 continually, whether through public celebrations of the anniversaries of their acquittals or through the construction of their memoirs” (Romantic Theatricality 39). The Scottish Martyrs’ own widely criticized convictions helped lay the groundwork for these subsequent acquittals, and broadsides of Palmer’s letters back to England were published as late as 1799. But the Martyrs were not to have the gratification of sustained personal self-dramatization. Muir reportedly wrote some autobiographical documents while in Australia, but he left them behind during his escape and they were never published. Nevertheless, in the end, Botany Bay’s first political prisoners cast a long shadow in nineteenth-century British culture. When the cause of parliamentary reform re-emerged after the Napoleonic wars, advocates for change revived the memories of these men, the first members of the middle class courageous enough to publicly challenge the modern political establishment in Britain. Celebrating the passage of the 1832

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reform bill, the Corn Law poet Ebenezer Elliott traced the origins of this victory to the sacrifices made in the 1790s. His composition “The Triumph of Reform” proclaims: Oh could the wise, the brave, the just, Who suffered—died—to break our chains; Could Muir, could Palmer from the dust, Could murdered Gerrald hear our strains; Then would martyrs, thron’d in bliss, See all ages bless’d in this.

In 1837, Tait’s Magazine gathered together a variety of commentary on the trials, published as Memoirs and Trials of the Political Martyrs of Scotland; persecuted during the years 1793 and 1794. viz: Thomas Muir; Thomas Fyshe Palmer; William Skirving; Joseph Gerrald; and Maurice Margarot. The Memoirs opened by underscoring the aspect of the trails that continued to draw the most attention and criticism: the sentences of exile to Australia. In England, the authors contended, even Paine himself would have received no more than a fine and imprisonment. The authorities’ subsequent overreaching on this occasion, however, would help to hasten the eventual end of an oligarchy whose desperation and cruelty it unambiguously disclosed. But in Scotland they sentenced them to the most shocking species of transportation; transportation—not to America, not to a cultivated society, to an easy master, and to kind treatment—but to an inhospitable desert in the extremity of the earth—condemned to live with ruffians, whom the gibbet only had spared, and under a system of despotism rendered necessary for the government of such a tribe! The mind of man, shuddering at a disproportionate sentence, could feel no respect for the administration of justice so strained; and the hand of authority was therefore weakened and palsied by the act. (Memoirs 2–3)

Critics of British Romanticism generally have overlooked the literature concerning the experience of transportation. Robert Hughes remarks that exile to Australia seemed to offer Georgian authorities the perfect way to dispose of political prisoners, in particular: “. . . transportation got rid of the dissenter without making a hero of him on the scaffold. He slipped off the map into a distant limbo, where his voice fell dead at his feet” (175). In a sense, this description reflects how Romanticists have tended to regard the subject of transportation itself. Although they worried about being abandoned

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by their contemporaries as time wore on,15 the Scottish Martyrs were not forgotten by the contemporaries who read accounts of their trials, and who published pamphlet biographies and broadsides in their defense.16 The substance of their legal arguments would be taken up by contemporaries who remained in Britain but whose sense of alienation was powerful. Persecuted reformer John Thelwall, for example, escaped conviction for treason in 1794. Thelwall’s later attempts to exonerate his name and cause appropriated some of Palmer’s techniques: Michael Scrivener describes how Thelwall among others used lectures after his trial as essentially another chance to address his jury, and how Thelwall offered reformers as the true British patriots at odds with illegitimate, though entrenched, authority (175–176). Literary scholars have focused on reformers like Thelwall, who remained in Britain, and have been largely content to leave the stories of the early Australian exiles themselves to either historians of crime or to scholars of early Australian literature. Yet the threat of exile shaped in crucial ways the rhetoric and tactics of British reformers, particularly during the 1790s, after the sedition trials of 1793 sent gentlemen to the antipodes for a crime that to many was no crime at all. These men and their sympathizers labored to ensure that the exile did not simply “slip off the map,” struggling instead to use their marginalized position to continue their attacks on a political system that they felt had betrayed its own origins, as well as its current constituency. The government’s decision to eliminate its political enemies by transporting them illuminated what was, for reformers, the guiding error of the conservative establishment: the promulgation of a political “narrative” of historically defined rights little better than a ruin, a story so selective that it relegated most of the nation’s subjects to political invisibility. Despite their differences as individuals, George Barrington and the Scottish Martyrs seize on the experiences of trial and transportation to call into question key assumptions about the nature of nationality and crime. Defying stereotypes of convicts as aliens infesting Britain, the condemned demonstrate the power of conviction, double-identified here with judicial punishment but also a stubborn refusal to reproduce received ideas about national identity, social class, and moral virtue. The central event of Barrington’s narrative—repelling a mutiny— allows even a hardened petty criminal eventually to claim a respected role in the British empire. Only a few years later, the Scottish Martyrs represent mutiny as a rhetorical dodge perpetrated by their persecutors, men whose official standing cannot disguise their inability to

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justify their claims in the only real language of legitimate authority— the cause and effect sequencing of coherent narrative. In both cases, transportation into exile allows these writers to complicate assumptions about guilt and innocence, whose varied nature the political uproar of the 1780s and 1790s had all but drowned out.

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Chapter 5

E dge wor t h a n d t h e Je w s: D i a sp or a a n d Pol i t ic a l C on t rol

Dispelled from their homeland and scattered across Europe for

over a thousand years, the Jews were the paradigmatic diaspora for Europeans during the Romantic era. Some Britons with millenarian yearnings, identifying a Jewish return to Palestine with the end of days and religious apocalypse, dreamed of the creation of a Jewish state. But unlike French émigrés or transported convicts, the Jews had no extant nation to which they might return. Perceptions of Jews’ religious and racial difference were compounded by the highly sedimented nature of Jewish cultural identity. Expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, Jews were readmitted beginning in the midseventeenth century. By contrast, Jewish communities had existed for centuries in other European nations. These groups possessed different subcultures tinged by the national identities of their hosts.1 As a legacy of living secret lives amid the Inquisition, Sephardic Jews in particular had absorbed many traits of their Christian, Spanish neighbors. Todd Endelman explains, “In matters of dress, speech, manners, and the like, bourgeois Sephardim were indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts” (Jews of Georgian England 120). The differences in culture, as well as religious traditions, between Jews of Spanish or Portuguese origin (Sephardim) and those of Central and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) could be vast. On one hand, the extent and duration of the Jewish diaspora divides representations of Jews from others groups considered in

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this study. On the other hand, insofar as Jews lived in England well before the Emigration, as well as before the advent of transportation, how Britons responded to Jews anticipated and set the terms for the questions raised by French émigrés and transported British convicts. In a similar vein, Aamir K. Mufti begins his recent study of the secular Indian state’s attitudes toward Muslims with a historical exploration of attitudes toward Jews from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Mufti contends that Georgian literature about Jews establishes the narratives and paradigms through which Britons came to terms with an array of minorities—including the colonial subjects in the far-flung nineteenth-century British empire. The emergence of the Jews across Western Europe as a “question” centered around the challenge posed by their persistence, as a group, to the ideals of the emerging liberal state, a state theoretically predicated on secular culture and religious toleration. What Mufti calls “the particularism of the Jews”—perceptions of the stubborn perseverance of Jewish difference, in religion and identity—threatened fundamental Enlightenment ideals of secularism and universal equality.2 Jews seeking acceptance in early nineteenth-century British society were dogged by the stigma of racial and religious difference, regardless of their daily practices and personal religious convictions. In their perpetual exile, Jews operated as a powerful symbol for some writers’ sense of alienation from British culture and values. For example, Byron’s 1816 collection Hebrew Melodies, written in collaboration with Jewish composer Isaac Nathan, calls up the historic lineage of Jewish wandering and looks ahead to the poet’s own imminent, permanent departure from England. But more common was the reaction of Charles Lamb, who criticizes the growing acceptability of Jews and Jewish culture in Regency society.3 In his oftreprinted Elia essay “Imperfect Sympathies” (1821), Lamb dismisses Jewish efforts to fit into mainstream British society as insincere and doomed to failure: I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews christianizing—Christians judaizing—puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of

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anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative.. (121)

For Lamb, being British still means being a Christian—or at least, not being Jewish. The “essentially separative” nature of Jewish identity, no matter how fervently disavowed, clings to the Jews Lamb encounters. For decades, Jews in England had grappled with serious obstacles to assimilation, regardless of their lifestyles or tastes. Their difficulties looked ahead to those experienced by other aliens, from English/French hybrids, such as Frances Burney’s Juliet Granville, to convicts of actual, or perceived, “foreign” origin (the Irish George Barrington, the Scottish Thomas Muir and Thomas Muir, or the French Maurice Margarot). This chapter will explore these questions through an analysis of what has become the touchstone work for Romantic scholarship on Jews and Judiasm: Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817).4 One of this writer’s final, and most ambitious, novels, Edgeworth’s text combines the history of the “Jewish question” with an allegory of contemporary, Regency politics. Edgeworth was a child of the Enlightenment and, as a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, a writer on familiar terms with hyphenated identity. Much of Edgeworth’s novelistic output, ranging from Castle Rackrent (1800) to Ennui (1809) to Ormond (1817—published with Harrington in a double-volume set), aims to graft the ideals of rationality and religious toleration, particularly as regards Roman Catholicism, onto the identity of Anglo-Irish landowners. In taking on the history of Jews, the writer of Harrington labors assiduously to dispel prejudice against such groups as irrational, unfair, and self-destructive. At the same time, her project is haunted by the persistence of Jewish difference even in its final pages, and the promise of true acceptance in Britain for Jews remains elusive at the novel’s end. Edgeworth’s difficulties imagining true assimilation, despite her sympathy for Jews in the novel, have struck many writers as inconsistent with Edgeworth’s lifelong veneration of reason and impartiality. But if we recall Aamir Mufti’s argument, then it is precisely Edgeworth’s roots in the Enlightenment that lead her to see Jewish “particularity” as an irresolvable problem. Although her perspective on Jews in Harrington begins about as far from that of Lamb as one can imagine, her conclusions ironically are similar. Yet Edgeworth’s ambitions in Harrington go beyond defending Jews in British society. The novel focuses on two flash points in the eighteenth-century history of religious intolerance: the repeal of the

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1753 Jewish Naturalization Act, and the 1780 Gordon riots against Catholics. These historical referents extend the text’s subject matter into an examination of how British racial, religious, and class prejudice, broadly conceived, take agency from victims and perpetrators alike—a conclusion with pointed implications for the contemporary political scene when Harrington was published in 1817. The central trope in the novel for this process is that of ventriloquism. Even as ventriloquism was a popular entertainment in Georgian society, many writers associated it with political upheaval and subversion. Historically, the individuals persistently identified with the politics of ventriloquism, with secretly manipulating public affairs, and public officials, while appearing to do little explicitly, were Jews. The discourse in Britain on Jews and Judaism consistently returned to the idea of clandestine conspiracies aimed at murdering Christian children, destroying Christian communities, and ultimately controlling Christian institutions and governments.5 This history adds an unexplored dimension to depictions of Jews and Jewishness in post-war Regency culture. The years of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies and Lamb’s “Imperfect Sympathies” coincided with the evolution of political radicalism in Britain. Debate over Britain’s political future— would it be a republic or not?—was stifled by the gagging measures of the Pitt ministry in the 1790s. But such discussion resurfaced with greater urgency after the termination of war with Napoleon in 1814. The purported threat to British security in this period was not the Jews, however, but rather working-class activists insistent on parliamentary reform. The conservative ministry contained this challenge in the same way that Britons historically had responded to the threat of Jewish difference: by accusing its critics of conspiracy and violence. Harrington is perhaps the first text to self-consciously scrutinize this particular confluence of events, giving the novel a motive beyond justice for Jews. Edgeworth relocates blame for civil unrest from traditionally reviled groups onto other agents associated with the fearmongering of her own time. Attacking an aristocracy that conceals its own voice while speaking through others, Edgeworth illustrates how the real villains are those who use traditional prejudices against disenfranchised groups like the Jews to control their social inferiors and to conceal their own sordid or irresponsible motives.

Ventriloquism and the Jews In a novel filled with peculiar dreams and waking trances, one of the strangest dreams experienced by Harrington’s protagonist invokes

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the motif of ventriloquism. The crisis over Harrington’s romance has come to a head; the Jewish Mr. Montenero must decide if Harrington is too unbalanced to allow his daughter Berenice to marry the young Englishman. Harrington proclaims that he has overcome his early, irrational aversion to Jews, but his dreams as he anxiously awaits Montenero’s decision tell a different story. As he falls asleep at night, all the horrors of early associations returned upon me. Whenever I began to doze, I felt the nervous oppression, the dreadful weight upon my chest—I saw beside my bed the old figure of Simon the Jew; but he spoke to me with the voice and in the words of Mr. Montenero. The dreams of this night were more terrible than any reality that can be conceived; and even when I was broad awake, I felt that I had not the command of my mind. (231)

In Michael Ragussis’ reading, this dream shows how prejudice, if unconquered, will destroy Harrington’s happiness: “the child’s primitive terror of Jews . . . stands in the young lover’s way twenty years later” (Figures 74). But the peculiar method of this disclosure is as significant as its content. Montenero is a cosmopolitan art collector who exemplifies how much Sephardic Jews resembled their Christian counterparts. In this dream, he appears to be speaking through Simon, the Jewish old clothes peddler who is the first object of Harrington’s childhood terror. The character of Simon is as representative in its way as that of Montenero. Simon’s inflected speech codes him as an emigrant from Eastern Europe, and the way in which Harrington’s childhood nurse Fowler demonizes him reflects sociological reality; Todd Endelman rehearses the old clothes trade’s association with theft and other crimes, as well as the fact that the many Ashkenazi Jews “who carried on the trade were strikingly visible and highly vocal. Many of them continued to wear the long dark caftan and broad-brimmed hat of Central and Eastern European Jewry” (Jews of Georgian England 182). Harrington’s dream of voice-throwing conflates these two men—different in national origin, class, education, and tastes—into one formidable, alien monster.6 By imagining Montenero as “speaking” through Simon’s mouth, Harrington’s unconscious robs Simon of his voice and subjects both Jews to a leveling hysteria that erases their individuality. What really separates Berenice and her confused suitor, according to the dream, is not simply a primitive anti-Semitism. Rather, it is Harrington’s general susceptibility to irrational influences that are registered here through the idea of ventriloquism. This metaphor has a complex history in the Romantic period. This was a golden age for the performing ventriloquist on the English

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stage; the 1810s saw the rise of the first great ventriloquists of the London theaters, most notably the Frenchman Alexandre Vattemare and the British comic actor Charles Mathews. Ventriloquistic imagery and references are much apparent in early nineteenth-century society. Perhaps most famously for scholars of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria (1817) describes his creative process using this trope: “I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible” (164). Edward Bostetter’s The Romantic Ventriloquists argued for the resonance of ventriloquism as a general motif for Romantic poets, finding expression in a range of aesthetic theories and symbols ranging from Keats’ idea of negative capability to Coleridge’s Eolian harp. Ventriloquists were popular performers at open-air fairs, in traveling shows, and in other popular venues. In The Prelude (1805), William Wordsworth places one at Bartholomew Fair along with other street performers that make up “all freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts / Of man; his dullness, madness, and their feats— / All jumbled up together to make up / This parliament of monsters” (7. 688–691). It is unclear if Maria Edgeworth ever saw a ventriloquist perform or if she was, like her friend Walter Scott (among other Georgian authors), a “connoisseur of ventriloquism” (Connor 307). But Edinburgh professor Dugald Stewart, an old friend of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s whom his daughter knew well, was fascinated by the art of voice-throwing, writing that “I shall ever regret that the state of my health rendered it impossible for me to attend the extraordinary, and by all accounts, unparalleled, performances” of Alexandre Vattemare in Scotland (170n). Stewart took up the subject at some length in his classic of the Scottish Enlightenment, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792). He argued that control over the audience’s imagination, not a superior ability to project one’s voice, was the key behind successful ventriloquism. Stewart explains: “That the imagination alone of the spectators, when skilfully [sic] managed, may be rendered subservient, in a considerable degree, to the purposes of a ventriloquist, I am fully satisfied; and I am rather inclined to think that, when seconded by such powers of imitation as some mimics possess, it is quite sufficient to account for all the phenomena of ventriloquism of which I have ever heard” (170). Steven Connor fleshes out the implications of Stewart’s thinking: . . . the ventriloquist, like the hypnotist, relies upon the audience to verify his suggestions with regard to his invisible or inhuman interlocutors.

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Rather than the ventriloquist consciously directing the process from the outside, he may initiate a circuit of identifications that is actually much more like the scenes of hysterical or religious contagion . . . or the collective representations of the mesmeric session, than the operations of the master illusionist. (303)

Connor observes that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked a shift in perceptions of ventriloquism and ventriloquists; the public’s belief that such powers were divinely inspired was giving way to a view of the ventriloquist as a free agent, who could use his powers to entertain and to control. While many were delighted by such performances, a sinister underside of the new ventriloquism included its potential use “as a violence towards the one that is ventriloquized, or reduced to the condition of a dummy. The danger of ventriloquism was now no longer that it could allow the unscrupulous to exploit and delude the credulous, but that it might involve reducing others to the condition of objects, by stealing or annihilating their voices” (297). In fact, as Connor points out, in the 1810s both views of ventriloquism—as a method for misleading the credulous and as a way of reducing a speaker to a cipher—coexisted; the public associated ventriloquists with parlor amusements, but also with political unrest.7 Interest in the topic endured; in 1828, Dugald Stewart’s remarks were reprinted as “Observations on Ventriloquism” in a number of the Edinburgh Journal of Science alongside other commentaries and accounts of performances. Two of the three performances recounted in the Edinburgh Journal issue are by Frenchmen; the third account, from 1803, features a British ventriloquist recently returned from France. The dangerous political implications of mimicry and ventriloquism are explicit in this last report, in which a “M. Fitz-James” performs twenty different voices from a political meeting in Nanterre “taken from the late times of anarchy and convulsion in France, when the lowest, the most ignorant part of society, was called upon to decide the fate of a whole people by the energies of folly and brute violence” (Brewster 258–259). The ventriloquist is uniquely capable of conveying the political cacophony of revolutionary France. In the language of the writer, the ignorant masses are manipulated, or “called upon,” by some unnamed agent (various scheming political operatives? Napoleon? History itself?) to determine the destiny of a nation, and the result is years of imperial warfare and domestic tyranny. Wordsworth’s formulation in The Prelude similarly endows the ventriloquist’s art with not only aesthetic but also political implications: the ventriloquist is one element in a chaotic

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“parliament” that he opposes to the rule of nature. A contemporary of Wordsworth and a father of the American novel, Charles Brockden Brown, made the character of a ventriloquist, Carwin, central in his 1798 novel Wieland; Brockden Brown uses the ventriloquist’s ability to manipulate apparently sourceless voices as a political allegory for the workings of hidden forces trying to undercut the stability of the newly created United States.8 The battleground of political discourse in post-war Britain provides one powerful reason why ventriloquism continued to be associated with political unrest. As in Charles Brockden Brown’s America, verbal clashes over the best political course for Britain were haunted by uncertainty over who, exactly, was speaking at any given moment and why. The conservative government’s tactics, including the infamous use of agents provocateurs to draw out radical cells and push reformers to employ violent language and tactics, made it difficult to distinguish the putative plots of the radical opposition from the plots of the Liverpool ministry itself. Government spies and radical leaders alike were suspected of urging others to adopt language and take actions that could not validly be called their own; the performing ventriloquist parlayed the comparable ability to throw his voice into a theatrical occupation.

A View of the English Stage As James Shapiro and Michael Ragussis have shown, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is a central text when analyzing British attitudes toward Jews and national identity. The shift in attitude toward Jews in the early nineteenth century was typified by a historic performance of Shakespeare’s play at Drury Lane on 26 January 1814. At the time, Edmund Kean was a little-known actor from the provinces with a Jewish father; Edmund was raised by his uncle Moses Kean, himself a noted mimic and ventriloquist (Hawkins 16–27). Kean insisted on debuting at Drury Lane in the role of Shylock; supported by Byron, the actor prevailed over objections from theater’s managing committee. “Kean was the Byron of the stage,” in Judith Page’s characterization, “overturning hierarchies, displaying intense passion, identifying with the outcast, and living the life of the Romantic artist who burned out through his own excesses” (54). Page details the ways in which Kean’s interpretation of Shylock struck observers and fellow-cast members as revolutionary. Eschewing the traditional red wig, Kean also discarded the conventional view of Shylock as a one-dimensional villain inherited from the great eighteenth-century

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performer Charles Macklin. William Hazlitt, among others, championed Kean as uncovering the original spirit of a play that had been obscured by successive misinterpretations on stage. Kean’s detractors, Hazlitt claims in 1816, have formed an overstrained idea of the gloomy character of Shylock, probably more from seeing other players perform it than from the text of Shakespeare. Mr. Kean’s manner is much nearer the mark. Shakespeare could not easily divest his characters of their entire humanity: his Jew is more than half a Christian. Certainly, our sympathies are much oftener with him than with his enemies. He is honest in his vices; they are hypocrites in their virtues. (188)

Hazlitt’s automatic tendency to ascribe Shylock’s “virtues” to a submerged Christianity in his character is in keeping with Ragussis’s thesis that Jews in nineteenth-century literature are repeatedly “converted,” either figuratively or literally, in a quest to integrate them into British society. Like Charles Lamb, Hazlitt uses a Christian index to measure membership in modern society: the more “Christian” Shylock seems, the greater his claim to “humanity.” In surveying the performance history of the play, however, a recent editor of The Merchant of Venice implies that it is with Kean’s groundbreaking performance that Shylock begins to live up to his role as the “first stage Jew in English drama who is multi-dimensional and thus made to appear human” (Halio 9). This is because watching Kean is, in Hazlitt’s assessment, less like watching a theatrical performance than like reading “the text of Shakespeare.” This perspective positions Kean not as a manipulator of the audience or the onstage action but as a victim of an acting tradition that obscures the play’s dialogue and has tainted prevailing critical standards. Within the drama itself, “hypocrites” onstage victimize Shylock. If we accept Steven Connor’s definition of ventriloquism as “the separation of voices (and sounds) from their source, and the compensatory ascription of source to those sounds” (22), then by offering himself as a transparent medium for experiencing Shakespeare’s text, Kean in Hazlitt’s reading is the opposite of a ventriloquist, content to let artistic genius speak for itself.9 Kean’s early London appearances in The Merchant of Venice coincided with the end of the Napoleonic wars; two months after his debut as Shylock, the allies were in Paris. During the ensuing resumption of agitation for British political reform, the issues of control and manipulation foregrounded in Hazlitt’s reviews were very much at

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issue. The multiplying faces on the political scene created a bewildering chaos of voices whose origins and agendas were often murky, and whose intended audience, ambiguous. In the particularly unsettled political climate spanning 1815–1817, political opponents drew lines that would establish the terms of debate for decades to come. The controversial passage of the Corn Bill in 1815 led to riots in Norwich and Birmingham, and the Corn Laws would be a major target of radicals until their abolition in the 1840s. The Spa Fields uprising followed in early December 1816, after which the so-called Blanketeers tried, and were prevented from, marching to London to petition the Regent to address political corruption. By 1817, much of the repressive legislation used during the 1790s to suppress the reform movement resurfaced: authorities suspended Habeas Corpus in March 1817, restricted public meetings, and prohibited the election of delegates by provincial and metropolitan clubs. Central to the Regency reform controversy was disagreement over who had a right to speak—and to be addressed—in light of British history and the terms of the nation’s constitution. Whom exactly did the constitution interpellate—who was included in vague terms like “the people”? All men who had come of age, only landed proprietors, only governmental representatives, or some other group entirely? (Fulcher 60–70). The authorities’ tactics, in particular the well-known use of agents provocateurs, compromised their claim that they alone could decide such questions. Public revelations about secret agents repeatedly frustrated officials seeking courtroom convictions for participants in radical clubs and demonstrations. In James Watson’s trial for treason after the December 1816 Spa Fields uprising, radical organizer Henry Hunt’s testimony pointing to the government’s use of agent provocateur James Castle was decisive in an acquittal. Hunt’s testimony particularly cited Castle’s tendency at radical functions to literally try to put words in the mouths of his supposed comrades, suggesting seditious toasts for which he demanded support (Worrall 108).10 Similarly, information regarding the machinations of agents provocateurs in 1817 undermined the Home Office’s attempts to convict several newspapermen of seditious libel (Derry 71). Hunt himself became a lightning rod, at the time and subsequently, for conservative condemnations of radical tactics. The role of voice in Hunt’s alleged manipulation of the malleable public is signaled by the derisive sobriquet given to him by Robert Southey of “Orator” Hunt. While Hunt also worked as an organizer and financier of the radical cause, it was expressly his role as a speaker at large public gatherings that earned

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him notoriety. Addressing a crowd at Spa Fields in November 1816, Hunt himself noted that anti-reform forces had recently switched tactics, targeting not the people but their leaders and orators who had supposedly deluded the public into believing government was an enemy.11 The broad resonance the trope of voice still has in discussions of political manipulation is evidenced in our own use of the term “dictator” to describe a totalitarian ruler. Low literacy rates in the early nineteenth century made the voice a particularly important way of communicating with the groups that radicals like Hunt felt were a key constituency. Henry Hunt knew agents provocateurs were present at gatherings like the three meetings at Spa Fields, and his own successes lay partly in his refusal to adopt older radical tactics of conspiracy, favoring instead open, constitutional means of protest such as the mass meeting and the petition. His attempts to redeem the idea of the people’s voice as a legitimate mode for political protest was, however, under constant attack. William Cobbett, Hunt’s friend and correspondent, understood how clearly implicated the Liverpool ministry was in rumors of supposed radical “plots”: “They sigh for a PLOT. Oh, how they sigh! They are working and slaving and fretting and stewing; they are sweating all over, they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot!” (qtd. in Belcham 68). It was the language of the plot, as much as any specific action or planned event, which Parliament used to justify the repressions of 1817. The exact origins of that language were impossible for the public to identify, since MPs contemplated the evidence behind the closed doors of secret committees (Belcham 71).

The Politics of Anti-Semitism The most pressing problem posed by a politics of ventriloquism is that of finding the ultimate speaker, the agent to be held accountable for the words he places in the mouths of others. Maria Edgeworth takes up this challenge in Harrington, with anti-Semitism as a case study for how internalized prejudice of any sort can rob anyone of his real voice. Harrington’s ventriloquistic dream about Montenero and Simon the old clothes man returns the reader to the novel’s beginning when, as a young child, he is conditioned to fear and loathe Jews. Harrington’s nurse Fowler intimidates him into obeying her commands through folktales about Jews who murder Christian children. In her hands, Harrington becomes a precocious hysteric, raving, shaking, and sweating whenever he sees or hears a Jew. Narrating this history years later, the mature Harrington compares himself to

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well-known eighteenth-century performing imposters like George Psalmanazar, who masqueraded as a native of Formosa, and to the pupils of Franz Mesmer (Edgeworth 75–76). Dugald Stewart, who believed the bodily expression of hysteria was a kind of ventriloquism, induced by another person to manipulate the nervous (as in Mesmerism), would understand Harrington’s development into a Jew-hater at Fowler’s behest in terms of a ventriloquistic circuit.12 In Harrington, then, Edgeworth sets out to investigate the politics of voice-throwing in what she had come to regard as one of its purest forms, anti-Semitism. Her novel emphasizes the particular vulnerability of Jews, foreign in religion, race, and often in nationality, before a mode of address that involves the theft of voice. As Judith Butler emphasizes, voice is essential to the political model of interpellation posited by Althusser; she goes on to suggest that the alien, literally a “displaced” person, is especially prone to the loss of freedom interpellation implies because of his particular vulnerability to hate speech. Confronted by insults or slurs, “Exposed at the moment of such a shattering is precisely the volatility of one’s ‘place’ within the community of speakers; one can be ‘put in one’s place’ by such speech, but such a place may be no place” (Judith Butler 4). The early chapters of Edgeworth’s novel chronicle Harrington’s conversion, via Fowler’s anti-Semitic slanders, into a dummy. The trope of voice repeatedly describes how Fowler develops her control over Harrington’s habits of thought. Curious about Simon the Jew, whom he sees from to balcony of his parent’s London home, Harrington refuses to go to bed when his nurse commands. Fowler forces him to submit through her own deployment of voice: “. . . she proceeded to tell me, in a mysterious tone, stories of Jews who had been known to steal poor children for the purpose of killing, crucifying and sacrificing them . . .” (70). When she frightens him into promising “not to tell” his parents the “secret” she has communicated to him, the truth about Jewish murders of children, his bondage to this oath finalizes Harrington’s status as someone with no real voice of his own (71). Of course, not only Harrington’s voice is stolen; so is Simon’s, and that of any other Jew who could reform Harrington’s perceptions.13 Anti-Semitism, for Edgeworth, harms the Jew-hater as much as it does the Jews themselves, making the anti-Semite an uncanny double for the group he despises. Reliant on a passive acceptance of old stories and slanders, the anti-Semite, like those he hates, is denied the development of his own capacity for individuality and expression. The irrational beliefs initially instilled by Fowler’s voice reappear in printed books and supplant all other claims on the boy’s

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attention. Harrington also helplessly internalizes the spoken words of physicians who come to diagnose him as an incurably nervous person: “I really often did not know the difference between my own feelings and the descriptions I heard given of what I felt” (76). This education has distinct class implications: Fowler’s “oracular duplicity” in repeating racist slander turns the person who should be her master into “her slave and her victim,” a boy incapable of growing into the social leader he would seem destined to be (70, 72). Harrington’s hysteria about Jews feminizes him—in his father’s words, turning him into a “miss molly”—but also relegates him to increasingly lower levels of supervision, until he finally slides to a no man’s land unregistered on the social grid. As the family tires of Harrington’s emotional displays of fear and Fowler leaves the household for a position elsewhere, he is left alone at night to put himself to sleep as best he can. His mother attends parties in the evenings, during which . . . the nurse, and lady’s maid, and housekeeper, went down to their tea; and the housemaid, who was ordered by the housekeeper to stay with me, soon followed, charging the under housemaid to supply her place; who went off also in her turn, leaving me in charge of the cook’s daughter, a child of nine years old, who soon stole out of the room, and scampered away along the gallery out of reach of my voice, leaving the room to darkness and to me—and there I lay, in all the horrors of a low nervous fever, unpitied and alone. (77, italics in original)

Precluded from developing into a man with a houseful of servants, he is unfit at this stage even to be supervised by them. Tellingly, the ultimate figure for this helplessness is his inability to reach anyone with his voice. Presented here as a physical, as well as an emotional, cripple, Harrington does not consider that he could “scamper along the gallery” out of his bedroom as easily as the nine-year-old who deserts him. Instead, in his failure to be heard he lies abed like an aged invalid, identifying with the “poor children” whom Fowler tells him are stolen by Jews in the streets, after which they are baked into pies. The reason for Edgeworth’s historical setting for her investigation of anti-Semitism soon becomes clear: her focus is roughly the thirty years between the repeal of the Jewish Naturalization Act and the Gordon riots, whose participants targeted “Papists” and Frenchmen as foreigners conspiring against British liberties and institutions.14 These events return us to the idea of the political plot, which finally seems to be what unifies the many different elements of this novel.

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Edgeworth’s obsession with plots and conspiracies in Harrington has been almost completely overshadowed for scholars by its interest in cultural history, testifying to the near invisibility of its principal conspirator, Lord Mowbray.15 A figure who persistently drops out of recent interpretations of this novel, Mowbray secretly circulates rumors about the adult Harrington’s insanity, based on his childhood anti-Semitic hysteria, in order to defame him and thwart his romance with Berenice Montenero. In other words, the real conspirators against British freedoms are not foreigners at all, but members of the ruling class bent on control and revenge. In his attempt to consolidate his social and economic power, Mowbray takes in Britons and foreign-born Jews alike. He does so not by open denunciation, but by a systematic campaign to ruin Harrington’s reputation that manages to all but erase Mowbray’s own role as instigator. In this, Mowbray and his chief accomplice, Harrington’s nurse Fowler, serve as doubles for a wide range of enemies both to Jews and to Britain. This invisible alliance between aristocrats and working-class dependents, rather than any secret plot engineered by marginal groups like the Jews, presents the real threat to British political stability. In this context, Mowbray stages eruptions of anti-Semitism, for others to either approve or condemn, largely to distract other characters from larger questions of who will wield social power and financial influence. Edgeworth dramatizes how anti-Semitism, and similarly irrational fears, can become cynical political weapons to manipulate individuals, economic classes, and political parties. The process of ventriloquism allegorizes how subjects with this goal shield themselves from scrutiny. The portrait of Harrington’s father, an MP and a prominent man in his party, introduces the idea of anti-Semitism as a political strategy. Harrington’s father also demonstrates the potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences of getting in the habit of letting others dictate one’s affairs, a habit that for Edgeworth is one root of anti-Semitic tendencies. Eventually taking Harrington’s education into his own hands, the father exposes his son to political discussions that include the “Jew Bill” of 1753. He had always been a staunch friend of Government; but upon one occasion, when he first came into Parliament, nine or ten years before the time of which I am writing, in 1753 or ’54, I think, he had voted against ministry upon this very bill for the Naturalization of the Jews in England. Government liberally desired that they should be naturalized, but there was a popular cry against it, and my father on this one occasion thought the voice of the people was right. After the bill

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had been carried half through it was given up by the ministry, the opposition to it proving so violent. (84–85)

Harrington’s father’s unusual susceptibility (“this one occasion”) to popular opinion, registered as the people’s “voice,” was the most noted characteristic of the Jewish Naturalization Act controversy. As Thomas Perry’s study of the propaganda surrounding the Act demonstrates, the Pelham ministry repealed the 1753 law largely because of a massive Tory campaign that sought to use the Pelhams’ support for the “Jew Bill” to bring down the ministry. To avert crisis, the government repealed the Act before the election, demonstrating to contemporaries the alarming power of popular agitation to coerce the nation’s leaders. Horace Walpole, for one, was astonished at how rapidly the Pelhams, who seemed inured to shame or outside influences in other cases, reversed their position on Jewish naturalization: in this one case, “a cabal of Ministers . . . who had crammed down every Bill that was calculated for their own power, yielded to transitory noise, and submitted . . . in order to carry a few more members in another Parliament” (qtd. in Paulson, Hogarth 200). In the 1760s, Harrington’s father continues to defend his opposition to Jewish naturalization: “he considered all who were for it as enemies to England” (85). But the real enemies to England, Edgeworth implies, are those like Harrington’s father, who take political positions that are informed by nothing more than personal whim and “violent” public opposition. The young Harrington’s interest in a dinnertime discussion about naturalization impresses his father, who claims that “my attention was a proof of uncommon abilities, and an early decided taste for public business” (86). The conversation brings Harrington to his father’s attention as never before, and shows how irrational prejudice can serve, in Judith Page’s words, as “a kind of male bonding” (153) that shores up his father’s sense of British masculinity. But Harrington pays attention only because his own irrational fear of Jews is worked on by the tone (literally) of the discussion: “turning from one person to another as each spoke, incapable of comprehending their arguments, but fully understanding the vehemence of their tones, and sympathizing in the varying expression of passion” (85), the boy is absorbed by the proceedings. After listening to the debate, he still cannot explain why, exactly, the bill’s opponents feel as they do. His father dismisses this failing as irrelevant to the issue at hand, since “to know on which side one is, is the one great point in life” (87). Edgeworth’s treatment of this occasion recalls some satirical prints dealing with the 1753 election, in particular Hogarth’s An Election

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Entertainment, which features a gathering of drunken Whig supporters at a political dinner. An equally ridiculous group of Tories are visible demonstrating outside the hall, championing outdated or irrelevant issues, including the excise bill of 1733 and the adaptation of the Gregorian calendar. The engraver places a ventriloquist at the Whig gathering not far from the town mayor on the extreme right, who has so debauched himself that he is being bled by a doctor. The ventriloquist, complete with a hand dressed up to resemble a human face, appears in the same line of sight as the window through which we can see the Tories carrying an effigy of a Jew with a sign around its neck reading “No Jews.”16 Visually, the ventriloquist and the culture of performance and manipulation he represents is identified with both the Whigs and the Tories, with both the Jewish Naturalization Act and the general uproar over the election of 1753.17 Ultimately, the anti-Semitism of Harrington’s father is but one example of his generally thoughtless and irresponsible approach to his public and private duties. A final proof of this comes when he is almost ruined at the novel’s end. Unable to govern his own affairs, much less those of his country, Harrington’s father has gone deeply into debt in order to pay for his parliamentary elections. As a result, he has had to sell one of his estates to pay his creditors, and it is the money from this sale—£30,000—that he nearly loses when his bank is imperiled by a financial panic after the Gordon riots. Learning of the potential loss, his wife laments that it would mean the end of their position in society: “if this be gone . . . we are lost indeed!” (255, italics in original). Harrington is prepared from an early age, by his nurse and his father, for life as a ventriloquized dummy. His enduring, involuntary reactions to Jews lead him to fall unwittingly into a series of traps prepared for him by his childhood friend, Lord Mowbray. From the outset, it is clear that Mowbray himself has little interest in the Jewish question per se: the dinnertime discussion of Jewish naturalization that so absorbs the young Harrington merely bores the child Mowbray: “. . . after suppressing the thick-coming yawns that at last could no longer be suppressed, he had risen, writhed, stretched, and had fairly taken himself out of the room” (86). For Mowbray, as for Fowler, anti-Semitism is only useful as an occasional strategy for manipulating people and situations to his advantage. This initially becomes clear at school, when Harrington criticizes Mowbray’s inconsistent behavior to Jacob the Jewish boy peddler: “To ask Jacob to lend me money, to beg him to give me more time to pay a debt, to

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cajole and bully him by turns, to call him alternately usurer and my honest fellow, extortioner and my friend Jacob—my tongue could not have uttered the words, my soul detested the thought; yet all this, and more, could Mowbray do, and did” (92, italics in original). As an adult, Mowbray is repeatedly identified with the world of the theater, and more specifically with a particular moment in the interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. He knows Charles Macklin, the great actor whose villainous interpretation of Shylock was the standard for decades. For the cultured reader of 1817, the emphasis Edgeworth gives to Macklin’s interpretation would have seemed oddly anachronistic given the rapidity with which Kean’s had supplanted it.18 By dwelling on Mowbray’s association with Macklin (Mowbray helps Harrington get tickets to a Macklin production of The Merchant, and he becomes romantically involved with the actress playing Jessica), Edgeworth connects Mowbray’s interest in this anti-Semitic interpretation of Shakespeare and his subsequent reduction of Harrington to a puppet. And when Mowbray begins openly courting the supposedly Jewish Berenice, Harrington marvels at his acquaintenance’s ability to impersonate: “He was an excellent actor, and he was now to act falling in love, which he did by such fine degrees, and with a nicety of art, which so exquisitely imitated nature, that none but the most suspicious or practiced could have detected the counterfeit” (207). Anti-Semitism, for him, is a mask that can be donned or cast off at will, a pattern established when he is a schoolboy. When congeniality will induce Jacob to loan him money, Mowbray is civil; when insults may help him defer repaying a debt, Mowbray does not hesitate to employ them. And when he believes that feigning interest in Judaism and tolerance for Jews will help him win the heiress Berenice, whose fortune he desperately needs to stave off his own ruin, he enthusiastically feigns such interest. The emergence of Mowbray’s use of anti-Semitism to get what he wants is accompanied by his growing power to dictate Harrington’s language and actions. Jacob becomes the school peddler by winning an election held among the schoolboys in which his opponent is the Christian Dutton, son of a Mowbray retainer. For this reason, Mowbray orchestrates a campaign (with obvious political overtones) against Jacob that includes trying to intimidate him into withdrawing voluntarily through various acts of cruelty and betrayal. Harrington initially participates in some of these stunts, which he later regrets and which he attributes largely to Mowbray’s growing influence over his mind and habits: “I think I should never have done so much wrong, had it not been for Mowbray” (90, italics in original). The one thing

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Mowbray cannot brook is loss of control or prestige. He never forgives Harrington for finally defending Jacob during a violent confrontation over the peddler “election.” This is not so much because Jacob is a Jew, but because Harrington’s defense of him necessitates questioning Mowbray’s leadership of his peers. In a reprise of Harrington’s childhood conversation with his father, Mowbray demands, “On whose side are you?” Harrington’s response, “On yours, Mowbray, if you won’t be a tyrant” (97), is far too qualified for Mowbray’s taste and leads the young men into a fist fight. Even more than the other “tyrant” of Harrington’s youth, Fowler, Mowbray and the aristocracy he stands in for require unqualified submission. Harrington’s schooltime rebellion against Mowbray’s despotism is short-lived. When the two men meet some years later in London, Harrington is charmed by a young man who seems to have left behind the childhood prejudices that, in Harrington’s language, amounted to a kind of demonic possession: “The evil spirit of persecution was dislodged from his soul, or laid asleep within him, and in its place appeared the conciliating spirit of politeness” (113). Much of the book chronicles Mowbray’s growing influence over Harrington the adult, both in ways he understands and in others of which he is not even dimly aware. The most destructive aspects of this control over his speech and behavior emerge in Harrington’s courtship of Berenice, which almost from the beginning Mowbray manipulates by urging his supposed friend to language and to actions not exactly his own. After Harrington employs some spirited rhetoric about history during a visit to show the Monteneros the London sights, Mowbray encourages his friend to be bolder: “Enthusiasm, you see, is the thing both with father and daughter: you succeed in that line—follow it up!” (171). Trying to impress Mr. Montenero and his daughter at the Tower of London, Harrington follows Mowbray’s advice only to end up looking ridiculous or even unbalanced: his reverence for the building’s history “was expressed with a vehemence which astonished Mr. Montenero; and, I fear, prevented him from hearing the answers to various inquiries, upon which he, with better regulated judgment, was intent” (173). Shakespeare again surfaces in the form of Richard III, but unlike Mowbray, Harrington is no polished actor and finds himself declaiming lines about the murdered princes in a rant. “Berenice’s eye warned me to lower my voice, and I believe I should have been quiet, but that unluckily Mowbray set me off in another direction”; the other direction is a quiet reference to Harrington’s historic fears of Jews, and at Mowbray’s comment, “I remember covering my face with both my hands, and shuddering with horror” (174).

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The ease with which Mowbray leads Harrington into displays of near frenzy is matched by his suavity in defusing his friend’s sense that he has made himself ridiculous in front of the woman he loves. The group next visits the Bank of England in their tour of metropolitan sights, and Harrington’s impression of the clerks weighing and measuring is an uncanny representation of his own developing state: “I had seen at the Bank the spirit of order operating like predestination, compelling the will of man to act necessarily and continually with all the precision of mechanism. I had beheld human creatures, called clerks, turned nearly into arithmetical machines” (178). Though Harrington’s own reduction to a dummy at Mowbray’s hands produces not “the precision of mechanism” but barely controlled flights of fancy, his will likewise has been “nearly” co-opted, by an imposter who presents himself as a good friend and confidante. The Monteneros and Harrington gain admittance to the bank in the first place through the intervention of Lord Mowbray, who has a relative employed there. Mr. Montenero uses the visit to the mint to recall the history of Jews who invented the banknote: “the tyranny which drove us from place to place, and from country to country, at a moment’s or without a moment’s warning, compelled us, by necessity, to the invention of a happy expedient, by which we could convert all our property into a scrap of paper, that could be carried unseen in a pocket-book, or conveyed in a letter unsuspected” (179). This history links Jews to the creation of the international monetary system and, inadvertently, to the creation of the clerks at the Bank, who appear to be little better than human robots. Without meaning to, Montenero ends up implicating Jews in a process that culminates in the reduction of human beings to automatons, the transformation that Harrington fears in his irrational moments and that he actually experiences—but from an unsuspected source. Lord Mowbray’s pose is finally cast aside when he becomes Harrington’s open romantic rival for Berenice’s affections. The catalyst for this falling out is Harrington’s refusal to take Mowbray’s advice as to the best progress of his suit. To his avowed enemy, Harrington can say at last, “Now, we understand each other.” “Why yes—and ’tis time we should,’ said Mowbray coolly, ‘knowing one another, as we have done, even from our boyish days. You may remember, I never could bear to be piqued, en honneur; especially by you, my dear Harrington” (202). The same need for mastery leads Mowbray to an extreme reaction when his protracted attempts to woo Berenice Montenero fail: “Detected and baffled, he did not well know how, by a woman whom he considered as so much his

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inferior in ability and address, Lord Mowbray found it often difficult to conceal his real feelings of resentment, and it was then that he began to hate her” (218–219). Beatrice’s rejection of Mowbray’s romantic overtures appears to mark the end of his effectiveness as Harrington’s antagonist. His creditors, alert to his failure to mend his affairs by marrying an heiress, descend on his home, and Mowbray goes underground to avoid arrest. But the violence of Mowbray’s disappointment is described in terms that suggest ongoing effects: “He had depended on the fortune of the Jewess. What resource for him now?—None. In this condition, like one of the Indian gamblers, when they have lost all, and are ready to run amuck on all who may fall in their way, he this night, late, made his appearance at a club where he expected to find me” (220). Mowbray fails to find Harrington that night, so in the short term, violence is averted. But this is not the first time Mowbray is associated with it; earlier, he tries repeatedly to provoke Harrington into dueling with him, and Mowbray eventually dies as a result of a wound inflicted in a duel with another character. The impulse described after his repulse by Berenice, however, is not that associated with the duel, a supposedly gentlemanly defense of honor (though Edgeworth also works to undermine the glamorization of dueling). Rather, in the description above, Mowbray’s behavior slides into a different register altogether, one defined not by British aristocratic notions but by a crazed loss of control that recalls an earlier Edgeworth novel, Belinda (1801). In it, the apparently polished suitor for Belinda’s hand, the creole Mr. Vincent, turns out to be addicted to gambling and nearly commits suicide in despair over his debts. While Mowbray himself is no creole, the ultimate “foreignness” of much of the British aristocracy is unwittingly emphasized by his mother, who is obsessed with her personal descent from a Norman conqueror. Her prize ring, tellingly, “was one of four rings, which had been originally a present from Pope Innocent to King John” (266), giving her more in common than she would like to think with the working-class Irish Widow Levy, who admits that she is “a little bit of a Cat’olick” (236). These details position Mowbray’s family, theoretically a pillar of the British aristocracy, as foreign in values (lacking a sense of honor and fair play) as well as in extraction. As the novel concludes, Mowbray and the politics of ventriloquism he represents is an absent presence, a figure working behind the scenes in an almost agent provocateur-like fashion to undermine the credibility of his opponents and drive them to destruction. Curiously, Edgeworth omits mention of Lord George Gordon, the most famous

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convert to Judaism in the eighteenth century, when introducing the topic of the Gordon riots. Rather, she generalizes regarding some who, for party purposes, desired to influence the minds of the people . . . The populace were made to believe that the French and the Papists were secret favourites of the Government: a French invasion, the appearance of the French in London, is an old story almost worn out upon the imaginations of the good people of England: but now came a new if not a more plausible bugbear—the Pope! It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he being seen in disguise in a gold-flowered gentleman’s nightgown on St. James’s parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, had been actually taken by the Bath mob for the Pope; and they had pursued him with shouts, and hunted him, till he was forced to scramble over a wall to escape from his pursuers. (234)

Mowbray’s complete loss of self-control as he “runs amuck” seeking Harrington comes to seem a clear prefigurement of the mob violence that erupts over rumors of a secret Catholic, French infiltration of the British government. The narrator’s repeated use of passive voice in this passage further identifies partisan manipulation of “the good people of England” with Mowbray’s tactics against Harrington. Constructions such as “the populace were made to believe,” and it “was confidently affirmed,” call attention to the existence of powerful, but hidden agents within the political establishment itself who stood to gain from civil disturbances, as they had during the election of 1753. In other words, if Harrington’s father represents one form of social menace—a political leader with no meaningful agenda at all—Mowbray represents another, an aristocrat with only one goal, the furtherance of his own power and position at any costs. For Mowbray, as for the unnamed masterminds behind the Gordon riots, anti-Semitism (along with other forms of national and religious prejudice) is a powerful tool for deflecting popular attention away from the real agents exerting control and from their objectives. Mowbray actually instigates an outbreak of working-class violence against Jews earlier in the novel during his first official leadership position, commanding an army regiment in Gibralter. His slurs against Jews, coupled with supply shortages during a siege of the citadel, encourage soldiers to destroy the shops of Jewish merchants they blame for driving up prices. Informed of this history, Harrington initially refuses to hold Mowbray responsible for the actions of those under his command: “as to his permitting their outrages, or directing them against individual Jews whom he disliked,

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I told Jacob it was impossible for me to believe it” (157). The idea of such circuitous exertions of power, however, becomes much more believable by the time of the Gordon riots. Mowbray’s mother, the prejudiced Lady de Brantefield, despairs when she is forced to rely on the Jewish Mr. Montenero for protection during the riots: “That my son, Lord Mowbray, should be out of town, how extraordinary and how unfortunate! . . . when we might have had his protection, his regiment, without applying to strangers” (244).19 But in fact Mowbray, or at least the attitude that informs his social relationships, is present in spirit, in the form of the mysterious agents behind Edgeworth’s passive verbs who induce the riots. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that a Mowbray retainer, Dutton, is part of the crowd that almost fires Montenero’s house, and that Dutton (at Mowbray’s behest) afterward attempts to stir up anti-Jewish feeling by falsely accusing Montenero of firing his gun illegally. In seeking to capitalize on the riots to take revenge on a personal enemy—the man whose daughter refused him—Mowbray displays a largely instrumental view of anti-Semitism’s slogans and tactics. Mowbray’s quiet conspiracy against Harrington collapses when Fowler reveals that she, along with a parade of other minor figures, have been in Mowbray’s employ for some time. “Almost from the moment of my acquaintance with Berenice, I could trace Lord Mowbray’s artifices,” Harrrington now sees, understanding the many moments in which Mowbray and his hired hands “had taken the utmost pains to work on my imagination on this particular point, on which he knew my early associations might betray me to symptoms of apparent insanity” (288–289). Like Harrington in his schoolboy days, Fowler claims that she is merely a tool in doing wrong: she begins her story with the disclaimer that “Lord Mowbray is the most to blame” (279) and ends with the same sentiment: “Lord Mowbray was, you’ll allow, the wickedest” (283). It becomes clear Mowbray coached Fowler, in her various roles, to say certain things at key times, on the understanding that they would reach the ears of the Monteneros and be believed. At one crucial moment in her revelation of Harrington’s illness, “Mr Montenero took occasion to question her most minutely [and] received such answers as Lord Mowbray had prepared Fowler to give. So artfully had he managed, that his interference could not be suspected” (285). The extent of Fowler’s coaching at her employer’s hands includes nonverbal cues (Fowler is told that Harrington is “never to be mentioned without a sigh” in front of the Monteneros [285, italics in original]) as well as exact language. Like the good puppeteer he is, Mowbray leaves little behind, besides his tools, to

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prove his guilt; the instructions that Fowler produces in her defense are unsigned, though the written word turns out to be easier to trace than the spoken one: “I knew his hand, however disguised” (286). The duel in which Mowbray is killed concerns (once again) Harrington’s own schoolboy defense of Jacob the Jewish peddler. In a letter to Harrington written by Mowbray’s brother officer after his death, the writer explains how Mowbray challenged another witness to those childhood events who takes Harrington’s side: “Lord Mowbray grew angry; and in the heat of contradiction, which, as his second said, his lordship could never bear, he gave his opponent the lie direct” (280). On his deathbed, Mowbray verifies to an attendant that his vendetta against Harrington’s romance with Berenice is a final instance of this insatiable need for unquestioning obedience: “Lord Mowbray assured Mr. Harrington that he did not mean to have carried the jest (the word jest scratched out), the thing farther than to show him his power to break off matters, if he pleased . . .” (281, italics in original). This final uncertainty over what, exactly, to call Mowbray’s plot against Harrington—the idea of a “jest” finally gives way to the nameless indeterminism of the “thing”—underscores the arbitrary choice of Mowbray’s mechanism for wrecking havoc on Harrington’s social relationships. This is not to deny that Edgeworth clearly targets anti-Semitism as a kind of insanity in itself, one whose traces almost prevent Harrington’s marriage and, by extension, England’s development into a worthy international leader.20 Yet the resolution of the marriage plot finally depends less on Harrington’s regulating his own imaginative predisposition to prejudice than on the death of Lord Mowbray and the end of his conspiracy. Killing Mowbray off seems to be the only way Edgeworth can disarm a character so practiced in the art of channeling his words through the mouths of others to achieve his own desires. Concerning rumors about Harrington, Montenero explains, “I did not imagine, I only heard and believed—and now I have seen, and disbelieve” (249). Hearing is associated with unqualified obedience, and seeing with reason and the power to distinguish fact from fiction.21 There remains, however, one more obstacle to Harrington’s marriage to Berenice, even after Mowbray is erased from the landscape: her religion. Harrington’s father is rehabilitated at the end to the extent that he is now charmed by Berenice and even her father— after the latter serves as his financial savior. But he will not break his word, he proclaims, and this binds him to oppose Harrington’s marriage to a Jewess—a vow he made many pages ago. The irrationality

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of this ongoing stubbornness, which the novel has worked hard to show is misguided, may be ridiculed, but Edgeworth does not force her hero’s father to renounce it. Instead, she engineers a miraculous ending when Montenero reveals that Berenice is actually a Protestant, raised in the faith of her mother, clearing the way for a happy ending. This conclusion reinforces Judith Page’s contention that “Harrington was not a complete success because [Edgeworth] could not fully imagine a British world in which ‘real’ Jews were at home” (136)—or to put it another way, a world in which Jews could be integrated into and accepted by British society. At the novel’s end, Montenero, the cosmopolitan Sephardic Jew so perfectly comported as to virtually “pass” for a Christian, may remain in England—or he may not. We are not told, and his fate remains unclear. We do know that before Harrington proposes, the Monteneros’ chilly reception in England leads them to plan a return to America. The new interest in and sympathy for Jews in the 1810s, particularly in the liberal circles traveled by people like the Edgeworths, suggest that Harrington’s elaborate analysis of the anti-Semitic violence of half a century ago is a study of the methods, as well as the issues, of politics. And methods, finally, were what political reform in the early nineteenth century was mostly concerned with, as the talking points of Henry Hunt’s platform demonstrated: universal male sufferage, annual parliamentary elections, and election by secret ballot. But in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, such proposals were rarely taken at face value by observers and almost never by one’s political opponents. Instead, the implicit assumption by most interested parties was that the rhetoric of the day had uncertain origins and a threatening agenda. The government’s efforts to silence radical voices culminated in the Peterloo Massacre and the Six Acts of 1819. Radicals came to share in the Jews’ historic sense of disenfranchisement and persecution, a state bound up with reformers’ inability to project a loud and unified claim that could rise above the workings of faction on their own side and reaction on that of their opponents. Such an identification of the radicals of Edgeworth’s present with the Jews of the past would have gained strength from the fact that some of the most notorious radical activists and theoreticians were in fact Jews. David Ruderman has unearthed an extensive body of work by Anglo-Jewish radicals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, 22 while Iain McCalman provides a substantial portrait of Jacob Rey, a Sephardic Jew also known as “Jew” King. The father of the writer Charlotte Dacre, King was a radical newspaper financier as well as a blackmailer and extortionist, and his prominence in the

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reform movement made him the target of vicious attacks in the Tory press. McCalman recounts that King displayed a long and consistent record of political opposition: he wrote a tract in support of the distressed populace in 1783; he supported Jacobinism throughout the 1790s; and he participated in most London radical campaigns between 1802 and 1815. The bitterness he felt towards England’s established order probably derived from insecurities and hardships associated with his lowly origins, his ambiguous social position and his despised religious faith. (38)

During the 1810s the Liverpool ministry went to great lengths to ensure that radicals like King and “Orator” Henry Hunt, seeking representation, were “caught” plotting revolution. This strategy culminated in the tragic entrapment of the so-called Cato Street Conspirators by an agent provocateur in 1820. In Edgeworth’s novel, plots and conspirators come to light with a clarity that eluded contemporary observers of the political scene and which historians of the period still struggle to attain. While the Jews of Harrington certainly are victimized by a culture that rarely wants to hear them, Edgeworth emphasizes the damage such a dynamic does to members of the British political and economic establishment itself. At the conclusion of the narrative, Harrington’s recovery is ongoing, while Mowbray self-destructs, incapacitated by a bottomless desire for power and control that no amount of plotting can seem to satisfy. In this version of the politics of ventriloquism, it is the instrument who survives and the controller who loses his identity in death. This fate can seem a reflection on Edgeworth’s own situation as she finished Harrington, among the last works she wrote during her father’s life and, indeed, among the last of her literary career. Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s final preface to his daughter’s works, written on his deathbed, was for the joint publication of Harrington and Ormond in 1817. In the father’s preface, he invokes the family’s oftenused idea of a literary partnership between himself and Maria. Well before the advent of feminist critique in Romantic scholarship, there was considerable skepticism about the salutary effects of her father’s influence on Maria Edgeworth’s corpus, and several critics see the notion of an Edgeworth “partnership” as a mask for Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s meddling in virtually every stage of the composition of her works.23 In his preface to Ormond and Harrington, Edgeworth’s father acknowledges criticism from his contemporaries even as he professes puzzlement as to the cause: “I have been reprehended for the notices which I have annexed to my daughter’s works. As I do not

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know their reasons for this reprehension, I cannot submit even to their respectable authority” (67, italics in original). In a characteristic gesture, he then replies for his daughter to her public, stating that “she takes this opportunity of returning them sincere thanks for the candid and lenient manner in which her errors have been pointed out” (67). It is typical of Maria Edgeworth’s staunch public defense of her father’s influence on her work that she herself appends no introductory comments to the 1817 volume; he appended prefaces to her novels because she asked him to, though the works themselves appeared under her name (unlike her educational tracts, which she wrote but were published under her father’s name). Edgeworth’s custom of seeking her father’s prefaces to introduce her fiction implies she is content to let her father speak in her place. While Edgeworth’s close relationship with her father tempts critics to emphasize his influence in all of her works, that relationship seems particularly relevant to Harrington since it was composed in the shadow of Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s death. Marilyn Butler records the various ways in which he encouraged—or pressured—Maria into publishing a final volume before he died. By the fall of 1816, he was clearly dying and “badly wanted to see another of Maria’s novel’s in print” (Butler, Maria 278). Atypically, father and daughter disagreed about what exactly should go into the new volume, but the various stages of negotiation all involved publishing Harrington alongside another work, either a novel or the comic plays with which Maria Edgeworth had been experimenting. The shadow her father’s ill health cast over the entire project is signaled by Maria Edgeworth’s comment to a new correspondent, Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, in 1816 that “except [for] anxiety about my father’s health we have scarcely anything in this world to wish for” (Lazarus 9). In its genesis, Harrington was unusual in that the idea behind the work came from outside the immediate Edgeworth family circle. In the past, Richard Lovell Edgeworth had provided suggestions that his daughter then took up, developing into the novels and stories of her oeuvre. The notion of writing a corrective to anti-Semitic prejudice, however, came from the letters of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus, an American Jew who wrote to Maria in 1815, a fact that Richard Lovell Edgeworth acknowledges in his preface. Lazarus begins her first letter to Edgeworth by registering delight at much of the author’s output, in particular Practical Education (1798). She concludes, however, by questioning Edgeworth’s anti-Semitic portraits in her fiction, most recently in The Absentee (1812), and by offering her own, American community as a place where such prejudices are unknown. Speaking

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about herself in the third person, Lazarus explains, “Living in a small village, her father’s the only family of Isrealites who reside in or near it, all her juvenile friendships and attachments have been formed with those persuasions different from her own; yet each has looked upon the variations of the other as things of course—differences which take place in every society” (6). Lazarus closes her letter by hoping for a reply; she received no fewer than three of them. Both Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth wrote individually to their new correspondent, and Maria signaled that she had already begun composing a literary response to Lazarus’ letter: “Will you be so kind to tell me how I can send you what I am now preparing for the press? It will probably not be published till the end of the year . . .” (8). Rachel Mordecai Lazarus did not sign her first letter, and gave her brother’s address. In his reply, Richard Lovell Edgeworth suggests that she is offering her criticism under an assumed identity (the grasping Jewish coachmaker of The Absentee is named Mordecai) and enjoins her to “pray make us better acquainted with your real self” (7). Maria, however, views Rachel’s seeming bid for anonymity differently: “Though you did not sign any name to your letter and though it seems an extraordinary coincidence that your brother’s name should happen to be Mordecai (absentee), yet I am persuaded from the tone of truth throughout the letter that you are a real living person and that you think and feel all you say” (8). Edgeworth’s readiness to grant agency to her correspondent is in keeping with her discomfort throughout the book she is writing with reducing another individual to a puppet, an extension of someone else’s desires or fears. Consequently, Lazarus is, Edgeworth feels sure, “a real living person,” and not merely an adopted persona, a mask from behind which the author could be criticized or even mocked. Such an idea, in fact, is what Rachel Lazarus seeks to dispel, though for different reasons. For her, the persona of the “Jew” is a source not of power but of weakness, invoking as it does a stereotype “by nature mean, avaricious and unprincipled”—this is “the stigma usually affixed to the name” (6). By omitting her own name from the bottom of her first letter to Maria Edgeworth, Lazarus presumably was attempting to avoid association with that stigma while at the same time not disingenuously assuming an identity not her own. Lazarus’ comments regarding Jewish life in America were quoted verbatim in Harrington, reflecting Edgeworth’s desire to give actual Jews a voice in the creation of their own literary representations, as her Jewish correspondent recognized. In her response to the novel, Lazarus observed that “It is impossible to feel otherwise than gratified by the

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confidence so strongly, yet so delicately manifested, by the insertion of a passage from the letter in which I had endeavoured to give an idea of their general standing in this country” (15). Questions persist regarding to what extent Maria Edgeworth was aided, and to what extent hindered, by Richard Lovell Edgeworth in her artistic development. Going beyond the reductive view that the father simply stunted his daughter’s efforts, Catherine Gallagher argues that in important if problematic ways, Richard Lovell enabled his daughter’s sense of her authorial power. Their relationship allowed Maria “to conceive of her ‘author-self’ [Maria’s term] as the expression of a conglomerate being larger than her individual self,” producing “a sense of expanded, even grandiose, authorship” (Gallagher 271). At times, the complex dynamic between father and daughter seems to lend itself to the ventriloquist/dummy analogy, but at other times it does not, particularly when she published under his name, effectively putting her words in his mouth—a power and responsibility that her letters show she felt keenly.24 The debate over her father’s influence on Edgeworth’s work will no doubt go on, underscoring how tracing the voice of the woman writer, as well as that of the politician, remains an uncertain enterprise. My intent here is to indicate how the interplay of authority, power, and language in the Edgeworths’ literary partnership defied the easy objectification of others that Harrington dramatizes and critiques. *

*

*

By the 1820s, even the most royalist French émigrés had returned to France; those who remained in England, and elsewhere, did so out of choice rather than fear. For many members of the other two groups considered in this study, there would be no journey home. Transportation to Australia continued well into the Victorian period, ceasing finally in 1868. Unable to pay for passage home, or lacking any home to return to, many convicts stayed on as free settlers once they served their sentences, or died before freedom came. The Jews in England eventually benefited from the growing liberalization in nineteenth-century society, achieving full emancipation in Great Britain in 1858 when the first Jewish member of Parliament took his seat. In the absence of a Jewish nation, Jews could now call Britain a version of their lost home. If these developments mark the end of one Age of Diaspora, others have taken its place. In our own time, mass expulsions of unwelcome populations in Darfur and elsewhere continue in the service of

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nationalist agendas. I write these words a few weeks after the capture of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who now faces trial for his role in the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica’s Muslim population. My comfortable life in the middle of the United States seems remote from such events. Yet in the wake of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, St. Louis, Missouri became home to the largest group of Bosnians in America who had been displaced by the Balkans conflicts of the mid1990s. Roughly 35,000 Bosnian refugees came to St. Louis in the 1990s, making up more than 10 percent of the St. Louis population, and articles in the local press still document the pilgrimages some Bosnians make back to the sites of violence and the mass graves. The children of Srebrenica appear in my undergraduate classrooms on occasion, embodiments of the ongoing hope of those in diaspora for a community that accommodates their difference. The existence of “Little Bosnia” in places like St. Louis reminds us that spirit of émigrés in 1790s London persists.

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No t e s

Introduction 1. Chateaubriand’s contrast between “internal” France and the “external” France of the Emigration is quoted by Thom, 196. Kristy Carpenter calls London “the capital of the emigration” in her essay in The French Emigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution. 2. For statistics, see Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution, 40. The wide range of social classes represented in the Emigration is noted by Carpenter as well as by Donald Greer. 3. In this respect, the literature of the Emigration resembles the antiJacobin literature that aimed to educate, to bring events abroad to the many readers who “had not had the opportunity to travel through France and observe the Revolution at first hand. Like most Britons, the chimney-sweeps relied, in other words, on representations of revolution” (Grenby 35). 4. Well into the twentieth century, exploration of the Emigration as a historical phenomenon suffered from the reductive perception that all émigrés were aristocrats and staunch royalists, a generalization that has only recently been extensively revised. Margery Weiner’s The French Exiles, for years one of the few available texts on the subject, reinforced this idea through its emphasis on the royal family and its most loyal adherents. Donald Greer’s study began to refine this portrait by distinguishing two main stages of emigration, one royalist (before 1793) and one more “democratic” as citizens fled in the wake of invading armies, civil war, and revolutionary purges (35). More recently, book-length studies by Carpenter and Simon Burrows have attempted the first wideranging explorations of how thoroughly the exiles influenced British politics and society. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer is the most recent historian to note the error of this view: “. . . individuals from a wide variety of social backgrounds and political persuasions left the chaos of revolutionary France, including many who might not have been considered as enemies if they had remained in the country” (30). 5. A serious proposal for émigré resettlement in the British colonies emerged from the French exile community itself, though to a much closer destination than Botany Bay. Charles Grant, Viscount de Vaux, argued for the wisdom of relocating to British North America as a way of giving émigrés the means to support themselves by farming, and of

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

strengthening the government’s hold on Canada’s territory and natural resources. The pamphlet concludes by explaining that Grant has already taken his own advice and “sails, with his Family, in a short time, for Montreal, where Government has granted him some lands” (7). Such wandering contrasts with the clear road to a national capital characteristic of the European bildungsroman (Moretti 66). Wiley argues that migrations such as the émigré flight to Britain constitute a new kind of identity, suspended between national categories and affording new possibilities for the construction of individual subjectivity. Critics working in diaspora studies today explore a variety of groups whose experiences deviate from the Jewish model, but preserve the etymological association of people geographically scattered by political, social, or economic change. Explications of this approach include Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” William Safran’s “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” and James Clifford’s “Diasporas.” In Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, deterritorialization surfaces in Kafka in a variety of tropes, including the presence of proliferating entrances and exits in his ominous castles and other buildings, designed to prevent “the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation” (3). Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan offer some key articulations of this view. In a somewhat different context, Emily D. Hicks has identified what she labels “border writing,” produced by individuals whose subjectivity is shaped by frequent national and cultural border crossings. Hicks is particularly interested in applying this concept to the literature of Latin America and Mexico dealing with their relationships with the United States. Border writing, Hicks argues, is inherently nonlinear, a reflection of the double nature of its subjects: “The border crosser is both ‘self’ and ‘other.’ The boarder crossers’ ‘subject’ emerges from double strings of signifiers of two sets of referential codes, from both sides of the border” (xxvi). Martin Baumann makes a similar point. Though Austen does not directly take up the issue of the revolution in her work, her novels reflect the highly militarized nature of British society during the wars with France; in Pride and Prejudice, for example, Darcy’s nemesis Wickham serves with a regiment whose relocation to Brighton is aimed, presumably, at helping repel any potential invasion. Similarly, all the men of worth in Persuasion are veterans such as Captain Wentworth, Admiral Croft, Captain Harville, and Captain Benwick. Austen certainly was personally aware of the perils émigrés faced. In 1781, her favorite cousin Eliza married a Frenchman, the comte de Feuillide. Early in the revolution, he sent his wife to England while he himself fled to Turin. Attempting to retrieve family

Notes

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

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possessions, he returned to France and was guillotined on 22 February 1794. Deirdre Le Faye contends that this event “left Jane with a loathing of republican France for the rest of her life” (78). See, for example, Journal of a French Emigrant, Fourteen Years Old, as well as Mme de Genlis’ The Young Exiles, which proclaims its goal as “the entertainment and instruction of youth.” For British efforts in the same vein, see Lucy Peacock, The Little Emigrant and Mary Pilkington, New Tales of the Castle; or, The Noble Emigrants. I use the term “escaped” since, even during the peace, it could be difficult to leave France. Tussaud’s application for a passport at first was denied “as it was contrary to the laws of the country then existing to allow any artists to leave France” (Memoirs 504). By October of 1792, the National Assembly decreed that returning émigrés were subject to death, and the law defined émigrés as “all persons absent from the department in which they possessed property,” but “did not specifically exclude” soldiers and prisoners of war (Greer 10, 11). Moreover, with a “certificate of residence” in a department other than that in which one held property, one could escape the émigré label. The most elaborate law against émigrés, who were viewed as fomenters of counter-revolution, passed in March 1793. It defined them as “those absent from their French residences” but it also included “those who enjoyed French citizenship, irrespective of property tenure,” and applied in annexed regions like Belgium and Savoy (11). In British literature, this kind of thinking is evidenced as early as Corialanus; Shakespeare’s general responds to his own banishment from Rome with the words “I banish you!” (III.iii.127), and proclaims that “there is a world elsewhere.” Jane Kingsley-Smith remarks, “. . . there remains a subversive power to the banishment or marginalization of Shakespeare. It encourages the marginal figure to reverse the balance of power, banished becomes banisher, in an action that reveals the temporary and fictional nature of the difference between them. . . . the spectacle of banishment gives expression to society’s fears of displacement but, more daringly, it hints at the contingency of identity and of place” (8). My view revises Claudia Johnson’s claim that “the relief of these refugees was not a popular cause” (Hannah More iv). Sarah Zimmerman notes the popularity of émigré relief among the middle classes, as well as a number of prominent public figures (59). Also see Decoetlogon’s The Patriot King and Patriot People (1793). Attempting to describe the form of the Reflections, Marilyn Butler remarks that Burke uses brief stories to lay out isolated events but “refrains from narrating the history of events in France; to say this is not a linear book is to put it mildly” (“Telling” 348). Ronald Paulson has observed that in this regard, Burke’s response defined a generation’s sensibilities; after the Reflections, the term revolution

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21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

1

“projected certain abrupt, broken, and unpredictable sequences of events” as opposed to older meanings, such as a return to a point of origin (Representations 49). This transition marked a permanent change in English conceptions of plot. This text was apparently translated from French, but the translator is not named on the title page. On the mixture of euphoria and anxiety that characterized the Peace of Amiens, see chapter 5 of Clive Emsley’s study. Wiley discusses Wordsworth’s ambivalent attitude toward émigrés, and points out that Wordsworth’s French mistress, Annette Vallon, does not seem to have attempted to emigrate in the early 1790s. For his discussion of “The Emigrant Mother,” which foregrounds the mother’s conflicted emotions and potential for violence, see Romantic Geographies, 50–51. George Rudé classifies only a fraction of the approximately 160,000 prisoners transported to Australia throughout the nineteenth century as political or protest prisoners. Printed in John Freeth’s The political songster. For Godwin, the ideal site for a colony of prisoners would be an uninhabited location where the convicts would be left alone, uncorrupted by European institutions and temptations. This tendency to compare Australian experiences, wildlife and landscape to European models has been noted by many scholars of early Australian literature and usually cited as a failing. For example, Barron Field’s “The Kangaroo” (1819), which was much admired by Wordsworth and Coleridge, compares the animal to various Western mythological creatures, including a mermaid and a centaur. Ken Goodwin attributes such “obviously inappropriate” use of European comparisons to early authors’ lack of “skill and confidence” (13) in describing the southern hemisphere’s environments. See, for example, Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism. Two notable exceptions being Craciun’s British Woman Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World and Wiley’s Romantic Migrations, discussed above.

“Boundless, yet Distinct”: The Émigré Experience and the 1790s

1. Smith’s letters to Charles Burney on the subject are dated 13 August 1793 and 21 August 1793 (Stanton 65–71). 2. These tensions are thoroughly traced by Susan Wolfson, who characterizes the poem as “sequential alternations of sympathy and political review” that criticize the ancien régime and elements of English society that continue to mirror its injustices (“Charlotte Smith” 106). Cf. Jacqueline Labbe’s Charlotte Smith, 118.

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3. Zimmerman makes her observation in Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, 63. Poetry quotations come from Stuart Curran’s edition of Smith’s poems. 4. Also commenting on this passage, Maxwell Wheeler sees a more ambiguous tendency, a justification of English reformist politics by way of an inherently conservative nationalist rhetoric. 5. Similarly, Wolfson contends that The Emigrants concludes by dramatizing how “peace seems to be only in the grave, out of this world, not only for this poet but for all” (“Charlotte Smith” 114). 6. Smith’s vision is distinct, as Michael Wiley points out, from contemporary views of the same Sussex landscape as part of a nation-state vulnerable to French invasion (14–15). 7. From the British Critic 4 (1793): 623; quoted in Wolfson, 115. The reviewer at The European Magazine drew the same conclusion; see Keane, 91. 8. The two editions of The Banished Man, appearing in 1794 and 1795, were published by Cadell and Davies, with whom Smith had an ongoing professional relationship. The edition used here is volume 7 of the Pickering & Chatto Collected Works of Charlotte Smith, which includes The Banished Man and The Wanderings of Warwick, ed. M. O. Grenby. Politically, the novel clearly departs from the radicalism of the earlier Desmond, the only other work Smith wrote that actually employs French settings. Yet the precise valence of The Banished Man, as either a recantation or reinforcement of Smith’s earlier principles, is unclear. Smith was on friendly terms with Girondist leaders during the early phases of the French Revolution, and gave the young Wordsworth a letter of introduction to Jacques-Pierre Brissot when Wordsworth called at her home on his way to France in 1791. The political sentiments encoded in The Banished Man, however, are elusive; critics read its sympathies in various ways. For example, Loraine Fletcher argues that Smith’s sympathetic portrayal of politically conservative characters signals a reversal of her earlier support for the Revolution (216–217). Chris Jones, in contrast, identifies Smith’s criticisms of British nobility in The Banished Man with a radical agenda, even in the wake of the September Massacres (174). This summary suggests how the novel’s politics follow through on the claim Anne Mellor believes Smith makes in Desmond that the genre “is uniquely qualified to consider political questions” because its dialogic nature can confront the complexities of lived experience in ways that partisan polemics cannot (Mothers 120–121). In a related vein, Nicola J. Watson has argued that the revolution affected Smith’s notion of literary form insofar as Desmond and The Young Philosopher rework Rousseau’s sentimental plots. 9. In this way, onlookers seek to stabilize what Rob Nixon has called “the unsteady vacillation between affiliation and isolation [that] appears altogether characteristic of exile” (22).

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10. As Angela Keane observes, the novel begins by flouting a number of readerly expectations, for example: the Rosenheim castle is not the Gothic prison we anticipate, and D’Alonville doesn’t imitate Smith’s earlier protagonist Desmond by falling in love with the married Mme D’Alberg (91–92). These disappointments are in keeping with my own observations about the abrupt discontinuities in narration and identity that characterize The Banished Man. 11. Such fears were justified. The most infamous instance of such a scenario was the 1804 murder of the émigré Duc d’Enghein on Napoleon’s orders. Suspected (wrongly) of planning to lead an émigré army and invade eastern France, the Duc was kidnapped by French secret police while on German soil, returned to France, tried in a military court, and shot on the same night (Thom 209–210). 12. Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm traces the development of “a system of personal documentation and registration [which] brought the inhabitant into even more direct contact with the machinery of rule and administration, especially if he or she moved from one place to another” (81) as part of the emergence of modern nationalism. The Alien Office was an important part of this process in Britain, becoming the nexus of “a complete system of surveillance for suspects, whether British or foreign,” creating “almost a mirror image of the much despised French system of secret police” (Sparrow, “Alien Office” 362). For the application of the act from 1793 to its lapse in 1826, see J. R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform, chapter 8. 13. According to the OED, “emigrant” enters English in the mideighteenth century, and émigré was first used in reference to the French f leeing the revolution. 14. As Homi Bhabha has observed more generally, definitions of the nation like those implicit in the Alien Act are invariably ambivalent, betraying through their linguistic and practical articulations “a temporality of culture and social consciousness” at odds with the authorities’ desire to project a national image that is not influenced by contingencies of time, place or population (Nation 2). At the same time, Bhabha argues that what he calls “traditional histories” (like the legal code) seek to overlook these tensions through assumptions that situations or events “have a certain transparency or privileged visibility” (3). 15. Linda Colley has demonstrated the durability of this notion in her comments on the success with which Scotland was integrated into the British empire after the Jacobites’ final struggles to restore the Stuarts to power in 1745 (117–132). Marlon Ross similarly explains how Burke’s nationalism depends on “magically” mending class and party divisions and even recasting violent ruptures like England’s civil war into “performative signs of natural growth” (58). Martin Thom expounds at length on the eighteenth-century transition from the nation as a social contract to a unitary “tribe” of primeval origins.

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16. Harriet Guest traces how the multiple viewpoints of surveillance and spying help the novel’s characters, and readers, piece together ambiguous or contradictory motives and actions. Despite the connection of such activities with political reaction, Guest contends that they also “become the principle means of piecing together some form of social knowledge . . . the distinterested, cosmopolitan survey of the liberal observer has been displaced into the competing and contradictory reports of interested gossips and disaffected onlookers” (185). 17. In The Emigrants, Smith holds out hope for the future of France only if “Freeman, such / As England’s self might boast, unite to place / The guarded diadem on [the king’s] fair brow” (2.108–110). In contrast, Keane seems to see Carlowitz as Smith’s surrogate in these arguments insofar as he is “an outlet for republican discourse that can no longer be articulated sympathetically through a French subject” (94). 18. M. O. Grenby’s reading of The Banished Man as an anti-Jacobin novel depends on his ignoring the pivotal role other characters play in mediating D’Alonville’s views and, ultimately, the reader’s own perceptions. Grenby argues that the formulaic presentation of suffering and exile associated with the Revolution in novels like The Banished Man leaves no room for debate and “essentially writes the reader . . . out of the need for, and even the possibility of, an individual response” (37). 19. Judith Davis Miller recognizes the importance of such moments, which in her reading disclose Smith’s continuing investment in Godwinian philosophy, despite the novel’s apparent conservatism: Smith “characterizes the relativity of truth when Ellesmere and D’Alonville agree to disagree about whether the French Revolution had merit in its original design. Their example illustrates Smith’s developing philosophy that political differences openly expressed can lead to a life of harmony and continual discovery” (350). 20. Craciun summarizes the end of Hubert de Sevrac as follows: “Robinson relocates her multinational émigrés (French-Scottish and French-English couples) in a utopian community somewhere in England” (153). For her similar comments on the ending of The Banished Man, see 157. 21. Ellesmere’s freedom from what Smith perceives as English insularity is further signaled by his ability to speak several foreign languages, as well as by his decision to travel in Germany after giving up his training at the bar in disgust “with the rugged features and incomprehensible manners of English jurisprudence” (Smith 205). Alienated from Britain in part by their cosmopolitan interests, Ellesmere and the Denzils are Smith’s examples of a well-born, cultured, multilingual group under attack during the French wars. David Simpson has remarked on the mounting prejudice in the 1790s against a British “subculture that liked to speak French, to travel, and to imagine itself as belonging to a worldwide citizenry” (142). One way that Smith

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22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Notes notes this sentiment emerges through her portrayal of the lower class’s resentment over employers’ preferences for bilingual servants. One woman complains, “I find ladies like to have their women speak French; and [if I could] I might have got better wages and a higher place, perhaps” (241). In this character’s eyes, the mystifying preference of the English aristocracy for foreign languages carries the taint of cultural, and perhaps political, treachery. Leanne Maunu reads The Young Philosopher (1798) through the lens of Smith’s political pessimism during the late 1790s. That novel, Maunu argues, implies that in light of British conservatism, one’s best available course consists of embracing another nation, and another nationality. While the characters of The Banished Man retain their national identities, the text’s conclusion seems in keeping with that of Smith’s later novel. Focusing on Denzil’s relations with her booksellers rather than Lord Aberdore, Guest offers insightful connections between surveillance of Charlotte Denzil and Britain’s reactionary political climate (176–179). The reviews singled out Smith’s thinly disguised attacks on her enemies in the novel as inappropriate; The Critical Review held it was “unjustifiable to make a novel the vehicle of accusations that ought only to be made in a court of justice,” and even the left-leaning Analytic Review complained that “we cannot think it any recommendation of this novel, that the authoress has so frequently introduced allusions to her own affairs” (qtd. in Fletcher 226). Such responses underscore the obstacles Smith (like Denzil) faced in publicly articulating her marginal social and economic position. Presumably this comment was intended to distinguish The Banished Man from her earlier, epistolary novel of the revolution, Desmond (1792). In her reading of Robinson’s novels from the 1790s, Eleanor Ty contends that they give power “to the domestic woman, to maternal figures, and to virtuous heroines” (18); she includes no analysis of Hubert de Sevrac in her argument for this rubric. As Labbe suggests, a primary aim in this novel seems to be the subversion of a number of romance’s expectations, in part by “heros” like St. Clair that are not particularly heroic and by characters like de Fleury, whose valiance disrupts romance’s automatic association of nobility with aristocracy (Romantic Paradox 37–38). William Brewer, in contrast, offers a reading of the novel similar to that of Anne Close, in that he positions the novel as a Godwinian response to both Radcliffe’s gender politics and the failure of reformist hopes after the Terror. In this way, Hubert de Sevrac anticipates the tendency Sharon Setzer identifies in Robinson’s The Natural Daughter (1799). In that novel, Setzer argues, Robinson “is more concerned with the gender politics

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that aligned Jacobins and anti-Jacobins than with the party politics that divided them” (532). 29. For the text of Lyrical Tales, see Judith Pascoe’s edition of Robinson’s poems. 30. Sparrow’s Secret Service, 389, notes the existence of this person, who also used the name St Ange.

2

The French Connection in Frances Burney and Mary Shelley

1. De Sevrac’s impassioned recounting of this moment to St. Clair is barely euphemistic: “The period rapidly approached when we were destined to separate eternally: I pressed her to my palpitating heart;—Oh! St. Clair! Her’s beat in the sweet union of love, and all the world was lost in that blest moment!” (3. 249). 2. Doody does remark on the novel’s ideological complexity: “Burney deliberately mixes ideological elements—knowing that the plot situations themselves are ideological elements” (325), ruling out a simple classification of the novel as Jacobinical or Tory in sympathy. 3. Epstein observes that Juliet’s namelessness for much of the novel allies her with “the beautiful mysterious orphan on whose ambiguous identity turns many an eighteenth-century plot” (177). 4. For example, in her introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, Doody characterizes Harleigh as a weak-willed bachelor who is “correct, nervous, and anxious” (xxiii). Claudia Johnson dismisses him as “the novel’s apologist for reactionary politics” (Equivocal 183). 5. Helen Thompson perceptively argues that the Wanderer’s various acts, or occupations—as musician, actress, seamstress—essentially perform the aristocratic identity she cannot, or does not, express linguistically. Ironically, the very reason she performs these functions for others—for money—disqualifies them as socially legible evidence that she is, in fact, an heiress (978). 6. For a contrasting view, see Deirdre Lynch’s The Economy of Character, in which she argues that the wanderer’s silence reflects Burney’s investment in “the fantasy of an inner self that might operate independent of relations of social exchange” (201). 7. See Burney’s Journals and Letters, viii, 282–283; July 1815 to Mary Ann Waddington. 8. It is worth noting that it is not completely clear whether Denmeath knows her claim is just or not. As Eagles explains, many an Englishman produced bastards in France, where attitudes toward illegitimacy were notably less judgmental than in Britain (5). To this extent, Denmeath (and Burney’s readership) might well have had profound doubts about Juliet’s claim to her father’s fortune and rank.

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9. It is probably pertinent that Burney herself, returning to England aboard the Mary Ann in 1812, was taken into custody and questioned by Alien Office officials exactly like any other foreigner. Burney reported with indignation that, although she lay abed still intensely seasick after a difficult channel crossing, she “was sent to Dover, to be examined, & ordered, and afterwards, to return to the Mary Ann!” (Journals and Letters vii 8–9). 10. For the many windings of French marriage law during the revolution and its implications for female citizenship, and specifically for émigrés, see Jennifer Ngaire Heuer’s The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830. 11. J. R. Dinwiddy explains that “in the early stages of the war, the government did not hesitate to deport any alien who could not give a satisfactory account of himself” (155). 12. There is evidence that Mary Shelley was reading Burney’s final novel in 1816 as she was working on Frankenstein; Shelley’s journal entry for 11 December reads “read the Wanderer,” which the editors identity as “probably” Burney’s text. During the same month Shelley also was working on chapter 4 of her own novel, in which Victor discovers the secret of life (Journals of Mary Shelley 148–149). 13. For a discussion of schemes to emigrate to America by Britons—most notably Priestly, Coleridge and Southey—and Wordsworth’s rebuttals, see Wiley’s Romantic Migrations, chapter 2. 14. Information on Volney is drawn from Charles Durozior’s A Life of Volney. While he was on excellent terms with George Washington, Volney found, according to Durozior, that in America “ ‘there existed at this time an epidemic of animosity against the French,’ to use the words of Volney himself; and, while the Americans suspected that he wished to give up Louisiana to the Directory, the French diplomatists reproached him with maintaining that he thought Louisiana would in no way suit France” (6) 15. Joyce Zonana’s article makes Safie’s story, as recorded in her letters, central to the novel. 16. The exact authorship of Mary Godwin’s Nong Tong Paw is uncertain, and the current view is that it was composed with the assistance of John Taylor . For a dramatic version of the Nong Tong Paw storyline, see W. T. Moncrieff’s 1824 Monsieur Tonson: A Farce, wherein “Tom King” ridicules M. Morbleu, an emigrant hairdresser who thinks “Mr. Thompson” is M. “Tonson”—hence the title. 17. I base this analysis on the government’s persecution of Safie’s Turkish father, who is Muslim and cannot speak French, and of those like the De Laceys who would assist him. In the implications of this narrative thread, Shelley anticipates Renan as well as more recent theorists of the nation such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. 18. See Simon Schama, Citizens, 162–174.

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19. Christopher Rovee, in a similar argument, traces the monster’s ugliness to its relentless particularity, a value at odds with the neoclassicism of Reynolds and, by extension, in sympathy with the working classes who were usually the victims of the bodysnatching trade. 20. “Luxuriant” is a term that comes up repeatedly in Victor’s narrative, with contradictory implications. Climbing in the Alps to forget his cares, for example, he notes that “The pines are not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre, and add an air of severity to the scene” (125)—the luxuriant, physically, is problematic insofar as it can threaten visual integration of the parts of a given scene. Here, it is precisely because the trees are not luxuriant that they contribute to the effect of the entire prospect. Similarly, Elizabeth’s imagination is “luxuriant,” but not her physical features—which seem finally so indistinguishable as to fade away entirely. 21. The 1831 edition underscores Elizabeth’s otherworldliness. In this version, the Frankensteins find her living in the care of a poor family of “dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants” whose features set off her fair hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and the “celestial stamp in all her features” (323n). 22. For an argument that ties Elizabeth’s adoption to an educationally conditioned docility, see Betty T. Bennett’s “ ‘Not this time, Victor.’ ” 23. Another way of parsing the monster’s ugliness would be through Franco Moretti’s notion that novelistic language becomes more and more figural as it approaches geographical, and ideological, borders. Metaphor becomes a way to “simultaneously express the unknown we face, and yet also contain it” (47, italics in original). Victor’s failure to see the monster as anything beyond a purely physical mishmash thus signals the failure of containing metaphors here. Since his creator cannot describe him figuratively, the creation becomes a monster to Victor. 24. This assessment of the monster’s condition, quoted by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (238), comes from James Rieger’s 1974 introduction to the 1818 text. 25. In “The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism,” Lynch reads Shelley’s novel alongside Madame de Staël’s Corinne to trace a cosmopolitan tradition of women’s writing focusing on female guardianship and marital status that offers an alternative to male-authored definitions of nationality. She does not, as I do, see the De Lacey home as ironically reproducing the terms of national exclusivity that it putatively rejects. 26. Randel carefully traces the political history behind the sites of each of the novel’s murders. Ultimately, he identifies them with flash points in the French Revolution, whose utopian yearnings and violent repercussions find embodiment in Victor’s creation.

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27. Though even his voice initially appears to reflect his generally mangled condition; in his first few days of existence, the monster says that when he tries to imitate birdsong “the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again” (132). Unlike Safie’s, in other words, the monster’s voice will never be mistaken for that of a nightingale. 28. William is technically the monster’s first victim, but the child’s death is represented as an unintended (though in the end welcome) consequence of the monster’s desire to stop the abuse William heaps on him: “I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet” (170). 29. Anne K. Mellor discusses Aldini’s theories and his London demonstrations of galvanic principles during the Peace of Amiens in Mary Shelley, 104–107. 30. Chris Baldick points out that Shelley herself constructs the novel out of bits of stories, identifying her with Frankenstein (30). 31. Nancy Armstrong also observes the novel’s fundamental ambivalence toward the competing pull of unity (in the form of the nation-state) and individualism, which Frankenstein invatiably codes as monsterous excess. For Armstrong, these ideological stresses are part of a broader melancholy on the part of Romantic novelists who anticipate the dimunition of epic heroics within the confines of what will become nineteenth-century literary realism. See How Novels Think, chapter 2: “When Novels Made Nations.” 32. The 1818 review is reprinted in the Broadview edition of Frankenstein, 309–310. This quote appears on p. 309. 33. See, for example, Mellor, Mary Shelley, chapter 3.

3

Beyond the Convict Taint: George Barrington and the Colonial Cure

1. Douglas Hay explains the key role of pardons and the commuting of capital sentences in shoring up state authority in his landmark article, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law.” 2. It is impossible to determine conclusively what parts of A Voyage Barrington wrote and what was added by other writers. While Barrington may have been involved in the productions attributed to him after A Voyage to Botany Bay, scholars agree that his connection with them was minimal. For discussions of Barrington’s actual involvement in publications attributed to him, see Suzanne Rickard, 32–40; H. M. Green, 21; and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 62–63. J. A. Ferguson provides a complete list of works citing Barrington as an author. 3. A. W. Baker details the debts that many early stories of transportees owed to the British conventions governing criminal biography. Baker outlines a formula that had structured such writing in England

Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

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throughout the eighteenth century, beginning with early life and the subject’s introduction to crime and concluding with either execution or transportation. The first Newgate Calendar appeared in 1728; there were subsequent editions in 1773 and 1809, and at least 8 more editions appeared after that. Since Cook’s expeditions to the south Pacific, travel narratives about the area had been popular among Britain’s readers. For the widespread interest in the Bounty incident during the early and mid1790s, cf. Neil Rennie, 141–180. This quote appears in the excerpt from Collins’ An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales reprinted in Peter Kitson’s Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion 1770–1835. This description appears in a passage of Collins’ chronicle that is not reprinted in Kitson’s volume; see Collins’s An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. . . . Millett’s extensive personal collection of convict tokens is catalogued and some of the more outstanding examples visually reproduced in the volume he coedited with Michele Field. Cf. Tom Gretton’s “Last dying speech and confession” in Convict Love Tokens, 39–46. Barrington’s unparalleled success as a kind of social cross-dresser was central to his lasting fame during the nineteenth century. John Lang includes an apocryphal anecdote about Barrington wherein the pickpocket fools a woman in Sydney into thinking he is a gentleman through his good manners and elegant conversation. At the same time, he manages to divest her of her keys, her thimble, her pencil-case, and the earrings in her ears. The story ends with Barrington, again through his sheer charm, convincing his genteel victim not to turn him in after he reveals his deception and returns the pilfered items. George Barrington, A Voyage to Botany Bay Together with his life and trial and the sequel to his voyage, 8. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Barrington. A considerably shorter version of this text, titled An Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, in New South Wales, appeared in late 1793 or 1794 and has been reissued recently and edited by Suzanne Rickard. In contrast, the work I am considering was published in 1795 and deals more fully with the issues under discussion here. Such characters recur in Austen’s oeuvre: in addition to Mr. Elliot, there is Willoughby of Sense and Sensibility and Wickham of Pride and Prejudice. Though Wickham never pretends to come from an aristocratic family, he does succeed in fooling the usually perceptive Elizabeth Bennett that he has been cheated of a comfortable clerical living before he reveals his true nature by seducing the sixteen-year-old Lydia. Other literary representations of such men include Mr. Harrell in Frances Burney’s Cecilia, whose mounting debts finally lead him

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Notes to commit suicide, and several of Maria Edgeworth’s characters, such as all of the men of the financially overextended Castle Rackrent and Mr. Vincent the gambler in Belinda. From The Memoirs of George Barrington. . . . The conservative theologian William Paley, no friend to convicts, concedes this same point. Since “. . . no one will receive a man or woman out of a jail, into any service or employment whatever,” he argues that the state is obliged to offer ex-convicts legitimate employment, perhaps on public works projects (545). Barrington’s challenge to the legality of outlawry also recalls the agenda of French revolutionaries who sought to eliminate the lettres de cachet, which enabled the crown to indefinitely imprison its enemies without charging them with a specific crime. Hughes notes that typhus was “the endemic disease of eighteenthcentury prisons” (37), and that overcrowding in the 1780s created conditions of crisis proportions. By 1790, the Hulks were taking in roughly 1,000 convicts per year: “Not only had the problem of security become acute, but typhus was by then endemic and the prospect of general infection terrified free citizens outside. The authorities would have done almost anything to get rid of the criminals their laws had created” (42). Chapter 3 of Lambert provides a detailed discussion of conditions in the early days of the Hulks. For example, see Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Dyer edited and annotated officer George Thompson’s notes written in New South Wales into Slavery and Famine, Punishments for Sedition. John F. Bayliss has noted striking similarities between the writings of black American slaves and Australian convicts, most notably in their common participation in moralistic and picaresque literary traditions. Lambert points out that Barrington’s account of his decisive involvement is not born out by other versions of the mutiny, which do not mention him. His contribution to suppressing the mutiny, if it happened at all, was probably minimal (198–199). E. P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters and P. B. Munsche’s Gentlemen and Poachers describe the growing black market in illegal game during the eighteenth century, as well as the history of laws against poaching and deer stealing. For “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” see Howard Sergeant’s How Strong the Roots. This is Barrington’s spelling (or the spelling adopted by his editors); current historians usually prefer to spell the name as “Bennelong,” a name adopted for the piece of Australian coastline now known as Bennelong Point. In her mix of seemingly incompatible qualities, Yeariana is presented by Barrington as typical of her environment. Commenting on how native animals bizarrely combine a variety of traits from other species, he remarks, “One would almost conclude from the great resemblance of

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the different quadrapeds found here, that there is a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes of all those various animals” (62). 23. Timothy Brennan points out this relationship when he contends that European nationalism “flourished in the soil of foreign conquest. Imperial conquest created the conditions for the fall of Europe’s universal Christian community, but resupplied Europe with a religious sense of mission and self-identity that becomes universal (both within and outside Europe)” (58). 24. Philip Rawlings articulates the transitional nature of the penal colony somewhat differently, explaining that since “transportation was hidden from the public view . . . like imprisonment, it fitted uneasily into a criminal justice system whose other main forms of punishment for serious crime—hanging, whipping and the pillory—relied heavily on their roles as public spectacles” (81).

4

The Scottish Martyrs and the Reform of Narrative

1. The fifth reformer of this group to be transported, Joseph Gerrald, was tried somewhat later and, after spending a year in Newgate, finally was sent to Botany Bay in 1795. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary cites, as one meaning for mutiny current in the eighteenth century, any “open revolt against constituted authority.” 3. Alan Frost’s Convicts and Empire remains the most decided argument in favor of the imperial thesis; for views of the Australia choice as mostly dictated by convict disposal, see Mollie Gillen and David Mackay. Accounts from Cook’s landings at Botany Bay and Norfolk Island mentioned the presence of flax plants and pine trees— potentially key materials for the British navy in the south Pacific, if they could be transformed into sails and masts. In the event, south Pacific pine trees proved too soft for masts, and flax was never processed in any significant quantity. 4. Curiously, Coleridge’s sympathy for transported convicts did not carry over into compassion for French émigrés fleeing civil war. Along with other young radicals, Coleridge viewed émigrés suspiciously in the 1790s, seeing them as reactionaries fleeing the richly deserved justice awaiting them back home. He publicly wondered whether “these emigrants from their private Depravity and political Intrigues were not such men, as no State in the act of settling itself could safely tolerate” (Lectures 124). 5. The only published scholarly biography of Muir is Christina Bewley’s. 6. Chapter 4 of John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death extensively analyzes the trials of Skirving, Margarot, and Gerrald, demonstrating how the prosecutors who posited sedition as an imaginary wrong

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

to the crown laid the groundwork for the 1794 treason trials of John Thelwall, John Horne Tooke, and Thomas Hardy. Chapter 2 of Pascoe’s Romantic Theatricality lucidly dissects the courtroom dramatics of Erskine and Hardy in particular, and of the ways in which such theatricality was coded as feminine by onlookers and the press. At Skirving’s sentencing, Lord Swinton stated, “I have heard that [Skirving] has a great family, and I am sorry for it; but the cases of Messrs. Muir and Fyshe Palmer should have led him to be industrious for his family, followed an honest occupation, and not have meddled with illegal associations” (State Trials 598). From Authentic Biographical Anecdotes of Joseph Gerrald. . . . Refuting those who argued that transportation was “an ordinary event” in criminal sentencing, the authors of Gerrald, A Fragment emphasize the stark difference between men like the reformers and the stereotypical felon: “No, Sir, it is not an ordinary event. We see men bred among the refuse of society, transported by the hundreds; and the philanthropist will see it with regret. But it is yet extraordinary for a man like Gerrald, to be subjected to this nefarious treatment: a man, from whose various information the wisest might be contented to learn, and whose bursts of eloquence and penetration might charm the most refined” (23). This sort of position was not new in British jurisprudence; Michael Scrivener describes a 1704 ruling by Justice Holt finding that any government criticism lacked proper deference and was potentially seditious (172). Peter Brooks explains how the kinds of narratives ensured by Habeas Corpus benefit plaintiffs. The recent interest in storytelling among legal scholars centers around how “. . . storytelling serves to convey meanings excluded or marginalized by mainstream legal thinking and rhetoric. Narrative has a unique ability to embody the concrete experience of individuals and communities, to make other voices heard, to contest the very assumptions of legal judgment. Narrative is thus a form of countermajoritarian argument, a genre for oppositionists intent on showing up the exclusions that occur in legal business-asusual . . . .” (16) Cf. Paul Carter, who regards articulations of Australian convict experience, necessarily at odds with official authority, as a kind of mutiny: “To let the convicts speak for themselves would have been to entertain the unthinkable: mutiny, another history” (295). Michael Roe set out to vindicate Margarot from Palmer’s charges and reclaim his reputation as a sincere advocate for reform in his study “Maurice Margarot: A Radical in Two Hemispheres.” Bewley notes that “people at home had no real conception of the problems and shortages in New South Wales and, as the war pro-

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gressed and conditions in Britain became harsher, the ‘martyrs’ slipped from the forefront of men’s minds” (133). 16. At least two of Palmer’s letters to friends back in Britain were published in the 1790s as broadsides. One document reprints a letter dated in June of 1795 that aimed to generate publicity for the upcoming publication of Palmer’s Narrative, mentioning as it does Palmer and Skirving’s persecution under Campbell in the opening paragraph. Palmer explains that in December of 1794 he had conveyed the text of the Narrative and accompanying depositions to an officer returning home, entrusting “him with what is dearer to me than my life,—my character” (qtd. in Hugh Anderson 315).

5 Edgeworth and the Jews: Diaspora and Political Control 1. This remains a persistent strain in Jewish philosophy and political thought. Cf. Vilém Flusser, a Jew of European origin but living in Brazil, who explains, “I am a citizen of Prague, of Sao Paolo, and of Robion, and I am a Jew and at home in German culture” (6). 2. In particular, see the introduction and chapter 1 in Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. The quote appears on p. 37. 3. Ragussis attributes this emerging sympathy in some quarters for Jewish figures to a complex interplay of millenarian yearnings, Napoleon’s imperial ventures in the mid-east, and the public’s intensified interest in conversion in terms of both religion and national identity (Figures 3–5). 4. Out of print for over a century, Harrington is now recognized as a foundational text in the dissection of British anti-Semitism; see Hoad, Page, Ragussis, Shapiro, and Spector. 5. James Shapiro describes the association of Jews with criminal conspiracies in the early modern period, while tracing how representations of Jews have helped define what it means to be English. See in particular chapter 3 of Shakespeare and the Jews, “The Jewish Crime.” 6. Their attitude to language, as well as their comparative wealth, set Sephardim apart from Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. While the former were usually well-off and fluent in Spanish and other languages, the Jews of Eastern Europe were neither. They were poor and came to England with economic hopes. In their wanderings, the Ashkenazim had clung to Yiddish as the language of their identity: whether they had lived in Hungary, Poland, or other countries, most never learned the vernacular of the areas in which they resided. Endelman points out that, though lower-class, Eastern European Jews in England usually learned some English, “the almanacs

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

published for itinerant Jewish peddlers after 1772 were written in Yiddish, with a liberal sprinkling of English words spelled out in Hebrew characters” (Jews of Georgian England 124). Connor gives many examples of texts linking ventriloquists with civil disturbances and even political despotism from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Walter Scott, for example, honored Vattemare’s talents in poetry even as he associated them with mob violence (Connor 311). In Jane Tompkins’ classic reading, Wieland is “a plea for the restoration of civic authority in a post-revolutionary age. Brown wanted to convince people that it was time to stop the progressive liberalization of the structures of authority which was leading the country into civil chaos” (61). The political subtext of Brockden Brown’s Wieland are indicated by, among other things, the fact that the author sent a copy to then-Vice-President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, in much the same way that Wordsworth would send a copy of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads to Charles James Fox to protest the demise of the small freeholder. For more on the political connotations of language and ventriloquism in Brockden Brown, see Jay Fliegelman and Thomas Gustafson. Ragussis’ work on the Georgian theatre demonstrates to what extent Kean’s performance is anticipated by various sentimental and comic stage representations of Jews. While the image of the Jew was more resistant to stage rehabilitation than some other ethnic types, such as the Irish and Scots, in a number of plays from the 1780s “the theater began to interrogate its own staging of Jewish identity, its reduction of Jewish identity to a number of recognizable theatrical tricks . . .” (“Jews” 792). In “ ‘John Bull, pit, box, and gallery, said No!’: Charles Macklin and the Limits of Ethnic Resistance on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Paul Goring critiques Ragussis’s position, focusing on the career of Charles Macklin, an Irishman who forsook his given name of Cathal McLaughlin in order to succeed on the London stage. For example, Hunt testified that it was Castle who proposed such toasts as “May the last of the Kings be strangled” at a radical dinner gathering (Worrall 108). In an effort to discredit the enduring, negative view of Hunt, Belcham portrays him as an often brave but temperate strategist and organizer, who unlike other “radicals” actually reached out to the working classes in his campaign for annual parliaments, universal male sufferage, and the secret ballot (59–70). Peter Logan also points out Stewart’s influence on Edgeworth, and Harrington, though not by way of Stewart’s theories about ventriloquism. What Stewart casts the principle of sympathetic imitation becomes, for Logan, a way of reading how anti-Semitism metastasizes throughout the novel’s London. See chapter 5 of Logan’s Nerves and Narratives, “Harrington’s Last Shudder: Maria Edgewoth and the Popular Fear of the Nervous Body.”

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13. As Ragussis points out, for Edgeworth traditional representations of Jews are so pernicious because they color the way we experience actual encounters with real Jews, in effect coming between us and those we come into contact with (Figures 63–64). In a similar vein, Catherine Gallagher observes that in the figure of Mr. Montenero, the Jewish art collector, Edgeworth seeks to repudiate not only a literary but also a visual heritage. Montenero’s bewildering purchase at auction of a painting of a Jew having his teeth forcibly extracted becomes intelligible when he explains that he buys it only to destroy it: “The point of such episodes,” Gallagher comments, “seems to be that Montenero has gained mastery over the symbolic order” (317). 14. Endelman notes that Jews were treated better in Georgian Britain than in France, Spain, and Germany. He partly attributes this comparative tolerance of Jews to the fact that, for Britons, Catholics were the far more despised religious minority. “There are no known instances of any large-scale mob activity against the Jews,” according to Endelman, though he adds that in its “intensity and its structure” English anti-Catholicism closely resembled anti-Semitism (Jews of Georgian England, 47). Edgeworth’s association of the Gordon riots with the Naturalization Act furor of 1753 anticipates this finding. 15. Amid the burgeoning criticism on Harrington, scholars have tended to overlook a political reading of the novel in the sense that I am attempting one. Ragussis emphasizes the psychological aspects of Fowler’s plotting, casting her as “the power of the unconscious” that reveals Harrington’s tendency toward mental instability (Figures 73). Page examines the novel’s literary history, in particular its complex deployment of gothic conventions to present how an individual’s mix of rationality and sympathy can overcome British prejudice against Jews. Spector’s article constitutes a wide-ranging survey of Jews in Edgeworth, setting the novel against the backdrop of Jewish emancipation rather than the specifics of the political events it invokes. John Plotz’s work on the crowd, in contrast, takes on the overly political aspects invoked by the Gordon riots, but still ignores Mowbray’s role as conspirator and orchestrator. Plotz concludes that Edgeworth holds up the Monteneros as examples of how “an alien national identity can come to be valued as an aid to preserving a stable social realm” (55). It is difficult to endorse this conclusion when we take into account Edgeworth’s vagueness as to whether or not Montenero will stay in England at the novel’s end. 16. Both Shapiro and Connor examine this print, though neither makes the connection between the ventriloquist and the Jewish question. 17. Frank Felsenstein reproduces and analyzes another revealing engraving entitled “The Grand Conference or the Jew Predominant” (1753) that shows Samson Gideon, a leading Sephardic Jewish financier and friend of the Pelhams, bribing the ministers to support Jewish naturalization. The scene is typical of representations of Gideon during the

180

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Notes controversy, though in fact he opposed the naturalization bill. Such pictures “helped to sustain an image of the Jew as a manipulating plutocrat whose financial sway and international dealing give him a jugular grip upon the political pulse of the state” (Felsenstein 209). Felsenstein also notes how Macklin in the novel highlights a change in attitude since the era of his theatrical prominence: “Edgeworth’s concern to give due emphasis to the larger adverse effect of Macklin’s Shylock is a good indication of a new empathy toward Jews and of a consciousness of shame at their mistreatment in the previous age” (185). The Irish Widow Levy, a street vendor of oranges, is a crucial ally in Montenero’s attempt to protect Mowbray’s family, and his own, during the riots. In point of fact, Jews, not the Irish, were “strongly identified” with the trade in oranges and lemons, according to Endelman (Jews of Britain 43). Edgeworth’s decision to make Montenero’s helper an Irishwoman points to a broader equivalence, in the author’s mind, between disenfranchised Jews and Irish Catholics. Sheila Spector argues that at the novel’s conclusion, “English irrationality is exposed as the true source of anti-social behavior, and prejudice—anti-Irish as well as anti-Semetic—its primary manifestation” (“The Other’s Other” 330). Connor connects such a view of hearing as opposed to seeing with the evolution of print culture: “there seems reason to suspect that our contemporary tendency to associate hearing with feeling—intense but indeterminate—and seeing with knowing—precise but abstract—is itself the result in part of the well-documented shift from a society based on the spoken, and therefore heard word, to one based on the written word” (22). See chapter four in Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key, “Between Rational and Irrational Dissent: Political Radicalism in Anglo-Jewish Thought,” 135–183. For a sample of criticism hostile to his influence, see Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972) and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Sedgewick’s Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Patriarchal Complicity (1991). Gallagher analyzes these letters on pp. 269–270.

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I n de x

Alien act, the see Émigrés and emigration Austen, Jane, 9, 91, 173–4 n Australia early perceptions of, 18–20 establishment of Botany Bay colony, 16–17 first governor’s seal, 88–9, 109, 123 see also Transportation, practice of Barrell, John, 114, 175 n Barrington, George as author, 86–7 as colonial functionary, 99–105 the “prince of pickpockets”, 91–3 Bhabha, Homi, 101, 166 n Brah, Avtar, 5–6 Brennan, Timothy, 83–4, 175 n Brewer, William, 56, 168 n Brockden Brown, Charles, 138 Burney, Frances Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793), 63, 67 Residence in France, 60, 69 The Wanderer (1814), 61–72 Butler, Judith, 142 Charles X (comte d’Artois), 1–3, 84 Cobbett, William, 141 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 110–11, 124, 175 n

Convicts see Crime and criminals in Britain; Transportation, practice of Crime and criminals in Britain association of disease and infection with, 94–5 convict love tokens, 88–9 identified with slaves, 95–6 viewed as aliens, 94–6 Diaspora, theories of versus cosmopolitanism, 7–8 Georgian Jews and, 131–2 and Romantic exile, 5–7 Edgeworth, Maria Harrington (1817), 141–54 as her father’s “partner”, 155–8 see also Ventriloquism Émigrés and emigration and the Alien Act, 3, 11, 21, 33–5, 70–2, 113–14 English perceptions of, 11–13 French definitions of, 9–11 Lioncel, or the Emigrant (1803), 14 Godwin, William, 108, 118, 119 Hazlitt, William, 139 Hunt, “Orator” Henry, 140–1 Jews in Georgian England, 131–3 see also Edgeworth, Maria; Ventriloquism

194

Index

Kean, Edmund Jewish origins, 138 as Shylock, 138–9 Lamb, Charles, 132–3 Lee, Debbie, 94 Lynch, Deirdre, 78–9, 169 n Marx, Karl, 47 Mellor, Anne, 172 n Mufti, Aamir, 97, 132–3 Narrative and political legitimacy, 110–11 and social stability, 36–41 Page, Judith, 138, 145, 154 Paley, William, 94–5, 174 n Ragussis, Michael, 135, 139, 178 n, 179 n Renan, Ernest, 37–8, 77, 78, 170 Rey, Jacob, 154–5 Robinson, Mary Hubert de Sevrac (1796), 49–56 Lyrical Tales (1800), 56–8 Scott, Sir Walter, 59, 62, 76 Scrivener, Michael, 128, 176 n Sedition trials in Edinburgh (1793) social conditions in Scotland before, 111–12 subsequent reception of, 126–7 theatricality and, 115–16 Shakespeare, William see Kean, Edmund Shapiro, James, 177 n

Shelley, Mary Frankenstein (1818), 72–84 “Monsieur Nong tong paw”, 75 Perceptions of the Scottish Martyrs, 118 Smith, Charlotte Turner The Banished Man (1794), 29–49 The Emigrants (1793), 27–9 Smith’s personae in her fiction, 44–9 Southey, Robert, 96 Spector, Sheila, 180 n Stewart, Dugald, 136–7, 142 Transportation, practice of to Australia, versus to America, 88 versus banishment, 18–19 reasons for resumption of, 16–18, 96–7 Ventriloquism in entertainment and politics, 136–7 and the Jews, 134, 135 as a Romantic motif, 136 Volney, comte de, 72, 73 White, Hayden, 7, 36, 52 Wiley, Michael, 170 n Wolfson, Susan, 164 n, 165 n Wollstonecraft, Mary, 51 The Wrongs of Woman (1798), 70 Wordsworth, William “The Convict”, 20 “The Emigrant Mother”, 15–16 The Prelude (1805), 136