Introduction

Abstract

Helen Maria Williams’s enthusiastic identification with the ‘citizen of the world’ ideal in her Letters Written in France (1790), and Jane West’s loyalist dismissal of this ideal as literally unChristian in her Letters to a Young Lady (1799), represent the full range of British representations of this cosmopolitan ideal in the 1790s. Building on the growing body of scholarly work that has restored women writers to the centre of Romantic-period studies,¹ my aim in Citizens of the World is to illuminate the underappreciated extent to which Romantic-period British women writers cultivated a radicalized cosmopolitanism through their engagement with French revolutionary politics. British women were drawn to France for both its ancien régime associations as ‘the paradise of lady wits’ (to quote Fanny Burney, Journals 1: 197), and its revolutionary politics that extended across gender and national lines. Most visible in the 1790s, yet persisting through the rise and fall of Napoleon in the writings of Francophiles like Anne Plumptre and Lady Morgan, revolutionary cosmopolitanism flourished in women’s writings of the Romantic era.

You will not suspect that I was an indifferent witness of such a scene. Oh no! this was not a time in which the distinctions of country were remembered. It was a triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the noblest privileges of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.

Helen Maria Williams, referring to the Fête de la Fédération in Paris, Letters Written in France (1790)

Patriotic attachment forms a marked feature in the character of those worthies of old who are recorded in holy writ. And the Saviour of the World, by condescending to imbibe this predilection for the soil in which he was born and suffered, has most effectively rescued the genuine feelings of the patriot from the undeserved reproach of prejudice and narrowness of soul. The citizen of the world … affects to despise distinctions which the Lord of Life has sanctioned.

Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady (1799)