Citizens of the World: The Émigrés in the British Imagination

Abstract

Emigration and travel were abiding preoccupations in Charlotte Smith’s writings. They were also personal passions that were rarely indulged by the author, who needed to write ceaselessly to support her nine children. Smith’s devotion to her beloved Sussex countryside in the Elegiac Sonnets and Beachy Head have (re)established her as a major Romantic poet with a rare talent for evoking the sublimity found in the particular, the minute, and the local. Inseparable from this devotion to the local are Smith’s cosmopolitan longings, most visible in her novels and their evocation of the citizen of the world ideal. Although this identity, as in the above epigraph from Marchmont, is typically claimed by her heroes, Smith’s well-known autobiographical interventions into her works should be expanded to include, in addition to her self-portraits in female victims of unjust institutions, her male citizens of the world.

I at last made up my mind; and seeing myself deserted by my fellow citizens I decided to renounce my ungrateful country, in which I had never lived, from which I had never received goods or services, and by which … I found myself so disgracefully treated.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

Thrown by misfortune from the bosom of my country, I early learned to be a Citizen of the World. — In what obscure corner of it… shall I ever find a quiet asylum?

Charlotte Smith, Marchmont (1796)