Of "Just Compassion": Sympathy, Justice, and the French Exiles in Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants

Abstract:Charlotte Smith's second poetic work, The Emigrants, has received less scholarly attention than her earlier Elegiac Sonnets. Calling for "just compassion," Smith adopts a rather complicated stance toward the French exiles, whose arrival stirred fierce debate across the Channel during the French Revolution. By proposing that The Emigrants should be understood in the context of the eighteenth-century sentimentalist moral philosophy of sympathy (an example of which is Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments), I argue that Smith tactically employs sympathy to affect the reader's judgment of this particular group of people and to provoke a rethinking of social justice.