The Tangled Bank: Nature as Via Media in Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books (1793)

My thinking about Charlotte Smith’s 1793 The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books comes out of a course on British Romanticism I taught in fall 2021. Subtitled “Righting Injustice, Writing Social Justice,” the course moved through a series of thematic units exploring such topics as Britain’s reactions to the social justice issues raised by the French Revolution and the discursive construction of human rights during the Romantic period. While it might not seem obvious, class conversations were mediated by the formidable, inescapable historic reality that the time period of British Romanticism coincided with the British Empire’s far-reaching involvement with and dependence on transatlantic slavery. In The Emigrants, Smith depicts the plight of French refugees (chiefly Royalists and Catholic clergy) arriving, in numbers that Broadview Press editors estimate as eventually reaching 12,000 per year (Introduction 32) on what they call “the stretch of British coastline from Dover to Southampton” (Introduction 31). Their property and citizenship forfeit and their return to France punishable by death, the émigrés sought political asylum in Britain (Introduction 32). The poem’s speaker encounters a group of emigrants while walking, Smith writes in a scene-setting prologue, “on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex” (The Emigrants 131). It was striking in class to consider the diasporic emigrant community Smith describes as “here, with swol’n and aching eyes / Fix’d on the grey horizon” (I.216-7), who “Solicitously watch’d the weekly sail / From [their] dear native land” (I.218-9) in the context of, say, Paul Gilroy’s famous call and proposal for “some new chronotopes” (4)—namely, the “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” (4) that his famous study eponymously calls “the Black Atlantic” as it attends to what he calls “the Atlantic [itself] as a cultural and political system” (15) actualized by “the economic and historical matrix in which plantation slavery . . . was one special moment” (15). Meanwhile, from our readings in Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies, we saw a new relevancy in The Emigrants’s lines where the speaker bitterly opines of Britain that