7 - The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer

Summary

In a climactic moment in ‘The Hungarian’, Volume IV of Charlotte Smith's The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800; 1802), the protagonist, Leopold de Sommerfeldt, is arrested under the Alien Act, taken into custody and ordered to leave England within twenty-four hours. British law thus joins together with the other oppressive forces that pursue Leopold throughout the story. In its focus on the individual's struggle against injustice, but also on the exigencies of exile and the coercive power of institutions in general, ‘The Hungarian’ encompasses many of the concerns that preoccupied Smith in her writing and throughout her life. The appearance of a repressive British law at a key moment in the narrative illustrates how a progressive political positioning and a critique of legalistic and institutionalized intolerance continue to feature even in her later literary works. This essay examines how Smith's use of the Alien Act is part of this critique, and how it also further functions for her as a marker of what I call ‘negative cosmopolitanism ’ – the consciousness of (failed) national belonging that emerges against a backdrop of political disappointment. Isolated by the forces of suspicion, chauvinism and reaction, the citizen of the world is revealed to be merely an alien; an exile, persecuted and scorned.

The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer is a series of novellas linked together through the letters of the eponymous hero, a melancholy man of means who attempts to alleviate his depression by relating to his friend the stories he has heard in the course of his wanderings. Taken together, the tales present a world of violence, rootlessness and despair, exhibited in a variety of locales and historical moments: sixteenth-century France in the aftermath of the St Bartholomew's Eve massacre; a slave plantation in Jamaica; war-torn Ireland; a gothic mansion in contemporary England; and in Volume IV, the tale I will focus on in this essay, in Hungary during a time of political unrest.