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Emigrants 1811 Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants Do a close reading of the preface to The Emigrants (1793) in comparison with the various prefaces to Elegiac Sonnets (especially the 6th edition) and her gothic novel of the French Revolution, Desmond (1792). How does Smith negotiate claims of authority in the midst of gendered deference? How does her authorial self-presentation differ in these different contexts? How does it remain the same? Does form or history seem to matter more to her construction of herself as (political) author? Outline “The Emigrants” stanza by stanza. What happens in each stanza? What larger structures or movements can you discern? What differences do you notice between the first book and the second? In particular, do a close reading of the first two stanzas of the poem: How would you paraphrase the opening verse paragraph? What’s unusual about this as a poetic beginning? What kinds of diction rule the opening lines? Do you hear an allusion to any earlier works in the ending of the stanza? What do you make of the (excessive?) alliteration in lines 15 and 16: what does that do for the poem? Paraphrase the second stanza. What’s the movement of the second verse paragraph? If poetry is shaped through repetition and variation, what is repeated and what varied in these lines? How do parenthetical remarks function? (Are they the same here as in the first stanza?) What allusions appear? When does the “I” appear in the poem, not just in the beginning, but throughout? How would you summarize its function in each appearance? “The Emigrants” was criticized for “egotism” both as a moral limitation and as a formal confusion. Describe both the moral problem of egotism and the formal issue. How would you describe the form of “The Emigrants”? (What formal elements does Smith evoke? How do these relate to one another?) Susan Wolfson impressively tracks Smith’s allusions to a pre-existing canon of male verse (often martial). Her argument stresses Smith’s use of such allusions to legitimate or authorize her own verse. Take one or more of the citations Wolfson identifies and develop a deeper, closer interpretation of what this citation means or does at its particular moment within the poem. Shred my essay, please. Gently. Where do I lose you? What claims seem overstated or undersupported? Close read the ending of each book. How are they similar, how different? Consider tone, imagery, context. Is it plausible to argue for a “short epic” form? You might consider an essay by Joseph Wittreich on Romantic “brief epic” in response to Milton’s Paradise Regained: this is also relevant to Blake’s brief epic Milton. Close reading questions: 1811 Close read the opening four stanzas. What norms do they create? How does form shape content? (What is the form? What are its historical associations?) Find two or three examples of places where formal demands produce a syntactical contortion: discuss the effects of this contortion on the overall meaning of this passage. What’s the role of personification? (What historical associations does personification as a trope have at this period? Does it seem modern? Dated? What earlier poets used personification extensively, where and why? Find a way to look this up.) Outline the poem stanza by stanza. What happens? What larger units do you see in the poem? Paraphrase the history Barbauld is offering here. Consider the use of fancy to frame the presentation of historical events and “the Genius.” Look back at Ellison’s essay to see what kind of argument she makes about fancy in 1811. Do you agree or disagree? Try to base your response to Ellison on a close reading of Fancy and Genius. Who is the Genius? How does this figure relate to earlier Romantic discussions of genius and inspiration? How about the notion of a “genius loci” or the spirit of a place? (You might check into Wordsworth’s interest in “genii loci,” if I’m not butchering the Latin. Read James Chandler’s discussion of Barbauld and history in England in 1819. Note his sources. Go to ECCO (Eighteenth-century Collections Online) through the library links and look up Anna Barbauld’s “Uses of History.” Compare Barbauld’s didactic prose with her (didactic?) verse. What differences do you note? Close read the last stanza of the poem. Ellison is unhappy about the figure of Columbus (and the masses) in the close of 1811. Do you agree with her argument? Try skimming (or reading about) Joel Barlow’s Columbiad. How might this text, produced by a player in both the American and French revolutions, influence our reading of the figure of Columbus or perhaps the Genius in Barbauld? How is Barbauld’s use of the literary commonplace of a tourist visiting London’s ruins different from Walpole’s apparently unexceptionable usage? See Skilton, attached. From David Skilton, “Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay's New Zealander …” It had always been known that great cities were all doomed to fall. Old Testament prophets relished the prospective destruction of their enemies, Ezekiel, for example, predicting that Tyre would be 'like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more' (26:14). When Hector is arming for battle in Book 6 of The Iliad he tells Andromache that 'the day shall come when sacred Ilios shall be laid low'.[6] His words are appropriated for use by future generations and future civilisations, and Gibbon reports of Scipio Africanus the Younger, who famously wrought on the city of Carthage the most utter destruction ever witnessed before the invention of high explosives, that [w]hile Carthage was in flames, Scipio repeated two lines of the Iliad, which express the destruction of Troy, acknowledging to Polybius, his friend and preceptor . that while he recollected the vicissitudes of human affairs, he inwardly applied them to the future calamities of Rome . .[7] … In 1771, Horace Walpole predicted that there would 'be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and in time a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra . .'; then again in 1775, he proposes that an 'American' from the banks of the Oronooko will revive knowledge of the English language and English gardening; and in 1776 that New York or Philadelphia will be giving laws to Europe.[14] In the late 1770s Thomas Lyttelton, also known as 'the wicked Lord Lyttelton', composed 'a Letter from an American Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St. Paul's, in the Year 2199, to a friend settled in Boston, the Metropolis of the Western Empire', in which the ruin of London is attributed to the destruction of British liberty and the failure of public credit. This poem was not a very accomplished work, and published posthumously in 1780, in the same year as there appeared an anonymous work of even less poetic distinction entitled The Deserted City.[15] In this, too, a visitor asks how London fell into ruin, and the answer is similar. Both these poems are in effect responses to a poem, Regatta, addressed to Lyttelton in 1775 at the beginning of the American war, wishing that Britain may not fall like Rome before her, through loss of native virtue.[16] During the Napoleonic War, in the dark days of 1810-1812, Thomas Love Peacock (like the writer of The Deserted City, 1780) foresaw the time when the Thames would be silted up and filled with sedge, and is followed in this by Anna Barbauld in her Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in which she predicts that the 'ingenuous youth' of Ontario and beyond the Blue Mountains would visit London With fond adoring steps to press the sod By statesmen, sages, poets, heroes trod . .(131-2)[17] In her answering poem, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen, Ann McVicars Grant felt able to assert in that more hopeful year that defeat was no longer to be thought of, and that, in any case, if anywhere was to be celebrated in decay, Glasgow would make as good a ruin as London.[18] Mrs Grant, who had been in the North American colonies as a young child, longed for the reunification of the empire, and might have imagined Britain retaining the upper hand, but it is usually American tourists who will contemplate London's remains, although some authors, such as the Scottish writer of Britain Preserved of 1800, see a place for a prosperous Britain in an American empire based on the British ideals of Free Trade and individual liberty, and on the universal use of the English (or as he put it) the British language. Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants (ucdavis project version: no line numbers, few stanza breaks) Book 1. Scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex. Time, a Morning in November, 1792 1. struggling light; how few the morning wakes to joy; curse beams of daystar 2. God means nothing but good to us; soul recoils from legal crimes, sighs for lone cottage—solitude might help bear own sufferings but tranquil seclusion = vain; Danaids, Sisyphus; cease wailings and learn no refuge (not cottage, or farm, or manor, or city mansions) can block “the spectre Care” 3. group of emigrants approaches (discriminate anguish) monk—cardinal/bishop—abbe—parochial priest—noblewoman with children (flashback to Versailles)—nobleman 4. poor wandring wretches! (vagrants)—behold strange vicissitudes of fate (emigrants fallen) but—hirelings of British courts: study a lesson that concerns ye much England, be generous to emigrants, but mend your ways to avoid revolution Book II (Georgics) Scene, on an Eminence of one of those Downs, which afford to the South a view of the Sea; to the North of the Weald of Sussex.
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