Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés British Convicts, and Jews

Covering the subjects of French emigration to Britain in the wake of the French Revolution, the transportation of British convicts (including the Edinburgh political martyrs) to Australia, and the experiences of the British Jewish community, Benis shows how these very different, but related experiences of diaspora both forged and, at the same time, undermined British understandings of nationality and national identity in this crucial period of British history. In her discussions, Benis argues that in its "remarkable charity" to the massive influx of French exiles, Britain established itself as the first modem liberal state, apparendy secure enough in its own sense of national identity to take in political exiles and those seeking asylum from revolutionary France, while, at the same time expelling from the body politic, those its considered criminal and seditious to its newly established penal colony of Botany Bay in an attempt to maintain boundaries of class and conduct. Ultimately, these attempts are driven by the government's response to the French Revolution indicated by its various acts to restrict the freedom of expression in print and debate, as well as in the Alien Act of 1793 (and legislation related to Jewish legal identity) which aimed to define and control the status and movement of refugees, subversive or otherwise. Benis also notes the presence of the subject in canonical writing, for instance, when Austen's parsimonious Fanny Dashwood makes a present of a needlebook "made by some emigrant" to each of the Steele sisters, demonstrating both the real presence of the impoverished émigrés dependent on the charity of the English middle classes in the fiction of the period as well as being a register for Fanny's pathological willingness to help anyone other than her own husband's half-sisters, struggling to maintain their social position.