Sensibility and Alienation in Charlotte Smith’s “The Emigrants” Maximilian Gonzalez College

In September 1792, French revolutionaries murdered over one thousand political prisoners to prevent them from being freed and joining enemy forces. After the September Massacres, many, including the English poet Charlotte Turner Smith, had to question their support of the French Revolution and its founding principles. In 1793, Smith published “The Emigrants,” a two-part poem about French refugees who settled in Brighthelmstone, a city in the south of England. The poem’s first part takes place a month after the September Massacres, and the second part takes place the following spring. Smith uses her poem’s setting, a place where civilization and nature meet, to show how the atrocities committed by French radicals throw humanity out of harmony with nature. In condemning French atrocities, Smith does not show the ways the revolutionaries literally destroy natural beauty; instead, she shows how her knowledge of the suffering in France prevents her from connecting with nature, even in England, which has been physically unaffected by the conflict. While writers of the literature of Sensibility view such emotional responses as admirable, Smith portrays them as destructive forces which break her connection with the natural beauty which...