Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions

220 Pages·2008·1.848 MB·English

by  Michael Wiley (auth.)

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influ-
ential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who
captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their
achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they
inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film,
and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary
forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, nov-
els, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of
letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and
Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly stud-
ies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact
on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on
Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats,
Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins,
Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor
is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty
at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at
the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades
of experience as editor of books on nineteenth-century literature and culture.
She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English
Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews
in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism,
folklore, and narrative theory.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE:
Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions,
by Michael Wiley
FORTHCOMING TITLES:
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in 19th Century Literary Culture,
by Lynn Parramore
List of Previous Publications
Romantic Geography: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces (St. Martin’s Press/
Macmillan, 1998)
The Last Striptease (fiction) (St. Martin’s Press Minotaur, 2007)
Romantic Migrations
Local, National, and
Transnational Dispositions
Michael Wiley
ROMANTIC MIGRATIONS
Copyright © Michael Wiley, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60468-1
The cover of this book includes an image of J. M. Probst’s 1780 Globus
Terrestris. The image is reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Ansbacher Map
Collection, permanently housed in the Morris Ansbacher Map Room,
Jacksonville (Florida) Public Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2008 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-349-37249-2 ISBN 978-0-230-61120-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230611207
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiley, Michael, 1961–
Romantic migrations : local, national, and transnational dispositions /
Michael Wiley.
p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives and letters)
Includes bibliographical references.

1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism.
2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. Self in literature.
4. National characteristics in literature. 5. Transnationalism in literature.
6. Romanticism—Great Britain. 7. Great Britain—Emigration and
immigration—History—18th century. 8. France—Emigration and
immigration—History—18th century. 9. North America—Emigration
and immigration—History—18th century. 10. Africa—Emigration and
immigration—History—18th century. I. Title.
PR448.E43W56 2008
820.993552—dc22 2007032128
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Julie, Isaac, Maya, and Elias
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Deposing, Disposing, Dispositioning 1
1 The French Immersion: Cross Currents of Selfhood 7
2 Imagining America 55
3 Consuming Africa: Embodying Antithesis 103
Afterword 147
Notes 151
Works Cited 183
Index 203
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Preface
I
n 2008, the word “migration” describes the terror-driven diaspora
from Darfur, the poverty-driven movement of fruit pickers, the
post-Katrina departure from New Orleans, the transnational aes-
thetics of expatriate artists, even the seasonal patterns of Canadian
geese and butterflies. It describes the prehistoric spread of hom-
inids from Africa to Eurasia, the Hebrew exodus from Egypt, the
Puritan crossing to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the flight
of young Somalian women from compulsory genital mutilation.
It describes emigrations and immigrations, the movements of the
living.
But in 1754, as Nicholas Roe comments, “emigrant,” in its modern
sense, “was quite a new word.”1 Within only forty years, though, it
was part of the public vocabulary. In 1793, Charlotte Smith used it to
title her poem about French refugees. And in the mid-1790s, Thomas
Poole speculated on the aesthetic and social gains that literary “emi-
grators” might achieve by leaving England.2
In a letter published in 1789, the naturalist Gilbert White argued
to a skeptic, who, along with many contemporaries, believed exclu-
sively in avian hibernation, that bird “migration certainly does sub-
sist in some places.”3 In 1792, the British explorer Samuel Hearne
described hunger-driven Indians wandering the Canadian wilder-
ness as “migrants.”4 Also in 1792, the historian and travel writer
Jeremy Belknap first used the word “immigrant” in print, though
he acknowledged that “the strict letter of the English dictionaries”
would not recognize it; and in 1809, Edward A. Kendall commented
on the newness of the word to the English language.5
The new languages and meanings of migration arose as British
emigration accelerated: from about 40,000 in the 1770s to about
80,000 in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to about 200,000
in the 1820s.6 Immigration accelerated as well, coming from North
America at the start of the Revolution in 1775, for example, from
France in the decade following the French Revolution, and from
Western Africa, often by way of the Americas or the British West