Writing to her regular correspondent, the Irish antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker in February 1793, Charlotte Smith describes her current literary enterprise: a poem in blank verse, in two parts, expected for publication in May of the same year, on the subject of the French emigrants – largely aristocracy, members of the middle classes and clergy – who were driven out of France for not adhering to the tenets of the new revolutionary regime and who arrived on the south coast of England in the early years of the 1790s. ‘It is not a party book’, she writes, ‘but a conciliatory book.’ She does not expand on the nature of the conciliation offered or proposed in the poem in question, The Emigrants. Given that she writes to Cooper in the month that war was declared between England and France and the poem is temporally poised on either side of this moment (November 1792, April 1793), she most obviously seems to be asking for conciliation between the two nations. The dedication to the poet William Cowper written in May 1793 amplifies this point. Appealing to Cowper's philanthropy, she hopes he will join her in hoping that:

This humanist agenda is certainly borne out at one level of the poem, which invites enlightened British readers to sympathize with their French ‘brethren’. However, the poem is embedded with more subtle conciliations and contests: not only between French and British, but also between royalists and revolutionaries, aristocrats and peasants, past and present, land and sea. Smith's speaker, perched on the cliffs or on the Downs may not be of ‘a party’ but neither is she entirely conciliatory, as she launches attacks on the British legal system and political corruption as though casting stones into the English Channel.

AMBIGUOUS SYMPATHY

To write about the plight of the emigrants here, and in her 1794 novel The Banished Man, signalled to Smith's less supportive critics a u-turn in her political sympathies.