The Banished Man (1794)
Charlotte
Smith (1749-1806)
If you’ve heard of Charlotte Smith at all – and a
lot of folks sadly still haven’t – then it will probably be because of her
poetry. Her rather more famous contemporary William Wordsworth (the chap who most
people will have heard of thanks to a certain poem about clouds and daffodils)
described her as ‘a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations
than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’. I could write a lot about how amazing her poetry is;
but during her writing career Smith also wrote ten novels and it’s upon one of
these that I want to focus today. Published in 1794, The Banished Man is a startlingly modern narrative following the
adventures of the French aristocrat D’Alonville during the time of the French
Revolution. Fleeing persecution in his own country, he journeys through Europe
where he faces continual and humiliating suspicion and rejection. Even when the
people he meet don’t actually suspect him of being a dangerous revolutionary
travelling in the disguise of a refugee, they are often unwilling to involve
themselves in assisting a penniless exile: it’s a concept that is as bitingly
relevant today as it was two hundred years ago.
The tale’s first audiences believed that the novel’s
sympathetic portrayal of an aristocratic main character indicated a shift in
Smith’s political allegiance. Smith had initially been a vocal supporter of the
French Revolution’s aims of liberty and equality for all. In fact, the truth is
rather more nuanced. Rather than expressing overt political support or disdain for
either faction, Smith instead focuses her anger upon the selfish and violent
individuals who have exploited the Revolution for their own personal gain. A
Polish Revolutionary is able to establish a close friendship with the French
aristocrat D’Alonville because, even if the two have different opinions, each
is willing to listen to and to respect the other’s point of view. Smith’s hero even
acknowledges the fact that, had their situations been switched, ‘I might have
thought and have acted as you have done’.
Intertwined with the stark realities of D’Alonville’s
experiences as a persecuted refugee, is the life of the British woman Arabella
Denzil. She is the daughter of an impoverished gentlewoman who supports her family
through her writing, and who is widely believed to be an autobiographical
portrait of Smith herself. Like Smith’s own husband, Arabella’s father has long
since left the scene, and without any significant male relatives the family is
left vulnerable to the machinations of sexual predators interested in Arabella’s
beauty. Her inevitable romance with D’Alonville is likewise hampered by the
unpopularity that attends such a cross-national relationship in the then deeply
nationalistic British society.
At the time, one of the most popular genres of
novel was the Gothic mode, in which heroes and heroines frequently faced both
real and supernatural dangers in exotically portrayed European locations. Smith
had written Gothic novels before and would do so again, but in The Banished Man she draws upon the
conventions of the Gothic only to twist them around into a realistic portrayal
of the genuine hardships suffered by those caught up in the all-too-real
horrors of the French Revolution. She even underscores the originality of the
novel by including a short section entitled ‘Avis Au Lecteur’ or ‘Advice to the
Reader’, in which she points out her avoidance of a boy-meets-girl romance
narrative. She writes that she believed ‘the situation of [her] hero was of
itself interesting enough to enable [her] to carry him on for sometime, without
making him violently in love’.1
Even though D’Alonville’s and Arabella Denzil do inevitably become involved
with each other, this romance remains very much a subplot to the novel’s main
aim of presenting and exploring ideas of cultural dislocation, and exile
inflicted by civil conflict. The depth, subtlety, and acute perception that
Smith demonstrates here make this novel one of her best and most riveting.
You can find Smith’s The Banished Man:
(An affordable, printed copy of this almost-out-of-print novel: despite the occasional typo, this is a very useful edition for a general reader and is available from many popular online stores)
Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of
Charlotte Smith, ed. M. O. Grenby,
gen. ed. Stuart Curran, vol. 7 (London: Pickering, 2006)
(An excellently edited copy of the text, though
rather pricey for a general reader)
You can
find more information about Charlotte Smith here:
(Wikipedia: always a useful starting point)
(Encyclopaedia Britannica – a valuable free resource)
1 Wordsworth's note to
"Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint bees' Heads," from ‘Poems
Composed or Suggested during a Tour, in the Summer of 1833’, in The Poetical
Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by E. DeSelincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5
vols (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1949), IV, p. 403.
