ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines how Smith's use of the Alien Act is part of the critique, and how it also further functions for her as a marker of what she call 'negative cosmopolitanism'–the consciousness of national belonging that emerges against a backdrop of political disappointment. In a climactic moment in 'The Hungarian', Volume IV of Charlotte Smith's The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, the protagonist, Leopold de Sommerfeldt, is arrested under the Alien Act, taken into custody and ordered to leave England within twenty-four hours. The necessary conventional closure is delayed, as the felicitous resolution of Leopold and Gertrude's story is displaced onto the final volume of the Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. The Young Philosopher, while providing the most salient representation of a viable alternative of community through the option of America, also emphasizes the lingering madness of the central female protagonist, Laura Glenmorris.
