ABSTRACT
In 1784, when Charlotte Smith ventured into print with her first volume of Elegiac Sonnets, she was in Kings Bench Prison with her spendthrift husband, Benjamin. J. Labbe has usefully noted that 'The Emigrants is a poem about war, about being at war; it is a rejection of war: and it is a declaration of war on a culture that continually seeks to marginalize and cast off–abjectify–segments of itself '. The Critical Review goes on to argue that the inclusion of autobiographical material blurs the political issue represented by the emigrants, but the problem might be that Smith is no longer using autobiography to entertain her reader, but to help those readers feel for others. Smith's decision to place herself in 'the foreground', to 'begin and end the piece' seems to have been based on a desire to magnify the reader's pity towards 'those overwhelming and uncommon distresses'.
