Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period by Lucy E. Thompson

Author:Lucy E. Thompson [Thompson, Lucy E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000532456
Google: XWtPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-30T03:11:56+00:00

‘Aliens’, paranoid discourse, and surveillance

David Simpson suggests that the period 1790–1810 was a time of ‘paranoid discourse’ that represented ‘aliens’ as a particular threat to social cohesion and security.8 Late-eighteenth-century popular fiction frequently voices disapproval at the ‘conflux of strangers to different parts of the country’ who might be ‘emigrant French come to cut our throats’, as William Frederick Williams’s character Mr Simmons declares in Fitzmaurice (1800, p. 13). The rhetoric of newspapers and parliamentary debates fuelled these fears with propaganda against French ‘aliens’:

The most positive orders have been given … to arrest or send away every Alien who shall be found to reside within ten miles of the coast … The object of this extraordinary vigilance is to counteract the views of the enemy in obtaining secret intelligence of our operations. (Jackson’s Oxford Journal 1800)

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