Asylum and Historical Memory in Victorian Britain

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century Britain famously provided refuge to exiles as diverse as Metternich, Marx and Malatesta, and obtained a reputation as an undiscriminating ‘asylum of nations’. Shaping Victorian Britain’s approach to asylum was not just, as Bernard Porter has observed, a lack of legal restrictions on foreign nationals, but also an increasingly salient awareness of the country’s long history of harbouring refugees. From the 1840s, a series of academic and popular histories, novels, songs, and artworks appeared that emphasised the centuries-long continuity of British asylum and the diversity of its refugee populations, ranging from sixteenth-century Protestants to famous Enlightenment thinkers and the counter-revolutionary émigrés of the 1790s. By the 1890s, historical enquiry on this subject had been regularized by bodies like the Huguenot Society and the Jewish Historical Society. Knowledge of this history fundamentally shaped how Britons reacted to refugee crises in their own times. As exiles arrived following the 1848 revolutions or the pogroms of 1881, supporters of generous asylum policies pointed to the economic and cultural contributions that earlier refugees had made to British society, while more restrictionist voices contended that recent refugees were less deserving of sympathy than those of past centuries. Exiles themselves utilized this awareness of British history to defend their physical refuge, and right to remain politically active, in Britain. This chapter will analyse the development of historical memory of asylum in Victorian Britain and demonstrate the uses to which British and exile actors put it from the 1840s to the 1890s