Making the Margins Legitimate: Travel, Family, and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

This study examines the first novels of Frances Burney and Tobias Smollett in order to analyze the effects of inner, familial forces and outer, worldly forces on the narrators’ national identity. Written thirty years apart, the novels follow a remarkably similar plot structure to arrive at different configurations of national identity. I argue that success creating a fictional character who fully enters British society is ultimately dependent upon the author’s own sense of marginalization. Indeed, Burney and Smollett configure their sense of Britishness around their own social positions as a woman and Scot respectively. Finally, these findings maintain that the differing pictures of national identity raised in these novels indicate a changing national situation. While the image of an ideal Briton remains unstable, the forces moving authors and readers to define Britishness are widespread.