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“Black, Patched and Pennyless”: Race and Crime in Burney’s The Wanderer
- Eighteenth-Century Fiction
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 2013
- pp. 677-700
- Article
- Additional Information
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In Frances Burney’s The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties, an English heiress escapes Revolutionary France disguised as a black woman. While in this disguise, she is accused of theft, beggary, and prostitution, and, despite her innocence, she is ultimately advertised as a criminal even after her black makeup fades. This article historicizes Juliet’s criminalization within metropolitan alarm about the alien black population of former African slaves living in Britain at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather than merely reproducing racialist thought as other critics have claimed, Burney’s novel interrogates the idea of black as criminal by exposing how the fraught, anti-Jacobin rhetoric of Edmund Burke and the class anxieties of the French Revolution contributed to the entrenchment of this early stereotype.