2009 was the year of centenaries: Calvin and Gladstone, Johnson and Swinburne – the list was a long one. In Cambridge, this was peculiarly striking. While the University was celebrating its 800th anniversary, several of its alumni were fêted as well. The year 1809 had produced three distinguished Cantabridgians: Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald. There was something wonderfully serendipitous in the realisation that so private and reticent a man as FitzGerald was sharing the limelight with two of Victorian England's most monumental presences. Tennyson and FitzGerald both studied at Trinity College and soon afterwards became friends: not an easy friendship, as it happened, but an important one for both of them. FitzGerald's ‘translation’ – if that is what it is – of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century. Tennyson's praise of it did not quite rise to the occasion: according to F. T. Palgrave, he commended ‘FitzGerald's famous Omar Paraphrase, in which Oriental thought is so marvellously refracted through the atmosphere of modern English style’: faint praise for a work of such stature, though the blandness may be Palgrave's more than Tennyson's. As I hope to show, however, the two poets had a good deal in common and the traffic seems to have flowed in both directions. It was FitzGerald who encouraged Tennyson to learn Persian, though Tennyson's interest in Middle Eastern poetry pre-dated FitzGerald's engagement with Omar Khayyám. But the actual relationship between the two men is not terribly enlightening.

Like the French railway system, photography had existed for over a decade before Napoleon III came to power. The French Academy of Science had been made aware of a completely new reprographic method – the daguerreotype – in 1839, but during the decade that followed only the most affluent could afford to own a daguerreotype or calotype. The early 1850s, however, saw a major turning point with the introduction of new, cheaper and faster processes which opened up photography to commercialisation on a vast scale, removing the medium from the exclusive preserve of scientists and specialists and ensuring its popularity. One of the period's most famous commercial photographers, André-Adolphe Disdéri, set up his hugely successful photographic studio in the centre of Paris in 1852, and over the following years the number of photographers and photographic societies expanded rapidly. Demand for glass, paper and chemicals soared, egg-production had to be increased to meet the need for albumen, and it has been estimated that by 1860 33,000 people were making a living from photography in Paris alone. Twenty years after the initial announcement of the discovery, photography had grown into a major industry and the Second Empire became the first period in French history to leave a photographic record of itself.

By the end of the Second Empire, photography had also left its own distinctive trace on the writing of the period.

In the indigenous traditions of the Victoria River region of Australia's Northern Territory, the bushranger Ned Kelly has become a spiritual ancestor of the Dreamtime. His defiance of authority is seen by aboriginal people as a powerful echo of their own profoundly unjust treatment at the hands of European colonisers. Kelly is viewed there as an indigenous defier of white colonialism and its attendant injustices. In some versions of the tradition he has even become Jesus Christ, a conflation similar to that found in some European carnival depictions of local bandit heroes and in the religious cult surrounding the image of Pancho Villa. As the documenter of these Victoria River beliefs puts it: ‘Ned Kelly is a whitefellow and he is indigenous; he is the Dreaming answer to invasion and injustice.’

Such permutations help us understand why outlaw heroes have existed for a very long time and in a great many different places. They continue to operate today. Whenever and wherever significant groups of people believe themselves to be oppressed and unfairly treated, especially to the benefit of another such group or groups, the many variations of Robin Hood are likely to continue rising up and striking back.

A recent study by Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton examines the “second wave” of refugees from Nazi Germany, the individuals who were under 18 years of age when they arrived in the United States during the years between 1933 and the beginning of the Second World War. Sonnert and Holton's point of departure is the finding that a disproportionate number of these émigrés achieved a measure of “success” in professional—and above all, in academic—pursuits. Among the examples they cite, to illuminate their statistics, are a number of very famous scientists and scholars, but inevitably the great majority of the individuals they classify as finding a place in the careers they single out have been journeymen in their various fields. This is where I can situate myself as a detail in their story, a refugee arrival in 1940 at age 9 and a reasonably productive faculty member of assorted colleges and universities since 1955.

In a rather commonplace naïve response to good social science research, I was almost chagrined to learn how little originality there has been in my life. Even an ambivalent attitude I expressed to one of my daughters at the end of an autobiographical letter I wrote to her when she was ten proves to have been a commonplace in my cohort. I wrote at the time:

Borders and boundaries, frequently of a contested political nature, are a recurring location of outlaw hero traditions. As far back as the ninth century the epic hero of Byzantine culture, Digenis Akritis, was known as the ‘twiceborn border lord’, a reference to his dual Arabic and Byzantine parentage. His warrior deeds along the often-troubled borders of his part of the world, real and not so, have been celebrated in Middle Eastern and Greek epics ever since. The Ottoman Empire's uneasy lapping at the borders of what is now Greece also produced endemic and long-lasting forms of brigandage, within which a number of outlaw heroes were born.

Further north, years of war turned the French–German borders of the late eighteenth century into poorly policed zones of brigandry. Local mafias practiced extortion, abduction and a form of torture known as ‘chaufferage’ in which the soles of unfortunate hostage's feet were burned to make them reveal where their goods were hidden. Like Chinese bandits, these gangs had their own secret language and were adept at disguise and deception. The most notorious leader was Johann Buckler (1779–1802), known as ‘Schinderhannes’, or ‘John the Scorcher’. He was a great escaper around whom the usual tales of outlaw heroes swirled, including his alleged befriending of the poor.

In the opening scene of King Lear, at the climax of the rhetorical contest for the old king's affection, an argument about nothing sets the tragedy in motion:

1. LEAR. what can you say to draw

2. A third more opulent than your sisters'? Speak.

3. CORDELIA. Nothing.

4. LEAR. Nothing?

5. CORDELIA. Nothing.

6. LEAR. Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

Lear's retort plays on a familiar axiom in classical philosophy, ex nihilo nihil fit, ‘nothing comes of nothing’. The quibble depends on a change of tense: ‘nothing comes of nothing’ is a proposition about the nature of reality; ‘nothing will come of nothing’ means ‘if you remain silent I won't give you anything’. Lear may think he is being clever, but there are other sides to ‘nothing’, relentlessly revealed to him by the Fool, for whom this word becomes a mocking catchphrase:

1. KENT. This is nothing, Fool.

2. FOOL. Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer, you gave me nothing for't.

3. Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?

4. LEAR. Why, no, boy, nothing can be made out of nothing.

5. FOOL. (To Kent.) Prithee tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to. He will not believe a fool.

This exchange tells us incidentally that Lear is perfectly aware of the correct philosophical formula; he has forgotten the twist he gave it earlier, though the Fool of course has not.

One important aspect of the outlaw hero tradition is the connection between certain individual figures and a strong sense of identity among their resistant communities and the descendants of those communities. Sometimes those identities are regional or provincial, sometimes they are national. Sometimes they are based on ethnicity. Frequently they are some combination of all these elements. Even though familiar around much of the world, Robin Hood remains a quintessentially English figure. Pancho Villa is inseparable from the Mexican Revolution and its aspirations for nation building. The bushranger Ned Kelly has come to be a kind of de facto Australian national hero with strong inflections of Irish rebelliousness, while figures such as the Cossack Stenka Razin and the Slovakian Janosik are indissolubly accreted to the troubled national and ethnic identities of their respective countries and groups. Other national and ethnic outlaw heroes include the Swiss William Tell, the South African Tseule Tsilo and the Javanese Wisanggeni, to name only some. Wherever and whenever they are found, these connections between cultural identity and outlaw heroes are an important marker of the complex power relationships within societies. The lives and legends of a selection of these figures highlight the interplay of myth and history in the production and perpetuation of notions of identity.

The Zone of Displacement: Variety and Movement

The study of exile is burdened by conceptual disputes about the displaced persons who are to be classed as exiles rather than refugees or émigrés or emigrants or cosmopolitans or members of a diaspora. The disputes are an indicator, first, of the political weights variously attached to the term—ranging from the disgrace of the expelled kleptocrat to the celebration of the freedom fighter—and, second, of the historical place of the trope in metaphorical or symbolic senses in numerous religious, aesthetic, and other cultural contexts— ranging from the sacral privileged status of the Christian or Jew awaiting the ultimate restoration to the elevated distance supposedly occupied by the creative artist. The issues are further complicated by the circumstance that the contested concepts figure in many of the variations in the claims and counterclaims constitutive of the displaced condition, so that persons seeking asylum may claim refugee status and deny that they are exiles, lest they be excluded as likely disturbers of the political order or policies of the host state, while individuals seeking recognition as agents and allies in political ventures will assert their status as exiles and reject the passive victimization implied by the term “refugee.”