The 1905 Aliens Act was the first modern law to restrict immigration to British shores. In this book, David Glover asks how it was possible for Britain, a nation that had prided itself on offering asylum to refugees, to pass such legislation. Tracing the ways that the legal notion of the alien became a national-racist epithet indistinguishable from the figure of the Jew, Glover argues that the literary and popular entertainments of fin de si?cle Britain...