Charlotte Smith in B.. - Global Public Library

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CHARLOTTE SMITH IN
BRITISH ROMANTICISM
The Enlightenment World:
Political and Intellectual History of the
Long Eighteenth Century
Series Editor:
Michael T. Davis
Series Co-Editors: Jack Fruchtman, Jr
Iain McCalman
Paul Pickering
Advisory Editor: Hideo Tanaka
Titles in this Series
Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment
David Worrall
The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832
Michael Scrivener
Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism
Carol Bolton
Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature
Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds)
Forthcoming Titles
Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society
Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (eds)
The Scottish People and the French Revolution
Bob Harris
The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century
Jonathan Lamb
John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon
Steve Poole
Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists
Michelle Faubert
William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War against the French Revolution
Michael Durey
www.pickeringchatto.com/enlightenmentworld
CHARLOTTE SMITH IN
BRITISH ROMANTICISM
edited by
Jacqueline Labbe
london
PICKERING & CHATTO
2008
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH
2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA
www.pickeringchatto.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without prior permission of the publisher.
© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2008
british library cataloguing in publication data
Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism. – (The Enlightenment world)
1. Smith, Charlotte Turner, 1749–1806 – Inﬂuence 2. Smith, Charlotte Turner,
1749–1806 – Criticism and interpretation 3. Romanticism – Great Britain
I. Labbe, Jacqueline M., 1965–
821.6
ISBN–13: 9781851969456
∞
This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American
National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
CONTENTS
Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction – Jacqueline Labbe
I. Advancing Poetry
1 ‘Herself […] Fills The Foreground’: Negotiating Autobiography
in the Elegiac Sonnets and The Emigrants – Kerri Andrews
2 From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet: Charlotte Smith and the
Labour of Collecting – Dahlia Porter
3 The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head
– Kari Lokke
4 The Subject of Beachy Head – Christoph Bode
vii
ix
1
13
29
45
57
II. Writing Only to Live: Novels
5 ‘The Slight Skirmishing of a Novel Writer’: Charlotte Smith and
the American War of Independence – Barbara Tarling
71
6 Charlotte Smith, the Godwin Circle, and the Proliferation of
Speakers in The Young Philosopher – A. A. Markley
87
7 The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in The Letters of a
Solitary Wanderer – Amy Garnai
101
8 Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen – Jacqueline Labbe
113
9 Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man in French Translation; or,
The Politics of Novel-Writing during the French Revolution
– Katherine Astbury
129
III. Private Theatricals and Posthumous Lives
10 ‘This Village Wonder’: Charlotte Smith’s What Is She? and the
Ideological Comedy of Curiosity – Diego Saglia
11 Recovering Charlotte Smith’s Letters: A History, With Lessons
– Judith Phillips Stanton
145
159
vi
Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism
12 Intertextualities – Stuart Curran
13 Charlotte Smith, Women Poets, and the Culture of Celebrity
– Stephen C. Behrendt
14 ‘Tell My Name to Distant Ages’: The Literary Fate of Charlotte
Smith – Louise Duckling
Notes
Works Cited
Index
175
189
203
219
257
273
CONTRIBUTORS
Kerri Andrews is a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University.
Katherine Astbury is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of
French Studies at the University of Warwick.
Stephen C. Behrendt is University Professor and George Holmes Distinguished
Professor of English at the University of Nebraska.
Christoph Bode is Chair of Modern English Literature at the University of
Munich.
Stuart Curran is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Louise Duckling is an independent scholar.
Amy Garnai teaches in the Department of English and American Studies at Tel
Aviv University.
Jacqueline Labbe is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
Kari Lokke is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California,
Davis.
A. A. Markley is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University, Brandywine.
Dahlia Porter is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Diego Saglia is Associate Professor of English at Università di Parma, Italy
Judith Phillips Stanton is an independent scholar.
Barbara Tarling is a research student in the Department of English at the Open
University.
– vii –
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1: Charles Wilson Peale, The Long Room, Interior of the Front
Room in Peale’s Museum (1822). Reproduced by permission of the
Detroit Institute of Arts
– ix –
37
INTRODUCTION
Jacqueline Labbe
In cheerless solitude, bereft
Of youth and health, thou still art left,
When hope and fortune have deceived me;
Thou, far unlike the summer friend,
Did still my falt’ring steps attend,
And with thy plaintive voice relieved me.
And as the time ere long must come
When I lie silent in the tomb,
Thou wilt preserve these mournful pages;
For gentle minds will love my verse,
And Pity shall my strains rehearse,
And tell my name to distant ages.1
When Charlotte Smith died, 202 years ago, her reputation was established as
a poet and novelist of sensibility. Keen readers appreciated her sharp politics
and her flair with poetic structure; most had enjoyed her semi-Gothic, increasingly real-world plots throughout the 1790s, while her poetry had moved on
from establishing the parameters of a Romantic genre to interrogating Romantic
form and structure towards the end of her life. As an author, she was a thorough and well-informed businesswoman as well as an innovator and compelling
storyteller: her letters show her voluminous correspondence with almost all of
her publishers (with the exception of Richard Phillips, who disposed of her letters) and her desire to influence almost every level of the publication process,
down to page layout and certainly including payment. Her self-definition as a
writer extended to viewing her publishers as her bankers: so thoroughly did she
feel a part of their world, she saw nothing unusual in drawing on her publishers not only for advances on money owed or expected to be earned, but also
in using them as guarantors for loans and drafts. Although her publishers did
not always share her conviction that this was justified behaviour, Smith’s letters
show her again and again chastising them for letting her down, casting them as
ungentlemanly and unreliable, and then backtracking swiftly to regain their confidence and custom. What emerges from the correspondence is Smith’s complete
–1–
2
self-identification as a writer, which chimes in interesting ways with her readers’
identification of her as an author. Bound up in words and print, the Smith we
know today is shaped by what, and how, she wrote.
This collection of essays pulls together many Smiths. For the first time in
one volume we read of her as novelist, poet, playwright, letter-writer – and literary icon, gaining and then losing a posthumous identity through how others
wrote about her. Perhaps because of the ways in which she has subsequently
been recovered – moving from minor novelist and pre-Romantic poet to protofeminist, ‘personal is political’ figurehead, to central 1790s novelist and essential
Romantic poet – Smith occupies several different rhetorical positions. This can
be seen, for instance, in how the several editors of her novels and poetry have
read and presented her, as well as how she writes and presents herself. Smith,
significantly, composes herself anew according to genre; readers both recognize
and complicate this process. Consider, for instance, the debates surrounding the
novel and romance in the late eighteenth century. This is the literary context
for a novel like The Old Manor House (1793), usually designated a romance
with Gothic elements. It is no surprise if a novelist as skilled and perceptive as
Smith, however, uses her text both to plot a story and to reflect on the narrative
devices available to and inherent in novel-writing. Consequently, in my edition
of Smith’s The Old Manor House,2 I identified what I saw as Smith’s complex net
of metaphoricity, and argued that she preserves a detachment that allows her
to explore the possibilities of genre. Unlike some of her other novels, The Old
Manor House dispenses with the thinly-disguised self-portraits that readers and
critics alike have found intrusive, and instead uses imagery to comment on the
implausibility of legal, cultural and social norms. But when I turned to editing
Smith’s poetry, it became apparent that the detached but sharply aware Smith of
The Old Manor House does not inhabit the poetry. Rather, Smith here creates a
web of subjective narrators, held together by an underlying referral to the poet
as a real woman with real sorrows. More than simply self-portraits in the manner
of Mrs Stafford in Emmeline (1788), and different altogether to the objective
voice of The Old Manor House, Smith’s poetic speaker(s) function as extensions
of a thoroughly poeticized subjectivity: that is, a subjectivity both created by and
dependent on poetry. In this way Smith exploits the possibilities of genre as she
does in her novels, but to a different end. Put simply, writing in different genres allows Smith to enlarge her rendering of subjectivity; reading her different
works complicates understandings of her persona as an expression of gendered
experience. This emerges even more strongly in surveying the variety of editorial
approaches to ‘Mrs Smith’.
Over the years different editors of Smith have characterized her work in ways
that reflect both the progress of feminist criticism and the changing assumptions about Smith’s own place in the canon. When Anne Ehrenpreis edited The
Introduction
3
Old Manor House in 1969 and Emmeline in 1971 for Oxford World Classics,3
Smith was considered to be one of the ‘minor’ novelists (much as Bishop Hunt’s
valuable and underappreciated 1971 article ‘Wordworth and Charlotte Smith’
could only conclude that Smith was the lesser artist, despite the clear affinities
between their works) and, as such, Ehrenpreis spends much of the Introduction
to Emmeline, for instance, tracing similarities between Smith’s novel and her
forebear Fanny Burney’s Cecilia as well as her descendant Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. For the rest of the Introduction she follows a plot-based summary
that recognizes the popularity of Smith’s first novel but does not claim much
significance for the novel until the last paragraph, when it is stated that Smith
‘broke new ground’ with her ‘innovations’ such as her ‘use of her own poetry
within a prose narrative, and her sensitive description of landscape’,4 both aspects
that subsequent literary scholars make much of. For Ehrenpreis, Smith is ‘Mrs
Smith’ to the end.
By the time of Janet Todd’s Pandora edition of The Old Manor House (1987),
one of the series ‘Mothers of the Novel’,5 ‘Mrs Smith’ has transmuted into ‘Charlotte Smith’, and details of her life make their way into a discussion of the work,
specifically to situate her as a woman writer struggling against an oppressive
society. Todd’s necessarily brief Introduction nonetheless sees Smith as a more
significant literary figure than did Ehrenpreis’s, concentrating more heavily on
themes and tropes rather than simply plot, and tracing her interest in social commentary ‘in novel after novel’.6 But for both, Smith functions solely as author;
by this I mean that neither editor explores Smith’s narrator as a persona, but
rather, by implication, situate ‘her’ as a direct reflection of the author. However,
in Todd’s and Antje Blank’s edition of Desmond (1792),7 an interesting change
has taken place: Smith is ‘Charlotte’ when the editors sketch out her life, but
‘Smith’ when they turn to her as author; the Introduction (with the luxury of
space denied Todd in the Pandora edition) treats her seriously as a major novelist
and an innovator, and ample discussion of plot, thematics, history, and structure are offered. Smith is still contextualized as a woman writer, but less as an
individual beating against the storm, and more as a fully-informed and skilful
writer, one who ‘handles’ her characters and ‘ensure[s] that the romance plot
of Desmond embodied a political argument in its own right’ in order to ‘stay
true to her progressive beliefs’.8 While little is made of the constructed nature of
the narrator, nonetheless implicitly this edition sees Smith as an author working
creatively with her text.
For these editors, Smith the novelist may be derivative, innovative, courageous, historical, well-informed, skilful, reflective, etc; her identity moves from
traditionally other-defined (‘Mrs Smith’) to individualized and authoritative
(‘Smith’); her novels from ‘minor’ to central. But it is significant that no editor
spends much time exploring how Smith uses voice and personality in her construc-
4
tion of her narrator. Certainly, most at least mention her use of autobiographical
details in her development of her characters, from the ‘plainly confessional’ selfportrait of Mrs C. Stafford in Emmeline to the children named after three of her
own in Desmond. But this is not the same as investigating the figure of the narrator. By privileging the person of the author in their introductions, editors have
done one of two things: imply an identification between author and speaker, or
simply ignore the possibility that the narrator could be anyone other than the
author. In my own edition of The Old Manor House, I used the Introduction to
provide a short biography, explore certain themes, and introduce the idea that
for Smith, politics, law, and genre itself expand beyond their own parameters
into metaphor; in doing so she ‘engag[es] with the abstracts relied on by society
and reveal[s] them as constructs, as conceits …. as the thematics whereby a culture defines, and confines, itself ’.9 My only nod to the separation of author and
narrator occurs obliquely, when I note Smith’s ‘repeated appeals to her readers in
her own voice embedded in works of fiction and the created scenario’ (emphasis
added).10 So at some point I must have become aware that to talk about the
author is not the same as discussing the device of the narrator, an obvious point
perhaps, but one often elided, especially when the author is female.
Significantly, editions of Smith’s poetry delve much deeper into the identity of the speaker of the poetry. This is partly because her poetry, especially but
not exclusively the sonnets, offers a fully-fledged Romantic subjectivity, an ‘I’
predicated on an acknowledgement of familiarity we are used to from reading Wordsworth and Coleridge, following their leads and accepting that, for
instance, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is ‘about’ Coleridge’s own reflections, and ‘Tintern Abbey’ is ‘about’ what happens when Wordsworth revisits the banks of the
Wye. Similarly, editors of Smith’s poetry (and likewise critics), conclude that the
speaker of Smith’s poetry is, indeed, Smith (most overlook, as Stuart Curran does
not, the numerous sonnets that clearly ventriloquize another speaker, such as the
Werter sonnets). In a trade press edition, the editor Judith Willson is insistent
that ‘Smith’s sonnets of loss and solitude were particularly expressive of a female
character’, that in the poems’ ‘formal skill there is an obvious sense in which a
woman is here consciously appropriating the poetic role’, that ‘Smith can be
seen finding a language for female experience within poetic conventions’.11 Even
for Curran, the ventriloquized sonnets ‘revers[e] traditional gender roles’:12 the
speaker is still feminine even if the source-text features a masculine ‘I’. Whereas
editors of the novels tend to overlook the presence of a narrator, editors of the
poetry have tended to see only one narrator, and that is the poet herself, endlessly
returning to the Self in her explorations of ‘woman’s position’. It is the actuality
of the author, therefore, that occludes explorations of the speaker or narrator
(an actuality, I would add, that in the poetry at least Smith is complicit with).
The only remaining question, in this scenario, is the personality of the actual-
Introduction
5
ized author, since, as my brief overview has suggested, for editors of the novels
Smith is an increasingly astute and intelligent user of tropes, interventionist in
the formation of literary histories, and chronicler of manners, mores, and events.
For editors of the poetry, Smith is a woman speaking from a specifically female
position of need, loss, and sorrow, less an interventionist than a victim, less a
chronicler than an experiencer of events.
What is striking about this personality map are its irresolvable contradictions. The author/writer thus presented occupies multiple, almost mutually
exclusive positions. Very few Smith scholars work actively on both the novels and
the poetry, and consequently we have been learning about two separate Smiths,
each closely linked to the genre she writes in, neither closely linked to the other.
Because the novel during the Romantic period is undergoing an extraordinary
amount of change and innovation, as it moves closer to its modern form, editors
of the novels (myself included) tend to focus on Smith’s techniques and innovations, her use of tropes and themes, her facility with genres and description.
Conversely, because Romantic poetry in the Smithian tradition is so closely tied
up with explorations of selfhood and subjectivity, memory and a personalized
past, editors of the poetry tend to present it as reflective of a personalized state
of mind, of ‘woman’s’ experience, treating its manifold themes and narratives as,
finally, reducible to and manifested from Smith’s life. Is it all to do with inherent
qualities of genre, or is it more to do with the expectations we as readers bring to
different genres? Genre, it seems, carries a greater force in constructing our preconceptions of identity than has been recognized, and Smith is a case in point,
a case we can crack by studying closely Smith’s style and techniques across genres. It is probably not entirely inaccurate to characterize the poetry as ‘personal’
and the novels as, somehow, less so. And yet, the Werter or Petrarch sonnets,
which Curran sees as ‘reversing … traditional gender roles’, that is, replacing the
male speaker asserting love and desire with a female one, are palpably about performance: not Smith taking Werter’s position, but Smith the author writing a
poem about Werter, spoken by Werter, expressive of Werter’s sorrows and not
somehow disguising Smith’s own. Underlying these sonnets is a bedrock of art
and artifice, not authenticity and sincerity. Editorial efforts to uncover the real
Charlotte Smith, then, have led to enhanced understandings of genre and expectation, subjectivity and faithfulness. And, as the essays in this volume show, there
are, fruitfully, myriad Smith personae to complement and enhance her thematics
and imagery. By grouping the essays according to genre, while simultaneously
addressing nearly all the forms in which Smith wrote, this volume invites the
scrutiny across generic borders that leads to the next stage in Smith studies: her
position as a major Romantic-period writer who happens to be female.
As Kerri Andrews notes in her essay, Smith understood the value of the autobiographical, but she made a much more nuanced use of the self than was the
6
norm, moving beyond a simple presentation of a unified subjectivity. Smith was,
vitally, aware of the ramifications of being read; she thus constructed a self to be
read, using personal and historical detail in the service of such structural aspects
as meter. The ‘inclusion of self ’ becomes ‘an act of defiance’, as Smith finds ways
to extend the autobiographical into the metaphorical. As she is so well able to do
with cultural mores such as primogeniture, Smith transforms the poetry of complaint into a poetics of plaintiveness, even as she extends the structural limitations
of the sonnet from within. Ultimately, ‘Smith’s autobiographical incursions’
bridge the old and the new, ‘older poetic forms and an emerging Romantic voice’.
Crucially, Smith ‘negotiates’ (with) autobiography, treating it as terrain to be
explored as well as a kind of feint for something beyond itself. This notion that
the self operates at a structural level within poetry finds play in Dahlia Porter’s
treatment of Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804) as a forerunner of the self(re)collection evident in Beachy Head (1807). These late works push genre in
new directions even as they function to provide Smith with a forum in which to
examine and remember her life of work. Porter sees Conversations as heralding a
new kind of hybrid text, wherein the narration facilitates the poetry rather than
the poetry acting merely as ornament. Arguing that the text acts as a ‘generic
and thematic composite’, Porter supports an understanding of the poetry’s status
as signalling moral development: in other words, as the spoiled child Caroline
matures, she becomes increasingly able to view the natural world appreciatively,
and, most importantly, increasingly adept at poetry. Porter’s intriguing conclusion is that the practice of creating a ‘cabinet’ of poetry in Conversations leads
Smith to use Beachy Head to review and reassess the collection of selves she has
amassed over her career, which ‘actively resist incorporation into the monolith’
of the text.
Beachy Head is for many readers Smith’s ultimate poetic achievement; her
‘local poem’ contains within its 731 lines a staggering array of layers, exploring
history, science, literature and memory ; the past, present and future; emergent
Romanticism as a new collection of tropes and ideologies; the passing of an
Enlightenment structure of order and method; and pathways yet to be marked
out. Kari Lokke and Christoph Bode both focus on this poem, their very different approaches and conclusions amply demonstrating the poem’s interpretative
fertility. Lokke’s essay seizes on the figure of the hermit with which the poem
concludes, contextualizing him as a signal Romantic trope also used by Wordsworth and Coleridge but of especial significance to women writers of the period
for whom the hermit/recluse acts ‘as a metaphorical magnet for the representation of the moral meaning of emotion’. Lokke’s essay thus situates Beachy
Head within two traditions for which Smith’s writing acted as a prototype: the
Romantic emphasis on the unknown and unknowable as a figure, paradoxically,
of knowledge, and the woman writer’s investigation of sensibility as emotionally
Introduction
7
flexible as well as stifling. Bode, on the other hand, sees in Beachy Head the blueprint for how the systems of modern society facilitate the development of new
forms of subjectivity. Describing literature as an ‘autonomous social sub-system’,
Bode demonstrates how Smith’s poetry, and Beachy Head in particular, both
supports and withstands the weight and intensity of discursive theory. ‘Smith
dialectically dissolves easy binaries’, and Beachy Head is ‘at once a signification
and the very thing itself ’. In other words, Beachy Head is a poem about writing a
poem about Beachy Head. As these four essays amply demonstrate, Smith writes
poetry that responds especially well to varied and complex approaches; she uses
surface and depth meaningfully and embeds meaning within structure as well as
what might be called plot. It is an oft-made point that Smith valued poetry as the
genre which legitimized her as an author, but it is as essential to note that Smith
understood the possibilities for expression and content that distinguish poetry
when it is written well and considered deeply. With Smith’s poetry, the more one
looks the more one finds; it is significantly, deeply Romantic because it asks to be
– it requires being – read into.
Smith’s mastery of poetry and poetics, her appreciation of what can be done
with words, textually and linguistically, finds play as well in her novels. Although
not under direct discussion in this volume, her early novels (Emmeline, Ethelinde,
Celestina) are only superficially novels of sensibility. Each pushes the boundaries of its genre, whether through the inclusion of a redeemable ‘fallen woman’,
the expansion of feminine independence and self-sufficiency, or the application
of disabling sensibility to a new version of (ineffectual) masculinity. And the
influence of these novels was profound and lasting. However, with Desmond and
subsequent novels Smith begins to do with the novel what she has and will continue to do with poetry: she begins to explore what can be done when plot and
characterization perform beyond their expected entertainment thresholds. As
Barbara Tarling sees it, Smith’s engagement with political history in Desmond,
The Old Manor House and The Young Philosopher (1798) allow a radical politics
to underpin the novels, forming a plotted response to Edmund Burke’s reactionary distaste for the social shake-up premised by the French Revolution that
emerges from her treatment of the American Revolutionary War ‘as a symbol of
political reform’. For Smith, the American War as portrayed in The Old Manor
House ‘achieves a break with the past’ while also ‘preserv[ing] the possibility of
establishing a future built on its foundations’. However, this is ‘transitional and
unrepresentative’; once linked with the French Revolution in its initial phase,
the two uprisings combine to provide an ideal of political and social reform. As
Tarling notes, this is an inherently radical argument in the increasingly repressive
atmosphere of the 1790s. A. A. Markley extends this point in an essay that makes
use of newly discovered letters to substantiate claims about Smith’s radicalism.
Exploring the evidence that Smith was friendly with both William Godwin and
8
Mary Wollstonecraft from the late 1790s, Markley sets the scene for a new political and literary backdrop for Smith at this time, as she moved from the rural
gentility of Hayley and his circle to the urban modernity of radical London. This
move, says Markley, coincided with the interest in formal experimentation that
bears fruit in The Young Philosopher’s presentation of a new kind of first-person
narration, what Markley calls ‘a virtual symphony of first-person voices … [an]
operatic … complexity of … competing and complementing strains and layers of
narrative’ demonstrating ‘how truth can be spoken to power’.
The issues of power and truth also underlay Amy Garnai’s essay, in which
the familiar Smithian theme of exile takes on a new political resonance in light
of the Alien Act of 1793. Smith’s personal experience of exile coupled with her
daughter’s marriage to a French émigré whose movements were threatened by
the Act find play in works like The Emigrants (1793) and the novels of the early
and mid-1790s, but, as Garnai shows, she remains keenly aware of the intrusion of political conservatism and repression into private life well into the 1800s.
Moreover, as the century turns, Smith goes further and further afield in her texts;
the American locales give way to the West Indies and Eastern Europe in the fivevolume The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800; 1802). Focusing on Hungary
in Volume IV, Smith enlarges her trope of exile so that the familiar, England,
becomes the strange for the protagonist Leopold. Further, she institutes what
we now call the transnational as she establishes that borders are as much about
pushing out as keeping in, and that ‘border-crossings imply, more than the
movement towards heterogeneity, hybridity, and an idea of universal citizenship,
a movement away from … despotism, intolerance and tyranny’. Travel itself metastatizes, becomes ongoing; ‘the consciousness of displacement prevails’. With
Letters, Smith does something new with plot; the action of the story transcends
its own boundaries and takes on the duties of metaphor.
The final two essays in this section establish Smith’s importance for her literary descendants and her international readers. In my own essay, I uncover the
embedded source for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) by demonstrating the
nearly-identical plot and characterization arcs of the two novels. However, the
essay argues that Smith ‘provides more than simply plot outlines or character
traits’. In focusing on how each novelist treats the theme of seduction within
their texts, I also discuss how the two novelists use their texts to reflect on
the very nature of novel-writing in an age of generic transition and definition.
Austen does not merely borrow from Smith; she shows a ‘dynamic commitment’
to Smith’s own experimental techniques that illustrates the modernity of both
writers. Further, as Katherine Astbury’s illuminating essay shows, Smith had a
significant impact on readers in France. ‘Almost all of Smith’s novels were translated into French’, making Smith ‘an important literary figure in France during
the Revolution’. But Smith’s novels also underwent some interesting changes as a
Introduction
9
result of the translation process. Using as a case study The Banished Man (1794;
Le proscrit), Astbury shows how easily translation can become adaptation, and
how what strikes Smith’s English readers as radical could be seen as conservative,
even reactionary, in a different national context. As much as there still remains to
do with Smith’s work in its original forms, Astbury’s essay shows how tantalizing
are the implications of translation and the potential for reading a new, Europeanized Smith.
One of the strengths of this volume of essays is the inclusion of work on
all of Smith’s main forms of composition. To this end, Diego Saglia and Judith
Stanton’s essays cover genres not usually directly treated in Smith studies. Saglia’s
essay deals with Smith’s play What Is She? (1798), offering theatrical context as
well as a historicized understanding of the theme of curiosity. In Saglia’s reading,
curiosity is both inhibiting (for men) and liberating (for women); it allows the
penetration of masquerade and disguise and encourages female self-actualization
and the achievement of identity. Through her comedy of manners, ‘Smith envisages the possibility of an assumed and fabricated identity that defeats curiosity
and its damaging intrusions in order to protect a secret core of genuine identity’.
Genuine identity is key to Judith Stanton’s quest, over a period of more than
thirty years, to assemble a complete oeuvre of letters written by Smith. Stanton’s
essay is a history of a scholar’s detective work, the closest we may come to uncovering a ‘real’ Charlotte Smith, but as Stanton’s article suggests, in her letters as in
her poems and novels Smith was adept at suiting her tone and self-construction
to her audience and her compositional needs. As Stanton notes, Smith’s letters
reveal not ‘querulous egotism’ but a kind of ‘treatise on the rights of woman as
[eloquent] as woman could well write’. And as the story of Stanton’s quest develops, we see the rise of Smith from a ‘minor’ figure whose correspondence could
not be valued since it ‘did not shed light on the greater (read: canonized) literary
figures in whose shadows … Smith laboured’ to the major author whose Works
can now be accessed in almost any university library.
The final essays in this volume address Smith’s involvement with the literature of her day, and her status as literature in the years and decades following
her death. As the editors of Smith’s texts for Pickering & Chatto well understand, Smith’s complex webs of allusion, quotation, and reference prove her deep
involvement with the world of literature. Stuart Curran draws together Smith’s
myriad sources to show that for her, literature was ‘world’ before such an idea
was culturally understood. Her ‘obsessive dialogue with other literature’ gives
us insight into her opinions and conclusions about her peers and forebears, and
illustrate her ‘engage[ment] in establishing the nature of a foundational authority
for her voice [rather than simply] displaying her learning as a … female accomplishment’ (much as her letters transcend their tone to reveal Smith’s sense of
autonomy and social and cultural worth). In creating a pantheon through quota-
10
tion and allusion, Smith also constructs a kind of bridge between her works and
those she references, which ultimately works to assert her own literary status, and
to remind us, once again, how intensely Smith valued her identity as author.
The final two essays show the ways in which Smith was read and textually reassembled by her admirers, and chart how deeply the changing criteria by which
women and their work was judged affected Smith’s posthumous reputation.
Stephen Behrendt’s essay investigates an intertextuality of a sort rather different to Curran’s: how Smith appeared in the writings of others. In his reading,
Smith’s poetic legacy was to inspire and people the poetry of her admirers, and,
as Behrendt determines, there was a gendered response to her life and work: her
male followers set out to rescue her reputation from oblivion, while her female
emulators aspire to her achievements: she provides them with inspiration. As
Behrendt shows, for several years after her death Smith’s work stimulated her
devotees, ‘while there is no question that her life … continued to hold real interest
for many … in the several decades following her death’. And this forms the focus
for Louise Duckling’s survey of Smith’s posthumous appearances in the anthologies of ‘poetesses’ that appeared throughout the nineteenth century. In tracing
Smith’s afterlives, Duckling finds that the life overtakes the work, and replaces it;
that Smith’s careful delineation of a self in need comes to seem the only reading
possible of this prime example of a bereft woman; and that, ironically, even this
eventually works against Smith, establishing the ‘moaning’ stereotype that was
one of the first misapplied commonplaces about Smith’s poetry to be challenged
by the feminist critics that first took her seriously as a writer. From ‘idealized
specimen of womanly excellence’ to inappropriately political, irreligious, and
indiscreet complainer: Smith’s anthologizers react less to her work than to their
conception of her personality. As Duckling shows, this persisted into the 1970s;
it was only challenged by the sea-change in cultural understandings of women’s
historical position.
In its fourteen essays, this collection illustrates Smith’s depth and versatility
as an author. It offers varied and astute readings of her work as deeply informed
by history, culture, and politics, and, through Behrendt’s and Duckling’s essays
on her posthumous reputation and her literary afterlives, it shows how Smith’s
centrality transmuted into a marginality derived from cultural insistences on seeing her as a woman who wrote, rather than a writer who was female. Countering
the few lingering descriptions of Smith as obscure or minor, the essays in this volume aptly demonstrate how seriously scholars need to treat her work, and how
vital and central she is to our understanding of British Romanticism. And there
is ample evidence of this. A quick search of the MLA Bibliographical Database
using ‘Charlotte Smith’ as a title keyword shows an astonishing upward curve in
Smith publications. Between 1900 and 1969 there were five articles published;
between 1970 and 1979 there were eleven; between 1980 and 1989 thirteen;
Introduction
11
between 1990 and 1999 fifty-four; and in the first six years of the twenty-first
century there were forty-five publications focused on Smith. This does not count
works for which Smith is a subject keyword, and it does not count dissertations
(of which, between 1966 and 2006, there were twenty-five). The fourteen new
essays in this collection continue the trend, while also setting new agendas and
establishing new critical milestones.
1 ‘HERSELF … FILLS THE FOREGROUND’:
NEGOTIATING AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE
ELEGIAC SONNETS AND THE EMIGRANTS
Kerri Andrews
In 1784, when Charlotte Smith ventured into print with her first volume of
Elegiac Sonnets, she was in Kings Bench Prison with her spendthrift husband,
Benjamin. Well-born but married to a merchant’s son at fifteen, Smith’s first
act as a professional writer in the Preface to the sonnets was to deny the life
her marriage had brought her, and to refer the reader to a substantially fictional
version of herself. She is not Charlotte Smith of King’s Bench Prison, but ‘Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park, in Sussex’, her childhood home. Jacqueline Labbe
has noted that ‘even in 1784 Bignor Park is not Smith’s home, but her younger
brother’s (the legal heir), and her claim (in the Elegiac Sonnets) resonates with its
own impossibility’.1 What, then, are we to make of Smith’s decision to identify
herself with a place that had not been her home for nearly twenty years? Smith’s
choice seems to have been informed in part by anxiety about her class status. Stuart Curran has suggested that Smith’s desire to write poetry is itself an assertion
of a particular class identity. Therefore, when her current social position did not
match that which she imagined she ought to occupy (through both birth and
her literary activities), Smith manipulated the reality to construct a more appropriate identity with which the public was to be presented. The sonnet form was
particularly suited to the sort of relationship Smith was attempting to establish
with her readers, as Stephen Behrendt has argued:
while the sonneteer maintains the ostensible fiction that her discourse is personal
and private, she knows full well (as does the reader) that she is performing this fiction
within a formal poetic form that is fully intended for ‘public-ation’ [sic] – for being
read ‘publicly’ as ostensibly ‘private’ discourse. For every moment that the readers are
invited to regard as ‘confessional’ in the Romantic sonnet, there exists a counter-invitation to remember that the disclosure is taking place not in the confessional but in
the public square in the market place of the print medium.2
– 13 –
14
Smith expects her reader to see, and to want to cross, the normally impermeable
boundaries between public and private, confession and performance.3
The preface to the first and second editions of the Elegiac Sonnets largely follows the standard apologies for having brought this material to public attention,
and ends with the usual authorial reluctance in publishing at all. Smith writes,
‘Some of my friends, with partial indiscretion, have multiplied the copies they
procured of several of these attempts, till they found their way into the prints of
the day in a mutilated state; which, concurring with other circumstances, determined me to put them into their present form’.4 She deviates from the norm,
though, when she mentions ‘Some very melancholy moments [which] have been
beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought’.5 Smith
refers to these moments obliquely when she mentions they are ‘concurring with
other circumstances’,6 making clear her invitation to the reader to see the poems
as being autobiographical. But these poems are only as much about Smith’s real
life as Bignor Park is really her home.
In many ways, Smith and her readers have entered into an agreement. The
reader is allowed the voyeuristic pleasure of believing they are watching a real
woman in the landscape, and Smith is in return accorded by the reader the status
she craves of being a well-born poet. Smith achieves this in part by giving her
poems titles which locate them within a specific time or place, making her work,
and the feelings the poems profess to represent, tangible. Smith’s tactic also publicizes her poetry’s lineage. The open spaces suggested in the titles of ‘Written on
the Sea Shore’, ‘To the River Arun’ and ‘Composed during a walk on the Downs,
in November 1787’ speak to an older tradition of poetry with ‘a predilection
for an unobstructed view’ of the landscape, as Rachel Crawford has noted.7 But
Crawford has also usefully postulated that there was a ‘discursive shift’ from this
interest in an ‘unobstructed landscape’ towards what she calls the ‘confined garden’ of sonnets and odes.8 The apparent paradox between the sweeping vistas
offered by the poems, and the prescriptive bounds of the poetic form therefore
serves to place Smith’s poetry culturally, much as the use of the sonnet form
places her in a literary tradition reaching back to Milton and Shakespeare.
This paradox is also what gives Smith’s introspection its peculiar power. ‘To
the South Downs’ recalls the initial conceit of her status as inhabitant of Bignor
Park, and professes to reveal the cause for Smith’s sadness in her childhood
haunts:
Ah! hills belov’d – where once a happy child,
Your beechen shades, ‘your turf, your flowers among,’
I wove your blue-bells into garlands wild,
And woke your echoes with my artless song.
Ah! hills belov’d! – your turf, your flowers remain;
But can they peace to this sad breast restore;
‘Herself … Fills The Foreground’
15
For one poor moment sooth the sense of pain,
And teach a breaking heart to throb no more?
And you, Aruna! – in the vale below,
As to the sea your limpid waves you bear,
Can you one kind Lethean cup bestow,
To drink a long oblivion to my care?
Ah! no! – when all, e’en Hope’s last ray is gone,
There’s no oblivion – but in death alone!9
The oxymoron of weaving ‘blue-bells into garlands wild’, of binding and confining that which is untamed whilst retaining its inherent wildness, serves as
a figurative representation of Smith’s sonnets. It also facilitates the change in
view from the ‘hills’, ‘beechen shades’ and the sea to the internal workings of the
speaker’s feelings, from the ‘unobstructed landscapes’ of early eighteenth-century loco-descriptive poetry to the far more cluttered landscape of the Romantic
imagination.
Smith’s introspection also serves a more concrete purpose. The act of selling her work simultaneously requires the reader to feel sympathy with Smith
herself, and to feel they are somehow witnessing that which has made their sympathy necessary. As Jacqueline Labbe has noted, Smith ‘requires a certain kind
of response. She needs to be rescued. If her readers find her personae attractive
enough, they will buy her poetry; her financial troubles will ease; she will live
happily ever after.’10 Smith attempts to invoke this ‘certain kind of response’ in
‘Written on the sea shore. – October 1784’. As the first edition of the Elegiac
Sonnets was reviewed in the Monthly Review only the next month in November (when the reviewer particularly admired ‘the plaintive and tender’ tone),11
Smith creates a powerful sense of immediacy. The reader comes to feel as though
they are sitting alongside the poet at the sea shore, whilst at the same time they
are immeasurably distant from her. As Smith writes,
Like the poor mariner, methinks, I stand,
Cast on a rock; who sees the distant land
From whence no succour comes – or comes too late.
Faint and more faint are heard his feeble cries,
’Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies.12
The poem’s temporality means that the reader becomes the ‘succour’ the poetic
voice fears will be ‘too late’ to relieve the miseries which are overwhelming the
poet. Of course, the desired mode of rescue is to buy Smith’s poems, which the
reader will have done, turning the sympathetic reader into the heroic rescuer of
this distressed woman. By creating this opportunity to come so dramatically to
her rescue through the careful combination of autobiography and fiction, Smith
16
ensures her readers will continue to buy her work; for who would want to risk
inhabiting ‘the distant land / From whence no succour comes’?
Smith’s readers did continue to buy her work, and when the Elegiac Sonnets
reached a fifth edition in 1789, the subscribers’ list was headed by ‘Her Royal
Highness the Duchess of Cumberland, 10 copies’.13 Although the most prominent, the Duchess was not the only well-known name on the list; Smith’s poetry
was also purchased by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister,
William Pitt the Younger. Smith’s poetry was now being bought by some of the
most important figures in Britain, and the literary strategies she was deploying
meant that the nation’s leaders would be coming to the rescue of her poetic self.
Smith’s acknowledgement of this is complicated. She makes use of the appropriate phrases to express her humble gratitude towards those who have assisted in
bringing together this ‘list of so many noble, literary, and respectable names’ into
a ‘brilliant assemblage’ of admirers, but there is no sense of surprise that Smith
should be able to command such a following.14 She modestly states that the names
have been gathered through the efforts of her friends, ‘rather than [because of ]
any merit of my own’,15 but such humility does not match the lack of an expression of gratitude towards the great names who have taken notice enough of her
work to buy her poetry. The price of the volume also reflects Smith’s sense of her
own worth: ten shillings and six pence, or half a guinea, was not cheap.
Publishing this edition by subscription had its own significance. Scott Hess
has noted that ‘[s]ubscription publication … maintained a closer sense of audience, allowing authors to know the names of the subscribers who sponsored
(and presumably read) their book’.16 This was important to writers because it
provided a way ‘to individuate the imagined reader in relation to an increasingly
large and unknowable print market place’.17 Publishing the fifth edition of the
Elegiac Sonnets by subscription, with such illustrious names on the subscriber’s
page, therefore serves a number of purposes for Smith. It firstly furthers Smith’s
claims that she is a gentlewoman. The language of the Preface may be modest,
but it is not grovelling; Smith is writing for her peers. That these people are
identified individually also functions to strengthen the conceit of Smith’s poetry,
that there is a personal connection between the poet and the reader. Smith may
also have been considering her relationship with her publisher when she decided
to publish this edition by subscription. Previously, the publisher of the Elegiac
Sonnets had been Dodsley; the fifth edition was the first published by Thomas
Cadell. As well as enhancing Smith’s sense of herself as a poet, publishing by subscription also ‘insured booksellers’ profits, by establishing a market for the book
in advance’.18 Although Cadell had previously published Smith’s novels, he had
not published her poetry, and this method of publication would have protected
him from any losses on the venture. The sort of individuals who responded to the
call for subscribers would also have served to confirm Smith’s standing as a poet
17
with her new publisher, so much so that when Smith next wanted to publish
poetry, this time about the plight of the refugees fleeing France, Cadell consented to purchase the copyright of Smith’s work. However, Smith still had to
persuade him to agree by writing (not entirely truthfully) about The Emigrants
that ‘it is quite unlike in its nature any I have printed & is, tho not on politics, on
a very popular & interesting subject mingled with descriptive and characteristic
excursions in the way of the Task, only of course inferior to it’.19 Judith Phillips
Stanton argues that ‘as Cadell published [the poem] in the end, he must not
have found it as politically offensive as Desmond, which he refused to publish’.20
Cadell was clearly confident in the talents of Smith as a poet when he agreed to
publish The Emigrants, but Smith had been far from honest about the content
of her poem when writing to Cadell, and this ‘dishonesty’ towards her publisher
was mirrored by what some of her readers felt to be a lack of candour towards
them about the true aims of The Emigrants.
Britain (and indeed the rest of Europe) had been shaken by the execution
of Louis XVI in January 1793, but the British were to be more directly affected
than most citizens of Europe by the influx of people fleeing from France as
Robespierre’s Terror took hold. The arrival of the émigrés prompted a reconsideration of what it meant to be British, and writers, most often conservative
but not exclusively so, were increasingly eager to suggest that the giving of aid
to the French was the best way to demonstrate that Britain was the most civilized nation in Europe. Frances Burney’s pamphlet Brief Reflections Relative to
the Emigrant French Clergy is characterized as much by its nationalist sentiment
as its consideration of the emigrants:
No land of barbarians has been insensible to their worth, no ruthless region of the
north has blighted sensibility for their misfortunes from ignorance of milder life; the
land to which they sailed was Great Britain; in the fulness of its felicity, in the meridian of its glory, not more celebrated for arts and arms, than beloved for indulgent
benevolence, and admired for munificence and liberty.21
Burney’s exaltation of Britain’s merits follows a passage where she imagines, with
some irony, the consequences of missing this opportunity to aid the emigrants,
and the barbarous shores upon which the French refugees would have landed
instead. Offering assistance to these people becomes an opportunity for Britain
to demonstrate its greatness, and gives moral superiority to the British system
of constitutional monarchy, the source of this ‘benevolence … munificence and
liberty’. The arrival of the émigrés in Britain had a profound effect upon national
consciousness, the émigrés themselves being turned rapidly into a trope which,
‘in nationalist hands’, notes Adriana Craciun, ‘offered opportunities for extending Britain’s ideological superiority and national pride through an ecumenical
18
Christian charity’.22 Such was the power of this particular kind of patriotism that
‘“this age of revolution”’ became an ‘“an age of nationalism”’.23
Within this very different political climate, Smith’s tactic of flaunting her
personal struggles, so successfully deployed in the Elegiac Sonnets, began to
attract criticism rather than sympathy, the plight of the French refugees being
felt by many as deserving primacy over all other considerations. Where the careful construction of personae in Smith’s earlier poetry had been accepted and
enjoyed by her readers, here in The Emigrants those same constructions had the
feeling of contrivance. In 1792, the Critical Review had concluded after reviewing Desmond that ‘[w]e trust that Mrs. Smith’s invention is not yet exhausted,
and that we may be again entertained by her very interesting narratives’.24 By the
time Smith had prepared the long narrative of The Emigrants, the reaction from
the Critical has altered:
Herself, and not the French emigrant, fills the foreground; begins and ends the
piece; and the pity we should naturally feel for those overwhelming and uncommon distresses she describes, is lessened by their being brought into parallel with the
inconveniences of a narrow income or a protracted law-suit.25
For the conservative Critical, Smith ought to have ceded her place as the object
of the reader’s sympathies; to not do so in a poem which is titled The Emigrants
is perhaps disingenuous, and unnecessary. Those readers who have bought the
poem have already supported Smith through the act of purchasing the text: her
financial needs are being met. But they are also buying the poem to show support for the émigrés, whose position and difficulties are not necessarily being
addressed so directly.
Ironically, though, Smith’s decision to place herself in ‘the foreground’, to
‘begin and end the piece’ seems to have been based on a desire to magnify the
reader’s pity towards ‘those overwhelming and uncommon distresses’. Smith, as
a wronged, suffering woman, is a natural arbiter for the exiles, and her poetry is
the natural conduit for an exploration of their troubles. She writes in her Preface
to William Cowper that her heart ‘has learned, perhaps from its own sufferings,
to feel with acute, though unavailing compassion, the calamity of others’.26 This
is not the self-seeking attitude that the Critical Review criticizes Smith for, but
the poet claiming that her own abilities should allow her to make the case of the
émigrés. Unfortunately for Smith, her critics appear to have misinterpreted her
motives.
Smith’s use of her own life experiences to demonstrate her right to speak for
the émigrés is not without complication, though. Her claim that ‘I should have
much to say, if I again dared to plead the pressure of evils, aggravated by their
long continuance, as an excuse for the defects of this attempt’,27 is not entirely
convincing; she has just ‘dared’, though briefly, to remind the reader of her per-
19
sonal position, and it has not been to confirm her as the rightful speaker for the
French. The Critical Review voices its objections to repeated incursions of this
type in the poem:
when a subject so new and interesting as the misfortunes of the French emigrants
came under her pen, we expected to be highly gratified. We will not say that we are
entirely disappointed: there is in this Poem good scenery and well-discriminated
groups of figures, but there is too much reflection, verging towards humble prose;
and the pathos is weakened by the author’s adverting too often to perplexities in her
own situation. Whatever these may be, the public, by whom this lady’s productions
have always been peculiarly well received, is not answerable for them, and the plaintive strain, though interesting when lightly touched, is too monotonous to be long
dwelt upon, though by the most skilful finger.28
Yet this passage also reveals the complexity of the relationship between Smith and
her readers, and the sometimes surprising expectations being placed upon Smith
by those readers. Here, it is the turn of the Critical Review to be found lacking
in candour; the readers of the Elegiac Sonnets have enjoyed the position of feeling ‘answerable’ for Smith’s difficulties, for rescuing her from them within the
confines of Smith’s constructed personae. Yet the reviewer describes the autobiographical interjections here as ‘monotonous’ – Smith’s sufferings are no longer
sufficiently entertaining to warrant their high visibility in her work. In some
senses, the inclusion of autobiography is being criticized on artistic grounds; the
miseries of the emigrants are ‘new’ and ‘interesting’, whereas Smith’s difficulties
are the opposite. The Critical Review goes on to argue that the inclusion of autobiographical material blurs the political issue represented by the emigrants, but
the problem might be that Smith is no longer using autobiography to entertain
her reader, but to help those readers feel for others.
And feel they must. Smith’s description is particular, centred on ‘the Cliffs to
the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex’. The specificity of the location is matched by the detail Smith gives of a dreary November morning, where
everything happens slowly, and anything that is given is given unwillingly, even
by the sun: ‘Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives / To this cold northern
Isle, its shorten’d day’.29 From this troubled landscape emerge the exiles arriving
in England, whose unindividuated thoughts contrast with the detailed descriptions of the scene; the reader receives a sense of general suffering, of the pain of
people uncounted and unknown. The poem’s speaker asks ‘How many murmer at
oblivious night / For leaving them so soon’,30 and relates their shared dreams and
miseries, always using the general and plural to describe them. Yet the reader’s
time within the almost tangible sorrows of these still unknown people is short;
the poet directs the reader’s gaze towards the heavens, and then moves beyond
the imagined sorrows of the many to the particular afflictions of one individual,
those of the poetic voice itself. We have gone from ‘them’ and ‘their’ to ‘I’, and
20
‘me’, and from the feeling that a group have suffered from ‘faithless friends, and
fame and fortune lost’,31 to the sense that an individual is being persecuted by
woes ‘that injustice, and duplicity / And faithlessness and folly, fix on me’.32
That the sufferings the reader is asked to see most clearly here are those of the
poetic voice’s is not surprising, given Smith’s past relationship with her readers.
Indeed, it is in some ways the poetic manifestation of Smith’s prefatory declaration that her own, real, sufferings mean she can make the case of the émigrés
effectively. That the poetic voice can move from their suffering to her own and
back again serves to demonstrate that only a fellow-sufferer can articulate the
sensations the émigrés are experiencing. Yet this poetical movement is not without its tensions for Smith’s readers. The speaker exclaims:
Ah! Mourner – cease these wailings: cease and learn,
That not the Cot sequester’d, where the briar
And wood-bine wild, embrace the mossy thatch,
… Can shut out for an hour the spectre Care,
That from the dawn of reason, follows still
Unhappy Mortals, ’till the friendly grave
(Our sole secure asylum) ‘ends the chace’.33
In this poem, the ‘Mourner’ is Smith herself, urging herself to accept that nothing can ease her sufferings except death itself. When the poetic voice next looks
to the émigrés, then, the finality of the speaker’s assessment of her own situation serves to open up a potential duality. On the one hand, the resignation of
the statement enables the speaker to have sympathy with her fellow sufferers,
and perhaps to allow the reader to hope that their situation will not prove to
be so terrible. On the other, the speaker’s advert to her own position and ‘the
friendly grave’ undercuts that sympathy by making the speaker’s situation more
pathetic than the émigrés; they may be ‘Sad Heralds of distress’, but they are wanderers filled with ‘the prejudice they learn’d / From Bigotry (the Tut’ress of the
blind)’.34 The speaker’s sufferings, in contrast, are presented with nothing that
might detract from the reader’s sympathy.
Smith may profess in her Preface and in the poem that the cause of the émigrés is her interest, but these stated aims are undermined by the qualifications
which are attached to her sympathy, and by extension, the reader’s. The poetic
voice claims that exile will help cure the émigrés of their ‘Bigotry’, while her own
exile is to be lamented:
there droops one,
Who in a moping cloister long consum’d
This life inactive, to obtain a better,
And thought that meagre abstinence, to wake
From his hard pallet with the midnight bell,
To live on eleemosynary bread,
21
And to renounce God’s works, would please that God.
And now the poor pale wretch receives, amaz’d,
The pity, strangers give to his distress,
Because these strangers are, by his dark creed,
Condemn’d as Heretics – and with sick heart
Regrets his pious prison, and his beads.35
Smith is clearly sensitive to the offence her suggestion here might cause; attached
to the text is a disclaimer of sorts, though it serves more to reinforce the sense
that this clergyman’s sufferings are not all to be lamented:
nothing is farther from my thoughts, than to reflect invidiously on the Emigrant
Clergy, whose steadiness of principle excites veneration, as much as their sufferings
compassion. Adversity has now taught them the charity and humility they perhaps
wanted.36
Indeed, the irony with which Smith treats this man further compounds the
impression that the emigrants will be improved by their suffering. This priest’s
religious faith is entirely counter-intuitive; on receiving the aid of ‘these strangers’ he immediately ‘regrets his pious prison’, instead of being grateful for their
help. His arrival in Britain initially serves to challenge his prejudices, as he stands
‘amaz’d’ at the response of the British, but the challenge falters, and he ultimately
looks back to what he has lost, rather than what he has gained, by coming to Britain. He is insensible of the help and kindness he is being offered, whereas all the
speaker wishes to do is live humbly in peace, where she can be ‘well content / If
on the short grass’.37 But this modest wish is not destined to be fulfilled. Instead,
‘Onward I labour; as the baffled wave, / Which yon rough beach repulses, that
returns / With the next breath of wind, to fail again’.38 The speaker of the poem
may be in a position to sympathize with the misfortunes of the émigrés, but
the subtext seems to suggest that they are insufficiently grateful for their relative
good fortune.
Yet the poem’s narrative gradually builds towards a cause greater than supporting either the émigrés or Smith herself. With the line, ‘Poor, wand’ring wretches!
Whoso’er ye are’,39 Smith universalizes her own suffering and that of the émigrés to encompass all those who are ‘hopeless, houseless, friendless’,40 those who
have had to endure ‘legal crimes’41 in Britain with no source of aid or redress.
Once more, Smith is given the authority to speak for these people because of
her own difficulties. Again, though, her role as representative for the ‘houseless’
and ‘friendless’ of Britain is complicated. In illustrating to the great of Britain
the inequities of their institutions and their attitudes, Smith appropriates the
émigrés as symbols of all the upper classes have to fear from their social inferiors.
Jacqueline Labbe has noted that the émigrés ‘serve to illuminate the weakness of
English culture as much as the violence of the French Revolution’,42 though the
22
vehemence of Smith’s attack on the British establishment might indicate that
her eye is more keenly fixed here, than across the Channel:
Ye pamper’d Parasites! whom Britons pay
For forging fetters for them; rather here
Study a lesson that concerns ye much;
And, trembling, learn, that if oppress’d too long,
The raging multitude, to madness stung,
Will turn on their oppressors; and, no more
By sounding titles and parading forms
Bound like tame victims, will redress themselves!43
Britain must either reform, or find itself embroiled in bloody chaos. Yet Smith
is not only addressing ‘Ye pamper’d Parasites’, but the country itself, revealing
to ‘the raging multitudes’ the extent of their power. Indeed, the emigrants are
the catalysts for the creation of a new form of nationalism, one that is based on
ordinary British people finding the strength to change the country around them.
Labbe has usefully noted that ‘The Emigrants is a poem about war, about being
at war; it is a rejection of war: and it is a declaration of war on a culture that
continually seeks to marginalize and cast off – abjectify – segments of itself ’.44
These ‘cast off segments’ who make up Smith’s ‘raging multitude’ now have the
potential to be mighty; the presence of the French exiles has demonstrated that
Britain is a country which needs to wage war on itself before considering waging
war on France.
Smith connects this broader sense of political freedom with the more personal freedom of the individual from unfair treatment in law. The one cannot
exist without the other and, the poem concludes, neither type of freedom can
be withheld without the alternative being a repeat of the death and destruction
occurring in France. The apparent autobiographical element of this appeal for
‘Justice’, whilst making a powerful case for those like Smith trapped by inadequate laws, also complicates the ending of the poem. Seemingly full of hope for
the émigrés, the conclusion is ironically undercut by this advert to Smith’s own
distress:
Then shall these ill-starr’d wanderers, whose sad fate
These desultory lines lament, regain
Their native country; private vengeance then
To public virtue yield; and the fierce feuds,
That long have torn their desolated land,
May (even as storms, that agitate the air,
Drive noxious vapours from the blighted earth)
Serve, all tremendous as they are, to fix
The reign of Reason, Liberty, and Peace!45
23
War, the poem concludes, has a cleansing effect which, though violent, is nevertheless of benefit. In France, once the fighting has stopped and, presumably,
when the Revolution has returned to what Smith sees as its original values, peace
can ‘reign’. At the very end, though, it is not war that Smith contends has this
effect. The word she uses to describe the violence is ‘feuds’. The French, it would
seem, are not fighting anything so damaging as a war, but are involved in a series
of squabbles which, once resolved, will see ‘Reason’ and ‘Liberty’ restored. The
alternative meaning of ‘feud’, suggesting a fight over land, only furthers the sense
that these fights are inconsequential. Smith concedes that the fighting is ‘fierce’,
but it is still characterized as a dispute between a people with broadly the same
views which will resolve itself in time for the benefit of the entire French nation.
By describing the war in this way, Smith seems to imply that the emigrants were
rather hasty in their flight from their homeland, once again causing an unfavourable comparison between the émigrés and their too quick, perhaps self-imposed
exile, and the speaker’s involuntary misery. There seems to be a genuine gladness
that the refugees will be able to return home, but the fact that there is no end
in sight for Smith’s own financial and legal difficulties (as she makes clear in her
Preface) destabilizes the ending of the poem, and adds an irony to the reader’s
own pleasure in the return of the French exiles.
Smith closed The Emigrants with the hope of peace in France, but with a
sense that she herself was destined ever to be an exile, a sense perhaps confirmed
when, five years later in the second volume of the Elegiac Sonnets, Smith returns
to November 1792. The three poems bearing this date have a kinship with The
Emigrants which is immediately apparent to loyal readers of Smith’s work; they
are explicitly placed in the same physical and temporal (and perhaps, therefore,
the same political and personal) location as The Emigrants. Smith’s readers are
clearly being asked to make the connections between these poems and The Emigrants, but the reasons for this are not necessarily obvious. As Smith herself
notes in her Preface, ‘the present is not a time when the complaints of individuals against private wrongs are likely to be listened to’.46 Yet Smith’s choice of time
is no coincidence. Jacqueline Labbe in her introduction to Volume 14 of The
Works of Charlotte Smith talks of her ‘careful chronology’ in relation to The Emigrants, and I would like to suggest that Smith is being just as ‘careful’ here.47 Her
Preface hints at the possible reasons for re-engaging with this point in time, a
period of considerable personal and political turmoil:
That these [verses] are gloomy, none will surely have a right to complain; for I never
engaged they should be gay. But I am unhappily exempt from the suspicion of feigning sorrow for an opportunity of shewing the pathos with which it can be described
– a suspicion that has given rise to much ridicule, and many invidious remarks, among
certain critics, and others, who carry into their closets the same aversion to any thing
tragic, as influences, at the present period, their theatrical taste.48
24
This volume of poetry perhaps serves for Smith as an opportunity to address her
critics directly, and to return them, as well as her readers, to a time where she
had been trying, however problematically, to make use of her autobiographical
interventions for the benefit of others. This time around, however, Smith makes
explicit her charitable aims so that even the most sceptical critics cannot misinterpret her intentions.
The three poems located in 1792 are an elegy to ‘The Dead Beggar’, ‘Addressed
to a Lady, who was affected at seeing the Funeral of a nameless Pauper’;49 ‘The
Female Exile’, ‘suggested by the sight of the group it attempts to describe – a
French lady and her children’;50 and ‘Written for the Benefit of a Distressed
Player, Detained at Brighthelmstone for Debt, November 1792’.51 By so naming
and describing these poems, Smith is implying for those sceptical critics that even
as she was enduring considerable personal difficulties in 1792 (and continues to
do in 1797, as she explains in the Preface), she was, and is, offering pity and relief
for the poor, the exiled and the sick, all of whom have been failed by society. Her
tone is belligerent, challenging her critics to suggest that she continues ‘to begin
and end the piece’ with her own sorrows. The footnote for ‘The Dead Beggar’ is
particularly combative, firmly rooted in the language of liberty which was still
being spoken in 1792, but which is now being silenced:
I have been told that I have incurred blame for having used in this short composition,
terms that have become obnoxious to certain persons. Such remarks are hardly worth
notice; and it is very little my ambition to obtain the suffrage of those who suffer
party prejudice to influence their taste; or of those who desire that because they have
themselves done it, every one else should be willing to sell their best birth-rights, the
liberty of thought, and of expressing thought, for the promise of a mess of pottage.
It is surely not too much to say, that in a country like ours, where such immense
sums are annually raised for the poor, there ought to be some regulation which should
prevent any miserable deserted being from perishing through want, as too often happens to such objects as that on whose interment these stanzas were written.52
The similarities between the language Smith uses here and that found in The
Emigrants are not accidental, and her criticism of the society which abandons
the poor in this fashion resonates strongly with her lament that ‘the cost / Of
seeking for redress is sure to plunge / Th’ already injur’d to more certain ruin
/ And the wretch starves, before his Council pleads’.53 However, there is also
a resonance with Smith’s self-directed plea to accept that death offers the only
release for those who suffer, and her claim that ‘the friendly grave’ is the ‘sole
secure asylum’ for ‘Unhappy Mortals’:54
Mourn’st thou that here the time-worn sufferer ends
Those evil days still threatening woes to come …
25
Rather rejoice that here his sorrows cease,
Whom sickness, age, and poverty oppress’d;
Where Death, the Leveller, restores to peace
The wretch who living knew not where to rest.55
Here, the connections between the subject of this poem and The Emigrants
work to strengthen both the political and personal elements of the elegy; Smith
lends additional power to this poem by asking the reader to make connections
between her earlier work and her own experiences. As in The Emigrants, though,
her interventions create tensions which threaten to once more destabilize the
charitable intentions of these poems.
In The Emigrants, Smith urges herself, as the ‘Mourner’ of the poem, to ‘cease
these wailings’,56 but in ‘The Female Exile’, the identity of this ‘Mourner’ has
changed. So too has the poem, despite the obvious sameness of subject matter,
time and place; instead of the blank verse of The Emigrants, ‘The Female Exile’ is
written in fractured anapestic tetrameter with a simple ABAB rhyme. This move
away from blank verse is important because, as Rachel Crawford has argued,
blank verse had a ‘high poetic lineage’ and, as ‘a meter employed by Milton [it
was] perceived as fundamentally English’.57 Furthermore, ‘iambic pentameter was
believed of all meters to approximate most closely the indigenous rhythm of the
[English] language, while the unrhymed line endings provided a verse equivalent
of unfettered feet redolent of English liberty and sinuous paths of the new, antiFrench … aesthetic’.58 Both Smith’s choice of this meter for The Emigrants and
her subsequent rejection of it in 1797 are significant. Using blank verse in 1793
may have helped protect Smith from adverse reaction following the publication
of her pro-Revolution novel Desmond and the execution of Louis XVI, and the
connections to Milton and indeed Shakespeare again confirm the pedigree of
her poetry. The rejection of such a particularly English form in 1797 when, as
Smith herself acknowledges, ‘the present is not a time when the complaints of
individuals against private wrong are likely to be listened to’,59 is perhaps further
evidence of her rejection of a country which is capable of abandoning its ‘hopeless, houseless, friendless’ inhabitants.60
The juxtaposition of these similarities and differences here with The Emigrants has a particular purpose. The triplet rhythm which takes the place of the
blank verse serves in the first stanza to bring the desolate opening scenes, both
of this poem and The Emigrants, to life. But this meter does more than just provide an aural distinction between The Emigrants and ‘The Female Exile’; it serves
as the means by which Smith is able to change the very identity of the poem’s
speaker from its predecessor, and embedded within it are the authorial intrusions which give this poem its own distinct significance. Although the anapests
are fractured, running over from one line to the next in order to complete the
26
feet, their triplet rhythm is compelling, reinforcing the poem’s setting on the
cliffs looking over the English Channel:
Beneath that chalk rock, a fair stranger reclining,
Has found on damp sea-weed a cold lonely seat;
Her eyes fill’d with tears, and her heart with repining,
She starts at the billows that burst at her feet.61
This rhythm becomes broken and disjointed when Smith introduces herself into
the poem; the disruptions mark the moments of autobiographical intervention,
when the sufferings of this nameless French woman merge with the feelings of
the explicitly named poet. By indicating these moments in the very structure of
the poem, Smith is making certain that reader is aware that the purpose of this
poem is very different from that of The Emigrants:
Poor mourner! – I would that my fortune had left me
The means to alleviate the woes I deplore;
But like thine my hard fate has of affluence bereft me,
I can warm the cold heart of the wretched no more!62
Smith, by figuring this transformation from her station in The Emigrants, is able
to occupy multiple positions. She is no longer the ‘mourner’ of the poem, and
the shift means her own difficulties are no longer veiled by a poetic persona.
The sufferings which were dismissed in 1792 as imposing upon the more urgent
needs of the French émigrés now prevent Smith from offering assistance; the
poet herself has been rendered impotent by the chicanery of her trustees, and the
lack of understanding of her critics. Yet this impotence is, of course, only superficial. Smith’s powers as a poet remain undiminished by her circumstances. She
may be unable to offer assistance to others, but Smith remains able to negotiate
with her readers the writing of herself for her own benefit. Reviewers of Smith’s
works remained critical of these autobiographical intrusions, but in some ways
the inclusion of self has become an act of defiance; Smith may have been prevented from offering assistance to others, but she is still capable of securing help
for herself.
In 1797, the Critical Review closed its withering review of Volume II of
Elegiac Sonnets by declaring that ‘the language of wounded nature is simplicity: the gaudy flowers of poetry spring not from the soil of despair’.63 However,
Smith’s career is testament to the fertility of this ‘soil of despair’; by 1800 there
had been nine editions of Volume I of Elegiac Sonnets, and two of the second
volume. Interestingly, the botanical imagery chosen here by the reviewer speaks
to ‘the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground’ which Wordsworth would imagine only
a few years later.64 From these perhaps unpromising origins, Smith is able to
explore new imaginative possibilities; gazing out into the boundless sea from
27
her viewpoint on the South Downs, or into the infinity of space, Smith brings
together the sublime and the autobiographical. The light of the north star, having travelled across an unquantifiable distance, is reflected ‘in faint radiance on
the foaming waves’ of the English Channel where it is transformed into ‘short
rays of reason’.65 But just as vast spaces are reduced to the sensations they excite in
the individual, so Smith opens them up again, universalizing the ‘winds’ which
‘tempestuous howl’ so that they become part of ‘the storms of Fate’, introducing the unimaginable realm of the divine which stretches far beyond the sea.66
As Rachel Crawford has noted, ‘each lyric moment provides its own inward
infinitude; the spot of time grows larger the further into it we proceed’.67 The
movements between national, political and imaginative landscapes that Smith’s
autobiographical incursions facilitate reveal the intricate connections between
older poetic forms and an emerging Romantic voice.
2 FROM NOSEGAY TO SPECIMEN CABINET:
CHARLOTTE SMITH AND THE LABOUR OF
COLLECTING
Dahlia Porter
When she had completed her fourth children’s book, titled Conversations Introducing Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History, in 1804, Charlotte Smith
wrote to her friend Sarah Rose that she had ‘laboured it I think more than I ever
did any book’.1 Perhaps it felt laboured to her as she struggled under the spectre of
an increasingly serious illness (probably ovarian cancer), but this book also presented Smith with a compositional issue she had yet to encounter. Smith’s letters
to her long-time publishers Thomas Cadell and William Davies, and later to the
radical publisher Joseph Johnson, chart the development of Conversations from a
‘School book of Poetry to exercise the memories of Children’ to something quite
different.2 In a series of business negotiations with Johnson, Smith was forced to
re-conceive the book: her initial plan for a compilation of miscellaneous poetry
– following such pedagogical best sellers as William Enfield’s Speaker (1774)
and Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts (1789) – was eventually discarded, and a
prose narrative woven through a series of poems took its place.3
As such, Conversations would seem a reincarnation of Smith’s first children’s
book, Rural Walks (1795), a work she wrote by selecting ‘such pieces of poetry
as seem’d likely to form the taste, & … connecting the whole by domestic scenes’.4
Rural Walks plots the mental and moral development of the main character as
both story and lesson, a narrative technique common to children’s fictions such
as John Aikin and Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–9), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Maria Edgeworth’s Early
Lessons (1801). Unlike these novelistic fictions, Conversations began as one type
of educational work – a poetic miscellany – and became, as Smith worked on it,
a composite form distinct from the generic models available to her. The labour of
this little book was not in producing materials for it; Smith did not, as Johnson
asked, write forty additional pages of poetry.5 Rather, it was in the process of
narrating a collection of poems, a process that gave rise to a work that reflects
formally and thematically on collecting as a pedagogical, literary, and scientific
– 29 –
30
activity. As I argue, Smith’s labour on Conversations came to guide the conceptualization and production of her most ambitious poem, Beachy Head, a poem (as
Smith wrote to Cadell and Davies in 1805) that was ‘of magnitude to be printed
singly in Quarto, but I prefer making it a member of the collection’.6
In contrast to the educational fictions of her contemporaries, Smith’s children’s books incorporated poetic extracts into the narrative, a practice common
in novels of the period.7 Like her contemporary Ann Radcliffe, Smith used verse
chapter mottos in several of her later novels, including Marchmont (1796) and
The Young Philosopher (1798). Emmeline or Orphan of the Castle (1788) and
Celestina (1791) were praised by reviewers for the sonnets Smith wove into the
narrative.8 While verse often heightens the dramatic effect of poignant scenes in
Smith’s novels – as when Godolphin is overheard reciting ‘I love thee, mournful sober-suited night’ in the fourth volume of Emmeline – the short poems
and excerpts in Rural Walks and its sequel Rambles Farther (1796) served other
purposes as well. Corresponding with her desire to ‘exercise the memories of Children’, Smith’s characters (and in turn her young readers) are often instructed to
memorize and deliver the excerpted verse. With these scenes of recitation, Smith
adheres to the stated elocutionary purpose of collections like those of Enfield
and Knox. Unlike Wollstonecraft’s decision to produce works in multiple genres
– Original Stories is fictional narrative while her Female Reader (1789) creates a
young lady’s version of Enfield’s Speaker – Smith infused the educational miscellany with novelistic techniques. In Smith’s books for children, poetry functions
as both a supplement to narrative and a pedagogical end in itself.
If Smith sought to ‘unite the interest of the novel book, [with] the instruction
of the schoolbook, by throwing the later into dialogue, mingled with narrative’ in
Rural Walks, her generic composite also draws on other mixed-genre works of the
period.9 As with John Thelwall’s amalgam of periodical essay, novel, and poetical
effusion in The Peripatetic (1793), Smith’s introduction of verse amplifies (and at
times complicates) the narrative’s commentary on social issues of the day. Through
the structuring device of the walk, Smith’s characters confront rural poverty first
hand, while their forays into natural history introduce a global perspective stretching from West Indian plantation slavery to the British imperial project in India.10
Smith’s use of poetry to teach natural history follows a different lineage, one exemplified in Erasmus Darwin’s long annotated poem, Loves of the Plants (1789).11 The
maids and swains of Darwin’s allegorical verse are designed to convey the sexual
system of Linnaean botany explained in the notes. In Conversations Introducing
Poetry in particular, Smith follows Darwin’s lead: the prose narrative and supplemental notes, Smith assures her readers in the Preface, offer ‘a slight explanation’ of
the verse in places where ‘the subject or treatment of it might be obscure’, a claim
most visible in the work’s final, allegorical poem, ‘Flora’. Smith’s children’s books
were thus generic and thematic composites: each united popular novelistic tech-
From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet
31
niques; the pedagogic goals of the educational miscellany ; the social and political
engagement (and subversive potential) of the didactic essay; the scientific language
and geographical scope of natural history.
As with Darwin’s annotated verse, the combination of prose and poetry in
Rural Walks joins scientific knowledge to ethical sensibility. Smith’s book traces
the progress made by Caroline – a fashionably educated girl – toward socially
responsible feeling. At the beginning of the book, Caroline arrives at her aunt’s
rural cottage ‘dressed in the extremity of fashion’ and carrying herself with ‘an
air of haughty superiority, mingled with something of concealed disdain’.12 Dialogue I begins with Caroline, dramatically posed at her bedchamber window,
pouring forth a soliloquy on her condition:
Oh! merciful Heaven, what a dreary place! – Good God! what will become of me!
– To be buried alive in such a place as this! A wide wide common, with nothing in
sight but those miserable cottages yonder, or a few clumps of mournful fir trees!13
Caroline will soon reveal herself as selfish and callous – on a charitable visit, she
comments that ‘in London one never thinks of the poor people’ – and here her
moral failings are linked directly to her failure to see the natural landscape correctly.14 Rather than a picturesque winter scene and the breadth of the labourer’s
independence, common land, Caroline sees only graves and clumps, a reflection
of her self-imposed theatrical misery.
The remaining Dialogues teach Caroline (and the reader) how to read the
forms of nature with a worthy eye.15 Throughout the book, Smith links Caroline’s
development of an aesthetic vision to the empirical observation of nature. In Dialogue VI, for example, the teacher-mother figure Mrs Woodfield introduces an
excerpt from William Cowper’s The Task (1785) that catalogues Britain’s native
trees. From the poem, Caroline and her cousins learn that ash and beech have
‘grey smooth trunks’, the poplar’s leaves are streaked with ‘silver lines’, and the
oak is a deeper green than the elm.16 In this instance, verse teaches an empirical
lesson – how to distinguish types of trees – rather than functioning as poetry per
se. As a case in point, Mrs Woodfield continues the botanical litany in prose, to
which Caroline predictably responds, ‘[t]here are so many of them, that I think
I should never recollect them all’.17 Equally predictably, Mrs Woodfield replies,
‘[t]hat is merely for want of a little observation, to which, however, as a student
in landscape, you ought to accustom yourself. How monotonous and uninteresting is a paysage in which there are no variety of trees.’18 Observing natural forms
allows the artist to paint a more ‘varied’ scene, a key term in eighteenth-century
theories of the picturesque. Works like William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative
Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1786) and Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque,
as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794) popularized the activity
of seeking out and copying picturesque views, those defined, according to Price,
32
by ‘that great and universal source of pleasure, variety’.19 As Mrs Woodfield had
informed her charges in Dialogue III, a ‘taste for rural beauty’ consists in recognizing ‘the beautiful forms and the varied foliage of the trees, the colouring given
to the scenery by the different position of the sun, or the intervention of dark
or illuminated clouds; the rich shadows of the rocks … and numberless other
objects’.20 These picturesque elements, Mrs Woodfield suggests, might ‘appear
insipid to the common observer’, but are essential for forming the ‘the eye of a
painter or a poet’.21 In this context, the excerpt from The Task in Dialogue VI
enacts a double transformation: Cowper’s descriptive poetry performs the work
taxonomic science, while empirical observation of nature facilitates aesthetic
judgment and artistic perception. Caroline’s education is one in which science
and taste are inextricably intertwined.
Caroline finds all this a bit much to grasp, and faced with the glowing description in Dialogue III of everything she should see, she despondently replies, ‘Alas!
my dear aunt, I shall never be either [a painter or poet]’.22 The process of her reeducation has barely begun, and as the volume’s title indicates, Caroline’s mind
will be formed by ‘rural walks,’ rambles whose pleasures and lessons are not unlike
those described by Oliver Goldsmith in the Preface to his History of the Earth
and Animated Nature. Goldsmith underscores that once the student of natural
history has attained ‘the tedious, though requisite [taxonomic] part’ of natural
history study, ‘nothing but delight and variety attend the rest of his journey …
The mere uninformed spectator passes on in gloomy solitude; but the naturalist,
in every plant, in every insect, and every pebble finds something to entertain his
curiosity, and excite his speculation’.23 Like the picturesque tourist who encounters new scenes at each bend in the path, Goldsmith figures the study of natural
history as a delightful journey where aesthetic pleasure increases in proportion
with scientific knowledge. Goldsmith’s gloomy, ‘uninformed spectator’ is a template for mournful Caroline, and his emphasis on the active pursuit of natural
history constitutes her route to reformation. As this suggests, Smith drew on
contemporary aesthetic and scientific models to guide Caroline to the correct
perception of natural scenes.
The closing sections of Rural Walks display the outcome of Caroline’s dual
education in aesthetic appreciation and empirical observation. Walking out in
November, ‘the good sense and taste that nature had given her, had now room to
display itself; and even the dull and grey skies, the almost dismantled woods, and
the cheerless aspect which every object wore around her, failed not to awaken in
her mind poetical recollections’.24 Instead of remarking that there is ‘nothing in
sight’ as she did in her opening monologue, Caroline now observes ‘every object’,
and her observations recall to her mind a passage from Anna Seward’s Louisa, A
Poetical Novel (1784). ‘Resting on a fragment of a rock’, Caroline repeats these
lines from memory:
33
’Twas here, even here, where now I sit reclin’d,
And Winter’s sighs sound hollow in the wind:
Loud and more loud the blast of Evening raves,
And strips the oaks of their last lingering leaves,
The eddying foliage in the tempest flies,
And fills, with duskier gloom, the thickening skies;
Red sinks the Sun behind the howling hill,
And rushes, with hoarse stream, the mountain rill;
And now, with ruffling billow cold and pale,
Runs, swoln and dashing, down the lonely vale;
While to these tearful eyes, Grief ’s faded form
Sits on the cloud, and sighs amid the storm.25
The excerpt replays and amplifies the scenery already described in prose – Caroline notices an old oak that ‘seemed to mourn over the withered foliage beneath’
– while imbuing it, in the final two lines, with sensibility reminiscent of Smith’s
own Elegiac Sonnets.26 With this scene of reflection and recitation, Caroline’s
education in botany and aesthetics culminates where it began, in verse, but she
has graduated from description to sentiment. Caroline’s moral development, in
other words, is marked by her new-found ability to observe nature empirically,
comprehend it aesthetically, and rearticulate it as a poetic object.
Conversations Introducing Poetry continues Smith’s pedagogical project
of educating girls through the combination of aesthetics and natural history.
However, as I have suggested, Conversations enacts this educational agenda in
a fundamentally different way than her previous books. Explaining to Joseph
Johnson how she would bulk up her collection of poems, Smith proposes ‘a plan
which would give room for a great deal of other information & and serve as
a vehicle for the Poetry’.27 Unlike her previous books in which verse serves to
substantiate the narrative’s lessons – quoting Seward rehearses Caroline’s newly
acquired sensibility – in Conversations, prose is a ‘vehicle’ for the verse. Even
with the addition of narrative, it remained, in Smith’s mind, first and foremost a
collection of poems.
As this implies, while Conversations came to look very much like the children’s fictions published by Smith and her contemporaries, it continued to carry
the mark of its former self – that is, the ‘schoolbook’ or educational miscellany.
As Barbara Benedict and Leah Price have noted, collections of extracts or ‘beauties’ proliferated wildly after the defeat of perpetual copyright in 1774, when
texts long off-limit to compilers became fair game.28 Enfield, Knox and Wollstonecraft took advantage of this legal shift to compile collections of the ‘best’
(usually dead) authors from which children would learn grammar, elocution
and composition. At the same time, as Benedict argues, pedagogical collections
sought to train readers’ aesthetic sensibilities and moral compass, a project often
concomitant with cultivating a national literary taste.29 The genre’s popular-
34
ity is materially visible in Cadell and Davies’s list of works ‘Calculated for the
Instruction and Amusement of Young Persons’ appended to Rural Walks. The
advertisement begins with five miscellanies compiled by Knox, followed by Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas (a series of plays for young girls to read aloud); two
conduct books, More’s Essays on Various Subjects and Dr Gregory’s A Father’s
Legacy to his Daughters; and finally The Female Mentor, or Select Conversations
(1793), a compilation of unconnected, moralized vignettes similar to Anna
Barbauld’s popular Evenings at Home.30 This grouping displays the genres of
educational books that dominated the market at the turn of the century – advice
books and miscellaneous collections. Smith’s composite of genres was as much
astute business strategy as literary experiment: entering a market dominated by
the collection, Smith sought to retain familiar elements (poetry for recitation,
forming the taste and inculcating moral sensibility) while also cashing in on the
new trend in character-driven, developmental narratives.
Conversations Introducing Poetry, by contrast, adheres more closely to the
genre of the educational miscellany even as it transforms it more radically than
Smith’s earlier works. In its final form, Conversations contains more original
poetry than pieces selected from ‘approved’ authors; as a collection of verse,
it resembles Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets more than a compilation of beauties. The
compositional process Smith details in the Preface, however, places the book
squarely in the lineage of the schoolbook. With the ‘purpose of teaching a child
to repeat them’, Smith began by collecting poems from various sources (including published works by Cowley, Cowper, Gray, William Broome and Joseph
Wharton; her own published works; and the portfolio of her sister, Catherine
Ann Dorset).31 She then arranged them in a sequence, after which she ‘sent [the
manuscript] up to be printed’.32 In all but the final step – writing a narrative
around the sequence of poems – Smith followed the procedure for compiling an
educational miscellany.
By the turn of the century, these procedures and the reading practices they
induced had become the subject of stringent criticism. Rehearsing long-running
debates about the educational value of collections, in 1799 Hannah More argued
that the ‘brief and disconnected patches of broken and discordant materials’ in
compendia supplied an ‘infallible receipt for making a superficial mind’.33 An
education in excerpts, More complained, ‘makes smatterers’ who can ‘form no
concatenation of ideas’.34 More was not alone in her sentiments, and compiler’s
prefaces compulsively defend the genre.
To justify the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the Poetical Epitome, or
Elegant Extracts Abridged (1791), Vicesimus Knox reasons that
such compilations as these have not unfrequently been called garlands and nosegays:
but in a garland or nosegay, who would place the tulips, the lilies, the pinks, and
the roses in separate compartments? In this artificial disposition, their beauty and
35
fragrance would be less pleasing than if they were carelessly mingled with all the ease
and wildness of natural variety.35
In figuring his collection as uncultivated nature, Knox draws on the ‘variety’ of
picturesque aesthetics to naturalize the book’s disjointed form. But the poetic
nosegay also partakes of a second legitimating tradition, one that Knox invokes
by quoting Michel de Montaigne: ‘I have here only made a nosegay of culled
flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them’. This
passage from Montaigne’s Of Physiognomy refers to the practice of stringing bits
and pieces of other texts together to make a new book.36 Beyond legitimating the
compiler’s practice of literary borrowing, the quote draws out the editor’s role
of threading and tying, his work of creating through arrangement the connections that bind disjointed materials into a whole.37 By presenting the collection
as both growing wild and artfully cultivated, Knox promises the pleasures of
variety and spontaneity even as he draws our attention to the pedagogical value
of his editorial role.
In this context, we can see that when Smith threads a prose narrative through
a collection of poems, she literalizes a long-standing metaphor for the miscellaneous collection. Like Knox’s dual invocation of carelessness and editorial control,
Smith’s Preface to Conversations implies the pedagogical value of structured
variety. Framed as an apology for the ‘trespass’ of borrowing, Smith describes
her compositional process: she collected and arranged the poems and afterwards
wrote the prose to correspond to that sequence (thereby making it impossible
to remove the borrowed pieces).38 The poems themselves were selected, Smith
suggests, with ‘attention to variety of cadence’ so as to avoid the ‘monotomous
and drawling tone’ acquired by reciting verses from memory.39 In contrast to the
formal cohesion of Elegiac Sonnets, in Conversations Smith actively fosters miscellany. The prose with which she enlarged the collection ties the formally diverse
poems together, supplying the connections that critics like More found lacking
in educational miscellanies. Describing the process of narrating her schoolbook,
Smith made manifest her work as an editor and compiler.
If the labour of re-forming Conversations placed Smith in the position to
recognize her compositional practice as editorial, her subject matter situated
the literary editor-compiler within a larger world of collecting. Knox contrasts
the disorganization of his poetic nosegay with a different mode of collecting:
‘who would,’ he queries, ‘place the tulips, the pinks, and the roses in separate
compartments?’ The answer is obvious: the botanist would. Where Knox would
construct an opposition, Smith melds the roles of the literary and scientific collector. Each poem in Conversations represents an animal or plant, making the
collection of poems a figure for the natural history collections and botanical gardens so popular in late eighteenth-century Britain. Smith’s narrative accentuates
36
and consciously plays with this overlap between poetic and scientific collection.
For example, in the Conversation IV, the young pupil Emily exclaims, ‘Mamma,
I have now several little copies of verses on insects, and some on plants: I have
the squirrel too, the dormouse and the hedgehog, which are beasts, but we have
none that tell of birds’.40 Emily first reveals her subject as poems, but as her list
continues verses become the objects they represent: ‘I have the squirrel too’. To
her query, Emily’s mother Mrs Talbot responds, ‘We must apply to your aunt
for her assistance, and try to enrich our collection with some subjects from that
department of natural history; at present let me hear the poetical collection of
WILD FLOWERS’.41 Emily’s aunt, it would seem, will soon arrive with a parcel of taxidermically-preserved birds, while the poem ‘Wild Flowers’ is literally
a nosegay, a collection of flowers in verse. Smith further calls attention to this
melding of object and poem with the pun on ‘subject’, signifying both ‘the matter of an art or science’ (in this case natural history) and the ‘theme of a literary
composition’.42
Smith’s playful conflations often exhibit the institutional face of natural
history collecting. Emily, after listening to her brother George recite a ‘serious
poetical lamentation over a fly’, pronounces she might have liked ‘an eulogium
on a bullfinch’ better, to which Mrs Talbot responds, ‘I have a bird or two hatching for you, but they are not yet in a state to make a figure in our Museum’.43 The
‘figure’ in this passage is, of course, a metaphor – a relation of equivalence rather
than mere likeness. Reading poetry and understanding its forms stands in for
observing the subjects of natural history; collecting verses amounts to the same
activity as collecting specimens; Emily’s commonplace book of poetry serves the
same educational purpose as a visit to the museum. The narrative thread of Conversations draws attention to the physical practices of scientific collecting and
Smith’s own literary practice of composing the educational text – the methods
of stocking and organizing a museum find their counterpart in those of compiling and arranging a collection of poems.
Smith’s references to museums also have a specific pedagogical valence: her
word play picks up on a common eighteenth-century idea of natural history
museums as exemplary educational institutions. Perhaps the most prestigious
example is Sir Hans Sloane, who dictated in his will that his collection – soon
to become the foundation for the British Museum – should be public, available to be ‘visited and seen by all persons … for the improvement, knowledge
and information of all’.44 The American museum curator and portrait painter
Charles Wilson Peale makes similar (if more inflated) claims for his Philadelphia Museum (1785–1827). Since ‘the comfort, happiness and support of all
ranks depend upon their knowledge of nature,’ Peale argues, a museum that collects the objects of natural history ‘into a repository for the public inspection’ must
be an institution of great educational and national importance.45 Peale imagines
37
that by exhibiting ‘all the varieties of animals and fossils’ arranged according to
‘the Linnaean method,’ his museum might become ‘a great national magazine,’ ‘a
collection of everything useful or curious – a world in miniature!’46 For Peale, the
museum collection is valuable because it enables the visitor to grasp the world’s
variety by bringing it together under one roof, while its organization – exemplified in Peale’s painting The Long Room, Interior of the Front Room in Peale’s
Museum (Figure 2.1) – allows viewers to examine, compare, distinguish and
connect the items on display. Like the educational miscellanies Smith had in
mind when she began Conversations, Peale’s museum arranges a group of disjointed ‘pieces’, labels them and disposes them in a series so as to illustrate their
connections. Smith’s pedagogy in Conversations rehearses the correspondences
between literary and scientific collecting: poems are ‘specimens’ of verse forms
to be studied, annotations transform the descriptive titles of poems into taxonomic labels, and the printed book enfolds its own miniature world, as the series
of poems (like the glass cases containing curious foreign birds) portray the variety of nature from across the globe.
Figure 2.1: Charles Wilson Peale, The Long Room, Interior of the Front Room in Peale’s Museum
(1822). Reproduced by permission of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Conversations, I am suggesting, records Smith’s recognition that museums
and miscellanies shared both an educational agenda and a (textual or spatial)
structuring principle. The goal of Smith’s children’s books – to cultivate in young
people an ethical and poetic sensibility dependant on knowledge of natural history – laid the ground for a lighthearted yet deliberate conflation of scientific and
38
literary pursuits. As I will argue, the difficulties Smith encountered when writing
Conversations – the labour of recasting the schoolbook into a generic composite
of narrative fiction and poetic miscellany – became the work’s most substantial
lessons, lessons about the interpenetration of the pedagogical, literary, and scientific work of collecting in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture.
Indeed, the book’s final lesson arises from Emily’s unsuccessful attempt to
explain ‘some plants that were in a nosegay’ to the incredulous Miss Welthams.47
Emily has made the mistake, we learn, of calling plants by their botanical names:
the fashionable girls, Mrs Talbot chides, ‘will never forgive you for telling them
they should say “viola tricolor”, instead of “Leap-up-and-kiss-me” or “threefaces-under-an-hood”’.48 While this passage overtly cautions readers about the
ostentatious display of their newly acquired scientific knowledge, Smith materializes Emily’s penchant for taxonomizing nosegays in the volume’s final poem,
‘Flora’. A spectacular display in its own right, the goddess Flora appears dressed
in a collection of botanical specimens, whose Linnaean names are explained by
clues to their common designations in the verse and notes. For example, in Flora’s magic car ‘Saxifrage, that snowy flowers emboss, / Supplied the seat’, and
note explains why: ‘Saxifrage hypnoides, Moss Saxifrage, commonly called ladies
cushion’.49 Unlike the opposition Mrs Woodfield draws between a nosegay of
hot house flowers and the ‘genuine beauties of nature’ in Rural Walks, Flora’s
dress is both cultivated and natural, fanciful and empirical.50 By confounding the
nosegay with the specimen cabinet, ‘Flora’ fuses the poet’s ‘dear delusive art’ of
weaving ‘fantastic garlands’ (from Sonnet I of Elegiac Sonnets) with the language
and forms of empiricist science.
In this fusion, Smith also stakes her claim for the pedagogical necessity of
women’s access to scientific knowledge. As mother, educator, poet and naturalist, Mrs Talbot relates plant ecology in one breath and explicates verse forms
in the next. Her knowledge of natural history – the food preferred by sandpipers and the varieties of Conferon, for example – allows her to write poems like
‘Studies by the Sea’ virtually extempore.51 Smith’s narrative underscores that Mrs
Talbot’s ability to cultivate taste and sensibility in her children depends on being
versed in natural history. But even as she borrows from the authorizing topos of
natural history, Smith’s pedagogical goals raise questions about its methods. In
Conversations, Mrs Talbot declaims against the cruelty of scientific collecting
– the embowelling and drying of ‘poor birds’ and insects that have ‘resigned their
short lives in some degree of suffering, which nature would not have inflicted’.52
Her critique effectively deposes the professional scientist’s cultural authority by
pointing to his lack of sensibility, a trait embodied in the mother-teacher-botanist. By raising the spectre of suffering in a stuffed bird’s glass eyes, Smith asks
her readers to question the foundations of a natural history museum even as she
39
deploys its cultural cache to legitimate her pedagogical project to uphold the
authority of her scientifically knowledgeable mother-teacher.
In tandem with Mrs Talbot’s declamation against the insensibility of scientific collecting, the pursuit of natural history endows Conversations with global
perspective rife with questions about Britain’s imperial agendas. For example,
viewing the Jamaican fire-fly in a specimen cabinet leads Mrs Talbot into a lush
prose description of the island’s geography, produce, flora and climate, a description that might have easily been lifted out of a contemporary natural history. In
its turn, this description yields a poetic denunciation of West Indian slavery. The
fire-fly ‘seen in a collection’ will not cross paths with the ‘recent captive, who in
vain, / Attempts to break his heavy chain, / And find his liberty in flight’: pinned
to a board behind glass, its extinguished light can no longer fortuitously come
‘his darkling steps to aid / Thro’ the forests pathless shade’.53 This imagined scene
of opportunities missed links the naturalist-collector to his colonial counterparts, plantation owners who trade in human bodies rather than those of insects.
While picking up the tropes of 1790s abolitionist verse, Smith’s focus on the
impaled fire-fly asks her young readers to consider not only the analogy between
animal cruelty and slavery, but also if and how the seemingly innocuous science
of etymology might participate in the injustices of British colonialism.
If the specimen cabinet lays bear the imperial face of scientific collecting, the
rural walk brings it home to British soil. In Conversations, narrative and verse
combine to bridge the temporal and spatial distance separating Britain from its
imperial outposts. For example, a ‘ramble in the forest’ provokes a comparison
between European, American, African and Indian forests and their reptilian
inhabitants. When Emily exclaims how terrified she would be to ‘hear in this
wood such a noise resembling that which the rattle-snake makes’, she imaginatively imports the American species to her native wood.54 While Mrs Talbot
reminds her ‘there are no rattle-snakes in England’, the passage continues Emily’s
imaginative work: the discussion concludes with a poetic excerpt, ‘the petition
of an Indian girl to an adder’ written by ‘an eminent literary character then at
Winchester school’.55 Like Smith’s original poems in Conversations, the excerpt is
meant to represent the adder as a specimen while rendering it an aesthetic object
made immortal by art: the Indian girl asks the deadly snake to stay so she can
weave a chaplet mimicking its ‘vermeil red and living green’, enticing it with the
promise that ‘ages hence, when thou no more / Shalt glide along the sunny shore,
/ Thy copied beauties shall be seen’.56 The excerpt thus rearticulates Smith’s pedagogical and poetic agenda in the context of colonial India. Citing the poem’s
author – Joseph Warton, scholar and later headmaster of Winchester College
– reinforces this point: Emily and George are a microcosm of the larger trend
in which the imperial periphery has come home to educate Britain’s youth.57
Emily’s education is thus one in which natural history collecting has funnelled
40
the sylvan beauties and moral evils of empire into Britain’s rural and domestic
landscape. In its structure and themes, Conversations forces readers to attend to
the confluence of scientific, political and economic imperialism, and to confront
the implications of this conjunction for education and aesthetics.
As a text, Conversations draws authority from the procedures of natural history while probing its seams and scrutinizing its less visible aspects. As a book,
Conversations adopts the paradigm that made the natural history collection
an exemplary educational device. Smith’s analogy between poetic miscellany
and natural history museum configures the printed page as a physical, material
space in which items are arranged for particular literary and ideological effect.
As a result, Smith’s long-standing concern with how her texts appear in print –
her preoccupation, as Jacqueline Labbe has shown, with format, arrangement,
illustrations and notes – became part of the work’s fabric.58 As I suggested
above, Conversations provides a test case for understanding how the turn of
the century publishing market impacted authors’ fundamental understanding
of the possibilities of genre. But the demands of publishing also led Smith to
reflect in print on her role as the literary counterpart of a museum curator. The
way she introduces Warton’s poem is case in point: from Smith’s description of
the author, we know the ‘book of Poems on various subjects’ from which she
lifted the verses was a poetic miscellany, Salmagundi; a Miscellaneous Combination of Original Poetry (1791).59 The comparative natural history of snakes
in the prose gives way to an act of literary collecting; in both cases, Smith
performs the work of author as editor – collecting, selecting, arranging and
threading together.
The labour of transforming the educational miscellany in Conversations
generated a work that thematizes Smith’s remaking of authority, genre and
authorship. It is this lesson that exerted the greatest impact on Smith’s final act of
authorial self-definition, the posthumously published collection Beachy Head:
With Other Poems (1807). Smith considered the production of this collection
the culminating act of her poetic career (by 1805, she knew ‘the time cannot be
far off when my literary career will close’), and she initially wished it to appear as
a third volume of a new edition of Elegiac Sonnets.60 Like the title poem, Beachy
Head: With Other Poems ‘embraces a variety of subjects’: while later editions of
Elegiac Sonnets include forms other than the sonnet, her final volume of poetry
would be a true miscellany.61 Written in the tradition of topographic poetry,
Beachy Head itself is an amalgam of genres, tropes and bits and pieces of Smith’s
previously published works.62 As I argue, the formal properties distinguishing Beachy Head from contemporary local poems are a product of the double
vision of scientific and literary collecting Smith developed in Conversations. The
pedagogical paradigm and compositional strategies of Smith’s children’s books
41
became the source for her most ambitious and critically acclaimed poetic work,
a work that defines authorship as a fundamentally editorial act.
From its opening lines Beachy Head announces itself as the work of a poet
and naturalist. The poet reclines on the ‘stupendous summit’ of Beachy Head
‘while Fancy should go forth, / And represent the strange and awful hour / Of
vast concussion; when the Omnipotent / Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the
solid hills’.63 Smith inserts a note at the word ‘arm’ that reads: ‘Alluding to an
idea that this Island was once joined to the continent of Europe, and torn from
it by some convulsion of Nature. I confess I never could trace the resemblance
between the two countries’.64 Citing contemporary geologic theories while questioning their validity, Smith’s opening lines lodge geologic speculation in the
realm of poetic fancy. Like ‘Flora’ in Conversations Introducing Poetry, Beachy
Head has been ‘formed in Fancy’s loom’.65 As Julie Ellison notes, fancy ‘conforms
to the process of intellectual sorting – arrangement, classification, and comparison – that constituted the methodological core’ of human, as well as taxonomic,
science in the eighteenth century.66 Fancy is both an aesthetic and an empirical
mode, one that legitimates the poet’s scientific knowledge as well as her position
in the remainder of the poem as purveyor and commentator on Britain’s landscape, history, social conditions and empire.67
Fancy thus allows Smith to mediate between the prospect poem’s geographic
and thematic scope and precise empirical observation. In a second geologic passage, for example, the narrator shifts from ‘in fancy still’ beholding ‘those widely
spreading views’ to ‘still, observing objects more minute’, fossil shells in the
chalk downs.68 The topographical mode of surveying landscape turns swiftly to
the detailed observations of the naturalist. Both activities, however, explicitly
arise within the poetic consciousness. The hills ‘so early loved’ and the sea-shells
mingled with their ‘pale calcareous soil’ are present only in the poet’s fancy as
re-imagined scenes of previous experience.69 The previous stanza prefigures this
condition: with the caesura in line 358, remembered experience is transformed
into fanciful projection: ‘I loved to trace the brooks’ the poet recalls,
And stroll among o’ershadowing woods of beech,
Lending in Summer, from the heats of noon
A whispering shade; while haply there reclines
Some pensive lover of uncultur’d flowers,
Who, from the tumps with bright green mosses clad,
Plucks the wood sorrel, with its light thin leaves,
Heart-shaped, and triply folded; and its root
Creeping like beaded coral; or who there
Gathers, the copse’s pride, anémones
With rays like golden studs on ivory laid
Most delicate: but touch’d with purple clouds,
Fit crown for April’s fair but changeful brow.70
42
The precise botanical descriptions – the sorrel’s ‘light thin leaves, / Heartshaped, and triply folded’ – are, as Donelle Ruwe argues of this passage, typical
of Smith’s later verse, but they are also the contents of a specifically poetic
cabinet.71 ‘Haply’ introduces an imagined scene of pastoral ease, the product
of the poet’s fanciful combination of personal memory and empirical observation.72 Smith’s footnote to ‘anémones’ reinforces this point. The note mediates
between Latin and colloquial names, but unlike in earlier botanical annotations, in this case Smith puts the onus of distinction on pronunciation: ‘It
appears to be settled on late and excellent authorities that this word should
not be accented on the second syllable but the penultimate. I have however
ventured the more known accentuation, as more generally used and suiting
better the nature of my verse’.73 The question is anémone or anemóne, an issue
that comes to the fore when the flower moves from a taxonomic system or
prose description into iambic pentameter.
In drawing our attention to how the botanical specimen enters the nosegay,
Smith’s note also reveals another form of poetic labour involved in this passage.
The final four lines rewrite a dialogue from Rural Walks, in which the motherteacher Mrs Woodfield observes,
Caroline, you do not seem to admire the beauty of this copse. See, how it is already
spangled with primroses; and that lovely, though scentless flower, the wood anemony!
Gather me a few of those that are most blown, my Henrietta! Look at these purple
clouds that just stain the soft white leaves; and these rays of yellow, that form a little
glory round the center.74
In this earlier prose version, Caroline is taught to admire a prospect through
the examination of an individual flower. The flower, however, is also figured as
a prospect: its leaves are stained with clouds, which diffuse the sun’s rays into a
‘glory’. Caroline is learning to think analogically – in the flower we can see the
prospect, and thus have learned to imagine the prospect as a flower, drawing an
analogy between the minute and the widely spreading. Caroline’s education in
rational sensibility thus provides the conduit between the botanical description
at the end of one stanza in Beachy Head and the topographical vision of ‘widely
spreading views’ that begins the next.
In both prose and verse, the ‘lover of flowers’ is physically engaged in botanizing. With ‘plucks’ and ‘gathers’, the lines in Beachy Head literalize the act they
perform textually: as a character collects flowers and vines, Smith collects and
arranges passages from her previous work to build the poem. As Ruwe has shown,
this instance of textual borrowing has many counterparts.75 Smith extracted bits
from her sonnets, novels and children’s books and integrated them into Beachy
Head, making it a composite stitched together from pieces of her earlier works.
Performing the work of literary and scientific collector, Smith conflates the pro-
43
cedures of natural history and those of compiling a poetic miscellany. There is,
however, an important formal distinction between Conversations and Beachy
Head: the long poem erases the material marks of the collection. Its topographical mode relies on a unifying poetic consciousness that, unlike Mrs Talbot, effaces
distinctions of genre, form and source. The reclining poet of the poem’s opening
lines threads fragments of disparate works together into a cohesive whole, the
totality of Smith’s literary output across many genres and many years.
As my use of thread implies, the poem’s wholeness, like its central consciousness, is a tenuous thing. As Jacqueline Labbe has argued, the parallel reclining
figures Smith introduces, like the lover of flowers, show her actively ‘undermining her own self-construction’, while the poem’s sixty-six notes ‘contain a persona
often actively opposed to the “Poet” who occupies the poem-proper’.76 The self
posited in Beachy Head is not unified but multi-voiced: in her notes, Smith takes
on the mantle of historian, naturalist, poet and, crucially, editor, a role in which
she offers explanation, elaboration and qualification of her verse. As I argue in
conclusion, while the genre of the prospect poem offered Smith a way to present
a unified vision of her self and her poetic career, her final revisions to Beachy
Head recognize and embrace the role of compiler and editor she developed in
Conversations.
For 530 lines, Beachy Head flows from the vantage point of poem’s unifying
poetic consciousness; as noted above, even alternative perspectives are figured
as imaginative projections. In the final 200 lines, however, Smith inserted two
poems she originally listed separately in her proposed table of contents, ‘Shepherd of the hill’ and ‘The wood walk’ (or ‘Let us to woodland wilds repair’).77
Typographically and formally distinct from the rest of the poem, these inset
fragments foreground the editorial practices that underwrite Smith’s compositional practice. The rhymed, five or six-line stanzas of the ‘stranger’s songs’
contrast sharply with the stream of blank verse preceding it, foregrounding
the dislocation of poetic voice through formal discontinuity. At this moment,
Smith insists that we recognize these generically distinct pieces as actively resisting incorporation into the monolith of Beachy Head: they retain their status as
‘found’ pieces, akin to poems in a miscellany. The lines introducing the second
inset poem magnify this point: after the author of these poems has vanished
‘in silence, gliding like a ghost … Lost in the deepening gloom’, there are still
sometimes found ‘love-songs and scatter’d rhymes, / Unfinished sentences, or
half erased, / And rhapsodies like this’.78 An unpromising (if accurate) vision
of Smith’s posthumous literary reputation, the lines also provide an allegory for
Beachy Head itself: the youth’s verses remain scattered and unfinished. If Smith
began writing Beachy Head in 1803 as the culmination of her literary career and
the final expression of her poetic identity, by 1806 when she makes these inser-
44
tions, the unifying poetic consciousness had descended into silence, leaving the
work of binding to the editorial voice of the notes.79
With these poetic disruptions, Smith makes explicit that Beachy Head is a
product of collecting, and that in producing it, she was engaged in threading and
binding, editing her works, producing her own Variorum. At the end of her life,
Smith gave over the attempt to forge a unified author or corpus, instead embracing the role she occupied when she transformed an educational miscellany into
a generic composite. Materializing her work as editor, compiler and collector,
Smith presents Beachy Head for what it had been from the outset, a garland of
poetic specimens, a work in which the divisions and seams are visible even in the
moment of incorporation into a greater whole. This, I would argue, explains why
Smith insisted the lasting monument of her poetic career be made a ‘member’ of
a collection. As a meditation on the work of collecting, Beachy Head could not
stand alone: the process of re-collecting and re-membering the totality of her
literary life was underwritten by the editor’s work of excerpting and threading,
of dismembering to make anew.
3 THE FIGURE OF THE HERMIT IN
CHARLOTTE SMITH’S BEACHY HEAD
Kari Lokke
Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807) moves quite spectacularly from a sweeping and panoramic cosmological, geographical and historical vision, to a regional
portrait of the Sussex downs, to a series of village vignettes, before concluding
with the single and isolated figure of ‘the lone Hermit’ in the final lines of the
poem.1 This inward telescoping movement is accompanied and countered by the
climbing of the poetic speaker who starts out reclined in contemplation on that
‘stupendous summit, rock sublime’2 of Beachy Head and then proceeds upward
‘[a]dvancing higher still’ as ‘the prospect widens’3 until the view is so elevated
that only the limitations of the human eye prevent the sight of London while ‘in
the distant north it melts away / And mingles indiscriminate with clouds’.4
The opening lines of Beachy Head, indeed, offer the reader a prospect view
in miniature composed precisely according to the aesthetic principles that John
Barrell has suggested were widely adopted in eighteenth-century Britain from
the seventeenth-century Roman landscape painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas
Poussin.5 The eye of the stationary and elevated speaker/viewer is drawn immediately to the horizon highlighted by the rising sun before moving out again to
take in the surrounding view.
From thy projecting head-land I would mark
Far in the east the shades of night disperse,
Melting and thinned, as from the dark blue wave
Emerging, brilliant rays of arrowy light
Dart from the horizon; when the glorious sun
Just lifts above it his resplendent orb.6
Barrell makes clear that in works such as James Thomson’s Seasons, the prospect view allows or at least strives for a sense of distance from and control over
nature.7 This aesthetic is furthermore the property of the landed gentry and the
aristocracy who have the means to move about the country, take in and compare
landscapes.
– 45 –
46
The political, moral and historical lessons learned from Smith’s prospect
are, however, far different from those taught by the traditional, reassuring eighteenth-century prospect poem. As Jacqueline Labbe has shown, in addition to its
association with class privilege, the commanding prospect view is also a marker
of the social privilege of the male writer.8 A highly self-conscious woman poet
like Smith, then, asserts her poetic power in an oppositional fashion, by simultaneously claiming the prospect view as her own and then disavowing it.9 As the
poetic speaker moves upward, the historical, political and scientific victories of
European civilization and of Britain, in particular, are radically undercut just
as soon as they are delineated and celebrated. The second quick movement to
the horizon, for example, is marked by a ‘dubious spot’ there which turns out to
be a commercial ship that calls forth meditations on imperial exploitation and
human slavery practiced by those who value ‘gaudes and baubles’ over the ‘sacred
freedom’ of their fellow men.10
Tellingly, the subject of England’s resistance, as ‘Imperial mistress of the obedient sea’,11 to Napoleonic ambition and her illustrious history of naval victories
is easily abandoned, as the speaker asserts:
From even the proudest roll by glory fill’d,
How gladly the reflecting mind returns
To simple scenes of peace and industry[.]12
The remarkable geological and archaeological findings revealed by these hills
only serve to highlight the limitations of human pride and scientific accomplishment:
Ah! very vain is Science’ proudest boast,
And but a little light its flame yet lends
To its most ardent votaries;13
And the magnificence of nature humbles even the finest work of art:
Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still
I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold
Those widely spreading views, mocking alike
The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art.14
Similarly, skeletal remains of exotic elephants are witness to the vulnerable mortality of the greatest of the Roman Imperial campaigns:
Hither, Ambition come!
Come and behold the nothingness of all
For which you carry thro’ the oppressed Earth,
War, and its train of horrors –15
The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head
47
The cultural/natural histories that constitute this meditative climb thus culminate in a recognition of dark ephemerality not to be outdone in power and
eloquence even by that later master of mutability, Percy Shelley.
All, with the lapse of Time, have passed away,
Even as the clouds, with dark and dragon shapes,
Or like vast promontories crown’d with towers,
Cast their broad shadows on the downs: then sail
Far to the northward, and their transient gloom
Is soon forgotten.16
The reader of Beachy Head, then, follows the poetic speaker and ‘the wanderer of
the hills’17 in her/his continued ascent until, precipitously, in line 671, the focus
drops from ‘Where Beachy overpeers the channel wave’ to the cave of the hermit
far below. The movement of the reader’s attention thus replicates the ‘headlong
fall’18 of the hapless sheep who lose their footing as they graze on the brink of
the summit.
The ‘hermit of the rocks’ is thus doubly emphasized, both as the concluding
focal point in the narrowing panoramic and telescopic vision that constitutes
the movement of the poem as a whole and as the ultimate end of the speaker’s
counter movement of ascent to the summit of Beachy Head, an end that dramatically (and perhaps ironically) refuses any sublime prospect or transcendent
elevation.19 We cannot, of course, know whether Charlotte Smith intended to
conclude Beachy Head with the figure of the hermit or, as Stuart Curran writes,
‘whether her masterpiece … was as unfinished as the introductory note to the
volume assumes it to be’.20 I am, however, inclined to agree with Curran that
‘[f ]rom a modern experience of Romanticism, nurtured by the sometimes
oblique narrative strategies of its major poets, a work that begins atop a massive
feature of the landscape and ends immured within it bears a remarkable coherence’.21
In any case, the mysterious figure of the hermit, as all that remains once
the illusions of military, cultural and historical accomplishment are unmasked,
clearly represents a crucial interpretive problem in the effort to understand the
poem as a whole. Set in comparison to key figures of the hermit or reclusive
solitary in other writers of her era, Smith’s ‘hermit of the rocks’ also provides
insight into the specificity of Smith’s moral, spiritual and aesthetic project in
Beachy Head. This is especially true since the conclusion represents the poem
itself as dedicated to the hermit, perhaps even written by him before his death:
‘Those who read / Chisel’d within the rock, these mournful lines, / Memorials of
his sufferings, did not grieve’.22 Here the boundaries between Charlotte Smith,
her poetic speaker and the lone seaside hermit seem to vanish. If, as Curran’s
remarks imply, the hermit buried at the bottom of the cliff in some sense consti-
48
tutes Smith’s response to the opening vistas of the poem, then the figure of the
hermit completes the poem by answering the sublime prospect with a refusal
of the distance and detachment necessary for the masculine sublime and with a
reinscription of the human into the natural.23
Addressing the question of Beachy Head’s fragmentary nature, John Anderson suggests that ‘the fragmentary form of this poem is not entirely an accident
– that Smith was attracted to the idea of constructing a ruin, of using fragments
expressively’.24 In Anderson’s rich and evocative reading of the poem (which he
terms a dependent fragment, based upon Marjorie Levinson’s categories), Smith,
through the device of self-quotation and reference to her entire poetic oeuvre,
creates in Beachy Head a complex tribute to herself. My reading of the poem is
analogous and parallel to Anderson’s in that I see the figure of the hermit as an
enigmatic answer to the sweeping retrospective of her writing career as a whole
that constitutes Beachy Head. For in what might be termed her masterpiece, she
places herself in relation not just to the tradition of prospect poetry but also to
eighteenth-century literature of sensibility and to Romantic era poetic evocations of solitude in nature. Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, first published in 1784, and
her many novels were among the best known and widely read of British exemplars of the aesthetic of sensibility. The meandering, mosaic like structure of the
poem then aligns it as much with poetry of sensibility as with the Romantic fragment poem.25 Furthermore, by the end of her life in 1806 when Beachy Head was
written, Smith seems to have had a clear sense of her importance for the poetry
of Wordsworth and Coleridge such that she concludes this long poem with a
critical nod to the hermit/solitary/recluse figures of the Lyrical Ballads.26 And
of course, fragmentary form fits the solitaries of all three poets, as figures broken
off and isolated from humankind as a whole.
Twenty years before Beachy Head, we find in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Cave of
Fancy a strange and suggestive precursor to Smith’s hermit in the figure of the
seaside recluse Sagestus. In this gothic morality tale, a fragment begun in 1787
and published posthumously in 1798, Wollstonecraft, like Smith, sets her hermit against a backdrop of disillusionment and mutability. The tale opens: ‘Ye
who expect constancy where everything is changing, and peace in the midst of
tumult, attend to the voice of experience, and mark in time the footsteps of disappointment, or life will be lost in desultory wishes, and death arrive before the
dawn of wisdom’.27 Wisdom is manifested in this sage by a thorough knowledge
of Lavatarian physiognomy which he applies, in a strangely grisly and morbid
scenario, to the dead visages of shipwreck victims who have washed up on the
beach near his hut and cave.28 Compassion struggles in him with detached scrutiny, judgment and acceptance of the will of ‘the common Father of nature’.29
Each reified visage is scrutinized for structures and proportions that are read
as signs of conventionalized character traits such as cunning, melancholy, indo-
49
lence, benevolence, vanity or weakness. The physiognomies are interpreted along
an axis of good and evil based in physiological determinism: from ‘the traces that
virtue or vice [left] on the whole frame’, Sagestus can determine ‘whom nature
had stamped an hero, a poet, or philosopher’.30
Among the shipwreck victims, the sole survivor is a young girl whom he
adopts and promptly names Sagesta after himself. This pair constitutes a Romantic-era version of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Miranda, for the sage’s superhuman
knowledge of nature’s ‘most hidden secrets’ comes not from books but from
a gaze that has ‘retired from the view of vulgar objects and turned inwards,
overleap[ing] the boundary prescribed to human knowledge’.31 Devoting himself to her education, Sagestus leads his adopted daughter into the Cave of Fancy
where disembodied spirits ‘obedient to his potent word’32 are confined in a sort
of purgatorial existence as they prepare themselves for afterlife by ‘purify[ing]
themselves from the dross contracted in their first stage of existence’.33 And just
as Wollstonecraft’s furious storm differs from Shakespeare’s threatening but merciful seas, so her tale is marked by a harsh didacticism absent from Shakespeare’s
tragicomedy. Thus, after studying her mother’s cadaver, Sagestus ‘was now convinced that the orphan was not very unfortunate in having lost such a mother.
The parent that inspires fond affection without respect, is seldom an useful one;
and they only are respectable, who consider right and wrong abstracted from
local forms and accidental modifications’.34
The central lesson delivered to Sagesta by one of the disembodied spirits is a
tale of true and false sensibility that corresponds strikingly to the opposition in
Beachy Head between the final figure of the hermit of the rocks and the earlier
lovelorn solitary stranger whom he supersedes. In both texts, active compassion
is set against Romantic love. Passionately devoted to a married man and wedded
to another out of sympathy, Wollstonecraft’s spirit of sensibility spent her life
on earth in melancholy longing for her beloved. She is an early exemplar of the
Promethean Romantic spirit: ‘I adored virtue; and my imagination, chasing a
chimerical object, overlooked the common pleasures of life ... A latent fire made
me burn to rise superior to my contemporaries in wisdom and virtue’.35 Her tale
concludes with her efforts to comfort an impoverished, sick mother, efforts that
bring forth, before her own death, the following realization: ‘Surely life may thus
be enlivened by active benevolence, and the sleep of death, like that I am now
disposed to fall into, may be sweet!’36 Like Smith’s hermit, she dies in service to
others, finding in death a comfort that the townspeople in Smith’s poem hope
will be accorded to her heroic recluse.
Unlike Smith, however, Wollstonecraft gives us a definite assurance of
immortality and a clear moral, in the words of this embodiment of ‘extreme sensibility’:37 ‘I entered this cavern; for through it every mortal must pass; and here I
discovered, that I neglected many opportunities of being useful, whilst I fostered
50
a devouring flame’.38 Earthly passion must be subsumed by love of the divine:
‘Worthy as the mortal was I adored, I should not long have loved him with the
ardour I did, had fate united us, and broken the delusion the imagination so
artfully wove. His virtues, as they now do, would have extorted my esteem; but
he who formed the human soul, only can fill it, and the chief happiness of an
immortal being must arise from the same source as its existence’.39 Thus sensibility’s erotic and self-destructive potential must be channelled into humanitarian
impulses and charitable action.
The starkness of Wollstonecraft’s moralistic conclusion is, however, challenged by the powerful eroticism of her earlier vision of ecstatic union in death
with her beloved. Contemplating ‘[t]he death of Nature’ in a haunting sunset,
she exclaims:
My reflections were tinged with melancholy, but they were sublime. – I grasped
a mighty whole, and smiled on the king of terrors; the tie which bound me to my
friends he could not break; the same mysterious knot united me to the source of all
goodness and happiness. I had seen the divinity reflected in a face I loved; … I could
not think of immortality, without recollecting the ecstasy I felt, when my heart first
whispered to me that I was beloved ... My passion seemed a pledge of immortality.40
Here Wollstonecraft turns the dualistic masculine sublime on its head, for it is
intensity of sexual passion that offers proof of the immortality of the spirit. Similarly, Sagestus interrupts the spirit’s tale with a subtle and profoundly ambivalent
definition of sensibility as
the result of acute senses, finely fashioned nerves, which vibrate at the slightest touch,
and convey such clear intelligence to the brain, that it does not require to be arranged
by the judgment. Such persons instantly enter into the characters of others, and instinctively discern what will give pain to every human being; their own feelings are so varied
that they seem to contain in themselves, not only all the passions of the species, but their
various modifications as well. Exquisite pain and pleasure is their portion; nature wears
for them a different aspect than is displayed to common mortals.41
Here sensibility as physiological response and potential for passion overwhelms
its association with humanitarianism and charity. Ultimately the text founders
on this conflict between erotic vision and ethical dictum, between Romanticism
and Enlightenment, and is never finished. Indeed the spirit rapturously describes
heaven as a realm where death-divided friends are transfigured and then reunited
to part no more. Thus the figure of the hermit, for Wollstonecraft as for other
women writers of her time, calls attention to the tensions in the aesthetic of sensibility between the extremes of erotic desire and its sublimation into spiritual
compassion and active benevolence.
The passionate sincerity of Wollstonecraft’s spirit from The Cave of Fancy
brings into relief the gentle irony of Smith’s lyric presentation of her lovesick
51
stranger, whose love songs, distanced by their rhymed tetrameter and set off
from the rest of this blank verse poem, stop just short of self-parody. And in contrast to Wollstonecraft’s youthful judgment, hierarchies, and sublimity, Smith’s
attitude toward the beautiful south sea island fantasies of her visionary poet –
poignant testimony to the health of her libido even in her last years – seems one
of indulgence and subtle understanding. The lush sensuality of her evocation of
this south sea island ideal calls forth images from Gaugin for the twentieth-century reader and suggests that Smith, who described herself as ‘at barely fifteen,
sold to an idiot’42 could, despite this marriage to an abusive husband, still imagine fulfilment in love even as she was facing death.
The visionary, nursing dreams like these,
Is not indeed unhappy. Summer woods
Wave over him, and whisper as they wave,
Some future blessings he may yet enjoy.
And as above him sail the silver clouds,
He follows them in thought to distant climes,
Where, far from the cold policy of this,
Dividing him from her he fondly loves,
He, in some island of the southern sea,
May haply build his cane-constructed bower
Beneath the bread-fruit, or aspiring palm,
With long green foliage rippling in the gale.
Oh! Let him cherish his ideal bliss –
For what is life, when Hope has ceas’d to strew
Her fragile flowers along its thorny way?43
Though the poem, consistent with its previous complex and self-questioning
narrative patterns, challenges this valorization of fantasy in an ethnocentric,
judgmental footnote and displaces the dreamy solitary in the active benevolence
of the concluding hermit figure, it also acknowledges the heavy cost of abandoned dreams, erotic and otherwise: ‘sad and gloomy are his days, who lives of
Hope abandon’d!’44 Echoing, in lines 67–9, the references in her first volume of
Elegiac Sonnets to thorns and roses as the mixed blessing granted by the poetic
muse, Smith clearly identifies with this author of ‘scatter’d rhymes, / Unfinish’d
sentences / And rhapsodies’.45 Inevitably these lines call attention not just to
Smith’s lovelorn solitary but also to Smith herself.46
Midway between Cave of Fancy and the composition of Beachy Head, the
Lyrical Ballads provide two well known points of comparison to Smith’s solitary – the hermit figures in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and
Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. Whereas the focus of Wollstonecraft’s sage and
those depicted by her fellow women writers is the moral significance of sensibility, these hermits testify to a particular relationship between poet and nature that
we would now term Romantic. Strikingly, the recluses of both Wordsworth and
52
Coleridge are woodland hermits, whereas Smith places hers in an ocean cave, ‘a
flint-surrounded home’.47 In her choice of this stark landscape, Smith represents
the idealized courage of her recluse in his proximity to struggles between death
and life, mortality and immortality, collectivity and individuality, humanity and
nature figured as almost metaphysical absolutes.48 On the other hand, the hermit
in the concluding section of Coleridge’s poem is a grotesquely naïve and good
natured fellow whose spiritual and moral blindness seems connected to his affinity for a woodland nature whose beauty and comfort hide death and decay:
This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with mariners
That come from a far countrée.
He kneels at morn, and noon and eve –
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak-stump.49
This hermit ‘cheerily’50 encourages the approach to the Mariner’s ship, thus
revealing his rather desperate need for its dark lesson. And, fittingly, it is his
question, ‘What manner of man art thou?’,51 that compels the first recitation of
the Mariner’s tale.
Paul Fry astutely reads this figure as Coleridge’s reply to Wordsworthian
naturalism and nature worship, stages in human development that Coleridge
feared his friend would never overcome, despite Wordsworth’s clear assertions
to the contrary.52 (Though Fry does not mention it, one must also smile at the
Wordsworthian complacency suggested by the hermit’s ‘cushion plump’ and by
the loud rearing of his ‘sweet voice’!)
Fry further suggests that the hermit in ‘Tintern Abbey’ is ‘snatched back’
from ‘The Rime’ perhaps as a response to its critique. In Wordsworth’s poem, the
presence of the hermit is suggested by the smoke that rises above the rich verdure, the ‘wild green landscape’53 of the opening lines of the poem that conclude
with the image of the ‘hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The hermit sits alone’.54
In this abstract figure, we have the exemplary emblem of the transcendentalizing
and idealizing agency of Wordsworth’s poetic imagination.55 Historical context,
physical detail and social description are purposely stripped away.
In Beachy Head, Smith moves beyond this tension between naturalism and
supernaturalism by denying her hermit the beauty of English forests, indeed by
placing him, in a sense, beyond the sensuous pleasures and the healing influences
of phenomenal nature which were still available to the ‘forest hermit’, the lovelorn ‘visionary’, who precedes him in the poem:56
53
the soul-reviving gale,
Fanning the bean-field, or the thymy heath,
Had not for many summers breathed on him;
And nothing mark’d to him the season’s change,
Save that more gently rose the placid sea.57
Furthermore, he has weathered the trajectory of hope and disillusionment – so
familiar to us from canonical Romanticism – with his sensibility, his humanitarianism, and his commitment to individual action still intact:
his heart
Was feelingly alive to all that breath’d:
And outraged as he was, in sanguine youth,
By human crimes, he still acutely felt
For human misery.58
On the one hand, Smith’s hermit seems an embodiment of absolute compassion,
outside of space and time, an instantiation of utopian possibility. On the other
hand, his feeling is an active compassion that seeks expression in a particular
historical and phenomenal moment and that abandons the distance and physical safety upon which the canonical sublime aesthetic response is predicated.
We are in the presence here of the ‘material sublime’ that John Pipkin attributes
to Romantic women poets, a sublime that ‘foregrounds the subject’s own bodily danger’, highlights the strength required ‘to withstand the terrifying forces
of nature’ and ‘embraces the material forces of the natural world in order to
draw from them an expanded sense of selfhood’.59 Thus, Smith’s seaside hermit
is a seer or prophet who reads nature’s nuances for signs of the approach of lifethreatening storms that he can counter by coming to the aid of his fellow man,
shipwrecked sailors at risk of drowning:
He learn’d to augur from the clouds of heaven,
And from the changing colours of the sea,
And sullen murmurs of the hollow cliffs,
Or the dark porpoises, that near the shore
Gambol’d and sported on the level brine
When tempests were approaching ... 60
The altruism and usefulness of the final hermit figure in Beachy Head thus challenge the self-absorption of the solitary poet recluse who precedes him in the
poem. As a retrospective of Smith’s entire oeuvre, then, Beachy Head not only
honors that work, but also questions it, advancing, as Labbe argues, ‘a poetics of
self-critique’ and moving toward ‘a poetics of engagement’.61 At the same time,
furthermore, Smith makes clear, unlike Wordsworth or Coleridge, that her hermit, and his charitable agency and selflessness, are historically possible and very
54
likely real in the most literal sense. In keeping with her attentiveness to historical
and natural detail and her emphasis upon collective memory throughout Beachy
Head, Smith documents in her footnote to line 674 the local tradition of Parson Darby’s tale upon which her concluding narrative is based, also emphasizing
the importance of memorializing a perhaps lost local tradition. In this concluding emphasis upon the charitable action of one human being, both common
and remarkable, historical and legendary, Smith asks us to hope that the ‘better
region’62 to which her hermit’s spirit has fled might be possible here and now.
In her discussion of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Adela Pinch defines sentimentality as ‘the affective dimension of an epistemological conflict over the origins
of feeling’.63 We judge an emotional expression sentimental when we struggle to
know if the emotion it represents is collective or individual, staged or authentic, conventional or original, public or personal. The literature of sensibility, as
exemplified in the conclusion of Beachy Head, highlights an analogous ethical
conflict over the object toward which feelings are directed as we ask ourselves
whether those feelings are solipsistic or humanitarian, self-absorbed or compassionate, anti-social or social, erotic or altruistic, detached or engaged. Already
present in Mary Hays’s ‘The Hermit: An Oriental Tale’, (1786), this conflict also
informs Mary Robinson’s poem ‘The Hermit of Mont-Blanc’ (1800) and Sydney
Owenson’s novel The Missionary (1811).64 In each of these works, the figure of
the hermit, as in Beachy Head, represents a kind of limit case in the effort to
resolve this conflict, and, if not to transcend it, at least to bring the two poles of
sensibility into dialectical relation with each other.
In conclusion, then, I will offer a brief sketch of each of these recluse figures
in order to suggest the significance and persistence of the tensions evident in the
enigmatic conclusion of Beachy Head and to mark out a tradition to which this
poem belongs. It will become clear that Romantic women writers like Smith
employ this crucial figure of the recluse as a metaphorical magnet for the representation of the moral meaning of emotion as they take the aesthetic of sensibility
into the nineteenth century and transform it in the process. Mary Hays’s Persian
hermit Zeibriel is an Enlightenment sage/philosophe who recognizes the close
affinities of dangerous emotional excess, and of ‘ardent ... unbounded passion’
with ‘the finest genius and the most amiable mind’.65 After the loss of his wife and
son to the depredations of a licentious and tyrannical ruler, Zeibriel, instead of
seeking vengeance or falling into despair, retires to a forest cave where he teaches
the local shepherds ‘justice and equity, tempered with mercy: sobriety, temperance, and philanthropy’, leads them in ‘the mysterious paths of religion’, and
initiates them in ‘the sublime sciences of philosophy and astronomy’.66 Above
all he announces the dawning of a new age brought about through the necessity
of sublimating ‘fierce and uncontrollable emotions’ into a philanthropy which
is ‘an emanation of the divine perfections, and which embraces as brethren the
55
whole human species, however diversified by sentiment, mode, or complexion’.67
Thus whereas Smith juxtaposes lovelorn and heroic solitaries without explicitly
comparing or judging them, leaving her reader to ponder their meaning, Hays
represents the movement from personal passion to charity and humanitarianism
as a crucial step in a divinely ordained perfectibility.
Such idealism and utopianism are impossible for Mary Robinson at the end of
the 1790s, a decade marked for her by extreme personal hardship, political cynicism and disillusionment.68 ‘The Hermit of Mont-Blanc’, published in her Lyrical
Tales which appeared just two months before the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads in 1800, features a young man who, following form, seeks solitude as a
refuge from star-crossed love. ‘Cross’d in the fond ambitions of his soul / By false
Ambition’, he flees to the solitude of the Alps when his beloved is immured in a
convent, victim of ‘monastic horrors’.69 Once again, frustrated personal passion
is transformed into benevolence as his Alpine cell becomes a refuge for weary
travellers and lost Goatherds who ‘Bewilder’d in the starless midnight hour /
Implored the HERMIT’S aid, the HERMIT’S pray’rs; / And nothing loath by
pity or by pray’r / Was he, to save the wretched’.70 Yet these acts of charity seem
ultimately empty and meaningless, for he is subsequently described as ‘an alien
Man / From all the joys of social intercourse, / Alone, unpitied, by the world
forgot!’71 Robinson’s hermit is neither respected nor honoured as are those of
Smith and Hays nor does his virtue in any way alleviate his unfulfilled desire for
his beloved. His prayers are orisons offered to her at a ‘dark, though unpolluted
altar’ that ‘Love’ had ‘rear’d / On the white waste of wonders!’72 And his last
effort to rescue a desperate traveller reveals not an anonymous stranger but the
dead body of his ‘darling Maid’, victim of the conquering French Revolutionary
army. The hermit comes face to face with the ‘ruffian’ soldier whose ‘murd’rous
hands / Were smear’d with gore; and on his daring breast / A golden cross, suspended, bore the name / Of his ill-fated Victim!’73 In revealing the Hermit’s
beloved to be victimized first by the ancien régime as the involuntary inmate of a
convent and then again by the revolutionary forces, with the opposing ideological forces conflated in the soldier’s appropriation of the cross, Robinson seems
to nullify the possibility of positive political or cultural change. And spirituality offers no answer to inevitably doomed erotic love, for Robinson depicts
her hermit figure’s pain and prayers as utterly useless and vain. Thus the social
critique embodied in Robinson’s post-revolutionary hermit shades into nihilism
and existential despair.74
Moving forward from the publication of Beachy Head to 1811, we find that
the religious recluses in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary, like Robinson’s hermit, also function as vehicles for the critique of organized religion as an obstacle
to human love and justice. The title character, a Franciscan missionary named
Hilarion, longs to emulate the asceticism of his patron saint, to retire to a desert
56
where he will live above nature’s laws and beyond temptation by subduing all
human passion. The novel’s narrator, however, is unequivocally critical of such
urges, depicting them as the product of misdirected erotic energy: ‘inflamed by
the visionary nature of his religious studies, borne away by the complexional
enthusiasm of his character ... his unregulated mind becoming the victim of his
ardent imagination, he lost sight of the true object of human existence, a life
acceptable to the Creator by being serviceable to his creatures’.75 The reader is
then hardly surprised when on his mission to India Hilarion falls in love with the
Hindu priestess Luxima who claims to be converted so that she can be with the
man she loves. Luxima mirrors Hilarion in that her life of lush and secluded religious ritual honouring Camdeo, symbol of ‘religious mystic love’ and depicted
by Owenson as a Hindu cupid, is set in contrast to her rigid adherence to the
Indian caste system; Owenson thus makes it clear that neither her hero’s Christian asceticism nor the pantheist nature worship of her heroine lives up to her
ideals of true human charity and justice. Though their relationship remains
unconsummated and Hilarion never explicitly acknowledges his desire for Luxima to her, he is nevertheless condemned to the stake by Jesuits, rivals of the
Franciscans, and only rescued at the last minute by a suicidal suttee-like gesture
on the part of Luxima. In her dying words, Luxima envisions a utopian balance
or harmony between Hindu and Christian, religious zeal and humanitarianism,
asceticism and charity as a resolution of the moral and cultural conflicts that
have haunted this novel of sensibility.76
[W]hen I am no more, thou shalt preach, not to the Brahmins only, but to the
Christians, that the sword of destruction, which has been this day raised between the
followers of thy faith and mine, may be for ever sheathed! Thou wilt appear among
them as a spirit of peace, teaching mercy, and inspiring love; thou wilt soothe away,
by acts of tenderness, and words of kindness, the stubborn prejudice which separates
the mild and patient Hindu from his species; thou wilt check the Christian’s zeal, and
bid him follow the sacred lesson of the God he serves.77
Yet instead of heeding Luxima’s call to an activist, engaged faith, an early prototype of liberation theology, Hilarion retires to an isolated grotto, shuns human
contact and prays, as had Luxima, each dawn and dusk, at the confluence of two
rivers. Years later, his corpse is found in this cave by an Indian shepherd with an
urn that contains Luxima’s ashes, her Brahmin dsandum and his cross stained
with her blood. As with the conclusion to Beachy Head, the reader stops short at
this puzzling ending, and yet is pleased, I think, by the myriad questions raised
and the possibilities evoked. In the end, the fascination of the hermit figure for
Romantic women writers seems to lie in the attempt to trace the compelling and
rich, if ultimately unreadable, connections among human morality, spirituality
and desire.
4 THE SUBJECT OF BEACHY HEAD
Christoph Bode
The following essay on Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head – her long poem published posthumously in 1807 – forms part of a larger research project on
discursive constructions of identity in British Romanticism. To give a frame of
reference for my reading of Beachy Head and to put this reading into a context, I
should like to delineate briefly and somewhat sketchily what the overall project
is all about, what its basic premises and assumptions are and which results my
investigations have yielded so far.
The prime objective of the larger project is to trace as accurately and minutely
as possible the various ways and processes by which identities are discursively
constructed in the Romantic era and to identify their respective inner logic. In
this inquiry I work from the assumption that in this concrete phase of European
modernization the construction of identities by way of binary oppositions (e.g.,
I and not-I, Own and Other, man and woman (as biologically defined opposites), ‘nation’ as the result of the exclusion of alterity, occident vs orient etc.) is
increasingly transformed into and supplanted by differential discursive practices
of identity construction which, similar to differential equations in mathematics,
relate differences and changes in such a way that identity is, at best, realized in a
series of preliminary and unstable instantiations, as the necessarily variable result
of a highly dynamic discursive negotiation.
I have further assumed that it is not by accident that these new differential discursive practices coincide with a decisive phase in the formation of a
fully-fledged functionally differentiated modern society, as defined in Niklas
Luhmann’s Systems Theory,1 because it is exactly the flexibility and open-endedness of these practices that allows the different social sub-systems to operate
with variable and fluid identity designs and thereby to avoid the counterproductive and dysfunctional rigidity of identity concepts that are prematurely fixed by
‘substantialist’ parameters or content-defined entities. Differential practices, by
contrast, deal not with values but with rates of change; they are quintessentially
temporal and operate with Δ – Δ being the shorthand for changes that occur
over a span of time.
– 57 –
58
One of the main areas in which the full range of possibilities of discursive identity formation is played out and tested out is literature. It is not only
through the commodification of literature in the early eighteenth century but,
maybe more importantly so, through the introduction and acceptance of ‘absolute’ aesthetics and poetics that literature is increasingly freed from extra-literary
obligations. Or, to put it more precisely: the function it is assigned is – and this
may sound paradoxical – that it need not fulfil any particular function apart
from being interesting in itself and from being aesthetically stimulating.
The reason why it is particularly promising to take fictional or poetical texts
as one’s corpus is that because of the constitution of an autonomous social subsystem called ‘literature’ these non-referential texts are likely to exhibit, or at
least to mask in an interesting way, the inherent and unavoidable paradoxicality,
self-contradictoriness and inconclusiveness of discursive self-formation. Discursive self-construction will always have to begin with a decisionist beginning – a
Setzung, or positing – that cannot be anything but contingent (as Aristotle says
in his Poetics: ‘A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything
else, and which has naturally something else after it’).2 Discursive self-construction will then have to produce the illusion that what follows from this initial
laying-down has a cogency, a necessity, a logic of its own that will eventually
culminate in the identity of the subject of the discourse with the subject (matter) (i.e., with the object) of the discourse. Ideally, that is, in autobiography, as
Wilhelm Dilthey once remarked, the subject of the story coincides with the
subject which brings it forth3 – a relationship that can easily be reversed: discursive constructions of identity produce what is always already (and inevitably
so) presupposed but which, to all intents and purposes, is never given and never
achieved: a subject which is able to fully comprehend itself.
Now the crucial difference between discursive and differential constructions of identity on the one hand and other, foundational models on the other
is that the discursive and contingent origin of identity can either be masked
or exhibited, it can be veiled or displayed. But since systematic unmasking or
ostentatious exhibition is considered and treated as counterproductive in most
social sub-systems, the arena in which the contingency and ultimately (measured
by older standards) the impossibility of discursive self-grounding is displayed
is exactly the designated field of texts that are freed from fulfilling any specific
functions: literature. The conspicuous foregrounding and thematisation of the
immensely varied ways in which identities are discursively constructed becomes
the true province of literature – it can indulge in practices that elsewhere would
lead to the breaking down of any communication but which, in this field, are the
defining trait, the differentia specifica of this particular kind of communication:
enhanced and conspicuous auto-referentiality.
The Subject of Beachy Head
59
Therefore, one of the defining traits of modern literature, namely that it
speaks about itself and directs our attention to the text as text and to the processes of meaning-production themselves, structurally coincides with that which,
by definition, has no other subject but itself and has as its only telos and as its
reason for being the proof of its own meaningful coherence, of its own internal
necessity: the discursive generation and production of identity. The discursive
construction of identity can only be auto-referential, as are modern art and literature in their most characteristic manifestations.
In previous studies I have already traced the ways in which the significant
and inevitable paradoxicality of discursive self-constitution is manifested and
processed in William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge.4 These ways are, to summarize them very
briefly:
1 – the impossibility of ever ending and the complementary necessity to continually re-write one’s own life (even if the period covered remains constant)
in Wordsworth’s The Prelude – a process which finds its only logical ending in
the ontological fact of the death of its author;
2 – the dissolution of temporal continuity into a series of discrete moments
whose authenticity the text claims to guarantee (‘what the Imagination seizes
as Beauty must be truth’)5 but whose coherence is exactly what is called in
question – by which move the whole project of identity formation collapses,
and gladly so (‘(the poet) has no identity!’ – Keats);6
3 – a self-constitution that begins with the projection of fictive alter egos and a
public persona that is, however, for its development and indeed for its continuous confirmation vitally dependent upon a public response, so that the
production of this identity deliberately transgresses the text as text – the
process of fabrication is from the very beginning one that denies the separation and autonomy of the new sub-system of ‘literature’ (while at the same
time it strongly affirms its commodification) and relies indispensably on a
dialogical and performative acting-out of the potential of a role in the making; so that, eventually and ideally, role (that epitome of inauthenticity) and
identity become one (Byron);
4 – the conception of an ‘I’ that is merely a grammatical effect deriving from a
linguistic segmentation of an originally unified field of consciousness, which
then, however, lacks the privileged point of view from which it could diegetically organize the different hierarchical levels of its coming-into-being because
it wants the self-privileging capacity to convincingly introduce the narratological differences between diegetic, meta-diegetic, and meta-meta-diegetic
narrative (Shelley’s ‘On Life’, in conjunction with The Triumph of Life – but
Keats’s Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion follow the same pattern);
60
5 – finally, the projection of a subjectivity that can only be derived from, or
grounded in, the postulate of a Divinity because it acknowledges the inevitable paradoxicality of all attempts to discursively construct the identity of the
subject instead of deducing it from a transcendent ground of spiritual being,
whose existence can, of course, only be assumed in a leap of faith (S. T. Coleridge in his later writings, particularly so in his Logic).
At this point it may be necessary to state as unequivocally as possible that it is not
the aim of my project to identify, time and again, with boring predictability, the
point where attempts at discursive constructions of identity become self-cancelling or self-contradictory. My prime objective is not to identify what is similar
or identical in all these attempts. Rather, my prime objective is to identify what
is dissimilar and non-identical in them. To put it in another way, my objective
is to explore the range and the spread of historically possible realisations, the
very diversity, seen as a response to a historically concrete and continuing challenge. It would be tedious to prove, over and over again, that these attempts are
by necessity paradoxical and self-contradictory. Of course, they are. The interesting thing will be to show in which particular way they are paradoxical and
self-contradictory – how they obfuscate or, on the contrary, how they exhibit
their paradoxicality and how the new paradigm is gradually filled with concrete,
culturally de-pragmatitized models of how to negotiate the challenges of modernity.
It is at this point that I hope to be able to show that Charlotte Smith’s Beachy
Head is a particularly intriguing example of a Romantic attempt to construct
and deconstruct a subject in narrative poetry. For what is, after all, the subject of
Beachy Head?
Beachy Head is a headland in East Sussex near Eastbourne on the English
Channel, consisting of chalk cliffs. ‘In crossing the Channel from the coast of
France’, Charlotte Smith explains in a note to her poem, ‘Beachy-Head is the
first land made’. It is also, conversely, the last of England that you see on an outbound journey. And since Beachy Head is thus the first and last of England, it
is fitting that Charlotte Smith’s poem of the same name should begin with the
oppositional differentiation ‘here’ vs ‘there’, ‘home’ vs ‘abroad’, ‘England’ vs ‘the
Continent’, and with the waterway that separates the one from the other, that,
as it were, constitutes the two sides of a binary opposition simply by being there:
if it were not for that rupture, the topography would be undifferentiated. The
Channel constitutes ‘here’ and ‘there, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ etc. Here are the first
ten lines of Smith’s Beachy Head:
On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime!
That o’er the channel rear’d, half way at sea
The mariner at early morning hails,
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I would recline; while Fancy should go forth,
And represent the strange and awful hour
Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent
Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills,
Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between
The rifted shores, and from the continent
Eternally divided this green isle.8
Two things are noteworthy here, I think. First that the primal differentiation –
the decisionist Setzung of a beginning – is ascribed to a supernatural being rather
than to geological processes, although Charlotte Smith was well-versed in the
natural sciences of her day. As Paula R. Feldman says, Conversations Introducing
Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History. For the Use of Children and Young
Persons (1804), remains Smith’s most enduring children’s book,9 and Smith’s The
Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons, was published in the
same year as Beachy Head, 1807. But the point seems to be that no matter which
agent is responsible for that first differentiation, once it is made, differences proliferate and we can observe an accelerating process of differentiation, and on both
sides of the basic distinction, too. In a note Charlotte Smith comments that lines
5 and 6 are
Alluding to an idea that this Island was once conjoined to the continent of Europe,
and torn from it by some convulsion of Nature. I confess I never could trace the
resemblance between the two countries. Yet the cliffs about Dieppe, [sic] resemble
the chalk cliffs on the Southern coast. But Normandy has no likeness whatever to the
part of England opposite it.10
This is curious: because not only does this sub-text mention a different agent from
the one figuring in the poetical main text – ‘some convulsion of Nature’ vs ‘the
Omnipotent’ – it also continues a differentiation ‘on the other side’ (the region
about Dieppe vs Normandy) and by doing so sets itself up as a counter-voice to
the text it claims to explain. The process of differentiation seems contagious: the
moment this text here has stated its subject – an initial differentiation – it falls
in two and divides itself into sub-text and main text; differentiation, bifurcation
being not only the subject matter of the text but the very mode in which the text
itself exists. And very conspicuously so, for – and that would be my second point
– the process of differentiation is mimetically doubled in both texts by a proliferation of ensuing binary oppositions: The first ten lines of Beachy Head already
establish an amazing number of them (rock/sea; mariner/I; Fancy/reality; now/
then; God/man; continent/isle), and I should say they are all extremely relevant
since the rest of the poem can be understood as the progressive correlation and
circumscription of these initial binaries in a conspicuously destabilising way, a
way which is, as I hope to show, quite characteristic of Beachy Head.
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But none of these oppositions, I should like to argue (which, perhaps, comes
as a surprise), is more relevant than the implied dichotomy between the standing
position the mariner takes up and the reclining one that the speaker of the poem
prefers. In contrast to Smith’s The Emigrants (1793), the speaker of this poem
here does not stand on the cliff of Beachy Head, she is lying on it.11 If Beachy Head
has been compared with ‘Tintern Abbey’ and with ‘Mont Blanc’,12 the similarity
consists indeed in the fact that all three poems come in the guise of topographic
or locodescriptive poems but are really meditations on the placement of the subject vis-à-vis its own past (as in Wordsworth) or vis-à-vis its own vocation on the
occasion of a confrontation with that which is radically non-human (as in Shelley). But nowhere is the shift towards subjectivity more radically realized than
in Smith’s Beachy Head because not only is the whole poem based on a refusal to
see with bodily eyes (‘I would recline; while Fancy should go forth’),13 even this
refusal is only imaginary (‘I would recline’). It can, of course, be said that John
Keats in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (‘on the viewless wings of Poesy ... Already
with thee!’)14 attempts a similar radicalisation of subjectivity but in his case this
occurs far later in the poem and there is, of course, an uncertain bending back
upon the questionable basis of the subject at the very end of his poem, a gesture
which is significantly missing from Beachy Head. To be sure, it could be argued
that ‘I would recline’ is not a conditional clause but temporal in the sense of ‘I
used to’: at the age of ten, Charlotte and her family moved to Bignor Park in
Sussex and she was familiar with the landscape of the South Downs and that of
Beachy Head at an early age (‘Haunts of my youth! Scenes of fond day dreams,
I behold ye yet!’).15 But this objection only underscores my point: the subject
positions itself imaginatively on Beachy Head: The memory of having lain there
once is no less an imaginary move than the forceful projection of desire, ‘On thy
stupendous summit, rock sublime! ... I would recline’ (= let me recline).
The position of the speaking subject in Beachy Head is an imaginary one, it
is a virtual one, and this is the decisive precondition for the establishment of a
point of view that is so dynamic and so varied and shifting that one hesitates to
call it a point of view at all. It has more of a line or curve or trajectory constituted
by innumerous points: both the intermingling of geological time with historical
time, with regional lore and personal memories, and the immensely flexible handling of the subject position are only possible because the subject position is not
tied to the fiction of a corporeal self but rather the result of a fancy flight on what
Keats calls the ‘viewless wings of Poesy’. If we deduce from Beachy Head a ‘hybrid,
fluid self ’,16 the prime narratological reason for this is that the poem’s ‘camera’
is not circumscribed in its movements or operations by any bodily limitations;
rather, it describes an imaginary flight – it can record the minutest details, rocket
sky-high (‘But if the eye could reach so far, the mart / Of England’s capital, its
domes and spires / Might be perceived’),17 it can pan and scan the cliffs and sea,
63
trail through the woods, peep into caverns, and it records time travel as well, as it
jumps from geological convulsions to Roman times and from the Vikings to the
warm seas of the Cretaceous period. The subject of Beachy Head is not confined
by any limitations of time or space.
As in all poetry, we deduce a subject and a subject position from a specific
point of view, from a concrete perspective that is implied. As in painting, the
subject does not have to be in the picture (as it is in Caspar David Friedrich’s
famous Rückenfigur paintings) so that we can imagine his/her position: it is
always already (at least in perspectival painting) implied in the form of representation, in its broadest sense. In other words: the form of poetry indicates a
specific way of being-in-the world, a Weltverhältnis (which is why Theodor W.
Adorno could say that the social – das Gesellschaftliche – is materialized in the
form of poetry),18 so that a tracing of the shifts and breaks in Beachy Head follows
the quantum-leap-like manifestations of a subject that is constituted by these
changes – differentially constituted in that it records not only changes, but rates
of changes. In other words: it is we who deduce or infer the subject from these
movements, from these changes, because the subject, in this regard, is nothing
but the trajectory of encounters with an Other in this medium that spotlight-like
reveal its momentary position. Beachy Head, of which Duncan Wu has rightfully
observed that ‘its achievement resides in its unpredictability and inventiveness’,19
reveals that the trajectory of the subject becomes visible only in the way it relates
itself to its Other and in the discursive impressions it leaves in a medium.
The formal convergence of inner and outer, of subject and object, of spirit
and nature not only in Beachy Head but, I suggest, in all major Romantic poetry,
follows, in structure, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling ’s early suggestion in
his Introduction to Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), ‘Die Natur soll
der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur seyn’ (Let Nature be the
visible part of Spirit, Spirit the invisible part of Nature).20 and it is this formal
conversion which constitutes the condition for the possibility of a discursive
construction of the one in terms of the other, and vice versa.
In the following I will delineate how this is done in Beachy Head and for
that purpose I will concentrate on two major points which demonstrate paradigmatically how Smith dialectically dissolves easy binaries: the first point concerns
the way in which Beachy Head is auto-referentially re-inscribed into itself, the
second, how nature and society (society in the sense of everything that is manmade) are radically merged into each other.
Towards the end of the poem Charlotte Smith introduces two heterogeneous
texts into her own, the ‘stranger’s song’, ‘Were I a shepherd’,21 and his rhapsody
to ‘Amanda’.22 The latter is tellingly about the creation of a ‘sylvan room’ that
– much like John Keats’s bowers – through its leaves offers ‘securer shelter’
(‘Where leaves, inwoven in Nature’s loom, / Shall canopy our green retreat; ...
64
I’ll dress the sand rock cave for you, / And strew the floor with heath and leaves,
/ That you, against the autumnal air / May find securer shelter there’).23 The
polysemy of these ‘leaves’ – the leaves of a tree or bush and leaves of paper – in
a place for love and poetry is foregrounded in Smith’s framing narrative when
the finding of the stranger’s poem is presented as the discovery of some ‘deposit’
– culture into nature – , though the exact nature of its medium is conspicuously
withheld:
He vanish’d! Lost among the deepening gloom. –
But near one ancient tree, whose wreathed roots
Formed a rude couch, love-songs and scatter’d rhymes,
Unfinish’d sentences, or half erased,
And rhapsodies like this, were sometimes found –24
Thus the mediality of poetry is highlighted exactly when – with symptomatic
fuzziness and obscurity – it is suggested that the visionary has somehow literally
inscribed himself into the scene, into nature: ‘rhapsodies like this, were sometimes found’ – either on ‘leaves’, one supposes, or literally scratched into the bark
of a tree atop Beachy Head or even into the rock that is Beachy Head. Add to
this that the auto-referentiality of this inscription into nature is ambiguously
hinted at (‘rhapsodies like this’ refers to the following poem to Amanda as well as
to the frame text that rhapsodizes about Beachy Head) and it becomes apparent
that Beachy Head, in its attempt to inscribe itself into a natural medium, is more
than just superficially about itself. More than this, it is not only about the way
the natural landscape is overwritten, quite naturally it also enacts such an overwriting. It is itself an instance of what it is about; it is its own example, at once a
signification and the very thing itself.
Mediality and (re-)inscription become even more prominent in the final
episode of Smith’s patchwork quilt of a narrative, the one about the hermit who
lives inside a cave inside Beachy Head and who makes it his task to rescue shipwrecked sailors or, if help comes too late, to bury them in the limestone of the
cliff (‘the pale recluse / Dug in the chalk a sepulchre’).25 When one dark night
he himself is drowned (‘in the cause of charity’),26 it is his body in turn that is
buried ‘near his former home’, i.e. in another cave of Beachy Head. It seems like
all have to go into the chalky limestone in the end, to misquote from T. S. Eliot’s
‘East Coker’.
Beachy Head ends as follows:
Those who read
Chisel’d within this rock, these mournful lines,
Memorials of his sufferings, did not grieve,
That dying in the cause of charity
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His spirit, from his earthly bondage freed,
Had to some better region fled for ever.27
Some critics, including Theresa Kelley, have wondered about ‘the missing epitath’ in Beachy Head,28 the epitaph supposedly advertised as ‘these mournful
lines’. But ‘these mournful lines’ are not necessarily missing, I suggest, they are
possibly what we have just read: namely the whole of Beachy Head.29 The whole
of Beachy Head would then be re-inscribed into Beachy Head – admittedly an
utter impossibility, because it is hard to imagine that this material medium (the
limestone cave) could ever contain a text of such magnitude. And yet the skandalon is the same as that of the discursive construction of the subject when, at
least at the end, we want to embrace the illusion that the discourse has finished
the tale of how the subject was generated, of how it came about, of what and
how it is, plus the illusion that the subject is safely contained in its medium. We
seem to be slightly uneasy with the inescapable alternative that a subject can only
be made visible in a medium but that the medium can, of course, never comprehend the subject, since any medium can only register and represent traces of the
absenting movement of the subject.
When Beachy Head suggests that it can be found in the rock of the same
name, the implied idea is that in material mediality you can only find the traces,
the remnants and the deposits of a life that has meanwhile moved elsewhere (to
‘some better region’?). But since all that we are left with are these deposits – these
discourses – the text ultimately inscribes itself into itself: the place of the self-constitution of the subject is, of course, in language, and could be nowhere else. If
the discourse itself suggests that the place is far too small and too confined and
narrow, it only draws attention to its awareness of its own impossibility and that
it is by necessity and systematically catachretic. The subject may be too big but
it can only be traced and be made visible in a mediality that forever signals its
own inadequacy.
The (re-)inscription of Beachy Head into Beachy Head (and thereby into
Beachy Head) is underscored by another persistent trope and a dominant semantic field, namely that of fossil sea-shells and geological sedimentation. It is true
that when fossilized sea-shells (‘with pale calcareous soil / Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance’)30 are first introduced, the speaker of Beachy Head
wonders,
Does Nature then
Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes
Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling
To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world?
Or did this range of chalky mountains, once
Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves
Swell’d fathomless?31
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It is true also that both the poem’s text and Smith’s carefully crafted but irresolvably ambiguous note addressing the problem leave this question ultimately
open.32 But it is definitely not quite true that (as Theresa Kelley has it) ‘the poem
and its narrator immediately abandon both hypotheses, but more pointedly the
second’.33 Quite the reverse, having first rejected the second hypothesis (‘Tho’
surely the blue Ocean ... Here never rolled its surge’),34 the speaker comes back
to it, like a wave, and now even more space is allotted to the presentation of
the second option35 and to its prime prerequisite, sedimentation. Sedimentation
– not upheaval, which comes later – is what I would call the master trope of
Beachy Head.
For, interestingly enough, in the passage immediately following these geological speculations (‘Food for vague theories or vain dispute’)36 what the poem
suggests is that cultural history is transformed into nature since the most recent
layer of civilisation is only one more stratum, the alluvial one, in the geological
formation of Beachy Head. While the ignorant peasant treads the ground and
while the herdsman lies ‘on some turfy knoll’, they are not aware
that deep beneath
Rest the remains of men, of whom is left
No traces in the records of mankind,
Save what these half obliterated mounds
And half-fill’d trenches doubtfully impart
To some lone antiquary; who on times remote,
Since which two thousand years have roll’d away,
Loves to contemplate. He perhaps may trace,
Or fancy he can trace, the oblong square
Where the mail’d legions, under Claudius, rear’d
The rampire, or excavated fossé delved;
What time the huge unwieldy Elephant
Auxiliary reluctant, hither led,
From Afric’s forest glooms and tawny sands,
First felt the northern blast, and his vast frame
Sunk useless; whence in after ages found,
The wondering hinds, on those enormous bones
Gaz’d; and in giants dwelling on the hills
Believed and marvell’d.37
For the antiquary and for the archaeologist as well as for the geologist (and
Freud will later use this same imagery to describe his work as a psycho-analyst),
the geological strata are a spatialisation of time – the deeper you dig, the older
your finds. Seeing Beachy Head as Beachy Head, we can identify the stranger’s
song and his rhapsody as textual fossils – ‘seeming of resembling substance’, but
not put there by nature wantonly mimicking fantastic forms but by temporality
67
itself, which translates culture into nature, as the left-overs of civilisation form
a new layer.
‘Fossil’ is defined as ‘a relic, remnant, or representation of a plant or animal
that existed in a past geological age, occurring in the form of mineralized bones,
shells, etc., as casts, impressions and moulds, and as frozen perfectly preserved
organisms’.38 The subject can be arrested in its mediality but it is then fossilized
into its medium, mineralized, i.e. preserved in perfect form though not in substance.
Beachy Head, presenting Beachy Head as one of the ‘legible rocks’ of Romantic poetry,39 thus illustrates a central aporia that even seems to underlie this
essay:40 On the one hand it is held that the subject can only be constructed discursively; on the other, that the medium can register ‘only’ traces of the subject
but that it cannot ever comprehend the subject. Evidently, the only subject that
can be spoken about is the discursively constructed and negotiated one. However, this does not necessarily oblige us to subscribe to the view that there is
nothing outside the discourse. There may well be, although we’d be obliged to
remain silent about it, following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice at the very end
of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. This time around, it would not be ‘das Mystische’ which is unutterable and which only ‘shows/reveals itself ’ (‘Dies zeigt
sich, es ist das Mystische’).41 But, following a different way of thinking, it may
well be that the elusive subject so conspicuously displayed in Romanticism is the
Ding an sich of modernity – a something which, by definition, is only available in
the traces that indicate its absence. The subject is only accessible in its mediality,
in mediated form, but it is not necessarily reducible to this mediated form. It is
not impossible to imply that the subject amounts to more than its traces, just as
there is more than can be spoken about.
To come back to Beachy Head’s merging of nature and society: Anne Mellor
once wrote that Beachy Head ‘can be read as a challenge to the ‘egotistical sublime’
of Wordsworth’s Prelude in its insistence on the stubborn otherness and minute
particularity of the natural world and on the limitations of human subjectivity’.42 While I would never deny the immense differences between The Prelude
and Beachy Head, I beg to differ in this respect: Beachy Head offers a grandiose
panorama of how history is transformed into nature (and of how nature, in turn,
is invested with a history), into the rock formation of Beachy Head, because the
whole poem is about how history (geological time, historical time, regional and
personal memory) is materialized, layered onto and eventually embodied in that
limestone rock. As the speaker dis-embodies herself, so material nature embodies history, both natural history and cultural history. The emphasis is not on the
alterity of nature but on the idea that nature can be seen as a manifestation of
its very opposite. Likewise, Beachy Head does not demarcate the limitations of
human subjectivity but it highlights the fact that human subjectivity can encom-
68
pass everything (everything that it can encompass, that is ...). To depict the one
in terms of the other – subject as object, nature as (sedimented) history, space
as time, and vice versa for all the binary oppositions – bespeaks a metaphorical
mind-frame which knows that ultimately it has nothing to play with but imagined elements that can, however, be translated into each other as the discourse
proceeds. Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend this poem is a rock. Let’s pretend this rock
is a poem. Beachy Head gives not just images of how nature overgrows the ruins
of a declining civilisation43 – it makes the far more radical suggestion that culture and nature are just two seemingly disparate phenomena on one and the
same continuum.
What is more: In Beachy Head, Charlotte Smith has not simply found a
metaphor, a way of speaking about a relationship between culture and nature,
history and natural history, but her conversion trope of historical sedimentation
is arguably what one could call a Realsymbol, a trope whose meaning is not, as it
were, superadded upon its actual meaning in empirical reality – whatever that
may be – , but whose meaning is identical in both tenor and vehicle and therefore, possibly, not a trope at all.
Just as Beachy Head does not insist on ‘the limitations of human subjectivity’
but on its boundlessness and on its perpetual convertibility, so – pace Theresa
Kelley – Beachy Head does not specify ‘the incommensurability of [two] historical kinds [of historiography] to which Romanticism so often and so productively
returns’,44 namely ‘large supervisory projects’ vs ‘narrative[s] of locality, specificity, and individuals’. Rather, Beachy Head does show, by precept and example,
that sub specie historiae naturae et civilisationis the two are not only commensurable but should be used in conjunction.
To return to the beginning:
On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime!
That o’er the channel rear’d, half way at sea
The mariner at early morning hails,
I would recline[.]45
Recline, as the herdsman does. But in contrast to him, the speaker knows what
she is lying on – the whole of history – and that some day nature will reclaim
her and she will be incorporated into the cliff. As Stuart Curran remarked, contemplating Beachy Head’s controversial fragmentary status: ‘From a modern
experience of Romanticism, nurtured by the sometimes oblique strategies of
its major poets, a work that begins atop a massive feature of the landscape and
ends immured within it bears a remarkable coherence, the more so since in no
poem of the period can one find so powerful an impulse to resolve the self into
nature’.46
69
It remains a mystery, therefore, why critics have preferred to ignore the trope
of the speaker who lies upon a massive formation of sedimented limestone,
as its latest addition to it, and have focused instead on Curran’s ensuing nonsequitur that Beachy Head ‘testifies to an alternative Romanticism that seeks not
to transcend or to absorb nature but to contemplate and honour its irreducible alterity’.47 If, as Curran says, the self in Beachy Head is resolved into nature
– and I would hold that there is more than just an ‘impulse’ to do this in Beachy
Head – and if at the same time nature’s irreducible alterity is contemplated and
honoured, then, I presume, it follows quite logically that what Beachy Head ultimately contemplates and honours is the irreducible alterity of the self; the self
which constitutes itself in series of encounters with its Other and is yet never
fully resolved or exhausted in those encounters. I guess one can contemplate this
until one returns to dust and becomes part of the alluvial layer of the rock formation.
Beachy Head is the last you see when you set out and it is the first you see
when your journey draws to its end. In perfect keeping, Charlotte Smith gave
her last poem, incidentally but appropriately published in the same year that the
London Geological Society was founded, the name of that headland. We have
her text as a fossil in the rock formation of British Romanticism. The form, and
that is all we need to analyse this extinct life-form, is perfectly preserved, though
the substance of its subject may be ‘transformed utterly’.48
And therefore, with a nod to John Donne, ask not what the subject of Beachy
Head is – it is you.
5 ‘THE SLIGHT SKIRMISHING OF A NOVEL
WRITER’: CHARLOTTE SMITH AND THE
AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Barbara Tarling
A significant programme of historical and feminist recovery has ensured that
Charlotte Smith is now widely recognized as a central figure in the Romantic
canon, and the recent publication of her collected works affirms the richness
and determination that characterize her radical response to the French Revolution.1 This essay approaches Smith’s prolonged and progressive engagement with
the politics of revolution through the representations of the American War of
Independence that function in a number of her novels as both overt and covert
sites for the discussion of events in France.2 In Desmond (1792), The Old Manor
House (1793) and The Young Philosopher (1798), Smith reaches back to an earlier generation, using the American War of the 1770s to embody and critique
the ideological collisions that were re-enacted in Europe during the 1790s. In
so doing she produces something that begins to resemble the classical historical novel defined by Lukacs, usually considered to have been inaugurated by Sir
Walter Scott.3
The American War of Independence makes a guest appearance in a surprisingly large number of late eighteenth-century British novels.4 As they gaze
uncertainly from the imperial centre towards a distant colonial periphery,
novelists of the 1780s and 1790s express the profound anxieties concerning
contested definitions of identity and allegiance that were provoked by a quarrel which divided the British people and eroded cherished perceptions of the
nation as the epitome of constitutional liberty, civic virtue and patriotic endeavour.5 Contributing both directly and indirectly to debates about the condition
of Britain and the direction of its imperial ventures, their fictional and quasifictional representations of the war locate themselves within a public discourse
of politics, nationalism and domestic morality which, from 1789 onwards, was
dominated by the intellectual and political ferment associated with the French
Revolution. If we examine the ways in which Smith revised her accounts of the
American War as she promoted and defended her reformist agenda in response
– 71 –
72
to changing events in France and increasing repression in Britain, we can trace
a progression from the confident optimism of Desmond, through the anxieties
of The Old Manor House towards the disillusion of The Young Philosopher. We
can also see how her skirmishes against the forces of prejudice and interest are
focused through an extended dialogue with one work, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Set against the background of events in France between June 1790, when
hereditary titles were abolished, and February 1792, when the establishment of a
constitutional monarchy still seemed a real possibility, Desmond is Smith’s most
overtly political novel. Published in June 1792, only months after the events
that it purports to relate, the novel combines sentimental fiction with polemical
argument and intervenes directly in the revolution debate, openly challenging
Burke’s interpretation of events. Such explicit engagement with contemporary
politics was unusual in a novel, particularly one written by a woman. However,
Smith’s self-conscious determination to foreground the work’s political agenda
is apparent in her decision to reject the original title, ‘The Wandering Lover’, on
the grounds that it might provoke expectations of a sentimental romance ‘calculated only for mere novel readers’.6 In the preface she simultaneously asserts a
private, female identity and claims space in a discursive public sphere, vigorously
defending her decision to mix public and private discourse and to explore the
parallel effects of political and domestic tyranny:
But women it is said have no business with politics. – Why not? – Have they no
interest in the scenes that are acting around them, in which they have fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, or friends engaged! – Even in the commonest course of female
education, they are expected to acquire some knowledge of history ; and yet, if they
are to have no opinion of what is passing, it avails little that they should be informed
of what has passed, in a world where they are subject to such mental degradation;
where they are censured as affecting masculine knowledge if they happen to have any
understanding; or despised as insignificant triflers if they have none.7
Contemporary reviewers endorsed her strategy and applauded the skill with
which it was executed. In the Analytical Review, Mary Wollstonecraft quoted
Smith’s preface in full, praising her inclusion of ‘the French Revolution, and the
present state of France’ and warmly commending a novel in which ‘the cause
of freedom is defended with warmth’.8 The European Magazine considered
that the novel ‘vindicated the cause of French liberty with much acuteness’ and
applauded Smith as a writer whose work ‘towers above the common productions
of the day’.9 In the Monthly Review, William Enfield somewhat patronisingly
attributed recent improvements in the female character to the ‘higher and more
masculine tone’ of the novels that women were reading, and approved the way
in which Smith had ‘ventured beyond the beaten track, so far as to interweave
with her narrative many political discussions’.10 Even the Critical Review, which
‘The Slight Skirmishing of a Novel Writer’
73
did not share Smith’s radical views and found her representation partial in many
respects, admitted the sincerity of her arguments, conceding that ‘the opportunities of modern fine ladies for information are so few, that every means of their
obtaining it, incidentally, should be approved of ’.11
Despite its brevity, the novel’s fictional eye-witness account of the American War of Independence is a key element in Smith’s forthright response to the
work that her hero describes as the ‘elaborate treatise in favour of despotism …
lately published by Mr Burke’.12 Burke’s vehement and unexpected opposition
to the French Revolution was profoundly shocking to those who recalled his
powerful arguments in defence of the rights and privileges of American colonial assemblies during the parliamentary debates of the 1770s, and Desmond’s
reaction is symptomatic of the widespread anger and dismay aroused in radical
circles by a publication in which Burke ‘advances opinions, and maintains principles absolutely opposite to all the professions of his political life’.13 By linking
the American and French Revolutions and stressing their shared aspiration for
fundamental freedoms that Burke had previously appeared to support, Smith
challenges both the logic and the integrity of his case. Through the testimony of
Montfleuri, who served with the French army in America as a young man, she
marshals opposition to ‘the many absurdities into which a resolution to defend a
pernicious system, betrays its ablest advocates’.14
Desmond, alone among Smith’s novels, is cast in the epistolary format common both to eighteenth-century sentimental fiction and to polemical treatises
such as Reflections. A year after the storming of the Bastille, Lionel Desmond
travels to France to distract himself from the misery of a passionate attachment
to a married woman. Arriving in Paris just in time to witness the grand spectacle
of the Fête de la Fédération, he is befriended by an enlightened aristocrat, the
ci-devant Marquis de Montfleuri, meets various members of his family, listens to
their views, visits their estates, and records both private and public concerns in
his correspondence with a friend in England. The fictive authority of personal
observation that characterizes Montfleuri’s account of the American War and
Desmond’s depiction of the current state of France is emphatically opposed to
the second-hand (and therefore unreliable) nature of Burke’s histrionic narrative. It is now known that Smith spent several weeks in France during the late
summer of 1791, just before she began to write the novel, and the self-confident
tone of Desmond’s letters from France reflects the assurance of authorial experience.15 Writing to his friend, Erasmus Bethel, Desmond pointedly contrasts the
factual accuracy of his own descriptions with the sentimental exaggeration of
less trustworthy accounts:
I can now, however, assure you – and with the most heart-felt satisfaction, that nothing is more unlike the real state of this country, than the accounts which have been
given of it in England; and that the sanguinary and ferocious democracy, the scenes
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of anarchy and confusion, which we have had so pathetically described and lamented,
have no existence but in the malignant fabrications of those who have been paid for
their misrepresentations.16
Within the time frame of the novel, this letter, dated 19 July 1790, precedes Desmond’s reading of Reflections by several months, but its scathing accusations are
clearly directed at Burke and designed to question the veracity of his account.17
The questions of authority and authenticity that pervade Smith’s combative
response to Burke’s notorious polemic are highlighted by her use of the multivocal epistolary form. The work of Nicola Watson and Mary Favret has drawn
attention both to the subversive potential of the ‘private letter circulated among
… sentimental protagonists’ and to the political significance of the open letter, ‘symbol of representative government and evidence of a tolerant, equitable
system of justice – and of communication’, in the latter part of the eighteenth
century.18 Despite her professed doubts about ‘succeeding so well in letters as
in narrative’,19 Smith skilfully exploits the contrasting capacities of the medium,
combining the subversive intimacy of the private letter of the sentimental novel
with the candid exposition of the public letter of political debate to promote her
radical agenda. At the same time, however, her attack on Burke highlights the
unreliability of the subjective voice to which the epistolary medium gives expression. The novel’s political argument and its courtship narrative both demonstrate
that letters are not always the sincere and unmediated expression of sentimental
subjectivity: they also act as a conduit for the dissemination of duplicitous, partial or misinformed opinion.
The record of American achievement in the years since 1775 underpins
the novel’s optimistic vision of a reformed French polity freed from the abuses
of power associated with the ancien régime, and directly challenges Burke’s
gloomier prognosis. Montfleuri draws parallels between the rebellious colonies
and revolutionary France, linking their grievances and objectives, and associating both with English oppositionist ideology. Highlighting the success of the
American Revolution in overturning an autocratic regime and replacing it with
stable and more equitable institutions, his eye-witness testimony refutes the pessimistic assumptions on which Burke based his argument. Montfleuri portrays
the colonists, like the revolutionaries, as virtuous citizen-soldiers opposing the
professional armies of an authoritarian state, provocatively suggesting that ancien régime autocracy was not confined to France:
I saw, amidst the almost undisciplined Americans, many instances of that enthusiastic
courage which animates men who contend for all that is dear to them, against the
iron hand of injustice; and, I saw these exertions made too often vain, against the
disciplined mercenaries of despotism; who, in learning to call them rebels, seemed
too often to have forgotten that they were men.20
75
He also identifies the American War as the key catalyst for change in France,
pointing out that Louis XVI’s cynical and opportunistic support for the colonial
cause had exposed French subjects, ‘who had no choice, but went to be shot at
for the liberties of America, without having any liberty of their own’,21 to a seductive new discourse and example of freedom:
Blinded by that restless desire of conquest, and their jealousy of the English, which
has ever marked its politics, our government did not reflect that they were thus tacitly encouraging a spirit subversive of all their views; nor foresee, that the men who
were sent out to assist in the preservation of American freedom, would soon learn
that they were degraded by being themselves slaves; and would return to their native
country to feel and to assert their right to be them selves free.22
Desmond wryly notes that this irony affords considerable satisfaction to the British, who had bitterly resented French intrusion in their domestic dispute with
the colonies and who regard the present turbulence in France as just retribution
for Louis XVI’s interference in British affairs. His comment provokes Montfleuri to ridicule the inconsistency of those who criticized French intervention
in America but who now oppose the National Assembly’s measures to limit the
royal prerogative to declare war, which are designed to curb such unprovoked
aggression:
these good countrymen of your’s are a little inconsiderate and inconsistent; inconsiderate in not reflecting, that the interference which seems so unpardonable, was the act
of the cabinet, not of the people … and, inconsistent, inasmuch, as they now exclaim
against the resolution we have made to deprive our monarchs of the power of making
war; a power which they thus complain has been so unwarrantably exerted.23
Recently introduced into the French constitution, these new measures had
been comprehensively denounced by Burke, who was adamant that this ‘most
dangerous of all prerogatives’ ought not to be entrusted to the legislature, but
should remain under the sole control of ‘the executive magistrate’.24 Montfleuri’s reminder that French intervention in the American War, condemned by
the British and undertaken against the interests and without the consent of the
French people, had been sanctioned by the prerogative that Burke now sought so
stridently to defend, exposes the absurdity and inconsistency of his position.
Montfleuri’s references to the brutality of the American War are also directed
at Burke. His description of the ‘ferocity’ of an internecine civil war in which
the English and Americans became ‘butchers of each other’, is designed to highlight the relatively peaceful progress of the revolution in France (still a tenable
position as the novel was being written) and counter the melodramatic violence
of Burke’s account of the removal of the royal family from Versailles. A further
riposte is implicit in Montfleuri’s account of the political stability and economic
prosperity of the new American republic under a more representative and partic-
76
ipatory system of government. Burke had not disguised his extreme scepticism
about the composition of the new French legislature, questioning the integrity,
experience and impartiality of the representatives drawn from the bourgeoisie.
The full force of his eloquence had been directed against the members of the
Tiers Etat and the excessive power they enjoyed as a result of their numerical
equality with the two other estates. As well as castigating the provincial advocates whom he described as the ‘fomenters and conductors of the petty war of
village vexation’, he had poured scorn on the ‘country clowns … some of whom
are said not to be able to read and write’, and the traders who ‘had never known
anything beyond their counting-house’.25 The crux of the matter, as far as Burke
was concerned, was that these groups did not represent ‘the natural landed interest of the country’, and were therefore likely to be motivated by private interest
rather than concern for the public good. A constitution that privileged ability
over property in this way would, he argued, inevitably prove unstable.26 Montfleuri’s account of a recent visit to America, where he found that ‘a country which
seemed to be devoted to destruction’27 was now ‘in the most flourishing state of
political health’28 furnishes the evidence to refute this charge:
nothing is more false than that idea of the veteran statesman, that a country, under a
new form of government, is destitute of those who have ability to direct it. – That they
may be unlearned in the detestable chicane of politics, is certain; but, they are also
uncorrupted by the odious and pernicious maxims of the unfeeling tools of despotism. Honest ministers then, and able negociators will arise with the occasion. – They
have appeared in America; they are rising in France – they have, indeed, arisen.29
For later readers, this optimistic conviction would resonate with irony, but in the
early months of 1792 Montfleuri’s account of colonial and post-colonial American experience provides a convincing rationale for the necessity and feasibility of
replacing the corrupt and despotic institutions of the French ancien régime with
more accountable forms of constitutional government.
The moment of confidence was destined to be short-lived, however. As Smith
began to write her next novel, the French Revolution was already spiralling into
the violence that Burke had predicted and in the climate of anxiety following the
September massacres the optimism of British radicals began to wane. Financially
dependent on her writing, Smith could not afford to lose public support, but
her revulsion at the increasing violence of the Revolution did not diminish her
attachment to its ideals. Even in the dark days of 1794 she continued to defend
her early enthusiasm:
If I had been convinced I was in an error in regard to what I formerly wrote on the politics of France, I should without hesitation avow it. I still think, however, that no native
of England could help then rejoicing at the probability there was that the French nation
would obtain, with very little bloodshed, that degree of freedom which we have been
77
taught to value so highly. But I think also, that Englishmen must execrate the abuse of
the name of Liberty which has followed … and must contemplate with mingled horror
and pity, a people driven by terror to commit enormities which, in the course of a few
months, have been more destructive than the despotism of ages.30
Completed early in January 1793, only days before the execution of Louis XVI,
The Old Manor House adopts a narrative strategy that distances the novel from
contemporary politics and engages with Burke in a more oblique, though equally
determined, way. Overt reflections on the French Revolution are restricted to the
margins of the novel, but a more extensive representation of the American War
of Independence forms part of a wide-ranging satire on British social and political institutions that invites comparison with, and provides implicit commentary
on, political developments in France, while simultaneously maintaining a prudent distance from them. The dialogue with Reflections is resumed. Not only
does the novel’s domestic romance plot interrogate issues of ownership, inheritance and authority through a gothic representation of the English feudal estate
that significantly problematizes the Burkean metaphor of the ‘noble and venerable castle’, but Smith’s representation of the American War further subverts and
complicates Burke’s critique of the French Revolution.31
The hero’s choice of profession and his imminent departure for America are
the starting point for an exploration of British attitudes to the war. Orlando
Somerive, an impecunious second son with great expectations but no present
financial resources, joins the army when his father’s friend, General Tracey, offers
to procure a commission for him. Unlike characters in a comparable situation
in other novels of the period, such as Henry Hammond in Emma Corbett, John
Amington in The Fair Syrian or Harry Courtney in Caroline, Orlando’s participation in the war owes nothing to patriotic enthusiasm.32 Assured by General
Tracey that the rebellious American colonists are already on the brink of defeat,
Orlando has no expectation of being called to active service and is both surprised and dismayed when, in May 1777, his company is ordered to Portsmouth
to prepare for immediate embarkation. Using the American War to expose the
corruption of the British polity, Smith continues to justify her own reformist
agenda and to challenge Burke’s resistance to change. In a satirical attack on those
responsible for the conduct of the war, she reveals how hardships endemic to the
crowded and insanitary conditions on board the troop ships are aggravated by
sickness brought on by the tainted provisions supplied by greedy contractors and
ignored by careless, inhumane and incompetent officers whose positions have
been purchased with money and influence. The Anglo-centric focus of her representation reflects its role in a critique of British social and political institutions
that is carefully crafted to emphasize the affinities between Georgian Britain and
ancien régime France. There is a two-fold point to this comparison: firstly, to
suggest that in both nations court patronage has corrupted the necessary bal-
78
ance between the three estates; and secondly, to insist that a British state that
recently authorized and orchestrated a prolonged and bloody civil war against
its own colonial subjects is in no position to criticize the people of France for the
relatively limited and largely unauthorized violence of the Revolution. The Old
Manor House differs significantly from earlier fictional representations of the
war which explore the ideological conflict between imperial centre and colonial
periphery through sentimental narratives of family disruption and competition.
Smith shapes her American material specifically to support a radical critique of
ancien régime practices and to attack Burke’s conservative response to the French
Revolution, rather than to interrogate the origins of the dispute or debate the
merits of the American cause.
Within the novel, the widespread ignorance of the issues underpinning the
quarrel with the colonies is a matter of concern, with profound implications for
the nature and validity of political consent. Nevertheless, Orlando’s claim that
the American War was prosecuted against the wishes of the British people is
problematized by tensions and ambiguities in the narrative. For although recent
research on public opinion and the activities of the London debating societies
confirms that contemporary opposition to the American War was both more
extensive and more vocal than has often been allowed, this disapproval is not
apparent in the novel.33 Most of the characters show little awareness or understanding of the issues, and whilst their biased or apathetic acquiescence raises a
significant question about the nature of consent, it is rather different from the
one posed by Orlando:
He [Orlando] had always been told, that the will of the people was the great resort in
the British Government; and that no public measure of magnitude and importance
could be decided upon, but by the agreement of the Three Estates. Yet the present
war, carried on against a part of their own body, and in direct contradiction of the
right universally claimed, was not only pursued at a ruinous expence, but in absolute
contradiction to the wishes of the people who were taxed to support it. Orlando did
not comprehend how this could be …34
Orlando offers no evidence to substantiate an assertion that runs counter to his
own experience. The majority of his acquaintance appear to support the administration’s policy of coercion and the range of views canvassed in the novel suggests
that in the early years of the conflict, when prospects of a British victory seemed
plausible to many, the landed, commercial and military elite of Britain were
largely, if unthinkingly, in favour of the war. However, in reporting the opinions
of a wide variety of characters Smith also signals that their biased, self-interested,
superficial or apathetic acquiescence can scarcely be construed as informed consent. General Tracy’s confident conviction that ‘those wretched, ragged fellows,
without discipline, money, clothes, or arms, will be unable longer to struggle
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for their chimerical liberty’ is both ill-informed and prejudiced, based on the
partial and self-aggrandizing accounts of his military friends.35 Basking in the
conviviality of his dining room, Orlando’s wine-merchant uncle, Mr Woodford,
displays a vulgar commercial insensibility, toasting ‘Confusion to the Yankies’
and expressing the ghoulish wish that ‘there may soon be not a drop of American
blood in their rebellious hearts’.36 His support for the military initiative, despite
his contempt for a profession that offers so little in the way of profit to compensate for the degree of risk it entails, is motivated by a financial self-interest
incompatible with civic virtue or objective opinion.37 An equally unthinking
nationalistic bellicosity prevails amongst the social elite enjoying the hospitality
of the nouveau riche Mr Stockton, who ‘all agreed in one sentiment – that the
rebellious colonists ought to be extirpated’.38 More concerned with family pride
than present politics, Orlando’s elderly cousin, Mrs Rayland, supports the war in
order to perpetuate antiquated notions of allegiance and authority. Inordinately
vain of her cavalier ancestry, she considers the Americans as ‘descendants of the
Regicides, against whom her ancestors drew their swords’39 and as ‘rebels and
roundheads, to conquer [whom] seemed to her to be not only a national cause,
but one in which her family were particularly bound to engage’.40 Her response
links the imperial autocracy of the 1770s with the monarchical absolutism of
the Stuart era.
Whilst many characters in the novel bestow consent through partiality or
self-interest, others acquiesce through prejudice and ignorance. Orlando’s tender-hearted and liberal-minded mother is immersed in the domestic sphere and
takes only a passing interest in public affairs. Her support for the war is based on
a mixture of prejudice and misinformation and is symptomatic of a lack of interest apparently shared by the majority of the population, including her son:
having no time or inclination to investigate political matters, she now believed that
the Americans were a set of rebellious exiles, who refused, on false pretences, ‘the
tribute to Caesar,’ which she had been taught by scriptural authority ought to be paid.
Thus considering them, she rejoiced in their defeat, and was insensible of their misery; though, had not the new profession of Orlando called forth her fears for him, she
would probably never have thought upon the subject at all – a subject with which,
at that time, men not in parliament and their families supposed they had nothing to
do.41
It is not until he is supervising the embarkation of his men that Orlando begins
to question the nature of the enterprise in which he is employed. On arrival in
America he is appalled by ‘the horrors and devastations’ of war42 and speedily
concludes that such scenes were ‘not to be justified by any cause’.43 However,
it is only a chance meeting and an unrecorded conversation with an American
prisoner that gives him a rudimentary insight into the politics of the conflict
in which he is engaged. Unimpressed by the arguments of his fellow soldiers,
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Orlando’s doubts about the justice of the war ‘became greater the more he heard
of its origins’.44 This growing moral and political awareness signifies an increase
in civic virtue on Orlando’s part, and necessarily puts him at odds with the ideology of a professionalized army, in which, as his friend, Lieutenant Fleming,
points out at some length, it is the business of soldiers to fight without asking
questions:
for if every man, or even every officer in the service were to set about thinking, it is ten
to one if any two of them agreed as to the merits of the cause. A man who takes the
King’s money is to do as he is bid, and never debate the matter. … I am no politician,
nor do I desire to enter into a discussion about taxation and representation, which
these fellows have made the ground for their resistance. There is no end of the nonsense that may be talked in favour of their rebellion, nor the pleas of the ministerial
party. For myself, as I was brought up in the army, I have always cut the matter very
short – the sword is my argument; and I have sold that to my King, and therefore
must use it in his service, whatever and wherever it may be pointed out to me.45
Whilst many earlier fictional accounts of the American War explore the moral,
political and psychological impact of a civil war between members of the
same national family, the representation of the war in The Old Manor House
is primarily concerned to expose the autocratic nature of the British polity in
the 1770s and to use the insights acquired from those observations to refute
Burke’s arguments.46 Focused on the constitutional responsibilities of the
‘three estates’, and the accountability of the military forces at their command,
Smith’s critique of British policy is shaped in response to Reflections, which is
largely preoccupied with similar issues. Particularly to be regretted in the new
French constitution, Burke thought, was the fact that authority over the army
would no longer be vested solely in the person of the monarch, but would be
subject to the scrutiny and control of an elected legislature. The proposal that
the legislative assembly should confirm the appointments of officers would,
he insisted, undermine ‘the chain of military subordination … on which the
whole of that system depends’.47 Smith counters this argument on two fronts.
She highlights short-comings in the current court-administered system of
appointment through a conventional portrayal of unrewarded merit in the
person of the conscientious and courageous Lieutenant Fleming, and she uses
Orlando’s naïve enquiries to promote the idea that the state should enact,
rather than repress, ‘the will of the people’, and to lament the failure of the
British polity to achieve this end. Orlando’s troubled musings are a reminder
that the subordination of the individual to the needs of the state requires the
protection of fully informed constitutional consent. Fleming’s professional
pragmatism, on the other hand, embodies the mechanical obedience required
when military service becomes a profession controlled by the state, rather than
the dutiful response of concerned citizens. Both Smith and Burke express anxi-
81
eties about a professionalized army, but their fears take different forms. Whilst
Burke warns that the erosion of executive authority will encourage the rise of
a dangerous ‘military democracy’, Smith expresses traditional civic humanist
suspicions of a standing army under the control of a powerful and corrupt
executive.48 The juxtaposition of feudal and financial terminology in Fleming’s
definition of military duty reveals an unresolved conflict about the changing
nature of the army in the modern world, and confusion as to whether acceptance of the ‘King’s money’ symbolizes an offer of allegiance or seals a financial
contract. Weighing ‘the infatuation of the British Cabinet’ against ‘the easy
acquiescence of the British People’, Orlando is uncertain where final responsibility lies.49 Excluded by ignorance and naivety from the understanding of
the underlying chicanery of British politics that is conveyed to the reader by
the authorial voice, he remains unaware of the fundamental threat to the constitution posed by the award of military contracts to Members of Parliament,
whose votes to continue the war are motivated by a venal greed for personal
profit that displaces consideration of the wider public interest. As a result of
this corruption, the legislature’s power to restrain executive abuse of military
power by withholding supplies, focus of Parliament’s opposition to Charles I
and proximate cause of the English Civil War, has been fatally undermined.
The public events of the American War intrude into the romance plot of
The Old Manor House with considerable abruptness. Disconnected from the
courtship narrative, the American episode has a distinctly transitional quality,
although its themes of exile, alienation and captivity are central to the novel’s
vision of England. The severity of Orlando’s dislocation from the domestic environment of West Wolverton and Rayland Hall is emphasized by his constant
concern for his lover, Monimia, and obsessive anxiety about the fate of his sister,
Isabella. Katie Trumpener observes that this sense of estrangement ‘relativizes
the world view of the English aristocracy, even as it demonstrates their inability
to grasp their place and impact on the rest of the world, given their resolutely
local and provincial perspective’.50 Compelled to confront his own ignorance and
prejudice, Orlando contrasts the pastoral happiness he has enjoyed in his native
country with the misery he sees around him, and begins to question assumptions
that he has previously accepted without thought. Repressing the knowledge that
wars most often arise from ‘a mistaken point of honour, from the wickedness
of governments, or the sanguinary ambition or revenge of monarchs’, Orlando
initially tries to convince himself that he will be fighting for his country’s glory.51
Even as he seeks consolation in this idea, however, he perceives that it is based
on erroneous readings of both English and classical history. Supplementing
Orlando’s hesitant interrogation of the politics of war with confident authorial
assertion, Smith deconstructs the sentimental romance of Burke’s great hymn to
chivalry, looking behind the glamour of personal valour and martial prowess to
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question cultural definitions of honour and glory. Although Orlando cannot yet
see so far, the authorial voice reveals that, shorn of chivalric ideology, heroic rulers are no more than crowned murderers whose famed exploits are merely acts of
personal vanity. Smith resists Burke’s romantic attachment to ‘pleasing illusions’
and ‘the decent drapery of life’ by presenting the American War as sordid, unjust,
corrupt, and badly managed.52 Modern warfare, Orlando learns, is a commercial transaction in which the destruction of one group of taxpayers is funded by
another. Glory is not purchased metaphorically by exertion but is bought and
sold for hard cash to line the pockets of profiteering contractors, many of them
members of parliament.
The brutality, unpredictability and futility of the American War are literalized in Orlando’s experiences with the American Indians recruited by Burgoyne.
Here Smith engages with an issue that provoked more anger and anxiety during the war years than any other. Determined not to admit to a breach of the
accepted rules of military engagement that were deemed appropriate for civilized
nations, the British establishment stressed their efforts to supervise and control
their unpredictable allies, whilst their opponents, on both sides of the Atlantic, argued that the recruitment of native warriors tainted the British, and their
imperial agenda, with Indian barbarity.53 The extent to which this issue continued to trouble the national imagination is evident in the frequency with which it
reappears in fictional accounts throughout the 1780s and 1790s.54 Angela Keane
has suggested that Smith’s conventionally stereotypical representation of American Indians in The Old Manor House marks a colonialist discourse that ‘mediates
the culpability of the British, making them complicit with brutality rather than
its architects’.55 However, Smith’s footnotes at this point reveal an intention to
magnify British brutality in America rather than to mitigate it. Her displacement of the savagery of the Indian warriors onto the British who employed them
opens a marginal space in which she seeks to relativize and contextualize the violence of August and September 1792 in France. After a lengthy quotation from
Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution, which summaraizes the debate
about the British use of Indian auxiliaries, Smith’s marginal note refers readers
to an account of atrocities committed by loyalists and their Indian allies in the
Wyoming area of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1778,56 and challenges them to
draw comparisons:
Those who have so loudly exclaimed against a whole nation struggling for its freedom, on account of the events of the past summer … are entreated to recollect how
much the exploits of this expedition … exceed anything that happened on the 10th
of August, the 2nd of September, or at any one period of the execrated Revolution in
France – and own, that there are savages of all countries – even of our own!57
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Anyone accepting her invitation to consult the Annual Register would have discovered that most of the horrifying acts of violence were reprisals carried out by
American ‘Tories’ against their local communities, or even against members of
their own families, rather than atrocities committed by their ‘cruel and barbarous’ allies.58
Orlando is predictably disturbed and ashamed by his encounter with the
Indian warriors recruited by Burgoyne, which is represented through a repertoire of well-worn images that embody a conventional mixture of admiration
and distaste:
Their savage appearance, and the more savage thirst of blood which they avowed – that
base avidity for plunder, with an heroic contempt of danger, pain and death, made them
altogether objects of abhorrence, mingled with something like veneration.59
In the aftermath of sensationalist press coverage of Indian atrocities during the
Seven Years War, British perceptions of American Indians were overwhelmingly negative, and remained so throughout the War of Independence.60 Smith’s
tentative and ultimately unconvincing attempts to modify these perceptions
are embodied in the contrast between the veteran Indian leader known as the
Bloody Captain and a young warrior called Wolf-hunter. Her representation of
Wolf-hunter draws on a European ideal of the noble savage mediated by a sentimental ideology which argues that a ‘secret sympathy between generous minds
seems to exist throughout the whole human kind’.61 Wolf-hunter possesses finer
feelings and more gentle manners than his companions, and his sentimental credentials are displayed, not merely in his friendship for Orlando, but through
his role in a striking re-inscription of the story of Jane McCrea, a cause célèbre of
1777 that became one of the most symbolic and highly contested events of the
war.62 Jane was a young American women, engaged to a loyalist officer serving
with Burgoyne’s army, who was killed and scalped, ostensibly by Indians sent
to conduct her to the safety of the British camp. In Smith’s recasting of the tale,
a young American woman is driven into the forest by British troops who have
burned her farm and killed her husband. There she is discovered by the Bloody
Captain, who is on the point of killing her with his tomahawk when Wolfhunter intervenes to save her, risking his own life in the process. Having rescued
her from his kinsman, he then ‘conducted her to a fort garrisoned by her own
countrymen – again hazarding his own life to preserve hers’.63 Not only does
this episode reverse the story of Jane McCrea: its representation of a defenceless woman rescued from the cruel onslaught of barbarian rage and chivalrously
escorted to a place of safety is also a subversive rewriting of Burke’s overblown
account of the assault on Marie Antoinette at Versailles.
Orlando’s experience of the American War culminates in a captivity narrative
that reinforces his increasing sense of dislocation and prefigures his return to a
84
world made strange through absence. The sense of alienation that characterizes
his captivity is an extension of the cultural unease that drove him to seek refuge in
the library at Rayland Hall and finds its full expression in the complete estrangement that he experiences on his return. These circular thematics limit the extent
to which the American episodes function as a right of passage or bildungsroman,
and Orlando returns to Rayland Hall physically unrecognizable but essentially
unchanged by his extraordinary adventures. After his struggles to find Monimia
and reunite his family, the narrative concludes when he finally gains possession
of the hall and begins to make optimistic plans for its improvement. The significance of the War of Independence, Smith implies, for the American nation
as well as for Orlando Somerive, resides in a transitional and unrepresentative
nature that achieves a break with the past but preserves the possibility of establishing a future built on its foundations.
Written in the early 1790s, both Desmond and The Old Manor House use
the American War of Independence to express sympathy and promote support
for revolutionary ideals in France. Although The Young Philosopher reflects late
1790s liberal disillusion with the hope of political reform in Europe, this rationale has not entirely disappeared. Through the character of the hero’s friend and
mentor, the philosophic Armitage, Smith continues to link the American War
of Independence with the French Revolution and to defend their common ideals. She also pursues her dialogue with Burke, who had died the previous year,
by launching a sparkling satirical attack on his disciples. The most prominent
of these is the hero’s aunt, Mrs Crewkherne, who had once dined in company
with the great man, and been ‘amazed, petrified, enchanted, carried to the seventh heaven by his eloquence’.64 Mrs Crewkherne detests Armitage, despite his
exemplary character, because he is a supporter of both the French and American
Revolutions:
She hated a man who affected to revere, and had written in favour of the Americans;
nay, who had aided and abetted, as far as in him lay, the atrocious French revolution;
for he had been present at Paris at the taking the Bastille … and, on his return, had
ventured to write a pamphlet, in which, while he exhorted the French people not to
suffer themselves to be led by the first effervescence of liberty, into such licentiousness
as would risk the loss of it, he hazarded a few opinions on the rights of nations and
the purposes of government.65
In addition to this ‘mild and gentle pamphlet’ Armitage is also believed to have
written ‘a very cutting argumentative book’ against one of Burke’s publications,
an offence so heinous in Mrs Crewkherne’s eyes that it ranks with his introduction of the eligible English hero to the penniless and despised American
heroine.66
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The complicated and melodramatic narrative of The Young Philosopher features disputes over inheritance involving two generations of the Glenmorris and
de Verdon families that are never fully resolved. During the War of Independence, Glenmorris is kidnapped from his Scottish estate by privateers (an event
suggested by the real-life exploits of John Paul Jones) and carried to America,
where he finds himself among:
a new race of people – a people who with manners, customs, and general habits of
thinking quite unlike my own, had one great and predominant feature in their character which I loved and honoured – they were determined to be free, and were now
making the noblest exertions to resist what they deemed oppression.67
When Glenmorris tries to raise the ransom money needed to secure his release
and return to Scotland, it is his new American friends who provide the necessary funds. After he has rescued his wife from the grasping relations who
have imprisoned her in order to assume possession of his property, the couple
seek temporary refuge in Switzerland, where their daughter, Medora, is born.
However, as soon as peace is restored the family emigrate to America, where
Glenmorris completes his metamorphosis from Scottish chieftain to American
farmer. The repressive polity of Scottish patriarchal clan society, with its echoes
of absolute monarchy, gives way to a new transatlantic republic premised on the
liberty of the individual and freedom from old-world corruption. Comparing
his simple life in America with the luxury, injustice and misery that characterize
British society, Glenmorris rejoices in his decision to live ‘where human life was
in progressive improvement’ and celebrates the birth of an American republic
now cast in the role of utopian refuge for the oppressed.68
The Young Philosopher testifies to Smith’s continuing engagement with the
libertarian principles that informed the French and American Revolutions, and
with Burke’s reactionary response. The disputes over the possession of property
and the rights of inheritance that bedevil Glenmorris and his family (as they
bedevilled Charlotte Smith and her children) radically deconstruct Burke’s complacent account of a society whose virtue resides in the orderly transfer of land
and wealth from each generation to the next:
The power of perpetuating property in our families is one of the most valuable and
interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts
benevolence upon avarice.69
This is not the experience of Laura and Medora Glenmorris, whose access to
property is impeded by the labyrinthine workings of the law and the prejudices
of a greedy and corrupt society, which are concretized in the gothic episodes of
persecution and imprisonment that test their fortitude and threaten their san-
86
ity. Whilst Laura’s prolonged exposure to tyranny is profoundly damaging, her
daughter’s spirited resistance and speedy escape re-enact American opposition to
ancien régime despotism. To their surprise and chagrin, Medora’s captors quickly
discover that there is ‘no restraining a nymph who had been reared on the broad
basis of continental freedom’.70
In Desmond and The Old Manor House Smith’s representations of the American War of Independence champion political reform in Europe by providing
evidence of the need for change and auspicious predictions of its effects. This
social and political optimism adds resonance to the conventional trope of the
utopian country estate with which both novels close. For the liberal thinkers of
The Young Philosopher, exhausted and disillusioned by their bruising encounters
with corruption and injustice, utopian closure resides in an idealistic vision of
America and new concepts of citizenship and national belonging. Glenmorris’s
cosmopolitan and trans-national understanding of citizenship is Smith’s final
riposte to Burke, for it espouses the vision articulated by Richard Price in the
Revolution Day sermon of 1789 that provoked Burke’s wrath and inspired him
to write Reflections.71 In choosing America over Britain, Glenmorris rejects a
society in which ‘the miseries inflicted by the social compact greatly exceed the
happiness derived from it’, and embraces an ideal of citizenship which recognizes
that ‘wherever a thinking man enjoys the most uninterrupted domestic felicity, and sees his species the most content, that is his country’.72 By promoting
Glenmorris’s representation of republican America as a utopian refuge offering
multiple sites of possibility, Charlotte Smith continues to celebrate the American War of Independence as a symbol of political reform, even from the anxious
perspective of late 1790s Britain.
6 CHARLOTTE SMITH, THE GODWIN CIRCLE,
AND THE PROLIFERATION OF SPEAKERS IN
THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER
A. A. Markley
When Charlotte Smith wrote to her publishers Cadell and Davies on 22 June
1797 to negotiate a contract for The Young Philosopher (1798), she projected that
this new novel would be a distinct departure from her earlier works. Smith wrote
that ‘some of the idea’s that occurd to me both of character & incident were likely
to be work’d up into a composition of some novelty & of more solidity than
the usual croud of Novels’.1 Whatever her original ideas for the novel may have
been are lost to us today, although The Young Philosopher is clearly more openly
political than Smith had dared to be since publishing Desmond in 1792. As in
Desmond, she makes her hero’s reformist politics clear in The Young Philosopher
from the very beginning, writing in the Preface that she had intended to depict a
young man who is able to ‘preserve his equality of temper’ despite the injuries he
receives from the fraud and folly of the aristocrats, attorneys, and social climbers
around him.2
George Delmont’s political views are closely aligned to those of the Jacobin
circle, particularly those that he shares with his friend Glenmorris and his mentor Armitage, a character who was unmistakably modelled on William Godwin.
Such an openly expressed link to Godwin in 1798 might be seen as a rather astonishing move for Smith in an atmosphere in which the caustic anti-Jacobin novel
had begun to multiply by leaps and bounds. And it is evident that Smith did
worry about being associated too directly with Godwin’s politics. She includes a
disclaimer in the novel’s preface, writing that ‘I declare … against the conclusion,
that I think either like Glenmorris or Armitage, or any other of my personages’.3
Smith and Godwin became friends in the late 1790s and their friendship
clearly played a significant role in Smith’s conception and design of The Young
Philosopher. Smith moved to London in the summer of 1797 and lived there
again from January 1798 through the spring of 1800. During that time she visited and corresponded with Godwin regularly, maintaining a friendship with
– 87 –
88
him and with his second wife Mary Jane Godwin that would last until Smith’s
death in 1806.
The Abinger papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford contain four letters
from Smith to Godwin and one from Smith to Mary Jane Godwin, written
from 1797 to 1800. Pamela Clemit has pointed out that Smith presents herself in these letters in a familiar mode, as the long-suffering author and mother
struggling to overcome a host of financial difficulties and to provide for her
large family through her literary projects.4 These letters attest to the degree of
personal intimacy shared by Smith and Godwin during these years. In a letter
dated 1 September 1797, for example, Smith wrote to Godwin to ask his help
in inquiring about a residence in Sommers Town for her soon to be married
daughter Lucy, and she complains of the misfortunes of her son Charles Dyer
Smith, a soldier whom she calls a ‘victim of our accursed systems’.5 In this letter Smith also laments her financial woes and inquires after the health of Mary
Wollstonecraft, who at that time lay dying in bed after having given birth to her
daughter Mary. Several months later, in December of 1797, Smith again wrote
to Godwin to express her consolation upon Wollstonecraft’s death. ‘Is this world
indeed govern’d by a benignant an omnipotent being?’ Smith asks. ‘Why are we
here?’.6 ‘There is a sentence I shall never forget in the last work I have ever seen
of Mary Woolstoncroft,’ she continues, quoting Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), ‘“What
existence but a painful consciousness of wretchedness?”’.7 Characteristically,
Smith commiserates with Godwin by sharing her current perspective on her own
troubles, and she then invites Godwin to call upon her, expressing a wish to see
‘the two poor little Girls’.8
A few years later, in a letter dated 27 February 1800, Smith wrote to Godwin
of her wish to be relieved from the racket of a house beset with ‘Ladies who
have Law suits and laces and land to be thought about’.9 In this letter Smith also
invites Godwin to bring Coleridge to visit her, lamenting the fact that ‘surely no
one ever pass’d his or her life, among those so totally out of their way’.10 ‘If you
can make me acquainted with any other literary Man as pleasant as Mr Coleridge,’
Smith writes, ‘pray do – but I fear that is not possible’.11 Godwin’s diary confirms
that he and Coleridge did visit Smith along with several others on 12 February
and 4 March 1800.12 It is likely that the three discussed their concurrent experiments in writing drama during these visits.13 Godwin’s diary is disappointing,
however, regarding further evidence for his interaction with Smith. While the
diary includes a number of entries recording tea or supper with ‘C. Smith,’ ‘Cha.
Smith,’ and ‘Char. Smith’ in the years ranging from 1797 to 1806, Godwin’s contacts during that period included several other Smiths, and thus it is impossible
to number his visits with Charlotte Smith accurately.
The Godwin Circle, and the Proliferation of Speakers in The Young Philosopher
89
As she was beginning to write The Young Philosopher in 1797, Smith asked
Cadell and Davies to send her a new copy of Godwin’s Caleb Williams, explaining that ‘I was & am afraid one of my characters will be thought an imitation
wch I must avoid, & I want the books as there is thinking in them’.14 Of course
it is possible that Smith feared that she would be accused of borrowing too
freely from Godwin’s political philosophy in creating her progressive characters
Armitage and Glenmorris, or even that of her young philosopher himself, whose
close-cropped hair and rustic dress associate him with contemporary liberals
like Godwin and others in his circle.15 Nevertheless, it is also possible that she
worried that readers would associate the friendship she depicts between young
George Delmont and the older, liberal-minded mother Laura Glenmorris with
Caleb Williams’s friendship with Laura Denison, a new character that Godwin
had created and inserted into the third edition of Caleb Williams in 1797.
Much like Godwin’s plan for Caleb Williams, Smith’s goal in The Young Philosopher lay in exposing the ease with which ‘man, in a state of polished society,
is capable of executing towards his fellow man, when he can pervert the laws, the
customs and prejudices of the community, to the purposes of his passions’.16 She
had experimented with using Gothic elements to symbolize the subjugation of
women in her earlier novels, particularly in Emmeline (1788), The Old Manor
House (1793) and Marchmont (1796), but in The Young Philosopher she twice
rehashes a Gothic plot of a woman’s abduction and incarceration without the
stereotypical Gothic setting and machinery, as Godwin had done in Caleb Williams and would do again in Fleetwood in 1805. Smith worries in her preface
‘whether a Novel representing only scenes of modern life and possible events may
not be accounted of the old school, and create less interest than the wild, the
terrible, and the supernatural’,17 but she nevertheless occupies herself with this
mode of realistic Gothic, which indeed might be called ‘Godwinian’.18
Despite the fact that The Young Philosopher is a more overtly political work
than many of her other novels had been since Desmond, the degree to which
Smith saw this novel as a departure from her earlier works may also relate to the
way in which she designed and structured the novel’s narrative. In The Young
Philosopher Smith seems to have been experimenting with expanding and refashioning the complex manner with which she characteristically interwove passages
of first-person and third-person narrative as she developed her characters’ stories. Despite this novel’s title, its initial focus on George Delmont is eclipsed
by extended passages in which her heroines Laura and Medora Glenmorris tell
their own stories in accounts that stretch from several chapters, in Medora’s case,
to a whole volume in length in Laura’s. It may be that Smith’s closer contact with
Godwin and Wollstonecraft and her reading of their works in the late 1790s
influenced this particular aspect of her stylistic development.
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Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and the Politics of First-Person Narrative
When Godwin was asked in 1832 to describe how he came to compose his
renowned Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, he explained
that, ‘I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. But I
speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making the hero
of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction’.19 Godwin explains that this mode was ‘best
adapted’ to ‘the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind,’ and
that it best employed his ‘metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare
the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses’
of his characters.20
Godwin’s development of the first-person confessional narrative allowed
him to avoid creating a narrator who would become merely a mouthpiece of the
author, a pitfall he warned his fellow Jacobin author Thomas Holcroft to avoid
in his political novels.21 Significantly, this mode requires the reader to listen to
Caleb’s tale and to make his or her own judgment from the facts presented. The
confessional narrative thus became a perfect tool for Jacobin reformists whose
goal lay in converting the individual reader by guiding and retraining the reader’s
thinking. As Gary Kelly has explained, Godwin’s novels ‘narrate the formation
of individual character by circumstance, the errors into which such characters
are necessarily led, their awakening to the realities of injustice and oppression,
and their eventual move to liberation, successful or not’.22 Kelly writes that these
novels ‘use first-person narration to show how individual experience and subjectivity furnish evidence for the injustice and power of the hegemonic order, yet
constitute the only site for initiating the overthrow of that order’.23
Godwin’s experiment with first-person narrative also allowed him to develop
a complex and deeply nuanced psychological depiction of his narrator. Although
Jonathan Grossman has recently praised the way in which Godwin allows Caleb’s
confession to ‘cross’ into other characters’ minds, other critics have found fault
with the fact that Caleb occasionally shares information about episodes – and
the motivations and reactions of other characters – that he could not realistically
have known.24 Anticipating such criticism, Godwin attempted to counter it by
having Caleb explain in the early pages of the novel that ‘I shall interweave with
Mr. Collins’s story various information which I afterwards received from other
quarters, that I may give all possible perspicuity to the series of events. To avoid
confusion in my narrative, I shall drop the person of Collins, and assume to be
myself the historian of our patron’.25 Later Caleb reminds the reader that ‘it will
also most probably happen, while I am thus employed in collecting the scattered
incidents of my history, that I shall upon some occasions annex to appearances
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an explanation, which I was far from possessing at the time, and was only suggested to me through the medium of subsequent events’.26
Godwin intended Caleb’s narrative to create ‘an epoch in the mind of the
reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that
he was before’.27 Such a reaction is modelled for the reader within the novel itself
when Caleb tells his ‘plain and unadulterated tale’ in the courtroom at the novel’s climactic conclusion, assuring the reader that ‘Every one that heard me, was
petrified with astonishment. Every one that heard me, was melted into tears’.28
Caleb’s narrative is indeed a powerful experience for the reader; nevertheless,
although Falkland does make a brief confession and does engage in dialogue
with Caleb at various points in the narrative, we can only wonder how the novel
would be different had Falkland been allowed to tell his side of the story.
Charlotte Smith’s response to Godwin’s experiments with first-person narrative in the 1790s was clearly mediated by Mary Wollstonecraft’s own expansion of
Godwin’s agenda. Indeed, in her prefatory disclaimers in The Young Philosopher
Smith expresses anxiety that she will be accused of basing Laura Glenmorris’s
imprisonment in a madhouse on Wollstonecraft’s unfinished The Wrongs of
Woman; or, Maria; the fragments of which Godwin had published in Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works in January 1798. Smith praises Wollstonecraft’s
talents and asserts that had she borrowed from Wollstonecraft she would be
proud to acknowledge it, and she does in fact allude to this novel and to Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden at two other points in The Young Philosopher.29
Smith’s actual debt to Wollstonecraft, however, may lie in the extent to which
she allows her characters to tell their own stories in The Young Philosopher, as
Wollstonecraft had done in The Wrongs of Woman.
Many aspects of The Wrongs of Woman suggest that Wollstonecraft based
her plan for the novel on the model of Caleb Williams. The experiences of Wollstonecraft’s heroine Maria Venables resemble those of Caleb in intriguing ways,
although Wollstonecraft specifically adapted her experiment to illustrate the
particular ways that women were oppressed by men in contemporary Britain, an
experiment with particular relevance to Smith’s own agenda. Rather than limiting herself to a single first-person confessional narrator, Wollstonecraft blends
third-person narrative with the individual voices and accounts of more than
one speaker. The novel opens in medias res as the reader is told that the heroine
Maria Venables has been imprisoned in a madhouse. Maria gradually manages
to befriend her keeper Jemima and eventually persuades Jemima to bring her
books borrowed from another inmate of the house, Henry Darnford. Jemima
ultimately allows Darnford and Maria to meet and the three share their stories,
first Darnford’s explanation of how he came to find himself in prison, followed
by Jemima’s story of a long and troubled past, one of the most striking aspects
of the novel. Jemima’s story is particularly noteworthy for the degree to which
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Wollstonecraft attempts to replicate the manner of speech of a woman of Jemima’s walk of life in an attempt to make her particular voice a more realistic one.
In a letter in which she responds to the criticism of George Dyson dated 15 May
1797, Wollstonecraft explains that ‘persons who have received a miscellaneous
education, that is are educated by chance, and the energy of their own faculties,
commonly display the mixture of refined and common language I have endeavoured to imitate’.30
As Smith also does in many of her novels, Wollstonecraft augments her
main characters’ stories with the experiences of a variety of minor characters. In
Caleb Williams, the abused Miss Melville, the wrongfully accused Hawkinses,
the noble prisoner Brightwel, and the refined criminal, Captain Raymond, all
contribute to the multiple layers of the crimes of the social system that Godwin
wished to expose. Wollstonecraft dramatically expands the potential of using
such minor characters, however, in interweaving her narrative with such figures
as Jemima’s rival for the financial support of a lover, Maria’s impoverished friend
Peggy, and a woman impregnated and abandoned by Maria’s husband. Together
the stories of these women strengthen Wollstonecraft’s critique of ‘things as they
are’ by providing a catalogue of the wrongs of woman as they were experienced
by women in all levels of the social spectrum, a catalogue that includes the stories of approximately twenty-seven portraits of individual women.31 In her notes
for the preface of the novel, Wollstonecraft had explained her goal ‘to show the
wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various’.32
Commonly read as an extension of or illustration of Wollstonecraft’s famous
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), The Wrongs of Woman has rarely
been recognized for the degree to which Wollstonecraft was endeavouring to
break new narrative ground. Mary Poovey, for example, criticizes the novel by
referring to ‘the difficulty [Wollstonecraft] had in reconciling her intended “purpose” with the genre, which here shapes the “structure” of the work’.33 Mitzi Myers
is one of the few who has acknowledged the extent to which Wollstonecraft was
attempting to achieve something original in this final work. ‘Wollstonecraft’s
effort to let subject define structure is not always polished,’ Myers writes, ‘but
she is crafting a shape evolved from the content itself, one in which outer form is
a vessel of inner consciousness and present and past comment on one another’.34
Despite the novel’s fragmentary state, it is important to recognize the degree to
which Wollstonecraft worked to amplify Godwin’s formula and the scope of the
reformist novel significantly by exposing the reader to the characters and sufferings of many individual speakers – an approach to the political novel that Smith
would share.
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The Many Voices of The Young Philosopher
Charlotte Smith’s interest in experimenting with the potential of first-person narrative can be traced in her fiction from the very beginning. As early as
Emmeline, for example, she would anticipate Wollstonecraft by allowing a particularly distressed female character to tell her story in her own words. When
Emmeline and her friend Mrs Stafford discover the pregnant Adelina Trelawney
in hiding in the home of a cottager, they persuade her to tell them her troubles. Adelina narrates a familiar history that includes an abusive stepmother, a
marriage planned far too early, and a dissolute husband who gambles away all
of their financial holdings and flees to the continent. ‘“When I married him,”’
Adelina says of her husband, ‘“I knew not to what I had condemned myself ”’.35
The fact that Adelina is given her own voice in narrating her sad history is a
critical strategy in winning the reader’s sympathy for the character, for her tale
is meant to offer an explanation for her liaison with the noble Fitz-Edward and
to mitigate the reader’s shock upon learning of her pregnancy out of wedlock.
While Adelina’s story resembles the one Wollstonecraft would invent for Maria
Venables ten years later, it is interesting that Wollstonecraft objected to Smith’s
portrayal of this particular character. In her review of Emmeline in the Analytical
Review, Wollstonecraft criticized Adelina for indulging herself in ‘useless sorrow’ rather than devoting herself to ‘a nice sense of duty,’ as exemplified by the
equally unhappily married Mrs Stafford, who devotes herself to her children as
Maria Venables would also ultimately choose to do.36
It can also be argued that Smith experimented with the use of multiple voices
in her sole epistolary novel, Desmond, following, of course, the mode established
by Samuel Richardson earlier in the century. In Desmond Smith works to distinguish the writing styles of her hero Lionel Desmond and his correspondent
Erasmus Bethel with the French-inflected idiom of Jonville de Montfleuri, and
the feminine voices of Fanny Waverly and Geraldine Verney, another beleaguered heroine burdened with an abusive husband. Geraldine’s voice ascends
over the others at the novel’s climax when she details her experiences in setting
out to find her dissolute husband Verney when he is wounded by revolutionary
forces in southern France. Geraldine’s narrative of the troubles that beset her
and Desmond as they search for her husband in an ancient chateau, only to be
besieged by free-booters, provides not only the heightened suspense of a firsthand account, but a litany of details worthy of the most thrilling Gothic fiction
of the day. Although she would not write another epistolary novel, Smith would
continue to use the device of letters from time to time as a means of allowing her
characters to express themselves in their own words.37
After Desmond, Smith began to experiment to increasing degrees with mixing predominately third-person narratives with first-person accounts at key
94
moments in the plot. The Old Manor House, for example, is narrated nearly
entirely by a third-person narrator, yet in the fourth volume, when her hero
Orlando Somerive returns from his adventures as a soldier in the American
Revolution, Smith experiments with the structure of the narrative in interesting
ways. Orlando manages to reinstate himself in his place within both his family
and the larger society only by slow degrees. He first travels to the estate of his
patron Mrs Rayland and learns that Mrs. Rayland has died and that her estate is
now controlled by outsiders. When he returns to his family home he finds that
his mother and siblings have moved to London following his father’s premature
death. Because his family had given him up for dead, Orlando’s return to England is depicted as a symbolic return to life. Indeed, when Orlando approaches
a lawyer for assistance in locating his family, he is accused of being an impostor;
similarly, when he finally locates his mother’s new home the servants take him
for a ghost when he appears at the door.
After locating his family, Orlando’s chief concern lies in finding his beloved
Monimia, whose whereabouts he is forced to trace in stages, by piecing together
clues and bits of first-person narrative he gathers from a woman on the Rayland
estate, from his sister Selina, and from the malicious Roker, whose nephew had
married Monimia’s former guardian, Mrs Lennard. When Orlando finally does
come upon Monimia entirely by accident, Smith allows Monimia to recount her
own experiences and sufferings since Orlando had gone to war.
Smith followed The Old Manor House with the publication of a sequel, The
Wanderings of Warwick, in 1794. Here again, she experiments with multiplying narrative voices. The novel is presented as a narrative written by Orlando’s
brother-in-law Warwick in response to Orlando’s desire to learn about Warwick’s and his wife Isabella’s adventures during the concluding episodes of The
Old Manor House. By the sixth chapter of the novel, however, Warwick occupies
himself entirely with the tragic story of his friend the Conde de Villanova, who
recounts his personal history in a tangential narrative that runs to nearly half the
length of this short one-volume work. Smith would continue to enhance her
novels with such tangential personal histories. In Montalbert (1795), for example, the character of Mrs Vyvian takes over a significant portion of the second
volume in recounting her history for her daughter Rosalie.
Another highly original case in which Smith employed multiple voices to
great emotional effect can be found in A Narrative of the Loss of the Catharine,
Venus, and Piedmont Transports, a work that she published in 1796 to raise
funds to benefit a survivor of one of several shipwrecks that occurred off the
coast of the English Channel near Weymouth on 18 November 1795. Here
Smith adds poignancy to her stirring account by allowing the real victims of the
actual catastrophe to speak in their own words, and she takes care to indicate
their authenticity by pointing out on the title page that her narrative is ‘Drawn
95
up from Information taken on the Spot’. A fifer named Ensor, for example, is
described as having struggled through the waves to drag himself onto the shore,
only to recollect that his wife had not been so fortunate. ‘Oh, my poor wife!’
Ensor exclaims before swimming back into the sea to attempt to find her and
losing his own life in the attempt.38
‘Of the circumstances that attended the loss of the Catharine,’ Smith writes,
‘a more particular account shall be given, which, perhaps, cannot be done more
expressively than by quoting the words of the survivor’.39 Here Smith allows the
young mother who survived this particular wreck to describe her experience in
harrowing detail, from her terror at watching the crashing waves shatter the ship
to pieces, to her horror of drowning as the water begins to rise in her cabin, to
her courageous fight through the waves and up onto shore. Smith follows this
first-hand account with a list of those who perished and a description of the
details surrounding their burial. In the final pages of the work it is the gravestones themselves who tell the tale of those they memorialize; Smith concludes
by reproducing the actual inscription of a stone erected to the memory of the
officers, soldiers, seamen, and women who perished in the wrecks, as well as the
inscription and brief narrative of the tragedy inscribed on a stone commemorating the life of Lieutenant Ker and his fourteen-year-old son.
In The Young Philosopher, however, Smith proliferates a host of speaking
voices and individual narratives to a much greater and more complex degree than
ever before. Her reading of Godwin and Wollstonecraft and her reception into
Godwin’s circle as of 1797 suggests that there may be a distinctly political resonance to this particular development in her narrative style. The Young Philosopher
opens with what appears will be a typical third-person narrator, but the narrative
quickly branches into a variety of disparate narrative directions. In Volume I, the
vicious Mrs Crewkherne provides important background concerning the hero
George Delmont’s childhood and the unconventional education he received by
his liberal-minded mother. By providing this history from the point of view of
the ferociously conservative and fiercely anti-Jacobin Mrs Crewkherne, Smith
allows the reader to situate George’s and his mother’s politics squarely in the
Jacobin camp from the novel’s outset.
In Volume II, by contrast, Smith shifts the narrative entirely to the history of
another character, Laura Glenmorris, as she had done in such earlier works as The
Wanderings of Warwick and Montalbert. Laura narrates her history in her own
voice and her tale becomes another detailed list of the wrongs of woman. Laura
describes the childhood she spent under a domineering and acutely socially-conscious mother, Lady Mary, and her elopement with a humble cousin, Glenmorris,
which led to her being disowned. Laura’s and Glenmorris’s attempt to begin a
simple life in Scotland is thwarted when Glenmorris is kidnapped by a band of
privateers. The pregnant Laura is then taken prisoner by a relative of Glenmor-
96
ris’s who wishes to ensure her own line’s inheritance by seeing that Laura’s infant
does not survive. Laura describes her escape from this imprisonment and the
great struggles she overcomes in attempting to get to safety in vivid detail. When
she concludes with a happy reunion with Glenmorris, Smith allows Glenmorris
himself to recount the details of his abduction to America and his struggles in
finding his way back to Scotland.
Smith then moves back to the central story of her young philosopher George
Delmont in Volume III. Here she uses the device of letters between George and
Laura to allow George to describe his trip to Ireland to rescue his dissipated
brother Adolphus from mounting gambling debts. This line of the narrative is
punctuated by the stories of other characters, perhaps most memorably that of
the abandoned Elizabeth Lisburne, about whose history and suicide George
learns when he stops at Milford Haven. The reader is left to piece together Elizabeth Lisburne’s story as George does, from the account of a fisherman who had
known her and from the personal expression of grief that Elizabeth herself had
recorded in a melodramatic poem on love and desertion.
Finally, in Volume IV, Smith’s multiple voices reach the level of the baroque
when Laura’s daughter Medora is kidnapped as her mother had been years earlier.
As in a detective novel, and as she had done with Orlando’s search for Monimia
in The Old Manor House, Smith provides the reader with clues and snippets of
what has happened to Medora, and the reader must piece them together gradually, as do George and the other characters. First-hand accounts of Medora’s fate
are provided by George’s brother Adolphus; the innkeeper Mrs Tarbat; a poor
huntsman’s wife Mrs Billson; the noble Annabel Richmond; and an array of servants, cart-drivers, postillions, and lawyers. Ultimately, as in the case of Orlando
and Monimia, George discovers Medora quite by accident. Like Monimia, and
like Adelina Trelawney of Emmeline, Medora then recounts her own version of
her story, and, in doing so, Medora, like Monimia, comes into her own as a much
more mature and more fully realized character than she had been before. Here
again Smith multiplies the speaking voices: Medora’s tale is punctuated by her
recreation of lengthy runs of dialogue in which her abductor Darnell, Darnell’s
aggressive mother, Adolphus Delmont, the innkeeper Mrs Tarbat, and Medora’s
father Glenmorris all take an active speaking part.
Following Medora’s narrative, the novel’s final volume closes with a denouement in which Medora’s abduction is mirrored by the disappearance of her
mother Laura. Once again, the other characters gradually discover Laura’s
whereabouts by piecing together bits of narrative gathered from yet another list
of minor characters. Like Maria Venables, Laura has been imprisoned in a madhouse, and as Smith herself anticipated, this imprisonment, along with Laura’s
eventual befriending of the apothecary who serves the madhouse, bears a strong
resemblance to the setting and plot of The Wrongs of Woman. While the novel
97
concludes with the reunion of the Glenmorris family and with George’s marriage to Medora, the happiness of the ending is tempered by the severity of the
emotional crisis that Laura has suffered during Medora’s disappearance. In the
novel’s closing chapters George and the Glenmorrises decide that they can secure
their future happiness only by leaving the corruption and avarice of England for
the promise of a new life in America.
Choosing never to settle for a single narrator, Smith arranges a virtual symphony of first-person voices in this final novel – a novel that can truly be called
operatic in the complexity of its competing and complementing strains and layers of narrative. To make her speakers all the more realistic, Smith richly endows
them with idiosyncratic vernacular styles, including such distinct voices as the
heavy Scottish brogue of the Scottish midwife Meggy Macgregor, the halting
English of the French maid Susanne, the bombastic polysyndeton of the lawyer
Sir Appulby Gorges, the humorous neologisms of the affected Mrs Grinsted,
and the excessively allusive conversational style of Adolphus Delmont, intended
to flaunt his prestigious education and haut ton lifestyle.
Stuart Curran has described Smith’s discovery of ‘a refined tool of characterisation through regional dialect and class idiolect’ in The Old Manor House as a
feature of her work ‘that goes beyond the accomplishment of any previous novelist in English’.40 Curran notes that Walter Scott likewise appreciated this aspect
of Smith’s style, writing that ‘she is uniformly happy in supplying [her characters] with language fitted to their station in life; nor are there many dialogues
to be found which are at once so entertaining, and approach so near to truth
and reality’.41 Certainly this particular characteristic of her work can be related
to such predecessors as Richardson, Smollett, and Burney, but it is important
to note that other politically-minded writers were likewise using dialect and
idiolect with the aim of creating more fully realized and realistic characters in
the reformist novels of the 1790s. Examples include not only Wollstonecraft’s
attempts to endow Jemima with the ‘mixture of refined and common language’
as mentioned above, but also a number of instances in Thomas Holcroft’s political novels. Holcroft carefully distinguished the particular voices of the letter
writers in his Jacobin epistolary novel Anna St Ives (1792), for example, ranging
from the cool, rational styles of Anna and her lover Frank Henley, to the impetuous flourishes of the rake Coke Clifton, to the highly regional idiolect of the
barely literate grounds-keeper Abimelech Henley.
In her use of multiple voices in The Young Philosopher, Smith is true to Godwin’s conception of first-person narrative as a means of demonstrating how truth
can be spoken to power. Caleb Williams’s dramatic courtroom confession at the
end of Godwin’s novel finds a parallel in the fragmented final chapters of The
Wrongs of Woman when Maria pleads her particular case before the court as she
attempts to sue for a divorce and for control of her own personal inheritance.
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While Maria’s plea falls on deaf ears – the judge commenting on ‘the fallacy of
letting women plead their feelings, as an excuse for the violation of the marriagevow’42 – it is clear that, as with Godwin, it is the reader whom Wollstonecraft
hopes to persuade with Maria’s impassioned plea; a reader who cannot fail to be
affected by the poignancy of Maria’s personal sufferings or by the catalogue of
the wrongs endured by the many other women whose stories are documented
throughout the novel.
Similarly, in The Young Philosopher Smith allows both Laura and Medora
to recount their experiences in their own words, demonstrating the triumph
of truth over the power of rumour, one of Smith’s stated goals in the preface :
‘to expose the ill consequences of detraction’.43 Despite the fact that the attitudes and prejudices of few if any of the characters in the novel are converted
by Laura’s and Medora’s experiences or by their stories, their narratives attest to
the purity of their virtues in the close circle of their own family and friends,
and, most significantly, in the mind of the reader, who has been allowed a view
into the treatment of women in contemporary Britain that is designed to reform
his or her understanding of things as they are. Elizabeth Dolan has written that
Wollstonecraft works ‘to refract her individual troubles through a number of fictional characters, thus transforming individual complaint into social critique’.44
Like Wollstonecraft, Smith diffuses the difficulties she encountered in her own
personal life as a woman into the lives of her many and varied female characters.
It is important to see this particular aspect of experimentation with firstperson narrative in The Young Philosopher as a step towards the distinctly new
format Smith would adopt in The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, published from
1799 to 1802, and tellingly subtitled Containing Narratives of Various Description. In this highly experimental work, a series of disparate stories is linked
with a framing narrative that is looser than ever before, and a variety of speakers contributes to the narration of each particular tale. ‘The Story of Henrietta,’
comprising Volume II of The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, provides an example of Smith’s characteristic manner of plotting these tales. At the beginning of
this story Smith’s wanderer meets a Mr Denbigh, who tells the story of his love
for Henrietta Maynard and the difficulties the couple had encountered when
they wished to marry. In his account Denbigh follows Henrietta to her father’s
estate in Jamaica, where he is ambushed and injured by a band of maroons and
is rescued by a hermit in the island wilderness, a man who is also hiding and
protecting Henrietta herself.
Denbigh’s narrative then branches into the narrative of the hermit, who is
revealed to be Henrietta’s uncle Maynard. Maynard recounts the history of his
earlier life, his two disastrous marriages, and the tragic loss of his son, which led
to his withdrawal from English society. The tale concludes with Henrietta’s own
account of her escape from her vicious father’s estate and her rescue by May-
99
nard when she is caught in the midst of a violent slave insurrection. Each of the
three narratives of ‘The Story of Henrietta’ provides a distinct perspective that is
interwoven with the other two to offer a more richly developed history of this
particular family. Perhaps The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer should be read as a
new and highly original experiment in the form of the novel rather than a work
of another genre altogether. In addition, there may also be a relationship between
Smith’s experiments with extending and proliferating first-person narrative in
the late 1790s and early 1800s and her use of what she called ‘dialogue, mingled
with narrative’ in the works for children she published in the early 1800s.45
In the case of Smith and the Godwin circle we have rich evidence of a friendship that may have had profound implications for the development of Smith’s
own political agenda and the ways she experimented with expressing that agenda
in her fiction. Clearly the influence worked both ways. Godwin’s diary indicates
that he read Marchmont from 25 November 1796 to 11 January 1797 and The
Young Philosopher from 24–30 June 1798. It is worth noting that in his 1805
novel Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling Godwin for the first time allowed
a secondary character to tell his own story when the narrator’s mentor Ruffigny
is given ten full chapters to recount the experiences of his early life by way of
instructing the novel’s protagonist. Moreover, in Godwin’s 1830 Cloudesley, the
villain Richard Danvers is given thirty-eight consecutive chapters – spanning
the course of three volumes – to recount his side of his family’s history before
Godwin cycles back to the main narrator William Meadows. Such a refraction
and elaboration of his own earlier style suggests that Godwin may have drawn
inspiration from both Mary Wollstonecraft’s and Charlotte Smith’s experiments
with expanding the potential of first-person narrative, experiments that greatly
heightened both the emotional effects of their works and enhanced their political efficacy as they induced their readers to sympathize with the sufferings of the
individual.46
7 THE ALIEN ACT AND NEGATIVE
COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE LETTERS
OF A SOLITARY WANDERER
Amy Garnai
In a climactic moment in ‘The Hungarian’, Volume IV of Charlotte Smith’s The
Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800; 1802), the protagonist, Leopold de Sommerfeldt, is arrested under the Alien Act, taken into custody and ordered to leave
England within twenty-four hours. British law thus joins together with the other
oppressive forces that pursue Leopold throughout the story. In its focus on the
individual’s struggle against injustice, but also on the exigencies of exile and the
coercive power of institutions in general, ‘The Hungarian’ encompasses many of
the concerns that preoccupied Smith in her writing and throughout her life. The
appearance of a repressive British law at a key moment in the narrative illustrates
how a progressive political positioning and a critique of legalistic and institutionalized intolerance continue to feature even in her later literary works. Th is
essay examines how Smith’s use of the Alien Act is part of this critique, and how
it also further functions for her as a marker of what I call ‘negative cosmopolitanism’ – the consciousness of (failed) national belonging that emerges against a
backdrop of political disappointment. Isolated by the forces of suspicion, chauvinism and reaction, the citizen of the world is revealed to be merely an alien; an
exile, persecuted and scorned.
The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer is a series of novellas linked together
through the letters of the eponymous hero, a melancholy man of means who
attempts to alleviate his depression by relating to his friend the stories he has
heard in the course of his wanderings.1 Taken together, the tales present a world
of violence, rootlessness and despair, exhibited in a variety of locales and historical moments: sixteenth-century France in the aftermath of the St Bartholomew’s
Eve massacre; a slave plantation in Jamaica; war-torn Ireland; a gothic mansion
in contemporary England; and in Volume IV, the tale I will focus on in this essay,
in Hungary during a time of political unrest. Smith’s aversion to violence and
tyranny is underscored in this geographical and temporal diversity: war and
destruction are everywhere, it seems, and life is a continual struggle to find the
– 101 –
102
fortitude with which to face social and political uncertainty and the institutional
forces that prevail.
Let me open with a brief summary of the story. Leopold is introduced to
us when, together with a band of banditti, he accosts the Wanderer, who is
making his way through a German forest. On hearing that the Wanderer is an
Englishman, Leopold begs leave to tell him his story and to ask his assistance. It
transpires that he is actually the youngest son of a noble Hungarian family who
had fallen in love with a young Englishwoman, Gertrude, who was a houseguest
at a neighbouring castle. Although Leopold’s father, the Count de Sommerfeldt,
had originally opposed the idea of his son’s marriage, he soon relents. It is, rather,
through the contriving of Leopold’s eldest brother, Volgeth, that true misfortune
comes: due to a combination of greed, jealousy and the desire to enforce his
hereditary privilege he imprisons Leopold and his father separately and forces
Gertrude to leave the castle where she had been staying, her host having been
apprehended as well. Eventually Leopold escapes and is reunited with Gertrude
and, upon their marriage, they go to England. England is, however, inhospitable to them – Gertrude’s family is less than welcoming, and Leopold’s second
brother, Altdorf, who holds a diplomatic post in London, is cold and hostile,
and responds to Leopold’s appeal to his humanity by having him arrested and
deported through the Alien Act. It is upon his return to the Continent when,
in desperation, he joins a group of outcasts in the forest, that Leopold meets the
Wanderer. The novella concludes with the Wanderer’s promise to assist him but
only in Volume V do we learn that he has been successful – Leopold and Gertrude are reunited, choosing Switzerland as their home in exile.
As in many of her other writings, Smith’s personal story, as well as her engagement with the larger political and cultural issues of the time, resonate throughout
the narrative. Her inclusion of the Alien Act may be seen here as a part of this
enmeshment of public and private concerns. The Act, which was conceived as a
means of observation and control of the large number of French refugees that had
entered Britain following the French Revolution, was passed by Parliament on 7
January 1793 and enabled the government to order the deportation of any alien
at any given time; if the alien refused to leave, he or she was liable to arrest. As
Elizabeth Sparrow notes, this legislation, together with the Westminster Police
Bill passed by the House of Lords on 13 June 1792 ‘led to a complete system of
surveillance for subjects, whether British or foreign, almost a mirror image of
the much despised French system of secret police’.2 Along with the suspension of
Habeas Corpus in 1794 and the passing of the Two Acts (the Treason and Sedition bills, which extended treason to include writing and speaking against the
government) in the winter of 1795–6, it exemplifies the repressive legislation in
Britain in the final years of the eighteenth century. The Alien Act, in its opening
statements, acknowledges its provenance in this climate of political anxiety: ‘…
The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer 103
under the present Circumstances, much Danger may arise to the publick Tranquility from the Resort and Residence of Aliens, unless due Provision be made
in respect thereof …’.3 And indeed the Act was a direct predecessor to those later,
more generally restrictive bills of law. As the Marquis of Lansdowne perspicuously noted in his objection to the Act during the debate in the House of Lords,
there was ‘no doubt but that it was intended as the forerunner of the suspension
of the habeas corpus act; and that its suspension, with respect to foreigners, was
only a preparatory stop to the same with respect to the people of England’.4
The response to the tremendous influx of refugees from revolutionary France,
informed by the xenophobia that characterized a nation first on the brink and
then in the midst of war, would feature prominently in the cultural discourse
of the time as well. Although there was sympathy amongst the British public
for the French exiles as victims of Revolutionary violence, it was countered by
traditional anti-French and anti-Catholic biases.5 This animosity was especially
apparent in regard to exiled priests and, as Claudia Johnson writes, because
these ‘sentiments took precedence over humanitarian interests, soliciting aid for
French priests was controversial’.6 Examining the pamphlets written by Hannah
More and Frances Burney in 1793 appealing for aid to the French clergy, Johnson notes a vexed critical reception of their works that underscores traditional
religious prejudices; thus, More was ‘rebuked for deserting Protestantism’ and
Burney’s wisdom, impartiality, and credulity were called into question.7
Other contemporary commentators addressing the situation of the emigrants viewed their presence in terms of a threat to national security as well as
to religious inviolability. Let us look, for example, at the remarks of Thomas
J. Mathias, whose polemical poem The Pursuits of Literature (1794) with its
extended notes and commentary surveying the cultural and political landscape
in Britain, appeared in multiple editions well into the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the fourth edition of the Pursuits (1797) he addresses the
presence of the emigrants, and asks ‘[w]hether in England at this time, there are
not peculiar and paramount considerations which call for wisdom and prudence
to regulate and restrain the first natural and honourable impetuosity of mercy
and humanity, to the end that THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND, IN
HER CHURCH AND STATE, be preserved inviolate from open attacks, or
from insidious attempts?’8 For Mathias, the perceived threat to national security
embodied in the French exiles outweighs the sympathy for their plight, and thus,
he answers the question:
I have compassion for the unfortunate; I have charity for plundered exiles; I have
pity, and would wish and would give relief to the wretched and the suffering; I have
veneration for the truly pious of every persuasion in the Christian faith… But I have,
and it is an Englishman’s duty to have, a watchful eye upon the insinuating or domineering spirit of the Romish church … I call upon the guardians of our church and
104
state to be watchful, and to regard with attention the proceedings of ALL THE
EMIGRANTS.9
Smith herself had addressed the issue of the French exiles in her poem The
Emigrants, published in 1793, the same year that the Alien Act was passed.
As opposed to More and Burney, who express sympathy for the emigrants but
also distance themselves from their situation, she emphasizes participation
rather than spectatorship;10 unlike Mathias, she is motivated by identification
rather than suspicion. In viewing the refugees on the seashore, Smith’s focus is
on a common, shared sense of alienation that transcends national and religious
boundaries. As she writes in her preface, she is able, by her ‘own sufferings, to feel
with acute, though unavailing compassion, the calamity of others’.11 The poem
registers both her personal knowledge of legal and social disenfranchisement
and injustice, of how her
weary soul recoils
From proud oppression, and from legal crimes
(For such are in this Land, when the vain boast
Of equal Law is mockery …’12
and the experience of those whom she observes, the
lorn Exiles; who, amid the storms
Of wild disastrous Anarchy, are thrown,
Like shipwrecked sufferers, on England’s coast13
The commonality of suffering ultimately results in a convergence of the consciousness and memory of the poet and the French exiles who are the subject of
her contemplation:
Ah! Yes, my friends
Peace will at last be mine; for in the Grave
Is Peace – and pass a few short years, perchance
A few short months, and all the various pain
I now endure shall be forgotten there.
And no memorial shall remain of me,
Save in your bosoms.14
The merging of Smith with the emigrants is shown here in its ultimate expression
– one that, for the poet, only leads to death. At the same time, this movement
has political as well as existential implications, not only in its erasure of traditionally contentious geographical and religious boundaries, but also in the larger
critique of institutional frameworks that the poem presents. In Stuart Curran’s
words, ‘[t]he fact that there is so little difference … between those observed and
the sympathetic but powerless observer of their plight, underscores the universal
anarchy that passes for law, and the helplessness of mere persons before encoded
systems of public power’.15
The humane though generalized identification that appeared in The Emigrants soon became more specific and personal when, a few months following
the publication of the poem, Smith’s daughter Anna Augusta married Alexandre
de Foville, himself a French emigrant. Although Anna Augusta died about a year
and a half into the marriage, Smith continued to maintain a close relationship
with de Foville, and thus had first-hand knowledge of the vulnerability of the
French exiles in the face of government legislation and of the Alien Act in particular. In this context, it is important to note that the Act does not anywhere
refer to the situation of foreign spouses of British citizens and it appears that
they were afforded no special leniency in regard to their status as aliens. This is
indeed the case in ‘The Hungarian’: although Gertrude is a Briton, this status is
not represented as a factor that could counteract the authority of the Act in the
eventual arrest and deportation of her foreign husband.
Various comments in Smith’s letters attest to her ongoing awareness of
her son-in-law’s precarious situation. For example, in a letter to her publishers
Cadell and Davies in August 1797, she writes, ‘Mr. Foville begs the favor of you
should any Letter come to your care directed to Mr. Alexandre that you will send
them to him for some of his family have ever since his emigration directed to
him by that name’.16 This change of name is consistent with the way many émigrés used aliases in order to escape government scrutiny. In November 1800, in a
letter to the Duchess of Devonshire, she mentions the subject again, noting that
de Foville’s name is ‘three times on the Emigrant list’. – the bounty lists that were
drawn up by the French government in 1792 and which decreed the death penalty for those émigrés who after leaving France would later try to return.17 These
two references to de Foville’s plight reflect the double bind of the emigrants,
who were viewed with suspicion by both the British authorities (who kept their
own register of foreign residents)18 and the French government. In this same letter to the Duchess, Smith also writes of her continuing work on The Letters of
a Solitary Wanderer; of having finished the first two volumes, and of ‘going on
with the three others’.19 It is likely, then, that the concern over the status of the
refugees was not far from her mind while writing the novellas The fact that, of
all the five tales, ‘The Hungarian’ is the only one to centre on a male protagonist,
may reinforce the way that the consciousness of de Foville’s story accompanied
her writing of this text, not least in exhibiting the parallel between his situation and that of Leopold de Sommerfeldt – both hopelessly caught between an
inhospitable asylum and a homeland to which they can no longer return.20
Yet, as its title suggests, ‘The Hungarian’ has a more universal purview as well.
Nonetheless, it is difficult to determine why Smith chose to focus on Hungary in
particular as the backdrop for her hero’s story of social persecution. One possible
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reason may be the suppression of the Jacobin movement there in 1794–5, and the
reestablishment of a reactionary alliance between the Hungarian estates and the
Hapsburg dynasty following a brief period of enlightened despotism, which are
conducive to her story of generational upheaval and social unrest.21 At the same
time, however, Smith does not refer specifically to the political situation in Hungary itself, but rather situates Leopold’s ideological worldview in more abstract
terms. For example, he mentions Sidney and Milton as authors who taught him
‘to idolize political liberty’.22 The specific referentiality to the wider European
political situation, when it is present, appears in relation to Poland rather than
Hungary: Leopold tells the Wanderer that as a boy, ‘the oppressions the people
of that country were enduring, were the first public events that awakened indignation’ in his mind.23 This comment may be an oblique criticism of the British
policy of non-interference during the partition of Poland by Prussia and Russia;
more generally, Smith’s depiction of the European landscape acknowledges the
tumultuous political reality of the 1790s on the Continent, with its ongoing
military activity and constant shifting of borders and allegiances.24
As noted earlier, Leopold’s troubles begin when his eldest brother takes
control of the family estate, imprisons his father, and has Leopold captured and
incarcerated as well. This inter- and intra-generational activity is significant as a
marker of Smith’s political positioning in this text. Fraternal hierarchies repeatedly appear in her novels to signal a critique of primogeniture, for example in The
Old Manor House (1793), The Banished Man (1794) and The Young Philosopher
(1798)25 and in ‘The Hungarian’, too, Count Volgeth is defined in terms of his
ruthlessness in wielding the power of the first-born in order to promote his own
concerns. As Leopold later hears, ‘Volgeth had haughtily declared, that feeling
his privilege as the head of the family, to direct it, whether in private, political, or
religious concerns, he should long since have availed himself of the right of primogeniture, and have devoted me [Leopold] to the ecclesiastical profession …
had he not weakly forborne, in consideration of the simple infatuation of a doating old man’.26 Yet, the usurpation of paternal power in this text, it seems to me,
does not signify a concurrent change of ideology, but rather marks the intensification of the means by which the old values – through a new patriarchy – will be
enforced. Seizure of political power by a member of the younger generation was,
of course, a subject fraught with contemporary resonances following Napoleon’s
coup d’état of November 1799, and is echoed in the way that, while the elder
Count had initially been portrayed as an impediment to Leopold’s happiness
through his reluctance to agree to Leopold’s marriage to an English commoner,
he soon becomes a victim of his son, Volgeth, who is trying to promote, but by
much more brutal means, that very same control over Leopold’s marital plans.27
This, then, is a domestic drama that opposes hierarchal privilege to the egalitarian, cosmopolitan ideal suggested by the marriage of Leopold and Gertrude,
a union that joins members of different nations and classes. The depiction of a
cross-cultural marriage that appears in ‘The Hungarian’ is one more illustration
of a cosmopolitan sensibility to which Smith pays particular attention in her literary works, for example in the marriage of the English Ormond and the French
Genevieve in Celestina (1791) the English Fanny Waverley and the French
Count de Montfleuri in Desmond (1792) and the marriage of both the English
Ellesmere and the Polish Alexina, and the French D’Alonville and the English
Angelina, in The Banished Man.
Anne Mellor has recently argued for the way in which British women writers of the late eighteenth century imagined a conception of cosmopolitanism
that differed from the one which was articulated by their male contemporaries.
As Mellor explains, whereas Immanuel Kant theorized a citizen who, in addition to possessing individual rights also claimed a ‘cosmopolitan right’, the rights
belonging to the ‘citizen of the world’, women writers conceived this citizenship
as manifested,
not only theoretically, as a matter of political ideology, but also physically and
emotionally, as a matter of sexual practice, a sexual practice that produces hybridized children. Enduring international, interfaith and inter-racial marriages – these
become the hallmarks of a truly cosmopolitan subjectivity.28
This ‘embodied cosmopolitanism’, as Mellor terms it, manifests itself in Smith’s
work as a ‘commitment to a multilingual, united Europe, one freed from national
and religious conflict’, and that functions, together with the works of the other
women writers whom she discusses, ‘politically, as an utopian imperative, a
cosmopolitan, transnational boundary crossing that constructs a new form of
subjectivity’.29 Mellor’s discussion joins other recent scholarship that examines the concern with national identity as it appears in late eighteenth-century
British women’s writing, and which also acknowledge Smith’s particular contribution to this discourse through the various representations of nationhood
and cosmopolitanism that feature in her writings.30 These studies locate Smith’s
search for ‘alternative, multinational imagined communities’31 and focus in particular on America (to where her idealistic characters emigrate at the close of The
Young Philosopher) as the site that, in William Brewer’s words, ‘provides an ideal
environment for citizens of the world, whose dedication to liberty and universal
benevolence and freedom from avarice, xenophobic attitudes, and local prejudices would lead to their persecution in England’.32 Through America, critics see
Smith as presenting a ‘political and social utopia’, a ‘fantasy of spatial and historical relocation’ and ‘the true home of the citizen of the world’.33
Yet, while recognizing the importance of the American ideal for Smith, and
in acknowledging the persuasiveness of these discussions, I want to focus instead
on how ‘The Hungarian’ exhibits a revision of her earlier conception of cosmo-
108
politanism. What appears in this tale, I want to suggest, is the recognition that
transnational border-crossings imply, more than the movement towards heterogeneity, hybridity and an idea of universal citizenship, a movement away from
– in escape from – despotism, intolerance and tyranny. This differently nuanced
relation to cosmopolitanism emphasizes the real rather than the ideal, and
lived experience as opposed to a theoretical vision. It emerges from a sense of
personal loss combined with political disappointment over the collapse of the
original Revolutionary agenda and with the reactionary backlash in Britain that
appeared in its stead. Cognizant of the institutional powers that prevail, Smith
now presents this cosmopolitan movement as ineffectual; unable to erase the
effects of social defeat, it is ultimately doomed to failure. The conclusion to ‘The
Hungarian’ underscores this sense of defeat. For although as a result of the Wanderer’s efforts Leopold and Gertrude are eventually reunited in Switzerland, the
event occurs outside of narrative time and is only acknowledged in Volume V as
if Smith deliberately wants to leave us at the close of this novella with a world in
which the consciousness of displacement prevails.
Evidence from Smith’s letters underscores what are, for her, the tensions of
national belonging that arise from a personal sense of dispossession. For instance,
in a letter to Dr Charles Burney (to whom she had applied for advice regarding the technicalities of arranging the interfaith marriage of Anna Augusta and
de Foville) she decries the ‘illiberal and absurd prejudices’ of those who oppose
the marriage and who ‘condemn a most amiable Man, merely because he is of
another Country – for as to Religion surely we have the same God!’34 Some
months later, she imagined her own personal boundary crossing: in a letter to
her friend Joseph Cooper Walker, she writes of her dissatisfaction with life in
England and states that she would ‘not hesitate a moment … to bid to “the Isle
Land that from her pushes all the rest” a long & last Adieu’.35 Years later, in 1802,
even more financially oppressed and emotionally despondent, she would write
of the ‘humble project of selling my books & what little furniture I have, & trying if I can go out of England to die’.36 Because of the need to care for her family
and to attend to the business of the settlement of her father-in-law’s will, Smith
was never able to realize her dream of emigration, yet she continued to perceive
herself in the status of an exile: in a letter to her friend Sarah Farr Rose written in
1804, two years before her death, she could look back upon her life and describe
it as a ‘long and uneasy pilgrimage’ in which she was ‘oblig’d to wander as [she]
could’.37 These sentiments reveal what is for Smith the downside of cosmopolitanism, the awareness of which finds expression in her fictional work alongside
the more promising vision inherent in the portrayal of her international couples.
This cosmopolitanism, not exactly celebratory and far from utopian, becomes
also a default option which cannot mitigate the longing for the ‘dear regretted
land’38 that, either physically or psychically, has been left behind.
Smith’s perception of herself as a wanderer opts into the way that migrations
– both personal and large-scale – were motivated by the cultural changes of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, changes occurring as a result
of war, the restructuring of borders and (as in her own experience) economic
and social instability. Such are the pressures of survival within this landscape of
upheaval that, unlike in Rousseau’s Letters of a Solitary Walker, a text that is echoed in the title of Smith’s work, the act of wandering that she represents cannot
be ameliorated, or lead to transcendence, either by the privileging of nature or
through introspective solitude. Another allusion in the title of her book underscores more aptly the significance of wandering for Smith: at the end of Volume
III, the eponymous narrator refers to himself as ‘a kind of Solitary Wanderer in
the wild of life, without any direction or fixed point of view; a gloomy gazer on
the world to which I have little relation’.39 Smith has appropriated this quotation
from James Boswell, who cites a December 1754 letter from Samuel Johnson
to Thomas Warton in which Johnson expresses his feelings following the death
of his wife.40 The reference points to the centrality of loss and its destabilizing
effects in her own text as well.
In ‘The Hungarian’ the theme of loss receives cogent expression through the
depiction of a world characterized by omnipresent violence, despotism, exile and
arbitrary cruelty. Accordingly, the transnational movement appears not only in
the cross-cultural marriage of Gertrude and Leopold, although its presence suggests that ‘embodied cosmopolitanism’ is an ideal that can still be theoretically
desired. Portrayed more compellingly is the way that union is manifested within,
and inherently linked to, a landscape of displacement with its concomitant erasure of individual agency. Smith’s fictional characters, as she herself, must ‘wander
as they can’. This thematic focus is underscored in the overall sense of alienation
that the protagonists feel throughout the novella. And although Leopold and
Gertrude are subjected to repeated persecutions together throughout their wanderings, it is significant that each feels particularly vulnerable in his or her home
country. In Hungary, Leopold is prone to fits of overwhelming emotion and the
resulting inability to think and act clearly in his escape from his brother’s power,
and Gertrude is the one who repeatedly suggests a practical course of action.
For example, when he contemplates taking revenge upon Volgeth after hearing
of his father’s death while in confinement, Gertrude convinces a ‘headlong’ and
‘violent’41 Leopold of the futility of his scheme. Likewise, once in England, it is
Gertrude who experiences emotional duress resulting from the same sense of
disenfranchisement. Lack of financial and familial support upon her return to
England (her father’s unwillingness to help her is motivated in part by his suspicion of her foreign husband) causes her to feel a sense of otherness in her native
land. Thus, upon returning, humiliated, from a visit to her late mother’s friend,
who is now a member of a higher social rank, she remarks to her husband: ‘I
110
find myself here in a world for which I am less calculated than ever’.42 As Smith
repeatedly reminds us, accompanying the exilic state is always a consciousness
of the ostracism with which the exile commences; it is always a movement that
highlights the point of departure and that national belonging which has been
lost.
While I have been suggesting the prominence afforded to this depiction of
the traumatic moment of rejection in ‘The Hungarian’, it appears, to be sure, in
Smith’s other writings as well. As Angela Keane observes, alongside her cosmopolitan communities, Smith ‘leaves her readers haunted by signs of fracture’.43
These ‘signs of fracture’ are evident, for example, in The Banished Man, in the
feelings of longing and unease that temper the complacency of the exilic group
in Verona at the conclusion of the novel. ‘Oh, for a cup of oblivion’ cries the
exiled author, Mrs Denzil, as she acknowledges the impossibility of escaping the
pressures of memory and loss.44 Likewise, The Young Philosopher, while providing
the most salient representation of a viable alternative of community through the
option of America, also emphasizes the lingering madness of the central female
protagonist, Laura Glenmorris. Laura’s admission that while in England she will
‘be haunted by … the dread of persecution’ and her fear that she and her family
will ‘never recover’ from the effects of her English experience, signal her awareness of the irreversibility of social defeat.45
As Leopold soon learns, life in England is an experience for which, he, too,
is less than prepared. Initially filled with optimism upon coming to a country he
describes as ‘the asylum of the unfortunate, the arbitress of nations, the seat of the
liberal arts, and the chosen throne of liberty herself ’,46 it is not long before he is
forced to confront the climate of intolerance that has pervaded the country. The
general distrust of foreigners in fact works to erase Leopold’s Hungarian origin
and replace it with a new, collective identity. He is now ‘considered only as one
of those emigrants with whom the revolutions of the continent have crowded
the British islands’,47 an identification that provides one further representation of
the kind of negative cosmopolitanism underpinning this text, in which national
belonging is defined in terms of dispossession.
Leopold’s previous status as a victim of a local, domestic drama of inheritance
and privilege and his current one as a refugee with politically-freighted cultural
baggage converge when he attempts to confront his second brother, Altdorf, in
London. Following their unsuccessful meeting he is almost immediately apprehended with the orders from the Secretary of State, ‘issued under the alien act’48
to leave the country within twenty-four hours. It is indicative of Leopold’s ignorance of the true state of English society that he was, as he puts it, unaware ‘that
such an act existed’,49 thinking instead that his arrest had been contrived by his
brother independently of, and without recourse to the law of the land. Yet, as
Smith reminds us, political and legal privilege will always exert its control over
the disempowered. The sense of existential displacement which had accompanied Leopold’s earlier adventures thus serves in retrospect as a foreshadowing
of the legal alienation, manifested in British law, to which he is now irrevocably
subjected. Literalizing the downside of (inter)national belonging, the Alien Act
signifies for Smith the recognition of how institutional forces dictate a politically imposed, rather than voluntarily acquired, national identity. As she knows
well, the enforcement of nationalistic homogeneity as opposed to cosmopolitan
heterogeneity is the order of the day. The possibility of an enlightened international community succumbs to the pressures of political reaction and ultimately
ends in failure.
It may be instructive to briefly compare Smith’s use of the Alien Act at the
conclusion of ‘The Hungarian’ with another novel in which the Act appears,
Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, which, although published in 1816, is set in 1794
and as such provides a retrospective assessment of the revolutionary period in
which the representation of history itself becomes an important concern. In
Scott’s novel, the Alien Act is mentioned in passing,50 when agreed upon as an
expedient means by which to facilitate the deportation of the German swindler,
Dousterswivel, from Scotland, and so to bring about the rescue of his victim, Sir
Arthur Wardour, from the financial ruin brought about by his scheme. The Act
thus serves to efficiently assist in the restoration of social harmony and, by implication, of a desired social homogeneity, through the expulsion of the foreign
source of danger. The aftermath of the German’s retreat, as well as the immediate cause of it, is likewise suggestive of the historical awareness represented in
the novel: the setting afire of his implements of deception (his mining equipment) leads to the false alarm of French invasion and to the general response in
which all the population of the countryside unites in the defence of the nation.
As Nicola Watson argues, this ‘denouement , with the whole country rising in
patriotic haste … to fight the French’ is presented as a farce, and thus ‘can be read
as a way of airbrushing the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire out of history ; it was all a sham, or at worst an error, now exploded forever’.51
In different ways, then, the Alien Act is linked by both Scott and Smith to
the inefficacy of the French Revolution in bringing forth cultural change. For
Scott, it is implicated in the effort to distance the Revolution from historical
consciousness and to neutralize its cultural currency, but also in the presentation
of the British response to the erstwhile threat presented by the Revolution in
an approving context. Smith, conversely, writing from a more immediate – and
politically disparate – perspective, views the Act as symbolic of the failure of
the Revolution to usher in a new era of equality and tolerance in Britain and as
representative of the political backlash that reinforced the imperiousness of legal
and social institutions and of the control they exert over those who are marginalized by or are at variance with its systems of power.
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The conclusion of ‘The Hungarian’ illustrates the extent to which Smith
identifies this power. There is no efficient and tidy disposal of punishment and
reward here – the brothers Volgeth and Altdorf remain firm in their positions
of authority, Leopold is separated from Gertrude and cast off once more to an
exilic existence. As noted earlier, the necessary conventional closure is delayed,
as the felicitous resolution of Leopold and Gertrude’s story is displaced onto the
final volume of the Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. Yet even there their reunion
is noted just in passing and we are merely informed that the couple was reunited three months following their separation and settled, with the Wanderer’s
help, ‘very comfortably … in a Swiss cottage on the banks of the Leman Lake’.52
A further detail from Leopold’s story is also mentioned only in Volume V: we
learn that the Wanderer had first tried to assist him by confronting the British
authorities in London and trying to have his deportation revoked. The attempt
was unsuccessful, with the officials to whom he applied suggesting that the Wanderer had ‘been deceived in the views and character of the foreigner in whom
[he] had been interested’.53
The official intransigence that the Wanderer confronts once more reminds
us that, although Leopold and Gertrude are safely together in Switzerland, the
backdrop against which their story unfolds remains unchanged; this is indeed
a world in which legalized injustice has the final word. In the delineation of
Smith’s political worldview it is fitting then that the Alien Act is the decisive
marker of Leopold’s failure and that the British government and its laws are what
certify the defeat of the innocent, articulating the inextricable linkage of the personal and the political, the public and the private, the legal and the domestic and
symbolizing the climate of despair that prevails.
8 NARRATING SEDUCTION: CHARLOTTE
SMITH AND JANE AUSTEN
Jacqueline Labbe
I would like to begin with a tale of three Willoughbys: Sir Clement, George and
John. When Fanny Burney names her rake ‘Sir Clement Willoughby’ in 1778
she may well merely intend to evoke his breeding; as Loraine Fletcher notes,
‘Willoughby’ ‘carries the necessary Burke’s Peerage ring; a Willoughby fought
at Agincourt’.1 Burney’s character is a distillation of the libertine figure familiar
from Richardson and others: as Sir Hargreve Pollexfen in Sir Charles Grandison
(1754) does with Harriet Byron, he pursues and abducts Evelina; like Lovelace
with Clarissa he masks his sexual intentions behind protestations of love. Unlike
either of them he is allowed much less success: his abduction attempt lasts only a
few minutes, while his pursuit of Evelina is derailed almost from the start by her
understanding of his venality. Burney uses Willoughby to embody unsatisfied
desire and masculine competition over Evelina; in the end readers are unsure
whether he regrets more his loss of the heroine or his loss of her to Lord Orville,
his rival. Such is the lasting effect of Evelina that, when Smith calls her hero of
sensibility in her 1791 novel Celestina George Willoughby, the echoes of Sir
Clement are audible. But where Sir Clement is a rake, George is a man of feeling,
totally devoted to his love for Celestina and totally undone by his notion that
she is his half-sister and therefore unattainable. Although not a sexual predator
like Sir Clement, he is nonetheless far from perfect: indecisive and vacillating,
self-justifying and self-dramatizing, he agrees to a loveless marriage with his heiress cousin in order to recover his finances, suspects Celestina of duplicity on the
basis of mere report and publicly shuns her, and spends much of the novel sunk
in his own despair. Yet readers are invited to like Willoughby, as he is invariably
called, and to sympathize with him. He is presented as embodying true romantic
love, perfecting the lovelorn hero suffering under crossed stars. Defined by love,
his desire for Celestina is conveyed almost entirely through a romanticized, stylized view of it; instead of Sir Clement’s predatory sexuality, George Willoughby
exhibits emotional wildness, tameable only by Celestina. What links the two
Willoughbys is obsessive jealousy and possessiveness, expressed as a desire to
– 113 –
114
seduce on the part of Sir Clement and a desire to, in effect, be seduced (by love
as embodied by Celestina) on the part of George.
Jane Austen’s John Willoughby thus has a complicated pedigree, and his plot
in Sense and Sensibility is clearly derived from Smith’s Celestina, as both Fletcher
and William H. Magee make clear.2 Both notice Austen’s re-use of Willoughby’s
purely mercenary engagement, the encounter at a London ball, and other plot
points, which emphasize that although Austen’s novel was not published until
1811, it was conceived as early as 1795, only a few years after the publication of
Celestina. Austen’s Willoughby, however, is also infused with Burney’s: he begins
as George and transforms into Sir Clement. Initially impressing the Dashwoods
with his devotion to feeling and sentiment, his later exposure as a Sir Clementlike sexual predator means that his sensibility eventually comes to be seen as
desire in disguise. As George, he can get close enough to Marianne to touch her
and place her in compromising situations (the trip to Mrs Smith’s house is, in
effect, a consensual abduction), but his Sir Clement traits are made clear when
the reader learns of his seduction and abandonment of Eliza. John Willoughby
is, therefore, the model seducer, both of Marianne and the reader who regrets
his exposure as villain to the end (and there are many of them). When he allows
himself to regret the loss of Marianne, he even seduces himself: his pretended
sensibility takes a kind of nostalgic hold, allowing him to suffer the pangs of lost
love while also enjoying the comforts of Miss Grey’s £20,000.
The intricate weaving of narratives means that the three Willoughbys are, for
Austen, entangled. Although Fletcher claims that ‘by 1811 … Celestina would be
unknown to most novel readers or at best a memory’,3 the same could not be said
of Evelina: Burney was still actively publishing and a contender on the novelistic
stage. Moreover, Austen herself clearly relies on readers recalling both Evelina
and Smith clearly enough to respond to her treatment in Northanger Abbey
(another cross-decade novel, of course). For Austen, the echoes of Sir Clement
undermine John Willoughby’s sensibility from the start, while the remnants of
George justify his pretence. In other words, Willoughby is both more and less
convincing as a hero of sensibility for readers who recall his namesakes, and in
keeping with the complexity of Sense and Sensibility, Austen embeds his unsuitability as a hero with her intertextual references. In the end, the heroes who
display the most sensibility are, of course, not named ‘Willoughby’ at all: Col.
Brandon, pitied as aged by the immature Marianne, is the character devoted to
a romantic ideal of love, who suffers for it, and who is rewarded with Marianne,
and Edward is the character who stays true to his first love even as he is prepared
to sacrifice his feelings to duty. By including a Willoughby, however, Austen signals her awareness that a template exists, and she uses this to layer her John with
the seductive wiles of both Sir Clement and George.
Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen
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The rival narratives of Sense and Sensibility and Celestina, as informed by
Evelina, show that for Austen, Smith provides more than simply plot outlines
or character traits. In this essay, I will be showing that even a novel as late and
‘experimental’4 as Mansfield Park nonetheless has its genesis, like Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey, in the 1790s, and particularly
in Smith’s next-but-one novel to Celestina, The Old Manor House (1793). In
doing so I hope to show that for Austen, Smith is more than merely a forerunner or even a mine of names and situations; when reading The Old Manor House
and Mansfield Park together, we see not only that Austen ‘wrote explicitly out
of a tradition created by other women writers’5 but that she relied on The Old
Manor House to inform and shape the novel many readers consider her oddest.
In doing so, she reifies a key Smithian theme: seduction. For Smith, seduction
operates sexually, informing plots in which romance is as much about sex as it
is about love, and reflexively, acting metaphorically to represent a cultural reliance on domination and submission. Smithian seduction targets not only the
object of desire, but also the self, the reader, and the idea of genre itself. Austen,
an astute and intelligent reader of Smith, implements Smith’s meditation on
genre within Mansfield Park through her adoption of Smith’s plot, characterization, and motifs. What this suggests is not a simple reproduction of a famous
predecessor’s work, but an active engagement between two masters of a genre in
the process of establishing itself. Uncovering the Manor House at the heart of
Mansfield Park shows the ways in which both novels work to explore and consolidate a tradition that makes possible later nineteenth-century probings of the
genre. The Smithian contours of Mansfield Park, in other words, allow Austen’s
novel to contemplate the seductions of genre as well as the seductive ploys of its
characters.
Smith has been noted in connection with Austen at least since Mary Lascelles’s Jane Austen and her Art (1939); for Lascelles, Smith’s Emmeline provides
an ironic reversal of type for Austen’s Catherine Morland.6 Critics have mapped
links between Mansfield Park and Emmeline; between Smith’s early novels of
sensibility and Northanger Abbey; between The Old Manor House and Pride and
Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility; William H. Magee, by concentrating
mainly on diction and plot echoes, makes the case for many more associations,
including Celestina and Sense and Sensibility as well as The Old Manor House
and Mansfield Park.7 Magee calls Smith’s influence ‘profound’ and ‘pervasive’;8
despite this, ‘she offered Jane Austen no useful example in displaying everyday
life, dramatizing inner conflict, or even developing the emotions of her heroines of sensibility’; she is ‘a vital source of situations, characters and themes to
borrow, work up, and perfect’.9 She is not, in other words, in the same league,
unable to depict the social or psychological realism associated with Austen.
Magee’s is probably the most sympathetic comparison. For Bradbrook, Austen
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is ‘indebted’ for the ‘odd phrase’ or ‘vulgarism’; Smith’s ‘lack of fastidiousness’
means her ‘fiction was only of negative use’ for Austen.10 For Steeves, Smith is
‘not without invention, but in every aspect of her performance there was a novelist or two who could do better’;11 although he accepts that Smith was central to
Austen’s reading, his conception of Smith’s work is such that, like Bradbrook, he
can see her influence as not more than negative, something for Austen to react
against. For most readers, it comes down to this: no matter how many situations,
phrasings, or character traits Austen may owe to Smith, she inevitably improves
on them; this is the ‘normative’ position described by Claudia Johnson, where
‘nothing at all is wrong with Jane Austen, ever’,12 here expressed in conclusions
that, while Smith may lead to Austen, she can never direct her. Hence, ‘where
Jane Austen differs from a writer like Charlotte Smith is in her unwillingness to
stick by tidy dichotomies, or, indeed, to leave an earlier position unexamined’;
or, to use another tone, where Smith’s attempts at dialect are ‘crude’, Austen’s
are ‘unstrained’.13 The desire to present Austen as the epitome that characterizes
even the most recent criticism means that Smith can only ever be an inferior.
Given, then, the critical consensus that Smith’s work had some kind of effect
on Austen’s, no matter how trivial, it is telling that for some, she still does not
feature. For a critic like Christopher Gillie, Smith simply did not exist: Austen
was ‘extraordinarily isolated from contemporary writers’ (all male), and was the
‘first English novelist to discern [the genre’s] true potentiality and its limitations’
(for Gillie, all other important writers of the time were poets and essayists).14 For
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Smith is conspicuous by her absence in a list of forerunners to Austen.15 For Isobel Grundy, Austen’s ‘best loved authors’ and her fertile
influences are Crabbe, Richardson, Johnson, Cowper and Burney, a strikingly
male-dominated field; Smith does not even make the long list.16 That neither
Spacks nor Grundy, specialists in women’s writing, recognize Smith as part of
Austen’s ‘tradition’ suggests that the job of placing Austen as a late eighteenthcentury novelist, a contemporary of Smith’s (not to mention Burney, Edgeworth,
Radcliffe, and others), is not yet complete. Underpinning this essay, then, is an
understanding of Austen as a novelist embedded in her time, and as less apt than
her readers to make judgements about the quality of her contemporaries. Indeed,
the sheer frequency of allusion and borrowing noted by Magee and other critics
suggests that Austen’s originality is a critical construction, and that as novels are
reread and admitted to scholarly attention a new and fruitful focus will emerge.
The burden of needing always to surpass her contemporaries and immediate
forebears has had, I suggest, a distorting effect not only on Austen but also on
those other writers, like Smith, whose achievements have had to pale as soon as
the comparison with Austen is introduced. However, does Austen always need
to represent a stage of growth? Is it possible that readings of her consummate
naturalism and realism derive from a conviction of the generic superiority of
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these modes in Austen’s own literary descendants, and a desire, thus, to locate
them in Austen herself ? The critics who implicitly or explicitly suggest a hierarchy in which Austen is always already rated higher than her predecessors often
seem to base that hierarchy on ideas of progression and development: later (that
is, more realist) always trumps earlier (that is, more contrived). Yet, for every
realistically-presented character like Emma there is a contrived plot element like
Col. Brandon’s Elizas. Perhaps, then, using realism as a yardstick means that critics have consistently underestimated the seriousness with which Austen views,
reads, and writes her novelistic peers. If we no longer need to prove that Austen
is ‘different’, then we can begin to analyse the ways in which she is the same.
In turning, however, the Mansfield Park and The Old Manor House, I am
not refusing to recognize their distinctivenesses. Smith writes solely from a late
eighteenth-century perspective; Austen writes a dual narrative, one that fuses
the 1790s with the 1810s, the Revolutionary with the Regency-era. For Austen,
of course, this cross-generational aspect is not new; her habit of drafting and
returning to her texts over periods lasting years has already been noted. But there
is no manuscript evidence suggesting an earlier composition date for Mansfield
Park, which makes its indebtedness to The Old Manor House, based as it must
be either on her memory of Smith’s text or a fondness for Smith that occasioned
recent rereading, all the more significant. Austen, in other words, had no need
to borrow plot; in doing so, she institutes a dialogue with Smith over the nature
and literariness of culture. The Old Manor House, written in 1792 but set in the
mid-1770s, overtly comments on its author’s cultural context and her society’s
historical past; Mansfield Park, written about 1811 but inhabited by the 1790s,
implicitly addresses its own past and provenance even as its sits itself firmly in
the Regency.
The two texts, then, share more than their publication dates might allow.
And under the aegis of ‘influence’, scholars have noted that The Old Manor
House’s Monimia shares personality traits and domestic trials with Fanny Price:
both are poor relations, functioning as upper servants in fact (Monimia) and in
deportment (Fanny); both have thoroughly disagreeable aunts (Mrs Lennard/
Mrs Norris). Brean Hammond goes so far as to remark that The Old Manor
House ‘may have influenced the plot contours of MP’, although his ‘may have’
is instructive: Mansfield Park must still retain its originality.17 Yet what is overlooked is the wholesale importation of The Old Manor House into Mansfield
Park: beyond Fanny and Monimia, beyond ‘plot contours’, Smith’s novel is the
blueprint for Austen’s. While the Celestina/Sense and Sensibility resonances are
instructive, what The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park reveal is precisely
the indebtedness of Austen: how it is only by leaving Smith out of the frame that
Grundy can state so firmly that Austen is ‘chary of influence …. [and] little given
to direct imitation, let alone allusion’.18
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For both novelists, these are the only novels in their oeuvres that focus on a
place in the title: Rayland Hall, the Old Manor House that anchors Smith’s plot,
becomes Mansfield Park. This allows both authors to explore issues of property
and inheritance, income and money. Smith focuses on the former, Austen the
latter, but for both location focalizes issues that each has dealt with less prominently in other novels.19 Further, in each novel the author embeds politics to a
greater (The Old Manor House) or lesser (Mansfield Park) degree: the American
Revolution and the precise dating Smith assigns to Orlando’s adventures as a
soldier anchor the novel historically but also free Smith to pass subtle judgement
on contemporary governmental policies on the war with France ; the abolition
of the slave trade and the consequent economic downturn in the West Indies
play a more oblique part in Mansfield Park but, as critics have noted, underpin
the narrative more specifically than the plot makes plain, making the text one
of Austen’s more politically inflected.20 Both novels, as well, explore the ramifications of bad parenting: the Somerives in The Old Manor House teach their
children little more than sycophancy and mercenary imperatives in marriage,
while Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram are equally neglectful of their children’s
moral needs and equally focused on monetary approaches to marriage. But it is
in the arena of sex and seduction that the two novels converge most closely, only
to diverge most drastically. The seduction plot that underpins both narratives
hinges on representations of crime and punishment as well as love and desire. In
adapting Smith, Austen inherits her 1790s radicalism and also her moral strictures; her world of seduction is simultaneously the more permissive one of the
Regency and the more restrained one of a culture used to war and privation.
To return to Hammond’s remark that The Old Manor House ‘may have’ provided the plot for Mansfield Park: once the two novels are read in tandem their
narrative similarities are unmistakable. Beyond the titles and the thematics outlined above, each text features an autocratic landowner, a downtrodden heroine,
a romanticized hero, a wastrel oldest son whose extravagances impact directly on
the younger son’s prospects and threaten to destabilize the entire family’s finances,
a languid and ineffective mother, a misguided and mercenary father, a sister who
elopes, a cuckolded partner, a seducer, a libertine whose desire for the heroine
leads him to offer her marriage, a sparkling and vivacious although flippant and
unreliable coquette, a would-be seducer who hopes his assistance in procuring a
commission will be rewarded with sexual favours, and an entirely unlikeable and
despotic aunt. As the chart below shows, Austen combines some key roles:
People: The Old Manor House/Mansfield Park
•
Mrs Rayland/Sir Thomas Bertram
•
Monimia/Fanny
•
Orlando/Edmund
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Philip Somerive/Tom Bertram
Mrs Somerive/Lady Bertram
Mr Philip Somerive/Sir Thomas Bertram
Isabella Somerive/Maria Bertram
General Tracy/James Rushworth
Warwick/Henry Crawford
Sir John Belgrave/Henry Crawford
Isabella Somerive/Mary Crawford
General Tracy/Henry Crawford
Mrs Lennard/Mrs Norris
By basing her cast of characters on those of The Old Manor House, Austen appropriates their stories as well. And her technique of combining key characters
transforms those figures whose ‘realist’ nature become a feint for what is, in effect,
an intensely novelized construction: Austen’s composites allow her to investigate
the ramifications of genre and its constituent parts, just as Smith does in her use
of culturally-inflected plotlines.21 Certain things must happen in Mansfield Park,
then, as a result of its Old Manor House modelling. Certain actors within these
events find their roles rewritten, especially in storylines involving seduction.22
It has not gone unnoticed that Smith’s novels often contain seduction subplots; indeed, Emmeline is distinguished as a novel of sensibility by its Lady
Adelina narrative, which features adultery and an illegitimate birth as well as the
rehabilitation of the woman, while Desmond famously allows its hero an affair
with a married woman that results in a baby but does not ruin the hero’s happiness. Celestina, too, turns on Willoughby’s confused notion that Celestina is
his half-sister, conceived by his mother after an affair. So The Old Manor House’s
inclusion of libertine excess and elopement does not, in itself, stand out. Smith’s
willingness to explore less respectable arenas of sexuality have been linked to
her status as a married woman (hence sexually knowledgeable), to her radical
and Revolutionary sympathies, and to her enlightened feminist ideology.23 Certainly, she is aware of the value of seduction to a plot: heroes reveal unexpected
attitudes towards (some) women, heroines (whether major or minor) claim a
freedom and independence not usually allotted to them; moralities can be questioned and mores undermined. Austen has been a different matter. Although
from first (Willoughby and Eliza) to last (Mr Elliott and Mrs Clay) seduction
and sex have been pivotal to her plots, for many readers her novels may be about
courtship but they are definitely not about sex. And yet, as Jill Heydt-Stevenson
among others recently has shown, Austen makes extended use of bawdy humour
and sexualized behaviours in her texts, ‘breaching conventional propriety and
ask[ing] us to question any easy assumption that during her era women would
be less likely to experience’ the bawdy and the sexual.24 Heydt-Stevenson’s argu-
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ment makes plain the ease with which sexual puns and images can be uncovered
in Mansfield Park; the novel’s reliance on The Old Manor House means that its
libertine excess and elopement partake of the Regency and Revolutionary flavours embedded in its plot.
One of the biggest near-seductions in The Old Manor House takes place
between Orlando Somerive and the quasi-servant Monimia. From his childhood
Orlando is frequently at Rayland Hall and finds in Monimia first a playfellow
and then a potential lover: ‘Orlando, who had loved [Monimia] as a playfellow while they were both children, now began to feel a more tender and more
respectful affection for her; though unconscious himself that it was her beauty
that awakened these sentiments’.25 The relationship that develops is dependent
on Monimia’s ambiguous position in the house: as Mrs Lennard’s niece, she is
more than a servant but definitely less than a lady. Mrs Lennard seems fully aware
of the attractions of her niece for Orlando and contrives to keep them apart; he
as studiously creates opportunities for them to be together, mainly at night in, at
first, his, and later her, bedroom, a situation he encourages after finding her alone
and sobbing over mistreatment from Mrs Lennard: ‘the unhappy Monimia, who
had felt ever since her earliest recollection the misery of her situation, was never
so sensible of it as at this moment’.26 Orlando, pressing for clandestine meetings,
characterizes his love for her as brotherly (‘[I] love you as well as I do any of my
sisters – even the sister I love best’),27 but at seventeen to Monimia’s fourteen
he is sexually mature and aware of his potency: later, in his room, ‘Orlando was
tempted to kiss [her tears] away before they reached her bosom; but he remembered that she was wholly in his power, and that he owed her more respect than
it would have been necessary to have shewn even in public’.28 For Orlando, Monimia becomes an obsessive love object; his behaviour over her is wildly volatile;
he is seduced more by his feeling for her than by her body and beauty. For her
part Monimia comes to love Orlando through gratitude tinged with fear that
his antics will expose them both; indeed, she often declares love in an attempt
to get him to calm down. For each, their relationship is defined more by what is
prevented than by what is allowed: so that by the time Orlando goes off to war,
he has done little more than clasp Monimia in a close embrace.
In her treatment of Monimia and Orlando, Austen shifts the focus and in the
process transfers desire from male to female. Fanny, whose domestic situation
so mirrors Monimia’s, becomes the character in thrall to her love for Edmund,
which she attempts to see as sisterly (‘she loves him better than any body in the
world except William; her heart was divided between the two’).29 Edmund
accepts a subordinate position in the plot that would not be countenanced by
his begetter Orlando. Instead, Austen explores what might be called Monimia’s story in her portrayal of Fanny’s position in the household as ‘lowest and
last’30 and as thoroughly cowed by her tyrannical aunt. Even when Fanny admits
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her love is no longer sororal, she sees it as ‘reprobated and forbidden’.31 Fanny’s pathological self-effacement is a heightened version of Monimia’s: ‘all the
impressions that her infant understanding had received, tended only to confirm
the artificial influence which her aunt endeavoured to establish over her imagination. Her poverty, her dependence, the necessity of her earning a subsistence
by daily labour, had been the only lessons she had been taught’.32 Fanny, who
‘rated her own claims to comfort as low even as Mrs Norris could’,33 is as defined
by her peripheral position in her household as Monimia is in hers. By pushing Monimia to centre stage, Austen can also narrate the details of peripheral
abjection, clarifying the seductive nature of such marginalization. For Orlando,
Monimia’s sexual beauty combines with her availability as a semi-servant to make
her enticing: ‘the restraints that every way surrounded [Orlando] served only
to inflame [his passion]’.34 For Fanny, who internalizes the humiliations of her
domestic position, ‘desire [for Edmund] … is thwarted, beaten down, denied,
frustrated’;35 she substitutes for this a submission to her abjection that functions
as an alternative seduction: ‘“If you cannot do without me, ma’am”, said Fanny, in
a self-denying tone –’ (emphasis added).36 Johnson notes that ‘in [Fanny’s] erotic
life pain rarely conduces to pleasure’,37 but I would argue that, in giving in to the
seductions of humiliation, Fanny is content for pain to conduce to pain. Both
Monimia and Fanny are characters ‘who become more disturbing the longer we
look at [them]’.38
Moreover, both seduce through their downtrodden marginality; even for
their lovers, their restraint heightens their attractions. Thus Orlando pursues
Monimia all the more ardently the less available she is to him. This means both
physically, when she is locked in her tower or secreted in her aunt’s closet, and
emotionally, when he construes her adventures while he is in America as a series
of seductions (‘And [young Newill] kissed [your tears] off … I know he did
– yes! this stranger, infinitely more dangerous than [the seducer] Belgrave ….
And your protector, I suppose, renewed his solicitations by the way?’).39 Fanny’s
own celebrated self-restraint, tinged with Monimia’s function as the object of
Orlando’s desire, becomes itself desirable, especially to her suitor Henry Crawford, a point to which I will return. And by assuming Orlando’s place in the plot,
Fanny is coloured as well by his persona, albeit repressed and suppressed. Hence,
Orlando can express for Fanny her love, jealousy, and desire to indulge her own
feelings, while in her own text all such emotions are restrained into pathology,
and restriction itself becomes seductive: ‘though she had known the pains of
tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost all recurrence of either had led to
something consolatory’.40 In the end, neither Monimia’s unknown parentage nor
Fanny’s all-too-well-known background prevent their translations from periphery to centre. Austen’s concentration on fleshing out Monimia’s story suggests,
then, a keen awareness of Monimia’s worth.
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If Monimia moves from the margin to the centre, Orlando, in his guise as
Edmund, takes a step back. Plot-wise, Edmund seems to map least clearly onto
his source; Orlando’s emotional landscape is inherited by Fanny, as is his status as protagonist. Edmund himself, unlike Orlando, requires nearly the whole
novel to decide he ‘prefer[s] soft light eyes to sparkling dark ones’.41 And yet,
from nearly their first meeting Edmund assumes the teacher’s role with Fanny,
as Orlando does with Monimia; he forms her mind, taste, and inclinations; he
even has a habit of invading her private space. He seeks her out, asks her opinions, desires her approbation. In the shadow of Orlando, his ‘brotherly’ affection
appears less fraternal, more a disguised version of the desire he openly displays
for Mary Crawford. In the end, it is really only the temporary detour towards
Mary, and a Monimia-like demeanour, that differentiates Edmund (‘It is a name
of heroism and renown – of kings, princes, and knights; and seems to breathe the
spirit of chivalry’)42 from Orlando (whose name carries clear romance echoes).
Following his forebear, Edmund is more of a seducer than he might accept; he
certainly creates in Fanny a companion perfectly suited to his tastes and, eventually, his desires.
Monimia and Orlando, Fanny and Edmund – Austen’s pair resonates with
the seductive energies of their models. But Smith and Austen also involve their
heroines in more conventional seduction plots; the two characters also attract
the attentions of their respective texts’ libertines. For Monimia, this is Sir John
Belgrave, an upstart baronet whose desire for Monimia stems in part from her
perceived availability as a servant (stimulated by the servant Betty Richards’
actual sexual availability; she becomes Philip Somerive’s mistress). Monimia is
on her first outing from the Hall, and immediately becomes the target of Philip
Somerive and his friends.43 Provoking her to tears with his attentions (‘“We’ve
been asking [that sweet girl] who she is … and it seems she does not know”’), Sir
John ‘mak[es] professions of violent love’ throughout their first meeting, prevents another man from kissing her (she is his prey), and insists on accompanying
her on her way back to the Hall, only to encounter a possessively jealous Orlando
who immediately picks a fight with him.44 Later, Sir John attempts to enter her
bedroom through the same broken door and torn curtain that had admitted
Orlando, persecutes her with letters and in person, and finally approaches Mrs
Lennard with ‘a proposal of marriage’ to which Mrs Lennard ‘insist[s]’ she consent after ‘seeing Sir John, and hearing what he had to say’.45 Monimia, however,
‘positively refuse[s]’,46 and is packed off to Winchester, apprenticed to a milliner,
by her aunt. Once there she is discovered by Sir John, whose attentions and ‘new
proposals’ bring her the respect of her new employer.47 A romantic contrivance
in the form of a chivalric sailor, the son of her employer, finally rescues her once
and for all from Sir John – but for the reader it is clear that Sir John is another
Sir Clement, a seducer by trade.
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When Austen picks up on this for Fanny, she complicates the arrangement
by making Henry Crawford both more and less scrupulous than Sir John. Henry
shifts his focus from flirtation to conquest: ‘my plan is to make Fanny Price in
love with me’ becomes ‘You must be aware that I am quite determined to marry
Fanny Price’.48 Like Sir John, he finds Fanny attractive and assumes her availability; again like Sir John, he finds himself proposing marriage to the woman
he began simply trying to seduce. Austen devotes much more time than Smith
to the emotional evolution of her libertine; we see that it is not the determined
unattainability of Fanny that spurs him on, but a new appreciation of her virtues: ‘“Yes, Mary … I am fairly caught. You know with what idle designs I began
– but this is the end of them … [My attentions] are entirely fixed”’.49 The libertine
declares his reformation, stirred by what he expects will be the grateful love of
a good woman: ‘“I have (I flatter myself ) made no inconsiderable progress in
her affections”’.50 When Fanny, nonetheless, refuses him, and refuses to bow to
Sir Thomas’ wishes with the same steadfastness as Monimia shows her aunt, she
is sent to Portsmouth (Austen’s equivalent of Winchester) only to encounter
Henry there as well. Where Smith implied, however, that Sir John’s ‘new proposals’ did not necessarily any longer include marriage, Henry renews his courtship
of Fanny, and nearly wins her. And where Smith saves Monimia through the expedient appearance of a man of virtue, Austen rescues Fanny by returning Henry
to his libertine roots; his elopement with Maria, of course, means ‘the ruin of all
his happiness with Fanny’.51 Thus Austen substitutes a successful seduction for a
failed one – and a failed affair for a nearly-successful courtship.
Smith is careful to distinguish her libertines from her men of feeling, but
Austen seems to recognize their potential parity. As I have noted, Orlando is
not allowed to indulge in his desires for Monimia; his sexuality instead finds its
outlet in excessive sensibility and in a fastidious elevation of Monimia to the status of angel. This only slips when his jealousy persuades him that other men (Sir
John, the milliner’s son, a fellow soldier’s son) have been enjoying the kisses he
has only dreamt of.52 Smith again enforces the distinction with her character of
Warwick, the nephew of General Tracy, an aging roué who has become engaged
to Orlando’s sister Isabella. The permutations of character with Austen’s versions
here becomes complex. Isabella, like Maria, makes an engagement of convenience; in order to assure her father and mother that she will be provided for
after their death, and as a kind of thank-you for Gen. Tracy’s help in procuring a
commission for Orlando (much as Henry does for Fanny’s brother William), she
agrees to marry Gen. Tracy even though she laughs at him as an ‘ancient beau’
and later ‘cr[ies] about it’.53 He, in turn, only proposes marriage because, like Sir
John (and to an extent Henry Crawford), ‘he found so little prospect of succeeding with her … and he found it so impossible to live without her, that what
he had begun with the most insidious designs, concluded at last in an honest,
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though an absurd one’.54 Once the engagement is announced, Smith introduces
Warwick, who jokes to Orlando that he means to fall in love with his new aunt,
and then proceeds to do so. Warwick, called ‘the handsome Warwick’ by his
female acquaintance with whom he ‘lost his time – but hitherto without losing
his heart’, has ‘spirit … vivacity … [a] very fine person, and … softness of manners’,
can also ‘drink without losing his reason, but not always play without losing his
money’.55 He is a manly figure, a kind of playful libertine whose sexuality is yet
innocent rather than predatory. Within hours of meeting Isabella he declares
that he ‘shall be always a very loving nephew’ and that ‘she is a little divinity’;
within days he ‘is madly in love with Isabella, and she is as much in love with me
… I will marry her, and take her with me to America’ where he is being sent as
a soldier.56 The subsequent elopement does not carry with it the assurance that
they are married until more than 150 pages and nearly two years later, when
Orlando encounters Warwick in London and asks him if his sister has ‘changed
her name’.57 She has, and all ends well, since rather than displaying resentment as
does James Rushworth, Gen. Tracy eventually makes Warwick his heir and then
conveniently dies.
Austen, in assigning the roles of both Sir John Belgrave and Warwick (and
even, to an extent, Gen. Tracy) to Henry Crawford, suggests that the seducer
is not recoverable. Smith makes the elopement an embarrassment for Gen.
Tracy and distressing for Isabella’s family, but Austen criminalizes it by making
Maria commit adultery rather than simply follow her heart. Henry’s composite
character ensures he is seen as a true seducer rather than a bon vivant; although
intertextually submerged rather than open as with her Willoughby connections,
Austen ensures Henry’s moral weakness when she taints him with Sir John. Julia
Prewitt Brown has said that Mansfield Park ‘expos[es] horrors without resolving them. [It] is a deeply pessimistic and enervating work’.58 However, Henry
Crawford is actually a deeply reassuring character; especially once his immoral
pedigree is recognized, readers can see how deeply he deserves his punishment.
Austen shows that the man of feeling can easily mask the libertine; where Smith
separates them and in so doing allows the man of feeling his reward and his
renewal, Austen suggests that someone like ‘handsome Warwick’ is as dangerous
and threatening as Sir John.59 Henry Crawford is not allowed to have his cake
and eat it too; Austen clarifies the most useful tool of the seducer, his charm
and apparent sincerity, revealing the predatory nature of sexual feeling, which
destroys as it seduces. Although Henry ‘reproache[s]’ Maria as ‘the ruin of his
happiness’,60 it is plain that by relying on The Old Manor House, Austen ensures
that he never had a hope of happiness.
The seduction plot thus underpins each novel’s main romance, libertine
subplot, and elopement narrative. It also extends to the other main strand of
narrative that Austen adapts from Smith: the tale of the wastrel oldest son. Both
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Smith and Austen, as sisters to brothers, are well aware of the disenfranchisement that attends this family position. Smith suffers it directly, when her brother
Nicholas inherits the family estate, Bignor Park, which she can then only visit on
his suffrage.61 Austen may have been luckier in her brothers, but she nonetheless
shows her full awareness of what it means to have to depend on a brother with
the Dashwood women’s situation in Sense and Sensibility. Both Philip Somerive and Tom Bertram illustrate the risks of a system like primogeniture and its
attendant expectations by making the effects of an oldest son’s irresponsibility resonate throughout their families. Philip and Tom, seduced by their own
senses of entitlement, demonstrate the limitations of a social system that allows
order of birth to overcome personal worth (a point not lost on Mary Crawford,
of course). Their stories show how deeply the seduction plot is embedded in
The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park: both Smith and Austen shadow the
actions of the libertine seducer character with the nuances of a plot line that questions the cultural reality of the stability promised by primogeniture.
Smith complicates her version from the start by allowing the estate of Rayland Park to be held independently by a single woman (Mrs Rayland’s title is
merely honorific). Since it is not entailed, she is able to dispose of it by testament. This does not stop Philip from assuming his right to inheritance, an idea
encouraged by his father: ‘The eldest son [Philip], who would, as the father
fondly hoped, succeed to the Rayland estate, he had sent to Oxford, where he
had been indulged in his natural turn to expense; and his father had suffered him
to live rather suitably to what he expected than to what he was sure of ’.62 Consequently, Philip ‘had early in life seized with avidity the idea … that he must have
the Rayland estate’, and his boasting and poaching having been communicated
to Mrs Rayland, ‘now, whenever he was at home, the family were never asked’.63
While this allows Orlando to be seen with favour by Mrs Rayland, it also provokes brother’s hatred and jealousy; Philip believes that Orlando is robbing him
of his rightful inheritance, but Smith is careful to show that Philip destroys his
own chances. She is equally careful to show his enthrallment to his own expectations:
though nothing was more certain than that Mrs Rayland’s fortune was entirely at
her own disposal, and nothing more evident than her dislike to him, he never could
be persuaded that, as he was heir at law, he should not possess the greater part of
the estate … ‘No, no; the old hag has been … brought up in good old-fashioned
notions, and knows that the first-born son is in all Christian countries the head of
the house’.64
Philip designates for Orlando the profession of ‘parson’, but as his father makes
clear, his extravagance has already ensured that Orlando cannot go to Oxford
himself, and without a degree can never be a clergyman. Philip’s lack of care for
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the future of his family (as well as the future of the estate; his first planned action
is to deforestate it) shows his inherent unsuitability to inherit; Smith furthers
this by making him weak and vicious, given to gambling, drinking, and casual
sex. He sets up with the servant Betty Richards in London, lands in debtor’s
prison, having failed to establish his ‘lawful’ claim to the Rayland estate, is rescued by Orlando, and finally dies of ‘debauchery and excess’.65 Having carried
through, it is implied, on any number of seductions in his lifetime, Philip’s death
underscores the ruination that is the usual result of, in this case, self-seduction.
Austen’s Tom Bertram is also weak and self-indulgent, and his extravagance
is one reason the family finances are straitened. ‘Tom’s extravagance had … been
so great … [that] the younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the
elder’ by forgoing the Norris living: ‘“You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty,
thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his
…. through the urgency of your debts”’, notes Sir Thomas.66 Tom, unlike Philip,
feels ‘some shame and sorrow’, but soon excuses himself with ‘cheerful selfishness’:67 unlike Philip, Tom is a pleasure-seeker rather than a vice-seeker, and his
father exercises more control over his actions: Austen thus regularizes the estate
by replacing Mrs Rayland with Sir Thomas and making Tom’s expectations the
landowner’s as well. There is no question but that Tom will inherit, and even
Edmund’s future is settled: he is at Oxford and is shortly to be ordained. When
Sir Thomas takes Tom with him to Antigua ‘in the hopes of detaching him from
some bad connections at home’,68 Austen points out Tom’s pliability: Philip, of
course, sees it as his right to defy authority. Even Tom’s sexual adventures are
comical, as when he accidentally flirts with the younger Miss Sneyd who is not
yet ‘out’.69 Nonetheless, like Philip, Tom must suffer a ‘dangerous illness’ brought
on by ‘a neglected fall, and a good deal of drinking’ while at Newmarket, which
is worsened by his ‘extreme impatience to be removed to Mansfield’: ‘They were
all very seriously frightened’.70 For Austen, however, a punitive fever is sufficient;
‘he was the better for ever for his illness’ and ‘became what he ought to be’,71
deserving of his position and advantages as oldest son. Austen is not prepared
to go as far as Smith. Tom must be brought to acknowledge his responsibilities,
but the culture of inheritance itself is maintained. Smith, however, does away
with this culture, substituting a culture of merit through the violent erasure of
the obstructive oldest son. Mrs Rayland chooses her heir, and Smith destroys the
mystique of primogeniture. Austen, in adapting Philip’s storyline so that Tom is
not ‘bad’, but merely selfish, preserves its allure.
The Old Manor House, then, provides the template for Mansfield Park. And
nearly all the characters, whichever body they inhabit, either seduce or are
seduced in some way. Even Mrs Rayland and Sir Thomas are in thrall to their
own consequence and authority; each sees her/himself as the centre of power
and expects their family to submit. Hence, Mrs Rayland keeps the Somerives
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at a distance acceptable to her and controls their interactions through what she
is and is not willing to allow them. Orlando becomes the focus of her domestic despotism as well as his own family’s desperate sycophancy. In this way, he
seduces Mrs Rayland, first by his name and his perceived resemblance to the
Raylands rather than the Somerives, and later by his determined courtly service
to her needs.72 Sir Thomas is less seductive than expectant; seeing no need to
coax the loyalty of his family, he simply requires it, although when he asks for
‘my little Fanny’ on his return from Antigua his soft tone is enough to seduce
Fanny into an ‘increase’ of ‘every tender feeling’.73 Mrs Lennard and Mrs Norris
are similarly seduced by their belief in their ability to manipulate and organize
their households; Mrs Lennard, like Tom, is required to suffer for a limited time
in atonement, while Mrs Norris, like Philip, suffers a virtual death, shut up with
the ‘unfortunate Maria … in another country’ where ‘their tempers became their
mutual punishment’.74
There are certain textual departures. Hammond notes that Austen ‘edit[s]
out the topical’ in her version of The Old Manor House,75 although this underestimates Austen’s historical scaffolding: ‘Austen puts her readers in command
of the post-abolitionist setting of Mansfield Park from the start’.76 But Smith’s
overt use of history and her open manipulations of genre are sublated in Austen’s
text.77 For all her punishment of Philip, Smith is also more forgiving of her
characters’ sexual transgressions: Warwick and Isabella live happily ever after;
Sir John merely fades from the text; Betty Richards, the servant-turned-courtesan, is allowed to enjoy her finery and her lifestyle. There are no solemn, sober
Edmunds or cast-off Marias; even Orlando, whose weakness and sycophancy
attracts his narrator’s scorn, is rewarded at the end with love and fortune. And
there are aspects the novels share that are unconnected to the seduction plot:
‘the decline of the country-house ideal … [and] the possibility, and the costs,
of its reclamation’; ‘the possibility that the family doesn’t always feel “safe”’; the
vision of ‘a world that struggles to renew itself, fails and fails, and finally succeeds minimally … a world that is in decline from the outset’; the pathological
self-obsession of its main characters.78 Indeed, even some of the ways in which
Mansfield Park’s modernity and novelty have been declared make its connections to The Old Manor House all the more meaningful. Brown calls it a ‘work
of the early nineteenth century … imbued with that era’s unique concept of itself
as an age of transition’.79 Kathryn Sutherland sees the novel as ‘coloured by the
conformism which marked British thinking in the later stages and immediate
aftermath of the European war against Napoleon’.80 Johnson calls the novel, very
convincingly, ‘experimental’.81 And yet for all its forward looking and nineteenthcentury distinctiveness, it is profoundly affected by its connections to The Old
Manor House. The recognition of Mansfield Park’s modernity, in other words,
suggests that modernity is another legacy of Smith’s.82
128
The intricacies of Mansfield Park represent Austen’s dynamic commitment
to Smith through her detailed indebtedness to The Old Manor House. And the
differing approaches to, say, the depiction of event or the psychology of characters have more to do with the development of the novel from the 1790s to the
1810s than they do to the capabilities of Smith or Austen.83 By following the
narratives’ deployment of the seduction plot, readers can see how first Smith
and then Austen render what in the novel of sensibility was merely a plot device
into a necessary element of characterization, structure, and meaning. It’s not
merely that characters seduce each other or succumb to seduction; both authors
reveal the attractions of systems and cultures as well as roguery and mischief. Sex
and desire, love and romance, history and politics, the historicity of the novels
themselves: all are imbued with a shared interest in and exposure of the narrative of enthrallment. And having hooked their readers, between them Smith and
Austen push the novel of the 1790s into the nineteenth century.84
9 CHARLOTTE SMITH’S THE BANISHED
MAN IN FRENCH TRANSLATION; OR THE
POLITICS OF NOVEL-WRITING DURING THE
REVOLUTION
Katherine Astbury
When Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man was published in 1794 at the height
of the French Revolution, the Analytical Review considered it ‘an amende honorable for her past political transgressions’.1 Similarly, the European Magazine
received the novel favourably because it ‘makes an Englishman thrill with added
horror at the idea of introducing into England any portion of those sentiments
which have already wrapt an empire in flames’.2 Although her earliest novels
had been more sentimental than political, Smith’s prose work of the mid-1790s
appeared at a time when the link between politics and the written word was a
powerful one. The Banished Man’s plot is concerned with events of great actuality: it opens in 1792 with the impact of the Revolutionary wars and covers the
execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793 as well as the radical period of
the Terror. Smith offers characters reflecting a range of political opinions, with
particular emphasis on the unfortunate émigré hero, d’Alonville, and his Revolutionary brother, Du Bosse. French radicalism is consistently criticized in the
text, although the depiction of the republican Polish exile, Carlowitz, and the
idealistic Englishman, Ellesmere, ensures that ‘the tone of the work favours the
liberal’.3 The setting, the sympathetic portrayal of émigrés and the constant criticism of France make it perhaps a surprising novel to translate into French. The
fact that it was translated (in 1799, although not published until 1803) is partly
due to Charlotte Smith’s unqualified success as a novelist in France during the
Revolutionary decade and partly due to the vogue for émigré novels that was
sweeping Europe at the turn of the century.
This article aims to examine how Charlotte Smith’s novel was adapted to
conform more naturally with aesthetic and political concerns across the Channel. The translator, Louis-Antoine Marquand, subverts Smith’s political message
to make the novel more acceptable to French readers. This decision can only be
– 129 –
130
understood in the context of literature in France during the Revolutionary decade which saw the rise of the ‘European’ émigré novel.
The European Émigré Novel
The French Revolution exerts a curiously harmonizing effect on literary production in the final decade of the eighteenth century as writers across Europe, but
especially in those countries immediately bordering France, found inspiration in
the events it threw up. In particular, the dispersal of émigrés across the continent
provided writers with a common series of plot devices through which to explore
notions of identity and the interplay of politics and sensibility. Emigrés themselves such as Sénac de Meilhan and Mme de Genlis wrote novels about their
personal experiences but English, German and Swiss writers who witnessed emigration also use the émigré novel to great effect.4 Indeed, it is writers in countries
neighbouring France who first adopt emigration as a plot device. The Dutchborn Isabelle de Charrière, marrried and living in Switzerland, published Lettres
trouvées dans des portes-feuilles d’émigrés as early as 1793, with a heroine exiled in
England, her intended husband in Switzerland and her father fighting with the
Prince de Condé’s army in the Rhineland. The German novelist Auguste Lafontaine made his literary name with an émigré novel in 1794: Klara du Plessis und
Klairant, the sentimental tale of the noble Klara separated from her beloved but
untitled Klairant when the du Plessis family emigrates to Germany. Lafontaine,
who had travelled into Revolutionary France with the Prussian army, incorporated his own eyewitness accounts of émigrés in Koblenz into the novel. English
novelists also quickly capitalized on the numerous examples of émigrés around
them in London and the South-East in particular to provide an eager reading
public with displaced heroes, dramatic real events and plausible, if extraordinary invented ones. Charlotte Smith, with The Banished Man, Mary Robinson,
with the much neglected Hubert de Sevrac (1796) and Frances Burney, with
the slightly later The Wanderer (1814) are three prominent British writers of
émigré novels. It is perhaps not surprising that French writers were slower to
adopt the genre and those who do were often writing from personal experience.
The French émigré novel with the highest profile among literary critics today is
Sénac de Meilhan’s L’Émigré (1797), though it received no critical attention at
the time it was published. Sénac’s own emigration reads like one of the itineraries
from an émigré novel: he went from London to Rome to Saint-Petersburg via
Vienna and Warsaw before he settled in Germany and wrote L’Émigré. Mme de
Genlis, another prominent émigrée, went to London; her Les petits émigrés was
published in 1798.
Just as the characters in the novels move from one country to another, these
texts were often then translated from one language into another. For instance,
Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man in French Translation
131
Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres trouvées dans des portes-feuilles d’émigrés was translated by the German writer Therese Huber who changed the ending to reflect her
own political beliefs; Auguste Lafontaine’s novel Klara du Plessis und Klairant
was translated into both French and English in 1797. The émigré novel serves
as a useful indicator of the circulation of ideas and people at a time when writers were having to reassess notions of verisimilitude since the daily events of the
Revolution were often stranger than fiction.5
The opening of Smith’s The Banished Man bears striking resemblance to
what is often considered to be not just the archetypal French émigré novel but
also the founder of the genre, Sénac de Meilhan’s L’Émigré, written in 1794 but
not published until 1797.6 French critics are of course erroneous in their labelling since although it is one of the earliest by an émigré, it is not the first novel
about emigration. The division between those novels written by those who have
experienced emigration first hand and those who have witnessed it second hand
is an artificial one, as the beginning of both Sénac’s and Charlotte Smith’s novels shows. Sénac de Meilhan’s novel opens with the injured émigré protagonist
being taken in by two sympathetic German noblewomen who care for him in
their castle. Smith’s opens with the hero, d’Alonville and his dying father being
taken in by the German Baroness de Rosenheim and Madame d’Alberg, her
daughter, in the castle of Rosenheim. The two works were written at the same
time and there is nothing to suggest that Sénac was aware of Charlotte Smith’s
work when he devised the opening to his novel. It is instead more a reflection on
the way in which writers across Europe were exploiting plot devices linked to the
Revolution. The exceptional circumstances surrounding the forced migration of
nobles and the disruption caused by the Revolutionary wars are elements shared
by all writers of the period regardless of nationality. After all, emigration as a plot
device is by definition something that crosses borders.
The Reception of Charlotte Smith in France
Smith’s fiction appeared in Britain from 1788 until 1802. There is obviously
always a delay of some sort before a work can be translated and received in
another country and the reception of Charlotte Smith in France is further complicated by the socio-political implications of the French revolutionary decade,
and by the effect this had on the literary scene. The initial impact of the Revolution was immediate and dramatic. The state journal, the Mercure de France,
which for decades had published monthly short stories as well as literary reviews,
abandoned the monthly tale between July and December 1789 and considerably
reduced the column space available for reviews of literary work. While the literary market did pick up again in 1790, as hopes rose that the Revolution would
soon be over, the uncertainties of the political climate during the Terror of 1793
132
and 1794 brought literary production to an almost complete standstill once
more.7 The decade is, therefore, one of extreme difficulty for writers, publishers
and booksellers, who had to deal with practical problems such as paper shortages, as well as a dramatic shift in focus away from aesthetic works to ephemeral
political brochures and pamphlets.
Despite – or indeed perhaps because of – the problems affecting the French
literary scene, almost all of Smith’s novels were translated into French. There
were two separate translations of her first novel, Emmeline, both in 1788, and
both of which went to new editions later in the decade. Ethelinde was first translated in 1790 but appears to have gone unnoticed until a new edition appeared
in 1796. Desmond is translated with just one year’s delay, appearing in 1793, and
The Young Philosopher is also translated almost immediately, appearing in 1799.
Celestina, on the other hand, is not translated until 1795, four years after its publication in England, and the Old Manor House not until 1799, six years after the
first edition appeared in England. The Banished Man, first published in 1794,
was not published in France until 1803. The same translator, L.-Antoine Marquand translated these last two texts and it is probable that The Banished Man
would have appeared sooner had he not died and left a friend to arrange for the
publication of the volume. Montalbert does not appear until 1800, according to
the Annonces in the Journal de Paris and the Journal typographique.
As the reception of Smith in France is not well known, the following list is
offered of contemporary translations from her novels into French, in the order
in which her works were translated.
Emmeline
Emmeline ou l’Orpheline du château, traduit de l’Anglois, 4 vols (London and
Paris: Letellier, Desenne, 1788). There were two new editions of this translation:
Paris: Briand, An II [1794] and Paris: Letellier, 1799), both 5 vols.
L’Orpheline du château ou Emmeline, par Charlotte Smith, traduit de l’Anglois
sur la dernière édition, 4 vols (London and Paris: Buisson, 1788). Other editions include Maestricht, 1788; Maestricht, 1794 and Paris: Maradan, An VII
[1799].
Ethelinde
Ethelinde ou la récluse du lac par Charlotte Smith, traduit de l’anglais par M De
La Montagne, auteur de plusieurs ouvrages dramatiques, 4 vols (London and
Paris: Lavillette, 1790). Other editions: Paris: Fuchs, 1796; Paris: Maradan, An
VII [1799]; Paris: Renard, An XIII-1805.
Desmond
Desmond, ou l’Amant philanthrope. Traduit de l’anglais de Charlotte Smith par
L.-C.-D., 4 vols (Paris: Denné, 1793).
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Celestina
Célestine, ou la victime des préjugés, par Charlotte Smith. Traduit de l’anglais sur
la seconde édition par la citoyenne R..., 4 vols [Mme de Rome née Marné de Morville] (Paris: Buisson, An III [1795]).
The Young Philosopher
Le Jeune Philosophe, traduit de l’anglais de Charlotte Smith, 3 vols (Paris: au bureau
de librairie, an VII [1799]). Other edition: Paris: Nicolle, An IX [1801].
Rural Walks in Dialogues
Les Promenades champêtres, dialogues à l’usage des jeunes personnes, traduits de
l’anglois de Charlotte Smith, 3 vols (Geneva: Paschoud & Paris: Maradan, an VII
[1799]).
The Old Manor House
Roland ou l’héritier vertueux, histoire en cinq volumes par Charlotte Smith,
traduite de l’Anglais par le Citoyen M..., 5 vols [L.-Antoine Marquand] (Paris:
Gratiot, An VII [1799]).
Le Testament de la vieille cousine, traduit sur la seconde édition par Mme CéréBarbé, 4 vols (Paris: Mathiot, 1816).8
Montalbert
Montalbert et Rosalie, traduit de l’anglais de Charlotte Smith, 3 vols (Paris: Testud, An VIII [1800]). Other edition: Paris: Locard, An XIII-1805.
The Banished Man
Le Proscrit par Charlotte Smith, auteur d’Emmeline, d’Ethelinde, de Célestine, de
Montalbert, des Promenades champêtres, etc, etc. Traduit de l’anglais sur la seconde
édition par feu L.-Antoine Marquand, 4 vols (Paris: Le Normant, An XI-1803).
The reception of ‘mistress’ Smith’s novels is almost entirely favourable from the
outset. Given the scarcity of French novel writers, particularly in the first half of
the decade, she should be considered an important literary figure in France during the Revolution. The most detailed reflections on her novels appear at either
end of the period covered by her translations: in a review of L’Orpheline du château (The Orphan of the Castle, as Emmeline was entitled in French) in 1789 and
the editor’s preface to The Banished Man in 1803. The reviewer in the Mercure
of November 1789 who comments on the translation of Emmeline singles the
author out as rising above the mediocre standard of many of the translations of
English novels flooding the French market at that time. Smith’s novel is not just
appreciated for the interest it provokes in the reader, or the increasingly affecting
incidents with which it abounds, but above all for her characterization. Smith
is held up to be a model for those wanting to write novels for her mastery of
portraying opposing characters, an ‘art difficile qui demande une grande connais-
134
sance du cœur humain’ (‘a difficult art which requires considerable knowledge
of the human heart’).9 In particular, Emmeline is praised as ‘un des plus beaux
personnages que les Romanciers aient imaginé, un de ceux qui soient les mieux
soutenus, du commencement jusqu’à la fin, et qui sachent intéresser depuis la
première page jusqu’à la dernière’ (‘one of the most beautiful characters that novelists have ever imagined, one of the best carried off from the beginning to the
end and of interest from the first page to the last’).10
Praise for Charlotte Smith’s characterization remained constant throughout
the decade. The Journal de Paris review of Ethelinde in 1797 comments that ‘un
roman en quatre volumes n’est pas trop long, quand dès les premières lignes, le
lecteur prend un vif intérêt pour le personnage principal, et que cet intérêt va
toujours croissant à mesure que les objets environnans multiplient le choc des
passions’ (‘A four-volume novel is not too long when, from the opening lines,
the reader feels a keen interest for the protagonist and when this interest ever
increases as the objects surrounding the protagonists multiply the shock of the
passions’).11 The only criticism is that the women tend to faint a little too often
for the reviewer’s taste but the reviewer excuses this on the grounds that ‘peutêtre a-t-elle senti plus vivement que nous combien en certaines circonstances, le
moral à d’influence et d’empire sur le physique’ (‘perhaps she felt more keenly
than we did the extent to which the moral has an influence on, and an empire
over, the physical in certain circumstances’).12 That Smith had a good reputation
in France is confirmed by the review of Le Jeune Philosophe, the translation of
which the reviewer feels will increase her reputation.13 Furthermore, ‘l’invention
et l’exécution sont également heureuses’ (‘both the invention and the execution
are equally successful’). The fact that most of her novels are published with illustrations at the start of each volume is another indicator of the standing of the
author.
The Avant-Propos to Le Proscrit, Marquand’s translation of The Banished
Man serves as a retrospective review of Smith’s appeal in France during the
Revolutionary decade. The editor, the literary friend to whom Marquand had
left his manuscript, comments on the vogue for English novels that the Mercure
de France had already complained of back in 1789: ‘Depuis quelques années,
les presses de Paris ont gémi sous le poids de nombreuses traductions de roman
anglais’ (‘for some years, the presses of Paris have groaned under the weight of
numerous translations of English novels’).14 The scathing opinion of the editor is
that most of these works were selected without taste or thought and he feels that
the reading public were as guilty as translators for eagerly devouring anything
with the label ‘English’ attached to it. Anglomania in France had been a regular
feature of the literary scene since the 1730s but it is true that there are a disproportionately high number of English women writers being published in France
during the Revolution.15 More work is needed on the reception of British writers
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in France in the 1790s to explain why English fiction remains so popular, despite
the two countries being at war for most of the decade. Those English novelists of
merit singled out by the editor here include Elizabeth Inchbald, Matthew Lewis,
and Smith, who holds a particularly high position in the rank of English novelists in his opinion. These novelists are appreciated in France above all for their
‘connaissance profonde du cœur humain’ (‘deep knowledge of the human heart’)
as well as their ‘saine philosophie’ (‘healthy philosophy’) and ‘grandes lumières’
(‘considerable Enlightenment’),16 terms laden with political meaning by 1803
when it was common to attribute the ills of the Revolution to the philosophes of
the preceding century.
The shift in focus on terms such as Enlightenment and philosophie and above
all the political content of The Banished Man, make it a particularly interesting text to study in more detail when looking at Smith in France. Marquand,
the translator, had democratic tendencies and he too praised her ‘philosophie’17
as well as her knowledge of mankind. The novel is prefaced by the translator’s
reflections on Smith’s personal circumstances, something which represents an
important novelty with respect to her reception in France as her novels were
usually translated without either her preface or one by the translator. Here, Marquand makes it clear that Smith was writing ‘courbée sous le poids de l’adversité
et même de la misère’ (‘bent under the weight of adversity and even misery’),18
motivated primarily by maternal love. He correctly identifies the portrayal of
Charlotte Denzil, the fictional novelist as a representation of Smith herself, demonstrating that he has picked up on the references in the preface and footnotes
which refer to the circumstances in which Smith was writing and on the biographical elements in the novel.19 It is likely that he was drawn to Smith because
of perceived similarities in their respective positions; the editor draws out the
comparisons between the author and the translator as both show signs of a ‘travail précipité’ (‘hurried work’)20 to earn money for their families.
But it is for the political content that The Banished Man interests both editor and translator in France. The editor comments that because of its subject
matter, it is likely to receive an even more favourable reception than her earlier
novels. Emigration was a subject that had divided families and opinions from
the beginning of the Revolution. The first to leave the country had been the
King’s brothers in July 1789. At first, only a trickle of noblemen emigrated; it
was not until 1791 that large numbers start to leave and that émigré troops start
to be formed in Coblentz. Legislation quickly followed, stripping émigrés of
their possessions and placing family members left in France under surveillance.
In October 1792, all émigrés were banished in perpetuity and any émigrés who
had returned to France are required to leave upon pain of death. About 10%
of those emigrating were military officers who joined in the allied attacks on
Revolutionary France. Most were based in Germany but small cohorts helped
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the British advances on Toulon (1794) and Brittany (1795). Relatives of émigrés
were regularly singled out for repressive measures by the Revolutionary governments – as late as July 1799, legislation was being passed to make relatives
responsible for acts carried out by their émigré relations.21 In 1803, Napoleon
as First Consul offered an amnesty to French émigrés; many had in fact already
re-entered France and would take up leading positions in the First Empire and
later during the Restoration.
The editor of Le Proscrit cannot entirely approve of Smith’s representation
of a royalist and indeed it would still have been impolitic to do so at the time
– Napoleon was styling himself not only as the man who had ended the Revolution but also as someone who retained a number of its achievements. Rather
than dwell on d’Alonville’s nobility and emigration, the editor prefers instead
to focus on the link that virtue makes between individuals, regardless of ‘la différence des opinions religieuses et politiques’ (‘differences of opinion on political
and religious matters’).22 Again, the context in which these editorial comments
are made is reflected in the text: the Concordat of 1801 has restored the place of
Catholicism in France after the de-Christianizing phase of the Revolution but
Napoleon has also allowed Protestants to worship freely. His Code Civil would
attempt to restore order to the nation, in particular by focusing on reinforcing
the nuclear family. His emphasis on morality betrayed his Jacobin roots but was
symptomatic of the new era. Although the novel was published in France after
Napoleon has allowed émigrés to return, it can be seen that it deals nevertheless
with a topic of considerable political actuality and one that had divided opinion
across Europe.
The translator, Marquand, writing four years earlier, while the proscription
on émigrés returning to France was still in place, prefers to focus on the suffering
of those exiles, condemned ‘à errer dans un profond isolement sur la surface du
globe’ (‘to wander in acute isolation over the surface of the globe’).23 The ‘adroite
combinaison de la fiction et de la réalité’ (‘skilful combination of fiction and
reality’)24 increases the impact the text would have had on the reader, particularly in France in 1803, when it would be read by those directly implicated in the
emigration described. The translator is obliged, however, to stress Smith’s revolutionary credentials in reminding the reader of how she had enthusiastically
embraced the Revolution up until the Terror. He is also forced to declare his own
democratic principles for fear of being accused of attacking ‘le gouvernement
républicain’ (‘the Republican government’).25 The pronouncements by the editor in the Avant-Propos are an attempt to justify the publication, but of course
the situation is more complicated than the preface might suggest. Smith may
have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution at first, but this novel is
pretty harsh in its condemnation of France and d’Alonville, who is consistently
portrayed as the hero of the novel, is resolutely royalist and aristocratic. For M.
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O. Grenby, d’Alonville’s died-in-the-wool aristocratic sentiment makes him the
recipient of ‘most of Smith’s subtle scorn’,26 but it is easy to see how a French
translator might have interpreted Smith’s intentions differently. D’Alonville is
intolerant of those who are in favour of the Revolution, abhorring its supporters
and the ‘dreadful havoc’27 they have caused to his beloved France. Significantly,
he finds it ‘degrading’ (an expression used twice) to be disguised as – and therefore taken for – a peasant, one of those whose ‘politics he detested’.28 While he
shows fleeting pity towards those from lower classes who have suffered during
the Revolution, his barely disguised contempt for the ‘pilfering peasantry’29
was read at face value by Marquand when he was translating the text. In missing
Smith’s scorn, Marquand, like other readers of the time, read d’Alonville as an
unrepentant aristocrat and moderated his portrayal to make him more acceptable to French readers as a ‘good’ émigré.
Other representations of ‘good émigrés’ by writers from the same period
such as Isabelle de Charrière in Lettres trouvées dans des portes-feuilles d’émigrés
(1793) or Auguste Lafontaine in Klara du Plessis (1794) reveal mitigating characteristics that make their protagonists sympathetic despite their aristocratic
background. Germaine and Klara, the heroines of these two works are much
more open to the lower social classes than d’Alonville. Alphonse, Germaine’s
lover in Lettres trouvées dans des portes- feuilles d’émigrés explicitly refuses to fight
against his own country, unlike d’Alonville who begins the novel as a member
of the counter-revolutionary army and who in the course of the novel seriously
contemplates going to the Vendée to help with the counter-revolutionary cause.
Marquand cannot entirely ‘convert’ d’Alonville partly because he suffers none of
the ideological crises that beset a character like Alphonse. He does marry someone of lesser status but in true novelistic tradition, her virtue counteracts the
family background and being with Angelina does not seem to have broadened
his opinions on society. The circumstances in which Smith was writing in Britain explain why her ‘good’ émigré is perhaps less tolerant and less open to an
appreciation of the lower classes than comparable heroes in Swiss or German fiction. D’Alonville’s arrival in England shows us that large swathes of the country
looked poorly upon Frenchmen. In portraying a largely sympathetic Frenchman
who believes in order and in a nobleman’s duty to serve his country, Smith can at
the same time attack radicals in England and defend the French émigrés.
While the translator agrees with Smith that condemning all émigrés ‘indistinctement’ (‘without distinction’) is ‘injuste’ (‘unjust’),30 the context in which he
is writing means that he does not always share the political message she is putting
forward. And yet as translator rather than adapter, he is limited in how far he can
redefine the politics of the novel. How then does Marquand try to resolve these
contradictions within the translation itself ? On the whole, the translation is
faithful and accurate - Marquand has succeeded in what he set out to do, which
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is ‘de rendre, avec le plus de fidélité possible, la manière et les idées de mistress
Smith’ (‘to convey with the most faithfulness possible, the manner and the ideas
of mistress Smith’).31 Some small changes bring the novel more into line with the
French tradition - Smith’s preface is omitted entirely for instance, as are the epigraphs at the start of each chapter as both of these devices were out of fashion in
France at the time. For the main part, his attempts to reconcile his political position and Smith’s come across in a series of lengthy footnotes which appear from
the second volume onwards. Some political comment finds its way into the body
of the novel nevertheless. So Ellesmere’s belief that reason and justice ‘would
have rendered France, under a limited monarchy, the most flourishing and happy
nation of Europe’, is modified by the more democratically minded Marquand
who omits any reference to the ‘limited monarchy’ that Ellesmere favours.32 It
seems that Marquand interpreted Ellesmere’s Girondin position as being that of
Smith herself and systematically amends Ellesmere’s pronouncements to make
him into a supporter of democracy rather than limited monarchy.
Similarly, Marquand tempers d’Alonville’s view that the French were
‘infatuated’, preferring to see them as ‘malheureux’ (‘unhappy’).33 He reduces
d’Alonville’s father’s anti-Revolutionary stance – De Fayolles in Smith’s version
‘entirely disapproved’ of the Revolution and of the concessions the King was
making; in the translation this becomes ‘il s’étoit retiré dès le commencement
d’une révolution qu’il désapprouvoit’ (‘he withdrew [to his estates] from the
beginning of a Revolution of which he disapproved’).34 In a footnote to this, the
translator goes so far as to blame the nobility for wanting to ‘comprimer l’énergie
d’une dignité renaissante’ (‘constricting the energy of a re-emergent dignity’).35
Marquand goes on to criticize Smith openly in this footnote for labelling the
Revolutionary Army an army of sans-culottes, since, he points out, many of those
fighting had been conscripted from all levels of society and in his view they were
only fighting to defend their country against the foreign powers of Europe who
were serving their own interests rather than those of humanity.36 He remarks:
‘Mistress Smith, même, quoique, en plusieurs endroits, elle a soutenu la nécessité de la révolution, ne me paroît pas l’avoir assez séparée de ses excès, sur-tout
lorsqu’elle nomme l’armée française, l’armée des sans-culottes’ (‘Mistress Smith,
even, despite in several places having supported the need for Revolution, doesn’t
seem to me to have sufficiently separated it from its excesses, especially when
she calls the French army the sans-culotte army’), thereby showing clearly his
interpretation of Smith’s political views in the novel.37 One of Marquand’s most
strongly expressed personal beliefs is a criticism of those who outrage nature ‘en
assimilant l’être vertueux au scélérat, parce que tous deux tiennent dans la société
un rang pareil’ (‘by assimilating the virtuous being and the scoundrel because
both hold the same rank in society’),38 which also goes some way to explain-
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ing the minor alterations he makes to the wording of the novel, especially with
regard to the aristocrat d’Alonville.
Marquand does not consider life in France to be a ‘tragedy’ but a ‘tourment’
(‘torment’) and he consistently plays down d’Alonville’s and his father’s royalist
beliefs, preferring to style them as honest, courageous, worthy ‘honnêtes hommes’
in the tradition of sentimental fiction of the time, rather than as representatives
of the nobility.39 Any scorn Smith might have been demonstrating towards
d’Alonville is lost on Marquand who amends the characterization to make him
less offensive to French readers. So when d’Alonville is imprisoned, Marquand
omits the reference to ‘the blood he descended from’, and translates gentleman by
‘honnête homme’ to move the focus towards behaviour rather than bloodline.40
He is not afraid to criticize d’Alonville’s ‘esprit de parti’ (‘partisan mentality’)41
and indeed regularly criticizes the French nobility for ‘leur absurde opposition ‘
(‘their absurd opposition’)42 to the Rights of Man which then paved the way for
‘une poignée de factieux’ (‘a handful of agitators’)43 to sully the Revolution. He
toned down Smith’s praise for Marie-Antoinette (‘this unhappy woman, so lately
the admiration of the world’) and does not translate Ellesmere’s expressed belief
that her execution was a national disgrace.44 If anything, Marquand is more
critical of those in power during the Terror than Smith, condemning their ‘rage
insatiable’ (‘insatiable anger’)45 and despairing at the Revolutionary war which
‘moissonnait les jours de tant de braves guerriers et dévastait des provinces autrefois si belles et si florissantes’ (‘was mowing down so many brave fighters and
devastating provinces which were once so beautiful and so flourishing’).46 This is
entirely consistent with his democratic, republican principles. He is throughout
the text anti-nobility and anti-monarchy in his footnotes, subtly shifting the message he thinks Smith was putting across. He reads her as suggesting that England
is a superior country and so, when Smith criticizes the Revolutionary government taxing those whose children have emigrated, Marquand counter-attacks
by pointing out how easy it is for any ‘créancier prétendu’ (‘alleged creditor’)47 in
Britain to serve a writ against an honest citizen, and again in Volume IV, when
Angelina talks of the way in which the Denzil family have suffered at the hands
of the English legal system, he asks if the English government is really ‘le meilleur
des gouvernements possibles’ (‘the best of all possible governments’).48
Marquand does not only comment on Smith’s political beliefs but is led to
remark on a number of occasions about the novel itself. These annotations reveal
much about the differing literary traditions in France and England at the turn of
the century. From the Avant-Propos, Marquand has already made it perfectly clear
that he feels Smith wraps up her novels too quickly, suggesting that she is ‘toujours impatiente de terminer’ (‘always impatient to get to the end’),49 gathering
‘dans un seul chapitre une foule de détails, qui demanderait souvent à être développés davantage, et en omet quelquefois qu’on regrette de n’y pas trouver’ (‘in a
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single chapter a host of details which often ought to be developed further and
sometimes leaves out some details the reader is sorry not to have found there’).50
Similarly, in the course of the novel, he finds fault with what he considers to be a
tendency to leap from one scene to another in a rather lumbering way, and occasionally his frustration comes out in the translation. For instance, when Smith
says ‘the conversations ... shall be passed over, as well as less material occurrences,
till Ellesmere and his emigrant friend arrived in London’, Marquand translates
this line as ‘Nous nous transportons soudainement à l’arrivée de D’Ellemere et
de son ami à Londres’ (‘suddenly we find ourselves transported to the arrival of
Ellesmere and his friend in London’).51 The ‘suddenly’ hints at his disapproval.
Another indication of the way in which Marquand is having to make adjustments for the French novelistic tradition is the need to point out to readers that
the letters Mme Denzil receives from Humphry Hotgoose, Anthony Lambskin
and Josepth Clapper are deliberately ‘fort incorrectes’ (‘very incorrect’);52 French
classical notions of style meant that even the lowest social classes had to be represented with perfect and eloquent language on the page. This was starting to
change but there was much resistance to the use of poor language and style even
if it was realistic and fact that the translator needed to add this footnote, even at
this late date in the century, indicates that Marquand felt that French bienséance
was still not encouraging writers to indulge in that level of accuracy and verisimilitude.
There are signs, though, that Marquand’s text stands on the cusp between the
sentimental tradition of the eighteenth century and the burgeoning Romantic
tradition of the nineteenth. The Romantic movement developed later in France
than in England, delayed in part by the Revolution. The term ‘Romantic’ only
really enters literary currency in France with the publication of Germaine de
Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1810), although the archetypal Romantic hero, René, who
would inspire Byron amongst countless others, had appeared in 1802 as part of
Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme. Romanticism in France is initially concerned with an outlook on life and the soul-searching common to so many of
the early French Romantic literary characters is a direct result of the upheaval
and displacement of the Revolution. Chateaubriand had himself been an émigré
in London. Marquand’s translation, written before René and yet appearing in
print the year after it, hints at how the notion of a ‘Romantic’ outlook on life
is beginning to emerge. He feels it necessary to add a footnote on the use of the
adjectives ‘romanesque’ and ‘romantique’53 as possible translations of ‘romantic’.
‘Romantique’ was commonly used in French to refer only to scenery - see its use
in Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire for instance - but Marquand here
makes a case for it to be used to refer to people: ‘romanesque ne se prend qu’en
mauvaise part, il entraîne avec soi l’idée du ridicule; un esprit romantique, au contraire, est un esprit mieux organisé qu’un autre, qui ayant échappé à l’influence de
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la corruption sociale, a conçu des sentiments, des actions et des choses, une idée
particulière, à laquelle se mêle une teinte d’exaltation qui ne peut produire que
d’heureux résultats’ (‘Romanesque is only used negatively, it carries with it the
idea of ridicule; a romantic mind on the other hand is one better organized than
another and one which, having escaped from the influence of social corruption,
has conceived a particular idea of sentiment, action, and things to which is added
a touch of exaltation which can only produce happy results’).54 It is interesting
that it is not the ‘honnête homme’ cum romantic hero, d’Alonville who provokes
these reflections, but Ellesmere, to whom Smith attaches the adjective romantic
on a number of occasions. The translator interprets Smith’s use of ‘romantic’ to
be negative and slightly pejorative and so he prefers not to use ‘romantique’ as
the translation, choosing ‘romanesque’ instead but justifying his actions in this
extensive footnote. The translator’s sympathies lie with Ellesmere throughout
the text but he clearly feels that it would be going too far to adjust his characterization to fit this new notion of ‘romantique’ being a positive term. The footnote
provides a very early example of the shift in French from ‘romantique’ referring
only to landscape to a broader and more positive concept linked to the notion of
exaltation but the fact that Marquand felt it necessary to explain its meaning and
his decision ultimately to shy away from using the phrase ‘romantique’ shows
that the translation remains more firmly aligned with its eighteenth-century
predecessors than with the romantic novel post-Chateaubriand where Romantic characters and behaviour would become much more frequent.
At one point in the text, political and moral/aesthetic concerns converge.
Marquand highlighted it in the preface, referring to a ‘défaut’ in the novel which
‘j’ai taché de faire disparaître dans ma traduction’ (’I have tried to make disappear in my translation’).55 In fact, what he means by this is that he rewrites the
plot. This change to the plot is worth exploring in more detail. D’Alonville goes
to Revolutionary France to find his friend, de Touranges but is captured by some
Revolutionary peasants and, deemed to be ‘a prisoner of some consequence’,56
taken to Rennes. When brought to trial, he discovers that one of the judges is
the abbé Heurthofen who had crossed his path in Germany and the other is
his brother, Du Bosse. Rather than sent straight to the guillotine, he is instead
transferred to Paris and on the way has a tête-à-tête with his brother. The changes
in plot principally apply to the scene between the two brothers, in Volume 3,
Chapter 10. In the original, Du Bosse is a fanatical supporter of the Revolution who talks of ‘immortal liberty’, ‘of tyrants – Tarquins, and despotism’, and
who had hoped to save his brother’s life by bringing him ‘over to the Republican
party’.57 His speech is largely reported so that the author can distance herself
from the extremism represented. Du Bosse allows d’Alonville to escape captivity
and introduces him to members of his intimate circle, hopeful that vice might
convert him to the Revolutionary cause where politics had failed. Fearful that
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the new direction the Revolution was taking was going to force ‘true patriots’58
like him to flee, he asks d’Alonville to take his jewels and money to London
where he would join him. Betrayed by the treachery of Heurthofen, Du Bosse
is guillotined before he can make good his escape, although d’Alonville makes it
safely to Flanders.
In the translation, Dubosse is portrayed as having ‘embrassé avec ardeur le
parti de la révolution’ (‘enthusiastically embraced the course of the Revolution’)
– partly through ambition – but thereafter ‘les mesures sanguinaires qui en avaient été la suite, l’avaient fortement révolté’ (‘the bloodthirsty measures which
followed had appalled him greatly’).59 Fearful for his life, he does not have the
courage to resist and had ‘suivi le torrent’ (‘followed the torrent’), though by the
time he meets his brother, his rejection of the Revolution is nigh on complete.
The sight of his brother completes his political transformation and he arranges
for d’Alonville to head to Flanders so that he can return to England where he
intends to join him. The editor adds a footnote to the French translation explaining the change so that readers are aware of it from the outset. Dubosse ‘devient
par l’effet de ses remords, le libérateur de son frère’ (‘becomes the person to liberate his brother through remorse’).60 The editor considers this reworking of
Smith’s plot ‘plus morale’ (‘more moral’)61 whereas in Smith’s version, Dubosse
keeping d’Alonville alive seems, in his view, only ‘parce qu’il juge qu’il est plus
profitable à ses intérêts et aux circonstances de le faire servir d’instrument à ses
projets’ (‘because he judges it more beneficial to his interests and to the circumstances to make him serve as an instrument of his projects’).62
The change in plot is as much to reconcile Marquand’s political views with
those of Smith as it is to increase the morality of the novel. Consistently Marquand has shown that he felt the Revolution had been betrayed but, unlike Smith,
he did not renounce his belief in it, in the Republic or in democracy. A repentant
Dubosse who has been led astray by the ‘poignée de factieux’63 fits much more
neatly into his understanding of the Revolution than the original plot. Smith, on
the other hand, is reinforcing her distancing from the Revolution by portraying
Du Bosse as a Gothic villain, albeit one racked by guilt and shame. The remorse
in the Marquand version is much more intense and fits entirely into the moralizing tradition of the French eighteenth-century sentimental novel. Dubosse
avait autrefois commis des fautes, et l’ardeur inconsidérée de son caractère l’avait porté
à des excès et qu’il déplorait, et auxquels jusqu’alors la faiblesse qui lui était naturelle,
l’avait empêché de renoncer. Mais la vue de son frère avait réveillé avec une force nouvelle tous les reproches que lui faisait continuellement sa conscience, il se décida à
rompre les liens qui l’attachaient à une horde de scélérats indignes de l’existence.
(Dubosse had in the past committed faults, and the excessive ardour of his character
had led him to extremes he deplored, and to which up until then his natural weakness
had prevented him from renouncing. But the sight of his brother had revealed with
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a new force all of the reproaches that his conscience had been making to him continually, and he decided to break the ties that attached to him to abandon a horde of
villains unworthy of life.)64
Marquand even has Heurthofen have an affair with Dubosse’s wife, as if his
dastardly behaviour was not already sufficiently evident in Smith’s original. The
reworking means that there is no need for d’Alonville to be taken to meet Mme
du Guenir or her acquaintances, simplifying the action to focus on the two
brothers and on the sacrificial nature of Dubosse’s death.
Both Smith in 1794 and Marquand in 1799 are capitalizing on the vogue
for émigré novels that swept Europe. Able to exploit the potential of the combination of fiction and reality, both offer versions of the Revolution appropriate
for their readership. While Smith is careful to stress the advantages of England
and the British means of government, and to distance herself from any early
enthusiasm for the Revolution, Marquand is able to modify and mitigate these
political gestures by careful choice of word or phrase, a footnote, or reworkings
of the plot. Not all of the tensions between his democratic tendencies and the
novel’s pro-royalist stance are resolved – it is after all a translation rather than a
pure adaptation,65 but one of the factors that contributed so much to the success of the émigré novel in France, England, Switzerland and Germany, was its
flexibility. After all, ‘on ne peut s’empêcher d’éprouver de l’intérêt pour un être
qu’accable l’infortune, lors même qu’il a des torts à se reprocher’ (‘one cannot
help but be interested in a person weighed down by misfortune even if they have
committed wrongs’)66 (the editor, B…y de G…E, xviii). In exploiting a tale about
an exile, Smith and Marquand, like Sénac de Meilhan, Auguste Lafontaine and
Isabelle de Charrière, were able to provide riveting fiction which the readers
could interpret according to their own political allegiances.67
10 ‘THIS VILLAGE WONDER’: CHARLOTTE
SMITH’S ‘WHAT IS SHE?’ AND THE
IDEOLOGICAL COMEDY OF CURIOSITY
Diego Saglia
‘She is too good, or, at least, too silent for one to be comfortable with her’.1 Thus,
in the opening of Charlotte Smith’s comedy What Is She? (1798), the maid Winifred describes the elusive character of her otherwise irreproachable mistress Mrs
Derville. The same feeling of discomfort is emphasized by the lady’s suitor, Lord
Orton, who, disguised as the impecunious and troubled Mr Belford, exclaims:
‘Incomprehensible woman! Her situation, her mind, every thing about her, is
mysterious. Yet my heart mocks at the doubts of my reason, and I have scarcely
courage to wish them satisfied – yet I must know more of her, or endeavour to
forget that I have known her at all’.2 Thus Smith posits the mysterious woman
as the centre of her play’s action and the pivot in the love-story which, in line
with comedic convention, is its thematic, affective and ideological mainstay. In
addition, the fact that both Winifred and Orton/Belford are affected by Mrs
Derville’s unusual behaviour stresses the profound impact of her own enigma
on the community of people around her. Accordingly, an irresistible curiosity
urges the dramatis personae to pry into her identity and seek to reconstruct the
narrative of her life.
Placing Mrs Derville under the joint headings of mystery and secrecy, Smith
increases her long list of suffering, persecuted female wanderers. Also in the
generic context of the drama Smith’s use of curiosity does not represent a drastic departure from an eighteenth-century tradition numbering such influential
precedents as Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body (1709), one of the most successful of eighteenth-century plays, the plot of which is increasingly complicated
by the curiosity of the aptly named Marplot, or George Lillo’s 1737 tragedy
The Fatal Curiosity, later adapted by George Colman as Fatal Curiosity (1782).
In addition, by consigning her female protagonist to the scrutiny of countless
observers, she includes her in a series of ideologically weighted concerns typical
of the political and cultural climate of 1790s Britain with its alternate tension
of political subversion and regulatory containment.3 Indeed, it is a familiar fact
– 145 –
146
that the themes of curiosity, mystery and secrecy are central to 1790s radical
literature, and fiction in particular.4 Yet, throughout the century, curiosity is also
a crucial object of philosophical reflection, especially in the areas of aesthetics,
moral and political philosophy. In his Enquiry on the sublime and the beautiful
of 1757, Edmund Burke discusses curiosity as the first and simplest of emotions.
In Elements of Criticism (1762) Lord Kames offers an extensive treatment of this
mental faculty in an attempt to separate rational and progressive curiosity from
irrational and superficial desire for novelty. Also of interest, especially in view of
Charlotte Smith’s political leanings, is William Godwin’s importation of curiosity into the radical educational discourse of the essays in The Enquirer (1797)
and, specifically, his discussion of it as a positive quality capable of stimulating
an endless pursuit of knowledge.
On the whole, curiosity is as central to the eighteenth-century culture of
Enlightenment as it is elusive. In relation to the fin-de-siècle, Barbara Benedict
has recently remarked that curiosity figures ‘alternately as a threat to established
institutions and as a promise of progress’, yet also ‘expresses the struggle to define
the self for oneself, as well as the correlative fear of a disintegration of identity
in a post-revolutionary period’.5 As the link between curiosity and the definition
or disintegration of individual identity is crucial to Smith’s comedy, this essay
specifically seeks to illustrate the ways in which this work (as a written and performed text) addresses curiosity to postulate the possibility of an independently
defined female self.
As anticipated above, the target of general curiosity in What Is She? is
Mrs Derville, a genteel widow who settles in a remote Welsh village where she
acquires a reputation for being both secretive and a sworn enemy to marriage.
Lord Orton, disguised as Mr Belford, is in love with her and tries to discover the
‘profound mystery which envelopes her – A mystery, which might appear suspicious, did not the circumspection of her conduct bid defiance to calumny’.6 His
aim is explicitly that of dispelling ‘the doubts of [his] reason’.7 A host of minor
characters and interrelated subplots surrounds and complicates this central core,
their actions centring on the castigation of vices such as greed, ostentation and
consumption, and based on the commonplace observation that ‘the great secret
of modern life is appearance’.8 The entire play revolves around the different
attempts on the part of this community to discover the identity of Mrs Derville,
whose reputation is eventually cleared of all suspicions when Sir Caustic Oldstyle, Lord Orton’s uncle, recognizes her as his long-lost daughter-in-law and
then joins her in marriage to his nephew and heir.
Opening at Covent Garden on 27 April 1799 with an impressive cast of
actors including some of the best comic performers on the London stage, the
play lasted until 2 May, thus merely enjoying a modest run by contemporary
standards. The traditionalist chronicler of English drama John Genest observed
‘This Village Wonder’
147
that the play’s dialogue was ‘not bad’, but its accidents were ‘improbable’.9 On the
whole, Smith’s is a typical product of late-century comedy, with evident points in
common with plays by Mary Pix, Colley Cibber, Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth
Inchbald, while the title itself presents similarities with a host of other dramatic
and fictional works. Even its structural dissonances and discontinuities are not
without precedents in the eighteenth-century comedic tradition.10 Yet, at the
same time, What Is She? needs to be rediscovered as a relevant and original component of Smith’s literary production, and one that shares some crucial thematic
and ideological concerns with her novelistic output.11 For curiosity features in all
of her novels, from Emmeline (1788) to The Young Philosopher (1798). The heroine of Celestina (1791), a mysterious figure and an object of curiosity to country
people, is told that ‘in these places the people could not exist if their curiosity did
not keep their idleness from total stagnation’, while also Mrs Glenmorris in The
Young Philosopher becomes the target of the ‘idle curiosity’ and ‘impertinence of
arrogant intrusion’ typical of rural communities.12 Smith’s narratives posit seemingly innocuous curiosity as a socially and geographically connoted attitude that
transmutes into an ideologically qualified instrument of persecution and potential destruction of the heroine.
However relatively successful and structurally discontinuous, the play constitutes a determined exploration of curiosity that, in the process, re-orientates
this distinctive thematic feature of Smith’s production. If its exclusive focus on
curiosity accounts for some of its weaknesses as a comedic entertainment, yet
it also indicates where its ideological activism lies. In addition, in her dramatic
representation of curiosity, Smith blends the textual and dramaturgic level with
the performative and ‘spectacular’ dimension. The nefarious agency of curiosity
takes visible form in the actions of the characters on stage. In this sense, because
the emotional, performative and ideological centre of the play is built on one
pivotal affect, the comedy is a case of heightened ‘ostension’ – that is, plain,
unmediated ‘showing’ – aiming to affect the viewer by delivering its message
in emphatically visual form.13 In What Is She? Smith harnesses the languages of
theatre, and particularly the mixed devices of late-century comedy, to rework
one of the central concerns in her literary output of the 1790s through an ostensibly ‘theatricalized’, and thus spectacularly impactive, mode of presentation.
Yet, reconstructing the theatrical rendition of Smith’s play may turn out to
be a problematic operation. If reading this work requires an examination of a
present (though endlessly modifiable) text and the elusive modes of its performance, it is obvious that, in the absence of production notes, the latter aspect largely
evades our interpretative approach. Nevertheless, the author’s stage directions
may be of some assistance in providing indications on the performance. Equally
important is the fact that the first and only cast included an impressive roll-call
of some of the best comic actors on the contemporary London stage. Interest-
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ingly, moreover, some of these performers had recently acted in plays centred on
the themes of secrecy and curiosity. On 17 April 1797, the Covent Garden cast
(including Juliana Betterton, who will be Lady Zephyrine Mutable, and Maria
Ann Pope, who will be Mrs Derville) appeared in Curiosity, a play written ‘by the
late King of Sweden’ acted once for the benefit night of Joseph George Holman
(who is Orton/Belford in Smith’s play) and never printed.14 Juliana Betterton,
later known as Mrs Glover and at this time one of Covent Garden’s younger
actresses excelling in ‘laughing comedy’ roles, was well versed in ‘masquerading’
characters and in the 1797–8 season played the demanding part of Miranda in
Centlivre’s The Busy Body. Also, on 11 January 1798, Holman was the original
Egerton in the first performance of Thomas Morton’s Secrets Worth Knowing
at Covent Garden, a comedy centred on the importance of keeping a marriage
secret in order to secure a rich inheritance. Curiosity and its staging are part
of the performative skills and repertoire of the Covent Garden company, and
Smith’s play takes advantage of this tradition of texts and acting to give shape to,
and promote an ostension of, her own formal and ideological objectives.
Curiosity and Masquerade
The themes of disguise and masquerade offer a first, self-evident point of access
for an examination of how curiosity translates into stage business. A staple of
eighteenth-century culture, the masquerade is also what Louise George Clubb
defines as a ‘theatergram’, an element in that comedic ‘repertoire of movable parts’
made up of ‘units, figures, relationships, actions, topoi, and framing patterns …
that were at once streamlined structures for svelte playmaking and elements of
high specific density, weighty with significance from previous incarnations’.15
Indeed, Terry Castle has highlighted that, starting from John Dryden’s prototypical Marriage à la Mode (1673), the eighteenth-century stage is teeming with
‘masquerade plays, farces, and operas – from Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676) to
Sheridan’s The Duenna (1773) and Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1781)’.16
If these works feature the masquerade as an actual episode centred on a bal
masqué, countless other plays – and Smith’s comedy is one of them – present
a wide array of variations on this theme such as masking and impersonation,
exchanges of identity, insincerity and pretence, or the cult of appearances. References to this broader notion of masquerade abound in What Is She?, in which, at
the beginning, Lord Orton is said to be wooing Mrs Derville ‘in masquerade’.17
Other related references include the theme of character-changing among the
fashionable upper classes as embodied by the ‘aptronymic’ figure of Lady Zephyrine Mutable;18 fashion as masquerade;19 disguised characters such as Orton as
Belford, or Period and Lady Zephyrine as Lord Orton; the fact that Bewley,
Lady Zephyrine’s suitor, decides to adopt ‘La feinte par amour’ in order to con-
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quer his beloved;20 hints at attitudes à la Lady Hamilton;21 and several scattered
observations on the imitative and artificial nature of domestic and landscaping
improvements.22
Most evidently, however, it is Mrs Derville’s unsettling masquerade – her
adopted identity and her changing moods, especially her feigned ‘gayness’ –
that is at the core of the play. In I.i, she makes her first appearance ‘musing and
disturbed’23 and confirms, as spectators already know, that she is opposed to marriage. She wears the disguise of the inflexible woman, the recurrent ‘theatergram
of person’ of the termagant or the shrew which jars with the marriage-driven
logic of comedy.24 Also, it is through this disguise that the figure of Mrs Derville
imports into Smith’s work the quick repartee and arch retorts typical of the tone
and pace of ‘laughing comedy’.25
Yet, masquerade is no mere matter of light-hearted badinage. It is also a
weapon, a form of self-defence, control and empowerment. Through her use of
masquerade, Mrs Derville explains reality and satirizes it. As Belford complains
of his feigned poverty and misery, asserting that amusement ‘is not a pursuit for
the unhappy’,26 she answers: ‘What fills the haunts of dissipation, routs, balls,
theatres? What crowds auctions with those who have no money, or exhibitions,
with those who have no taste? What are the overflowing audiences of speaking puppets, and dumb-show dramas, what but refugees [sic] from the misery of
their own reflections?’27 Since the female protagonist delivers these metatheatrical lines ‘gaily’,28 they evidently add to her array of diversionary tactics, another
instance of her ‘masquerade of self ’ as a defence against the prying encroachment of curious characters and, specifically, as an instrument to monitor her
suitor and keep him in check.
Furthermore, Mrs Derville’s masquerade functions as an involuntary instrument of self-preservation. In the opening scene, it is clear that she pities and
helps Belford because she has feelings for him, even though, at this stage, she
cannot trust him completely. It is useful, therefore, that her personation of a
‘gay’ mood should result in Lord Orton’s ‘forgetting his disguise, and assuming
an easy gaiety’, ironically when he delivers the lines: ‘Yes, Ma’am, the great secret
of modern life is appearance – there would be no living without concealing our
miseries more cautiously than our vices’.29 He mentions and seeks to practise
concealment, and yet nearly gives himself away. Mrs Derville’s performance of
gaiety and light irony is so effective that it induces Orton to forget his assumed
character. Involuntarily, her mask unmasks Orton’s own charade and unsettles
his curiosity-driven attempt at revealing her secrets. Also, by requiring the actor
to perform out of character, however briefly, the text produces a dissonance in
the deployment of stage business that complicates the play of identity (Orton
who is Belford and yet forgets that he is Belford) and emphasizes this episode
as a significant point in the development of the play’s action and meaning. And
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both actors in this scene could draw on their respective skills in order to portray
the interplay between the two protagonists. Holman was a popular and versatile
performer, famous for his good looks and occasionally accused of showing them
off on stage to an excess, while Maria Ann Pope (the second wife of the famous
actor Alexander Pope) was generally praised for her spontaneity. As seen above,
they were experienced performers of masquerading roles in situations centred
on secrets. Their distinctive acting qualities contributed to the on-stage conflict
between masquerade and curiosity, as well as its ostension through the devices
and processes of theatrical spectacle.
Thanks to Mrs Derville’s successful strategies, the play celebrates masquerade and empowers pretence. For, even though at this point Mrs Derville’s is an
assumed character, Smith awards her protagonist an underlying sincerity that
allows her (both consciously and involuntarily) to dominate the action. And if
this is one of the reasons for the effectiveness of her mask, it also sets off its difference from the masks worn by other figures such as the other innamorata in
the play, Lady Zephyrine played by Juliana Betterton, another young actress well
versed in masquerading roles.
Lady Zephyrine’s masquerade, however, mainly depends on a lack of sincerity
associated with fashion and its unpredictable shifts. Smith explicitly aligns her
with this dimension, as the character triumphantly announces: ‘Oh, yes – as soon
as the Dog-days began, I took care to introduce the Kamschatka robe, the Siberian wrapper, and the Lapland scratch’.30 Moreover, Lady Zephyrine appears to
change her attitude repeatedly and intentionally in order to conquer Mr Bewley,
whose suit she had previously rejected. Curiosity is once again a central feature
in this masquerading female character, who, just like the other dramatis personae,
tries to disclose Mrs Derville’s secret: ‘I cannot doubt but this village wonder,
this Mrs. Derville, is some adventurer, perhaps plac’d here by Mr. Bewley, at any
rate the object of his attention’.31 This knot of curiosity and jealousy motivates
her to disguise herself as her brother Lord Orton in an effort to discover the
protagonist’s real identity and, accordingly, she informs the audience: ‘under this
disguise, and the assumed title of my brother Lord Orton, I hope, by professing a
passion for her, at least to ascertain her sentiments with regard to him’.32 Yet her
plan fails precisely because of the limits of her masquerading abilities.
The secretive protagonist is aware that Lady Zephyrine is a complex combination of sincerity and artful disguise, a mixture of ‘natural’ and ‘assumed’
characters.33 Possessed of superior masquerading skills, Mrs Derville soon gives
the lie to her ladyship’s disguise and observes, in an aside, ‘Yes – the voice, the
features – I can’t be mistaken – This is some trick of Lady Zephyrine’s’.34 By contrast, and through a significant inversion, the even less successful masquerader
Lord Orton is taken by surprise at the unexpected appearance of another person (he and his sister are still strangers to each other at this point in the action)
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impersonating himself: ‘What! this is not Period – ’Sdeath! what can it mean?’35
Mrs Derville, instead, sees through Lady Zephyrine and then proceeds to reform
her in the fifth act by pointing out the high moral virtues of Queen Charlotte as
an example of those ‘domestic virtues’ that may ‘long preserve our national manners from that last state of depravation which erects vice into a model’.36 Based on
a recognizable fictional type, the fashionable young lady in need of curbing and
improving, Lady Zephyrine stands for a woman whose identity is a self-damaging masquerade that calls for a drastic act of therapeutic unmasking. Albeit less
central than Mrs Derville, this character adds to the ostension of curiosity on
stage as her own factitious and superficially fashionable disguise contrasts with
the more existentially crucial one of Smith’s persecuted heroine.
The all-informing presence of masquerade in the play reflects what Dror
Wahrman has called an eighteenth-century ‘ancien régime of identity’, a situation
‘characterized by the relatively commonplace capacity of many to contemplate
… that identity, or specific categories of identity, could prove to be mutable, malleable, unreliable, divisible, replaceable, transferable, manipulable, escapable, or
otherwise fuzzy around the edges’.37 Although written and staged when a more
rigid ‘romantic’ regime of identity was setting in, What Is She? is still in line
with this broad cultural trend and delineates a gallery of masks of identity, two
of which are particularly prominent – that enabling Mrs Derville to control a
threatening situation and protect her own self, and another, Lady Zephyrine’s,
which inhibits and potentially destroys the self. In the terms of Terry Castle’s classic discussion of masquerade in eighteenth-century fiction, Smith’s play exploits
the distinction, as well as the interaction, between masquerade as an emblem of
‘global dysphoria’ and masquerade as an instrument of ‘eclaircissement’, a ritual
that promotes the transformation and recuperation of selves and ‘facilitates, like
a kind of covert deus ex machina, the ultimate reward of characters and readers alike’.38 As one masquerading character ‘cures’ the other, Smith envisages the
possibility of an assumed and fabricated identity that defeats curiosity and its
damaging intrusions in order to protect a secret core of genuine identity.
Men and Women: Curiosity and Social Control
That of Lady Zephyrine is ideologically disturbing curiosity. Even though Smith
seems to insist on the voluble side of her character, there is something intensely
troubling about the figure of a fashionable aristocratic woman who, on the
strength of her jealousy and curiosity, pries into the life of an unprotected, and
possibly ‘fallen’, female from the middling orders of society. Lady Zephyrine’s
game may seem the playful whim of a spoilt and meddling aristocrat, but in fact
she actively participates in the attempts at establishing, controlling and ultimately coercing Mrs Derville’s identity that structure the action in the play. And
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the most overtly disturbing manifestation of this coercion of identity emerges
in the character of the socially ambitious and utterly immoral Jargon, played by
John Fawcett, at this time a Covent Garden regular and one of the most popular
and critically acclaimed comic actors on the contemporary stage.
A commoner who courts Lady Zephyrine, Jargon defines Mrs Derville, the
‘village wonder’, as a ‘queen of curds and whey’39 then replaces this initial mask
with that of the kept woman, as he speculates: ‘if I could but take her to town,
puff her, patronise her, she’ll make me famous in a week’.40 Supposing Mrs Derville to be a woman without honour, he intends to set her up in London and
advertise her as a novelty, a proposal he bluntly formulates as follows:
what say you my little original? What do you think of my proposal? A house in Marybone, a black boy, and a curricle – None of your old-fashion’d mysterious work … an
opera box next my wife (that is to be) Lady Zephyrine – a faro table – then our whole
order in your train – puff you in the papers – (takes out a glass) stare you into notice
at the Theatre, you’ll make such a blaze.41
Jargon’s curiosity leads him to imagine a situation in which the persecuted
woman becomes the focus of sexual and spectatorial desire, even as he envisages a multiplication of curiosity ad infinitum on the metropolitan stage of the
capital, and thus provides a disconcerting picture of the destructive regulation of
identity driven by curiosity.42
Less obtrusively ostended than Jargon’s, though equally troubling, are Lord
Orton’s efforts to discover Mrs Derville’s identity and marshalling it into a satisfactory, because socially acceptable, tale. Unlike Jargon, moreover, the figure
of Orton/Belford is more subtly characterized and presents a more complicated interplay of masquerading strategies. Obsessed with knowing the truth
and clearing up his doubts, the lover’s prying interest regularly translates into
an effort to control Mrs Derville’s tale and identity. At the very beginning he
is horrified by the possibility that his beloved’s past may be tainted by immoral
conduct and that there may be ‘any thing improper in Mrs. Derville’s conduct’.43
Once again, this is made patent at the performative level as he expresses himself
‘in an accent of alarm and suspicion’.44 Similarly, the text stresses the intensity of
his curiosity when the stage direction requires the actor to deliver the phrase
‘any thing improper’ in ‘a tone of interest’ followed by an astonished ‘Extraordinary!’45 Both in its verbal contents and at the level of expression and intonation,
the play coherently develops the link between Orton’s suspicion and his desire
for control over his beloved. His affection ultimately depends on the possibility
that Mrs Derville’s story coincides with a socially irreproachable narrative. In III.
v, Orton revealingly states: ‘if she stands the test, and clears up the mystery of her
conduct, I will offer her my hand, and throw aside my doubts for ever’.46
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As already suggested, female characters in the play are better masqueraders
than men, who are generally not very adept at staying in character. Thus, even
though Lord Orton does his best to discover and control female identity through
his masquerading efforts, yet his shortcomings as an impersonator undercut his
attempts, as the play makes clear through the orchestration and performance of
moments of intense emotion according to the expressive modes of ‘sentimental
comedy’.47 And, also in this case, the two leads could be expected to give free rein
to their performing abilities, as Holman, praised for his handsome and expressive features and elegance, was an experienced interpreter of young lovers, while
Maria Ann Pope was noted for her tender and pathetic roles and, importantly,
had been the first Lady Eleanor Irwin in Elizabeth Inchbald’s ‘sentimental comedy’ Everyone Has His Fault (1793).
Starting from the opening scene, the play details and stresses the emotional
shifts of the main characters. In I.i, Mrs Derville’s expression is described as
‘musing and disturbed’48 but, as soon as Orton/Belford enters, she changes from
‘recovering her gaiety’ to a full ‘gaily’.49 This quick and assured transition confirms
that she has complete control over the situation. By contrast, the male lead often
‘appears agitated’ and his language falters, as in III.ii: ‘I confess it – I am at this
moment so agitated, that I own I am incapable of obeying you’.50 Although Mrs
Derville answers ‘in an accent of kindness’, he is ‘still agitated’ and can only stammer an uncertain ‘Madam – Eugenia’.51 A further shift takes place when, inviting
him ‘with eagerness’ to speak and reveal what is tormenting him (in fact, his love
for her), she is contaminated by his nervousness and exclaims ‘Oh, my fluttering
heart!’ and begs him ‘anxiously’ to express himself fearing that he may have discovered her real identity.52 Realizing that he still ignores who she is, Mrs Derville
recovers her self-control and resumes her mask of resourceful archness, a transition which the text qualifies through a quick succession of stage directions from
‘with an air of pique’ to ‘resentfully, yet affecting indifference’, and finally ‘with
volubility and assumed pleasantry’.53
These and other similar outbursts signal the emotional high points of the
play. The two protagonists (and, to a lesser extent, Lady Zephyrine and Bewley)
are the characters whose mood changes are most carefully traced in the stage
directions, and the fact that, in this opening scene, they share the same feelings
creates a deep connection between them which, in dramatic terms, justifies their
mutual attraction and eventual union in marriage. Yet, a sentimental bravura
piece such as III.ii also sets up a confrontation between male and female forms of
emotional expression and control. Thus, whereas Lord Orton loses his self-control and is again about to betray his real identity, Mrs Derville momentarily falls
prey to her emotions and soon recovers her grip on the masquerading game. She
successfully deflects and neutralizes her suitor’s curiosity which, although that
of a lover, is still dangerously in line with other regulating attempts in the play,
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aimed as it is at satisfying his own doubts and recognizing his beloved as socially
respectable and acceptable.
Crucially, the play targets and demolishes the male protagonist’s attempts at
establishing control over the woman in a specific scene that is part of the typical
stock-in-trade of comic stage business. If events have already revealed Orton as a
half-hearted masquerader, his weakness is made even more evident as he stoops
to subterfuge in what Sir Caustic calls ‘the closet scene’54 in order to eavesdrop
on Mrs Derville’s first interview with Period who, disguised as himself, is charged
with discovering her secret.55 In true ‘laughing comedy’ style, Lord Orton is hurried into a closet by the servant Winifred and thus exposes himself to the risk of
being found in this clichéd compromising situation. And when, in the climax of
IV.ii, the assembled characters discover him, Orton/Belford becomes the object
of general astonishment and ridicule, as well as of Mrs Derville’s displeasure. Yet
it is particularly interesting that, in her version of this archetypal comedic situation, Smith should not allow the male protagonist to speak until the end of the
scene, when the only character left on stage is Mrs Derville:
Before you go, Sir, let me exculpate – ’Sdeath! they’re gone, Madam! I feel too much
the cause you have for resentment, to attempt any justification. Yet, be assur’d, the
conduct to which I have descended is punish’d, cruelly punish’d, by this fatal conviction, that I am doom’d to love where I cannot esteem.56
Thus the play consummates Orton’s punishment and the failure of his plot to
uncover Mrs Derville’s identity. The other characters do not listen to his selfjustification, as they have found him guilty of treachery and baseness without
even staying to hear the reasons for his extraordinary behaviour. In addition, he
has not learnt anything from this experience, since, before leaving the stage, he
announces that the ‘fatal conviction’ he has formed during this incident (‘I am
doom’d to love where I cannot esteem’) confirms his mistaken suspicions about
Mrs Derville.57
The fact that Lord Orton cannot speak and that, when he does, his words
are ineffectual, indicates the structural and ideological importance of this scene
as an indictment of curiosity aimed at social control. Marking the disastrous
climax of the male masquerade, this incident makes plain the dangers of male
suspicion and the failure of male efforts at enforcing a realignment of female
identity with class-based expectations and gender conventions. In point of fact,
Smith’s re-elaboration of this comedic cliché is even more significant, if we read
it against the themes of enigmatic identity and ‘nothingness’ that are recurrent
in eighteenth-century women’s writings. Catherine Gallagher, in particular, has
observed that these concerns play an important role in the female dramatic tradition starting from Aphra Behn, whose plays address the issue of ‘nothingness,
placed at the centre of both femaleness and the commodity exchange’, while
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her discourse of self-authorization is deeply enmeshed in issues of ‘self-ownership’.58 Smith’s own version of ‘nothingness’ in What Is She? belongs in this line
of development. Yet, since in the closet episode it is the man who has no voice
and becomes an ostracized ‘nothing’, her play sets up an important reversal that
once again emphasizes its ostension of the perverse mechanisms and negative
consequences of curiosity.
The Neutralization of Curiosity: Agnition and Recognition
As with Lord Orton’s curiosity and his presumptuous efforts to regulate Mrs
Derville’s self, the curiosity of the other characters eventually comes in for its
share of ridicule and reform. In point of fact, in the conclusion, curiosity mutates
into incredulity when Sir Caustic publicly announces that Mrs Derville is his
daughter-in-law. But this final recognition, which completely and satisfactorily
dispels the woman’s mysteries, can take place only after she has gone through the
key process of agnition.
In both moments, agnition and recognition, it is the aristocratic patriarch
Sir Caustic Oldstyle who orchestrates events. This role was played by another
iconic performer of the Covent Garden company, Joseph Shepherd Munden
(then forty-one years of age), a star of the comic stage celebrated for his interpretation of ‘old men’, who, by this time, had performed all the major comic roles
in new and repertoire comedies to great acclaim. Munden’s Sir Caustic is thus a
doubly authoritative figure, both in textual and performative terms, but Smith’s
writing does not allow him to displace or supplant completely the female protagonist and her independent actions. In the phase of agnition, it is Mrs Derville
that dominates events and reveals her own story to Sir Caustic, who entreats
her to do so.59 Importantly, the old man is an incurious figure, and even more
interestingly she reveals her identity to him in order to satisfy her own desire
to know, her own curiosity. This unexpected turn of events takes its cue from
another recurrent feature of stage property, the miniature portrait. Charged
with sounding Mrs Derville and discovering her secret, Period disguised as Lord
Orton borrows a miniature of Sir Caustic thinking it is one of Lady Zephyrine’s.
As he shows it to Mrs Derville, she ‘takes the picture carelessly, but on looking at
it, nearly faints’.60 The miniature is in fact her own portrait and leads her to Sir
Caustic to inquire how he came into it. Discovering that he is the father of her
deceased husband, she brings herself to reveal her own tale in the dramatic and
sentimental tones of a Gothic narrative complete with convent, elopement and a
Southern European destination.61 Visibly, the patriarch as the supreme embodiment of moral and socio-economic authority does not orchestrate the agnition
scene. He sanctions it but, in actual fact, it is the persecuted female protagonist
and her revelations that make it possible.
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As a direct result of this discovery, Sir Caustic organizes the climactic public recognition of Mrs Derville, that is her reinsertion into a recognizable and
acceptable socio-economic position. Addressing the assembled characters, he
announces: ‘I’m glad to see you are capable of receiving generously the daughter
whom my good fortune has restored to me’.62 To the incredulous dramatis personae, who exclaim in unison ‘Mrs. Derville!!’, Sir Caustic replies by inviting them
to refrain from excessive emotional outbursts (‘Come, no sentimental overflowings now’) and thus decisively interrupts the affective imbalances, keyed to and
stimulated by curiosity, of the previous acts.63 Sir Caustic’s interdiction marks
the end of the dominion of curiosity, and is followed by the announcement of
the weddings of Lord Orton to Mrs Derville, and Bewley to Lady Zephyrine,
and the punishment and retribution of the play’s complicated cast of secondary
characters and plots. Sir Caustic’s definition of Mrs Derville as ‘the daughter
whom my good fortune has restored to me’ effectively restores her to her own
social position, family context and economic sphere.
Evidently, the two characters who dominate the end of the play are Sir Caustic and Orton’s friend and ‘agent’ Period. Played by such iconic actors as Munden
and William Thomas Lewis, whom Hazlitt called ‘the greatest comic mannerist that perhaps ever lived’,64 these two figures ensure the return of peace and
the extrication of the complicated twists in the subplots. In particular, since Sir
Caustic/Munden has the last word on masquerade and identity (‘Women never
pardon any deceptions except their own’)65 and puts a stop both to curiosity and
sentimental excess, he wields the textual and performative authority to bring the
play to its resolution. Nonetheless, Smith’s text does not award him the decisive
intervention of a deus ex machina, for, in fact, the play’s denouement represents
the culminating stage in the female protagonist’s own cunning exploitation of
the masquerade of identity. Sir Caustic de facto acknowledges that, if a few points
remain to be cleared up (Orton asks Eugenia: ‘Can you, will you pardon the
deception?’),66 this solution is firmly in the heroine’s hands.
This examination has emphasized how, as the structural core of Smith’s comedy, its ideological discourse and performative code, curiosity intersects with a
whole array of themes such as self-control and self-ownership, privacy and social
positioning, as well as the value and performance of emotion. The play’s ostension of curiosity effectively unlocks its major ideological concerns, which, in
turn, may be organized through binary antitheses such as freedom of identity
and agency as opposed to coercion, conservative socialization against liberal
individualism, masquerade as protective of genuine self against masquerade as
falsification of self, male against female control of narrative, and male as opposed
to female emotional expression. In addition, the complexity of Smith’s elaboration of curiosity in her 1799 comedy appears in all its relevance when we see it in
the context of her prose fiction, where the exclusion inflicted on her ‘banished’
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heroines is regularly reinforced by the pressures society continues to exert on
them even in exile in the shape of unwelcome and damaging inquiries. Thus, the
scandalous and fascinating figure of Lady Adelina is one of the main objects of
inspection in Emmeline, and The Old Manor House (1793) features the figure
of the helpless orphan Monimia, the secret of whose birth Smith never entirely
dispels. Women in Desmond, especially the protagonist Geraldine Verney, are
frequently the targets of intrusive and damaging curiosity and may be forced to
hide in the peripheries of ‘some remote part of England’ to avoid the ‘curious
malignity of the people, who call themselves the world’ such as the Bath circle of
gossipy ladies headed by the heroine’s mother.67 In The Young Philosopher, both
Mrs Delmont and the mysterious Mrs Glenmorris are hounded by ‘idle curiosity’, and the objects of ‘frequently fabricated marvellous histories relative to
people in the neighbourhood on the slightest foundations, or without any’.68 In
Harriet Guest’s recent interpretation, these distinctive figures and situations in
Smith’s canon are evidence of her alertness to the fact that, ‘by the late 1790s,
spying and surveillance have become, in some accounts at least, an accepted if
not necessarily welcome part of the social fabric, an important means of social
regulation and control’.69
Performed at the chronological culmination of Smith’s novelistic activity,
the play evidently rehearses this complex ideological and thematic heritage.
Yet, it also treats curiosity in a slightly different way. Since, in keeping with the
tradition of ‘reform’ comedy, What Is She? is mainly concerned with saving individuals through self-improvement and social reintegration, it avoids a definition
of curiosity as an exclusively pernicious force. Although it mainly appears as an
instrument of control and coercion, in the play’s climax it is curiosity that enables Mrs Derville to extract information and reconstruct meaning. It is her own
curiosity about the miniature that allows her to recover a crucial fragment of
her own story. In this light, curiosity in What Is She? is also a version of that
positive ‘spirit of prying observation and incessant curiosity’ aimed at ‘pursuing
enquiries, accumulating knowledge, observing, investigating, combining’ which
Godwin extols in the essays composing his pedagogic treatise The Enquirer of
1797.70 Put to a proper use, curiosity enables Mrs Derville to unveil secrets and
bring truths to light. It is not a mere instrument of repression, but also a tool of
investigation and expression. Thus, it ultimately allows the mysterious woman
to reconstruct her identity and define her own social, economic and affective
position.
It is far too easy to approach Charlotte Smith as an author who does not ‘do’
comedy well, an image of the writer that has its most authoritative source in Sir
Walter Scott’s Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists (1821). There, he states
that ‘Mrs Smith’s powers of satire were great, but they seldom exhibit a playful or
a light character. Her experience had unfortunately led her to see life in its most
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melancholy features, so that follies, which form the jest of the fortunate, had to
her been the source of disquiet and even distress’, while the amusing characters in
her novels ‘are so drawn as to be detested rather than laughed at’.71 In fact, Smith
is also undeniably a comic and comedic writer who masters a complex and rich
tradition of laughter on stage in all its various nuances – those of the laughing,
sentimental and reform comedy modes – and reflects critically on the status of
this dramatic genre. In Desmond it is the persecuted, and thus eminently tragedic, heroine Geraldine Verney who significantly launches into a disquisition on
the actual merits of theatre as ‘the school of morality’, and especially questions
the educational values of a comic genre currently swamped with ‘portraits of
folly, exaggerated till they lose all resemblance, harlequin tricks, and pantomimical escapes’ and where there is little ‘genuine wit’.72 By recovering traditional plot
structures and models of characterization, What Is She? is Smith’s own attempt
at writing serious comedy of the type promoted by contemporaries such as Inchbald and Cowley and reviving its function as a ‘school of morality’ that carries
out its own ideological mission through its mechanisms of ostension.73
Awarding full visibility to the themes of curiosity, mystery and persecution,
the play recovers what in Smith’s novels is an essentially destructive force and
recycles it for good purposes. If the eighteenth-century discourse of curiosity
has been described as ‘not fixed … but morally slippery’ and one in which ‘the
legitimacy of curious enquiry is uncertain’,74 such uncertainty and ambivalence
are crucial for a proper understanding of its treatment in What Is She?. As, in
her comedy of persecution, Smith creates a protagonist who both falls victim
to, and controls curiosity, she confronts her audience with the tangible, indeed
the powerfully ‘ostended’, possibility of a self-defined and self-vindicated female
identity.
11 RECOVERING CHARLOTTE SMITH’S
LETTERS: A HISTORY, WITH LESSONS
Judith Phillips Stanton
When William Hayley invited Charlotte Smith to join him at Eartham for a
writer’s retreat, the poet William Cowper observed her ‘[c]hain’d to her desk
like a slave to his oar’.1 She would produce twenty new pages in a morning – an
extraordinary pace – and read them to Hayley’s guests in the afternoon. Cowper
did not acknowledge, or perhaps did not see, that Smith was, as Sarah Zimmerman writes, ‘pursu[ing] two writing careers at once: her published works and a
copious correspondence’,2 a significant portion of which letters are published
in The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith. This collection, and Stuart Curran’s
magisterial edition of her works now complete at Pickering & Chatto, mark
Smith’s rising star, a new mini-industry of Smithian studies, engaging us in the
most honourable and exciting project of elaborating on and proving Curran’s
bold and welcome claim that Charlotte Smith is the first Romantic poet.
It was not always so. I first heard of Smith in 1967 as a college junior in
a course on the English novel. Our secondary reading, Edward Wagenknecht’s
Cavalcade of the Novel, proclaimed The Old Manor House to be, ‘excepting the
work of the acknowledged masters ... surely one of the best romances in the
whole realm of English fiction’.3 That stuck with me. In fact none of Smith’s novels or poetry was in print that year, a situation shortly remedied by Anne Henry
Ehrenpries’s handsome hardback editions of The Old Manor House (1969) and
Emmeline (1971). By then I was a graduate student focusing on British literature
and the novel at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. On
campus, opposition to the war in Vietnam was peaking. Even at a sleepy southern campus like UNC, student protests over the war and the ongoing protests
in the civil rights movement disrupted classes, but they also pointed us women
graduate students to an older entrenched injustice in our coursework. The English department’s official list of authors for Phd candidates to study included
only Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf among a host
of men. Our radical women’s caucus posted tracts in the men’s restrooms protesting that works by our gender were rarely taught, except in Prof. Albrecht B.
– 159 –
160
Strauss’s seminar, ‘Style and Stylistics in the Minor Eighteenth Century Novel’.
Bucking the local, and universal, trend, he put on his syllabus neglected male
– and female – authors whose works we take seriously today – Bage, Holcroft,
Lewis, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Lennox, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Mary
Wollstonecraft and ... Charlotte Smith.
Remembering Wagenknecht’s esteem for Smith, I rushed to claim her
because, new to feminism myself, I did not want to get stuck with a truly minor
woman writer. The Old Manor House intrigued me, as did Smith’s difficult life
and her radical political convictions, but I balked over writing a dissertation on
her. In the American south, feminism was not welcome. I was a tobacco farmer’s daughter, brought up in the conservative Southern Baptist church, bred and
raised to support the status quo, a world men ran and women ... graced. So if I
had to write anything, I wanted to write about someone important: Alexander
Pope, whose prosody had been the subject of my senior honours paper, or Henry
Fielding whose work was so robust and ‘manly’. In the end, with Prof. Strauss’s
encouragement, I decided to give Smith a go, little imagining how she would
change my life. Of the three key studies of the then profoundly marginalized
Smith, two were by scholars as marginalized as she: F. M. A. Hilbish’s exhaustive critical-biographical study, Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749–1806),
published in 1939, and Rufus Paul Turner’s pioneering, unpublished 1966 University of Southern California (USC) dissertation, ‘Charlotte Smith: New Light
on Her Life and Literary Career’, which located 230 Smith letters in libraries
and archives in the United States. Turner (1907–82) was a prolific AfricanAmerican writer of 3,000 articles and 40 books, mostly on radio electronics
and transistors, when he began his literary pursuits.4 Why and how he turned to
Smith is unknown, although USC is fairly close to the Huntington Library and
Art Gallery’s trove of fifty Smith letters described in Alan D. McKillop’s elegant
1952 essay, itself the first piece on Smith of any substance since Hilbish’s biography.5 Of the three so disparate Smith scholars, only McKillop (1892–1974)
at Rice University was well known for his work on eighteenth-century prose
and poetry, especially Samuel Richardson and James Thomson. Ironically, the
catalogue of his extensive correspondence and working papers at the Woodson
Research Center, Fondren Library at Rice University doesn’t mention Smith,
suggesting that she remained a marginalized writer to him.
Hilbish, like McKillop, was born in 1892, daughter of a Kansan Methodist clergyman whose correspondence and reminiscences she edited in Tales of a
Frontier Preacher (1959). Her only other publication of note was The Research
Paper (1964). Who better to author such a work, for Hilbish’s study of Smith’s
life is still a marvel, its research conducted through correspondence with countless archivists in record offices and rectors of local parishes in the UK, at a time
when the cost of ocean-liner travel from Philadelphia to England was prohibitive.
Recovering Charlotte Smith’s Letters
161
As for her technical achievement, imagine typing draft after draft on a clunky
manual typewriter with a manual carriage return, black-inked ribbons and carbon copies staining fingers and best blouses. Corrasable bond paper hadn’t been
invented, nor ‘white out’ for erasures. ‘Carpel tunnel syndrome’ had not yet been
medically described, perhaps because pausing for carriage returns and stopping
to replace each page gave aching wrists a rest.
By 1977, the physical labour of research and writing had lessened. For my
dissertation research, I jetted to New York City to study Smith’s letters at the
Berg Collection in the New York Public Library and took a fast commuter train
to Yale University, where I first encountered the Beinecke’s 128 Smith letters
to Cadell and Davies. For we few new students of Smith in the 1970s – Peggy
Gledhill, Joan Piorkowski, Carroll Fry, Diana Bowstead and me6 – Smith studies
were looking up. Two more of her forgotten works, both out of print since the
1790s, were printed in facsimile, Desmond and The Young Philosopher.7 In America, at $20 a volume they together cost $140, half again as much as my monthly
rent. With Ehrenpries’s more affordable Emmeline and The Old Manor House
available, I had only to arrange with the New York Public Library for a copy of
the original edition of the very rare The Banished Man. Because of its poor condition, they microfilmed it. My library made a photocopy off the microfilm and
bound it for me to use.
When time came to type my final draft, my trusty Smith-Corona electric
typewriter with its nifty pop-in/pop-out ribbon cartridges, and eraser cartridges
too, enabled me to do 275 pages in ten days. I kept my carbon copies safe in my
refrigerator, as we were then advised, in the event of fire.
At my final dissertation orals, Prof. Thomas Stumpf asked, ‘What next?’
‘She could use a modern biography’, I said, oblivious to the complexities of
that task. ‘But first, I have to get my hands on all her letters’.
Turner’s inventory of Smith’s letters in America made this project look
contained, even manageable. In a letter-writing campaign that canvassed all
university and major and many minor public libraries in the United States and
Canada, Turner had located significant large collections: the Huntington’s 50
letters to her friends Joseph Cooper Walker and Sarah Farr Rose; the Beinecke’s
128 letters to Cadell and Davies; and Princeton’s 17, although how or why the
Cadell and Davies letters came to be separated from the original business files
remains a mystery of the sort that drive researchers mad.
Technologically, 1978 was the dark ages: we had no email, no personal computers, no search engines. To supplement Turner’s list of letters in America, I
searched by hand the exhaustive ASLIB Directory of Information Sources in the
UK to find libraries, museums and archives that might have anything by Smith.
My efforts turned up letters in dribs and drabs – two at the Bodleian and British
Libraries, four at the Cowper and Newton Museum, one each at the Univer-
162
sity of Edinburgh, The Fitzwilliam, Liverpool Public Libraries, the Westminster
Diocese.8 But when I wrote to the Surrey Record Office, an archivist referred
me to a very generous independent scholar, Richard Wenger, whose research on
Stoke Manor, Charlotte Smith’s beloved childhood home, had led him to over
200 Smith letters at the West Sussex Record Office (WSRO).9 Obviously, I had
to see them. It was not easy, or cheap.
The WSRO required a cheque in pounds sterling (£170, if I recall correctly)
tediously acquired from my local bank in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who did not
often deal with denominations from the UK. One snowy, blustery winter day,
the photocopied letters arrived at my English department at the University. I
sped through the four-inch high stack of copies with naïve anticipation, and my
heart sank. The letters from Petworth House Archives almost doubled the size of
the collection, were all only to the Earl of Egremont and his estate agent William
Tyler, dwelt primarily on the entangled trust affairs in the last six years of Smith’s
life and added next to nothing to our knowledge of Smith’s literary friendships,
opinions, dealings, or work. That last was a particularly disappointing lack at a
time when she must have been working on her influential final poem, Beachy
Head.
Worse yet, in the letters she presented herself not as what Jacqueline Labbe
has so aptly described as her multiple poetic personae – mother, poet, distressed
gentlewoman, political thinker, botanical authority10 – but as someone else, and
in exhausting detail: an obsessed, obsessive harpy. My graduate assistant read
these letters with disgust. Smith, she thought, was whining. Would scholars
think so too? Was my once-tidy project doomed by imbalance, excess length and
anger? And how would this haranguing persona bear on Smith’s still slight reputation? Oh, for the charm of Frances Burney, the domestic intimacy of William
Cowper, the passion and revolutionary fervour of Mary Wollstonecraft!
The letters of Smith’s peers might be better known and more accessible, but
that could not matter, I told myself for the next twenty-five years. Smith’s letters are what they are, a historical record, different from Burney’s, Cowper’s and
Wollstonecraft’s, and all the more valid and valuable because of that. Ultimately,
in Smith’s letters to Egremont and Tyler, I came to see that all of her righteous
indignation over injustices inscribed as eloquent a treatise on the rights of woman
as woman could well write. Indeed when Egremont forbade her to write to him,
she turned on his estate agent at times with such impatience and vituperation
that even my faith in her motives and sanity was tested. William Tyler was her
last resort. Had she lost her mind?
I do not think she had, but believe these letters reveal a new persona, a woman
on the cutting edge of her time, a self that goes beyond Labbe’s apt list and Sarah
Zimmerman’s recent observation that, in her letters to Sarah Rose, Smith discovers a ‘new intimacy’, ‘ ... the expression of trust in another that alleviates the sense
163
of isolation that had, for most of [Smith’s] career, defined her persona in her
letters and published works’.11
Smith never trusted Tyler – lawyer, estate agent, implacable opponent to her
requests for money and justice and to her interpretations of Richard Smith’s will
and the trust’s history. While Smith had addressed Egremont’s previous estate
agent James Upton Tripp as ‘dear Sir’, with respect, trust and even affection, her
fifteen early notes to Tyler are merely civil – ‘Sir, believing it certain that Lord
Egremont is at Lewes ... on account of the races’12 – though she manages the
conventional complimentary close, ‘your obed sert’, ‘your hble servt’. Notably,
as relations with Egremont deteriorate, she signs a letter to Tyler, ‘[I] remain his
[my emphasis] grateful, tho very unfortunate hble Sert, Charlotte Smith’,13 effectively effacing Tyler’s status and his work as Egremont’s representative.
A year passes, and it is clear Smith has quarrelled with Tyler: ‘Sir, When a
person is injured as I am, it is natural to complain in an high tone; I shall not apologise for it to you’,14 she writes bluntly, so fed up with bowing to his authority
that she skips the most minimal of courtesies and does not even sign the letter,
insulting him but ironically effacing herself. Throughout her later letters to Tyler
– whether unsigned or with her hated surname crossed out – Smith strikes a
note I am not sure we have heard a woman sound who was not a queen, as she
goes toe to toe with the lawyer who managed the affairs of one of England’s
grandest estates. With confidence in knowledge she was not supposed to have,
this woman speaks and acts as family historian, accountant and legal advocate in
the vexed and dreaded chancery case. She argues points of law as if she had sat at
the inns of court.
In Wisconsin in the winter of 1980–1, I typed these troublesome letters every
evening after supper, swathed in my goose-down robe and slippers, my focus
on her elegant hand, not seeing what I see now. My snug second-story study in
the turret of a romantic hundred-year-old house was a far cry from the drafty
cottages at Frant, Elsted and Tilford that Tyler’s machinations reduced Smith
to. But 280 inches of snow fell on us that year, the air temperature dropping
one morning to minus 30° (Fahrenheit), not counting wind chill factor. When
Smith complained of the wind whistling through her cottage, I felt for her.
*****
Personal computers were in their infancy and inadequate for a project of this
scope. I was about the most computer-phobic scholar ever to sit at a monitor,
but my now-husband badgered me into learning to use the text processing system available for free on my university’s Honeywell mainframe computer with
this tantalizing promise: ‘Once a letter’s entered, it’s done’. He was right. For the
second and last time, I re-keyed the 230 American letters typed on my trusty
Smith-Corona electric in 1978–9. The later letters from the Petworth House
164
Archives I entered just only once. When the final edition went to press, I had
lost track of only one letter. With relief, I keyed it in again. Text processing was
cumbersome compared to the word processing systems like Word and Word
Perfect in wide use today. It required learning complex mark-up language, did
not do line wraparounds, and did not show what the final page would look like.
Even so, what this electronic resource meant for the accuracy of the final text is
incalculable.
*****
From its beginning, my project was blessed by the most generous scholars and
assiduously helpful librarians and archivists. In England, in the summer of 1981
on a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, I spent half of ten
short weeks at the West Sussex Record Office which administers the modern
Earl of Egremont’s Petworth House Archives. Alison McCann is still its archivist. I had arranged with her (by airmail letters sent weeks before) to have Smith’s
original letters waiting when I arrived.
Early in June, jet-lagged after my first ever flight abroad, I sat down in the
main reading room of the WSRO’s handsome Georgian home, and there the
letters were, dusty, musty, old ink brown with age but so much clearer – and
more real – than the Xerox copies. Charlotte Smith’s hand had written them.
From 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m., I proofed my transcript of the letters against the
originals, as obsessively focused in my pursuit of errors and omissions as Smith in
her quest for justice. On Tuesdays, Mrs McCann worked off-site in the Archives.
On Wednesdays she would return with folders of additional, collateral materials
– deeds, letterbooks, accounts – that she’d unearthed simply because I had come
from my distant world to hers. ‘I didn’t know whether you might be interested
in these.’
Interested? I untied packets bound with ancient twine and pored over stiff,
but beautifully preserved pages, the first person to peruse them in 200 years,
taking notes in pencil (still no laptops) until my fingers cramped. Not knowing
what might turn out to be important, I took notes on everything. Everything,
it turned out, mattered. Much of the authority of the edition came from these
obscure documents.
Finishing there, I travelled. A double-decker bus passed ripening hayfields
on my way to the Cowper and Newton Museum at Olney. My work at the Bodleian in Oxford, a much grander and more formidable place, was punctuated by
block parties off Banbury Street for the Royal Wedding. Back in London on my
BritRail pass, I found city bus schedules enigmas but loved the underground.
No matter how far it discharged me from my destinations, I hiked and found
them, revelling in the orderliness of the Army Museum, the chaos of the Indian
Records Office, and the tatty fustiness of riches housed in the Society of Genealogists.
165
But it was under the vaulting blue dome of the Main Reading Room at the
old British library on Great Russell Street while trying to pinpoint the date of
Lucy Smith’s ill-fated marriage that I came face to face with what I can only call
my first mistake: I’d chosen a project with a subject named Smith, whose husband, relatives and twelve children were all named Smith.
Not easily daunted, I took down a volume of the Harleian Society’s marriage
records and pored over records from parish after parish, running my finger down
column after column of Lucy Smiths. Soon obsessed, I took down vol. 54, The
Registers of Marriages of St. Mary le Bone, Middlesex, 1796–1801, and pored
through 1796, 1797, but with no luck. ‘I’m going mad’, I thought, ‘and should
quit now. Lucy didn’t marry Thomas whoever the heck he was in London’.
But then under 1798, there she was, fairly leaping off the page: ‘June 12. Thomas Postlewaite Newhouse of St Andrew, Holbourn Middlesx, b[achelor]., and
Lucy Elenore Smith, s[pinster]. L., by B. L. Wit[nessed]. John Shute Duncan’,15
a mystery person whose name I’d seen in as a witness in Mrs. McCann’s registers
of deeds. He was Newhouse’s friend. And I was not mad, and this was the most
essential, most satisfying research a body could do.
By the 1990s, I confirmed this date and others in the basement of the Society
of Genealogists, a favourite haunt blocks away from the nearest underground
exit. Again I walked, taking in the Barbican, so I could use among its many
invaluable resources, the IGI – the International Genealogical Index – an indispensable scholarly tool light years beyond Hilbish’s or Turner’s reach. In the ’90s
it was searchable only by microfiche, a blinding chore, and available only at scattered locations like the Society and some churches of the Latter Day Saints, or
Mormons. Today, for a fee, it is searchable online.
*****
In the fall of 1987, Oxford University Press rejected the letters for the reason I
had most feared. My edition did not shed significant light on the greater (read:
canonized) literary figures in whose shadows – so far as any of us knew then
–Smith laboured. Well, they did not; I could see that as plain as day. But if not
Oxford, the venerable British scholarly press, who would ever care about them as
historical record? A colleague at Clemson University where I now taught offered
one small comfort: Oxford had turned down Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters too.
Shortly thereafter, Indiana University Press accepted Smith’s letters as a
350-page book with a delivery date of September 1989. By then my manuscript
was 1,100 pages, but it would compress in print. I had hopes of publication in
time for my 1990 tenure decision, but my health and the size of the volume led
to delays. The gravity of my predicament led me to realize my second mistake:
open-ended projects such as a bibliography or a collection of letters are wildly
inappropriate for any junior scholar. I put the letters aside, wrote articles, cre-
166
ated new courses and minor curricula in technical writing and women’s studies
that would count instead. In 1990, I was awarded tenure, but in the next year I
resigned, leaving behind the increasingly distracting diversity of my academic
duties, and moved to North Carolina: me and Charlotte Smith. All my data
were stored on old-fashioned ten-inch, nine-track, 6,250 bpi computer reels.16
Her letters were printed on the old continuous printout paper, and my research
weighed a ton – boxes of file folders of correspondence, legal pads of notes, and
my ever more essential handmade index on 4 x 6-inch note cards, my only access
to the vast array of information in the letters.
Free from academia, I finished the edition, taking advantage of excellent
research collections at nearby University of North Carolina and Duke University.
I wrote a paper for the week-long International Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies conference, expressly to be invited to Bristol in the summer of 1991.
Anna Augusta Smith de Foville’s grave was there, and finding it was an adventure worthy of a chapter in Richard Altick’s venerable The Scholar Adventurers
(1950).17 Friends and fellow conferees joined me in the most heartening feminist
collaboration I had yet embarked upon. On Tuesday Antonia Forster sat across
from me at the county library when I found Augusta’s obituary in a local newspaper and read it in tears. A bereft Charlotte Smith had obviously written it.
Antonia, eyes misting, agreed. On Wednesday, Betty Rizzo and Linda Merians
steered me to the county records office where I got a map to Augusta’s grave at
the Strangers’ Burial Ground in Clifton Hot Wells. Alone that drizzly afternoon,
I could not find it. On Thursday Jan Fergus joined my quest, and confirmed that
what I had found did not match the map. That evening after sessions ended, I
went back alone and found it, down the hill and locked behind an iron gate and
tall stone walls topped with pointed iron grating. The next day, Antonia joined
me, eager too to get inside. We enquired at a public school up the road. But it
was Friday, late, and closing. The rector who might have a key was away for the
weekend. Discouraged, we left.
The next day was bright and sunny. Most conferees had left, but Nancy LeeRiffe joined me for one last try. The graveyard’s locked iron gate was ten feet
tall, and the wall around it taller. Could I climb the gate in my sneakers, white
denims, emerald silk shirt? Farm girl at heart, I scrambled up. But fierce iron
pillions topped the gate and walls, and when I looked down, I could see myself
sprawled on a forgotten grave, a hip or ankle shattered. It was a quiet Saturday
afternoon. I pictured myself waking up in hospital, too concussed to remember
my passport in my room.
What to do? Nancy and I walked up the hill to the school. Between it and
the graveyard was a low iron gate, no cars or pedestrians in sight. We clambered
over it and sneaked back down the hill, hidden from all by the formidable rock
wall. A three-foot stone wall edged the Stranger’s Burial Ground. Nancy stood
167
watch, and I stole in. The map, which now made sense, led to Augusta’s grave, a
flat granite marker under the drooping limbs of an ancient yew. Kneeling beside
it, I gently wiped the short dry spiky needles off its inscription and copied it
down, feeling, in its syntax and its cadences, the protest, the prostrate grief of
the mother whose prose by then I knew so well. Smith had penned not only her
daughter’s obituary but also the inscription on her grave. I rocked back on my
heels, at a loss what else to do. But the day was perfect balm, and in a glimmering moment a weight lifted off my heart: Augusta’s ghost was honoured and was
free.
In 1992, I turned in a ‘final’ 1,400-page typescript, three years late, and a good
third longer than Indiana had contracted for. My sponsoring editor, Joan Catapano, was fully behind the project, but a senior editor delayed: at this length, it
was too expensive, and Charlotte Smith was just another minor woman writer.
Years dragged by. Isobel Grundy’s trusting note to the Smith entry in her
1990 Feminist Companion to Literature in English – ‘letters ed. Judith Stanton,
forthcoming’ – haunted and bolstered me.18 A dozen new editions of Smith’s
novels by Janet Todd, Antje Blank and others for Pandora Press, Mary Ann
Schofield for Scholars Facsimile Press, Stuart Curran’s landmark Oxford edition
of Smith’s poetry, a swell of articles and chapter-length treatments in scholarly
studies and appearances in anthologies – Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s,
Roger Lonsdale’s, Paula Feldman’s – all encouraged and dismayed me.
Charlotte Smith was not a minor woman writer. Her letters should have been
available to scholars and students years ago. And so I told Ms Catapano when
we met at a conference. She assured me that she was behind the project and presented it annually for publication. I should send evidence of Smith’s importance.
I should not give up. I sent evidence and did not give up. My husband, a computer professional, urged me to put the letters on the then-young internet, but I
held out for the imprimatur of a major American press, for Smith’s standing, not
mine, as I had left academia and had nothing to gain from a distinguished publication. Several people, including Loraine Fletcher, Stuart Curran, Henry Fulton,
Judith Pascoe and a handful of dissertation students, had read and commented
on some or all of the letters, but I wanted them to be professionally edited and
produced. We would wait Indiana out.
*****
I told Ms Catapano that I worried about letters I could not find, specifically the
letters I had come to think of as the ‘Maida Butler’ letters – cited in an 1956
article in Sussex County Magazine, but with minimal scholarly apparatus.19 The
most marginalized of all the early Smith scholars, Butler wrote one other work,
a history of a London banking family, a typewritten manuscript on deposit at
the British Library.20 Her Smith article does not divulge how she came across
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Smith’s letters, or describe where or how many they were. ‘Oh yes’, Ms Catapano
said cheerfully. ‘Publication always flushes out more letters’.
It was not as if I had not looked. Mrs McCann had helped, directing me to
East Sussex Record Office (they knew nothing), the publishers of Sussex County
Magazine (they were dead) and contacting her trusted expert county historians
on my behalf. As I reconstruct this particular search, I see another mistake: I
should have kept a research diary listing everywhere I went and everyone who
helped. At the time, keeping carbon copies and later photocopies of correspondence, boxes of note cards, stacks of legal pads – all that seemed enough.
One afternoon, I spent hours under private guard in the bowels of the old
British Library trawling through Sotheby’s and other sales catalogues of the early
1950s. In 1998, I consulted the National Register of Archives (NRA) before
they were computerized. I visited the Brighton/Hove Public library to copy a
lost poem I had found, and asked what else there might be, well aware of Smith’s
many months in ‘Brighthelmstone’. Some letters, I knew, were lost. Smith surely
wrote more letters to the trusted, kindly publisher Joseph Johnson than the one
I found. We can be sure, too, that she corresponded regularly with her friend,
patron and fellow poet Henrietta O’Neill when O’Neill was at Shanes Castle
and probably in Portugal as well before she died of pneumonia. But Shanes Castle, where the family probably kept her personal effects, burned to the ground in
1816. No trace of letters to or by her survives in the online NRA.
My searches never turned up letters to or from Sampson Low either, publisher of Montalbert, Marchmont, Minor Morals and Letters of a Solitary
Wanderer (vols 1–3). A recent search of A2A, the NRA’s ‘Access to Archives’,
turned up nothing. Low’s wife took over his press, and it continued in some
form into the nineteenth century – and with these new tools, new data being
added daily, we can all keep looking, hoping. For it is impossible to imagine that
Low received anything less than the steady stream of letters Smith sent to Cadell,
Sr, and later Cadell, Jr, and Davies, or that Richard Phillips complained of and
evidently destroyed.21 Only three short weeks after Smith’s death, Hayley wrote
to friends, attempting to gather letters for Charlotte Mary’s proposed edition.
Phillips responded in terms that make an editor gnash her teeth:
My connection with Mrs. Smith was only in the latter part of her Life at the time
when her Infirmities & Necessities had so much increased as to render her impatient
& peevish & altho’ many of her Letters were long & biographical, yet they abounded
so much in complaints of the World[,] her Lawyers, her Husband, &c, that I have
frequently torn half a dozen at once after a very slight reading ... [T]he Letters which
I can find or recover are at your Service
169
Unfortunately, only two letters to Phillips made it into my edition, possibly the
first and last she wrote to him. What happened to any letters he did not destroy
is a mystery ... for now.
In 2002 I had just completed copy edits for Indiana, under the keen eye of
talented freelance editor Alice Falk. As I responded to her spot-on queries and
corrected odd errors, I saw yet another mistake: the letters should have had a
co-editor. I never meant to hoard them, indeed invited readers’ help, but it never
occurred to me that anyone else would want to join such a sprawling, quixotic
project.
*****
When publication had seemed imminent in 1992, I wrote to all thirty libraries, archives, and private owners for permission to print their holdings large or
small. Going to press ten years later, Jane Lyle, my in-house editor at Indiana,
and I agreed that it was the merest courtesy to notify them that publication was
imminent at last. I asked if they had acquired any new material and checked
the wording of the attribution. This time around, corresponding – by email
– was a breeze, no envelopes to stuff or foreign postage to figure out at the post
office. And the turnaround time was astonishing: sometimes the same day, often
overnight. Warm congratulations from archivists who seemed to remember me
poured in and, of course, permissions, readily confirmed.
My friend (as I consider her after over two decades of stalwart support) Alison McCann at WSRO agreed that I should write to the new Earl of Egremont
himself. And then, a couple of days later, she emailed me again.
‘I don’t know whether you will be delighted or horrified to learn that just
this spring, in the process of moving the Petworth House Archives into its new
location, we discovered forty-six new letters by Charlotte Smith in an old tin
muniment chest’. I was delighted, I wrote back. My friend and long-time fellow conspirator Loraine Fletcher made a day trip from her home in Reading to
preview them for me.
‘Yes’, she emailed promptly back, ‘they belong in the edition’. I posted my
credit card details, and Indiana stopped the presses. The letters, undeniably
significant, were among the earliest to survive, showing Smith’s quite cordial
relations with James Upton Tripp, Tyler’s obliging predecessor, and mitigating
the vituperative voice of her later letters. But there were fifty-five Smith letters,
not forty-six, and, remarkably, fifty letters by the husband Smith once called illiterate. In them he is articulate, clever, even charming as he ruthlessly pursues his
self-aggrandizing goal of securing all trust interest monies for himself – the ‘old
mouser’,22 as he calls his estranged wife, and her brats be damned.
There were also half a dozen letters by her children, showing Lionel’s failed
effort to enrol at Oxford and Lucy’s requests long after her mother’s death for
170
Egremont to help her children. But the most telling is the copy in a clerk’s hand
of her 1803 ‘scurrilous’ letter to Benjamin, probably kept by Tyler to use against
her: ‘Take Rope enough and hang yourself ’, she writes to her estranged and hated
spouse. ‘I will not cut you down’.23 For me, after decades immersed in her trials,
his torture, here was vindication!
Transcribed and annotated, this batch of new letters made a typescript of
121 pages to be interleaved with the existing text. There were 160 or so people,
places, or points to annotate, over half of them, thankfully, new – because, where
any matter occurred that had already been annotated, I had to chase down the
old annotation, move it forward to the new, earlier letter, and revise it in light
of new information from the new letters. On top of the additional letters, forty
more pages of changes to existing annotation resulted from that new information. As for the all-important letters from Benjamin Smith, my editor okayed
citing them at length in footnotes.
*****
After the edition was published, important letters continued to turn up.24 I
found the missing ‘Maida Butler’ letters by chance. I had been fortunate to read
in draft Sarah Zimmerman’s handsome biographical note on Smith for the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. When I saw the article in print, its
bibliography listed holdings at the Beinecke, at the Huntington, and at the ...
Preston Manor Museum (PMM)? My heart sank. Why had I not heard of this? I
emailed Sarah, berating myself for not noticing that archive in her draft, but she
knew nothing of it. Apparently the ODNB’s research staff have resources of their
own. When I emailed the Museum, they referred me to the East Sussex Record
Office – yes, the same ESRO that Mrs McCann and I had queried two decades
earlier. In fact, Preston Manor Museum is in Brighton, mere blocks from the
public library where in 1995 I had found a lost poem and inquired about those
very letters.
I waited for them to arrive, worrying. Surely the Museum had only a dozen
or so letters. Maida Butler’s article was so short. But no, there are ninety-three, all
important early letters fleshing out details of Smith’s relations with the Cadells,
Sr. and Jr., and William Davies. How had this come to pass? We will never know.
About the time that the Times Literary Supplement ran Nicola Trott’s review
essay on recent Smith works (Labbe’s, Fletcher’s, Judith Willson’s and mine),25
the letters were moved from PMM to ESRO. They shed significant new light
on everything Smith published up to The Young Philosopher, as well as plays she
wrote that were not staged and who she knew. Fortunately, I came across them in
time to warn Stuart Curran who alerted the editors of Smith’s works for Pickering & Chatto. But how had I missed them, and how had they now come to light?
Without meaning to excuse my great oversight and the edition’s great lack, it was
171
brought to my attention that records at the Museum had not been kept up to
modern archival standards and that the Museum itself had a volunteer curator.
As Joan Catapano had said so cheerfully, publishing letters uncovers other
letters. The more so, I learned, where a marginalized author and an underfunded,
out-of-the-mainstream museum are concerned. Ideally, the letters would have
been published together, but another ninety-three letters would have put a tremendous strain on the Indiana edition, especially on top of the late discovery of
the fifty-five letters at Petworth House Archives. Preparing these latest letters
would have delayed the edition for at least another year, and it would have had to
go into two volumes, or – to keep it at one volume – as much as a fifth of the letters presently in the edition would have been excluded. And by what standards?
I had already pruned the letters to Tyler. More pruning would have distorted
the courage, or madness, Smith showed in locking horns with Tyler while
advocating for her children’s rights. William Hayley – in a letter I accidentally
discovered while poring obsessively over one of those letterbooks Mrs McCann
‘thought I might be interested in’ – wrote ‘privately and confidentially’ to Sir
John Hawkins about the precarious state of Smith’s sanity.26 I do not think she
was mad: chronically depressed, perhaps, often on opiates for pain, and obsessed
at times to the point of paranoia. Her letters to Tyler do not prove madness, but
they help us to understand Hayley’s opinion, which no doubt he shared with
others and was possibly widespread among those closest to her – her husband,
certainly, and in later life publishers like Phillips.
I am relieved that the first round of letters are out, keeping the historical
record intact, before the discovery of another hundred, and deeply gratified by
the reception they have had. But I have had a grand Scholarly Adventure, one
worth adding to Professor Altick’s annals. The adventure continues. In preparing
this paper, I revisited the provenance of letters at various holdings ... and turned
up a new half page note at McMaster University in Canada to Davey Stidolph,
Smith’s accountant and sometime amanuensis, and a four-page letter to Harriet
Lee at the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle. They had acquired
the Lee letter in 1993 and I had visited them in 1994 to copy out by hand their
letter to Mary Hays, which they required, it being, they said, too fragile to photocopy. Their facility was undergoing renovations, which may explain why it did
not occur to them that the editor of the Smith letters might be interested in
any other Smith letters that they had. And I was rushing around the New York
Public Library, trying to make the most of limited, underfunded time, and did
not think to ask, though I had asked in 2002 when I wrote for permission to
publish the Hays letter. The 1797 letter to Lee, the only one to her so far, is very
significant indeed. It helps to establish that Smith was more connected to other
prominent writers of her day, especially women, than we have heretofore been
able to document.
172
These new, late, lost, found letters are the vicissitudes of an editor’s life. To
take on a definitive edition, you have to be a perfectionist, and you have to let
perfection go. Let me just add a sidebar here, lest any future researcher be any
more trusting of online resources than of our human counterparts or ourselves.
In preparing this essay, I revisited a number of names at the NRA to check their
records against what I knew from my own on-site researches. They list one set of
records on William Towers Smith at the India Record Office, but others exist, I
know. Moreover, Smith’s fifty-six new letters and Benjamin’s fifty are not listed
four years after they came to light. And the Maida Butler letters are given as if
still housed at the Preston Manor Museum, even though they were moved to the
ESRO as early as July 2004.
*****
My life, and the intimate details of Charlotte Smith’s, have been entwined for
over thirty years. One reviewer of my edition remarked that I had effaced myself
in it. That absence, or attempt at objectivity, was intentional. As scholars, we
parse and probe our authors’ lives and works and psyches in terms of schools of
thought, as if we were somehow exempt from the very rubrics we subject them
to. I have not always been exempt. A non-academic friend once asked about my
project: ‘Who was this Mrs Smith?’ Now, thanks to a tidal wave of new Smith
studies, I could say ‘the first Romantic poet’. Then, I gave a quick and dirty ‘bio’:
she wrote ten novels, four volumes of poetry, six children’s books, and had twelve
children, one rotter of a husband, and influence on authors I was sure my friend
had heard of (William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, John Keats). My enthusiasm,
and belief in the importance of Smith’s work, which never left me, must have
infused my voice.
My friend tilted her head and asked earnestly, ‘What would you say to her if
you could meet her?’
Tears sprang to my eyes, and my throat choked. In that instant my good
friend Mrs Smith was near enough to touch, real, as real as any of the many
scholars, librarians and archivists who helped me along the way. Gray streaked
her light brown hair, and long strain and deep sadness etched stark lines in her
still pretty face. Her dress was faded, its sleeves frayed, and her thin, ink-stained
fingers were knobbly from decades of plying her quill pen. But her eyes glinted
with kind amusement at my star-struck state.
‘How very good of you to come’, she said, not rising from her chair. ‘What
can I do for you today?’
Questions assailed me, and each scholar has their own: a turn of phrase, a lost
allusion, a hint that she knew someone we cannot yet prove. I thought of what
we have lost. What became of her daughters Charlotte Mary? Lucy Newhouse?
Harriet Geary? The son-in-law Alexandre Marc Constant de Foville whom she
173
so admired? What happened to her essay on novel writing? Or to that last novel,
left undone? Did she mean to finish Beachy Head? What fragments or whole
treasures were among the sweepings of her closet that someone – Charlotte
Mary? or her sister Catherine Dorset? – consigned to the flames? Where is the
inventory of the precious library of 500 or 1,000 volumes she sold in 1803 for
money to save her from the county jail?
How well did she know Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hay, Harriet and Sophia Lee? When and where did they visit
her? When and how often did she visit them? Where are the other letters she
wrote to them, hinted at in the few that have survived? What happened when
she went to Paris?
But in the meeting none can have with her save through her holograph letters and the printed page, all I could manage was, ‘Mr Cadell was right, you
know. Your novels live. And about your poetry ... We assembled this volume to
honour “the celebrated Mrs Smith”’.
12 CHARLOTTE SMITH: INTERTEXTUALITIES
Stuart Curran
To hear Charlotte Smith talk about her writing, you would think she was a
drudge or even a hack, ‘compelled’, as she now famously put it, ‘to live only to
write & write only to live’.1 Her letters to publishers are long on publishing detail
– how many sheets to a volume; how many volumes to a novel ; how much she
would be paid for each – and not just short, but wholly lacking, in any claim to
art. Except that she is continually ordering or borrowing books from them, she
seems to have her nose to a grindstone and her eyes shut to all literary value.
Only occasionally, most conspicuously in her letters to her Dublin friend, Rev.
Joseph Cooper Walker, who selflessly oversaw her fortunes in Ireland, and in
those late, wonderfully animated letters to Sarah Rose, does her sense of literary merit show through. There, indeed, one suddenly discovers someone who
is reading every principal piece of literature available and commenting sharply
upon the success or lack thereof of many contemporary productions. She complains to Walker of Edgeworth’s Belinda that ‘the harshness & rude manner
of the execution is unpleasing’2 and to Mrs Rose that she ‘thought [Godwin’s]
Fleetwood very la la – not to say a disagreeable Novel ... Men very seldom write
pleasing novels’.3 To an unknown correspondent on New Year’s Day of 1805 she
wryly remarks that for her friend Godwin, ‘Novel writing is not his forte but his
foible’.4 Frequently, as in this same letter, she notes archly how badly written and
derivative much of the current literary production is. Here, then, is a person with
a highly developed sense of taste who in her occasional foray into literary criticism meticulously distinguishes the styles and trends in contemporary literature.
Still, we do not look in her correspondence for an extensive critique of other
writers or for an analytical account of her own processes and aims as a writer.
The kind of self-reflection of a Keats or a Byron is, unfortunately, foreign to the
nature of her correspondence. If we want to know about Charlotte Smith’s views
as a literary critic, thus, we must turn to her novels and poems, where she holds
an almost obsessive dialogue with other literature.
Even if we lacked her correspondence, we would know whom she esteemed
in the literary history she inherited because she continually quotes from them.
– 175 –
176
In English she returns again and again to Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson,
Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Sterne, and, her favourite contemporary poet, William Cowper. Among French writers her taste is highly eclectic, though she
returns often to La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, and, especially, Voltaire, in whose
works she appears to have read very widely. And given that under George IV you
could be prosecuted (and Leigh Hunt’s brother John was), for publishing Voltaire, his every appearance in her works thus carries political weight. Her Italian
favourites are Petrarch’s sonnets and Metastasio’s operatic arias, with an occasional glance at Guarini’s Pastor Fido and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. She knows
no German, but is keenly aware of the distinctive place occupied by Goethe’s
Werther in the literature of sensibility. There is one other literature in which she
is not only proficient but, for a woman author, surprisingly forthcoming: Latin.
She certainly admires Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, but she reserves a special place
for Virgil.
Charlotte Smith, then, in her own writing reveals herself to be widely read,
indeed, usually so in comparison with her peers. In contrast to Smith’s practices,
if we turn to Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), we encounter two allusions to
Shakespeare, three to Pope, and one each to Sheffield and Congreve. With her
Cecilia (1782) the list is longer, but then, so is the novel – much longer. There
are fifteen allusions to Shakespeare in this work, three to Pope, two to Milton;
and Kyd, Otway, Vanbrugh, and Swift each have one. In Camilla (1796) we find
six allusions to Shakespeare, three to Milton, two to Pope, and one each for Ben
Jonson, Dryden, the Spectator papers, Thomson, and Young. Or if we look to
Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) for a later model, for all its self-reflexive literariness
and characteristic recurrence of reading lists, there are only three allusions to
Shakespeare, four to Milton, three to Pope, and one each to Ben Jonson, Gray,
Samuel Johnson, and Sheridan. How different this is from Smith’s practices any
reader of hers will acknowledge.
There is another way of incorporating authors into one’s text that enjoyed
a brief rage in the 1790s, the chapter motto. During much of the eighteenth
century chapters were often preceded by a check list or an argument; sometimes
the latter, as with Fielding, Goldsmith, and Smollett, amounted to a humorous
secondary text in play against the main one. At some point late in the century it
became fashionable to ornament the chapters of fiction with verse. The preface
to the fourth edition of Elizabeth Helme’s popular Louisa; or, The Cottage on
the Moor of 1787 notes, ‘This edition is divided into chapters, mottos added to
each, and the whole carefully revised’.5 Mrs Helme’s literary repertory, however,
is strictly limited: her mottos draw fourteen times from Thomson’s Seasons, three
times from Young’s Night Thoughts and Addison’s Cato, twice from Blair’s Grave,
and once each from John Home and William Shenstone. The author who gave
this fad its wind was Ann Radcliffe, beginning with The Romance of the Forest
Charlotte Smith: Intertextualities
177
in 1792. There we find the following assortment of mottos: ten from Shakespeare, five from Collins (the ‘Ode to Fear’ is rather a natural in this context),
three from Beattie, two each from Thomson, Mason, and Warton, with an individual sprinkling of Gray, Seward, and two anonymous poets. Two years later, in
The Mysteries of Udolfo, Radcliffe turns to a similar collection of British poets:
with twenty-one citations of Shakespeare, nine of Thomson, seven of Beattie,
five of Milton, three each from Collins and Gray, two from Mason, one from
Goldsmith, and, quite surprising given the orthodoxy of those choices, two from
Frank Sayers’ Ossianic ‘Moina’, one from Hannah More’s sacred drama ‘David
and Goliath’, and a snippet from Samuel Rogers’ near-contemporary Pleasures of
Memory. This fashion continued for a short while but quickly ran out of steam,
probably because it was such a test of the author’s breadth of reading and mnemonic capacity. Harriet and Sophia Lee use mottos for each of their Canterbury
Tales of 1797, as does Maria Regina Roche for Children of the Abbey (1796)
and Clermont (1998). Mary Charlton employs them for Phedora in 1798 but
retreats from the necessity in Rosella the next year. Still, in 1799 Jane West will
use mottos for A Tale of the Times, and then, it seems they disappear from such
a regularity of appearance until the ‘Author of Waverley’, showing in this as in
many other instances his profound debt to Smith, resurrects them in the second of the series, Guy Mannering (1815). Thereafter, with few exceptions,6 Scott
offered mottos for each of his novels’ chapters – many from Shakespeare and the
standard canon of eighteenth-century poetry, to be sure, though also a number
from Scots ballads, and, perhaps surprising, several from such contemporaries
as Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. When Edward Trelawny borrowed this
practice in his eccentric Adventures of a Younger Son of 1831, he did so, it would
seem, mainly to show off his own literary acquaintance. All his mottos are drawn
from Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and some of the verse he uses at that point had
actually never been formally published before. Thereafter the chapter motto
largely disappears from fiction in English.7
In the 1790s, writing in the midst of this current, Charlotte Smith adopts
mottos for each of the four volumes of The Old Manor House (the first of which,
from Ariosto, as recent scholarship has well understood, tells us where to begin
contextualizing this fiction).8 And then, with The Banished Man, Marchmont,
and The Young Philosopher (though, oddly, not Montalbert, the second novel in
this succession), she wades straight into the current. Or, perhaps, one should
emphasize that it is a distinct tributary, since her rushing stream of quotations
seems quite unlike the other bodies of water just fathomed, almost stagnant
with their all-but-predictable British classics. The title of The Banished Man is
drawn from Matthew Prior’s adaptation of ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’, but the title
page, perhaps in tribute to her new son-in-law Alexandre de Foville, bears an
epigraph from Montaigne. The motto from the first chapter comes from the
178
imitative old Scots poem ‘Hardyknute’. Chapter mottos in the four volumes are
drawn from both Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides;
from Horace and Virgil’s Aeneid (both twice); Petrarch, Guarini (three times),
Ariosto, and Metastasio; from La Fontaine, Voltaire (four times from different,
obscure plays), and Rousseau; and, in English, along with the usual bows in the
direction of Shakespeare and Milton (though often from unexpected texts),
and to Collins and Thomson, we encounter Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Addison’s Evidences of the Christian Religion, Johnson’s Idler, and, closer to her own
time, Cowper, of course, but also Erasmus Darwin and George Crabbe. Even
when she adopts a motto from Shakespeare, Smith almost deliberately lards the
discourse, as in Volume 2, Chapter 6, with other literatures: there she quotes
Racine, Voltaire, and Cicero, in that order. One should note, too, that though
her Greek authors are quoted in eighteenth-century English translations, none
of the others are translated. As most of the editors of the Pickering & Chatto
Works of Charlotte Smith (2005–7) discovered, her various compositors apparently had no knowledge of these languages, and it seems never to have occurred
to Smith herself that this might raise an issue demanding her assiduous care.
Assuredly, Smith, with her fluent, practical French and the ability to navigate
five centuries in the development of the Italian language, would have provided
accurate texts to her publishers. From the printed results, however, one could
claim with actual authority that Smith never proof-read a text in Latin, French,
or Italian. Sometimes, the Italian in particular is beyond restoration to more
than the approximate gist of the utterance.
Marchmont and The Young Philosopher are not so assertively catholic and
erudite in their pursuit of mottos as The Banished Man, but each of those novels has its own curious emphases. The mottos in the last volume of Marchmont,
for example, form a tissue of foreign literatures, beginning with a long, untranslated and unsourced passage from the elegies of Tibullus. The last chapter of
the first volume of that novel, in what would appear to be a private joke, opens
with an unidentified passage from the forty-sixth of her own Elegiac Sonnets.9
In The Young Philosopher the most striking feature among these devices occurs
shortly after the praise Smith lavishes on Mary Wollstonecraft in the preface, at
the head of the second chapter, where a passage, again unidentified, from Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice greets the reader. If we did not know
what sort of philosophy is being privileged in this novel, it would appear that
our ignorance just might stem from our not having read the right texts to insure
our recognizing its nature. Another issue arises with the last two of these novels,
where a number of quotations have proved untraceable, even with all the modern electronic means at an editor’s disposal. That is to suggest that Smith, in both
of them, if not as elaborate in her choices of text as in The Banished Man, is going
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even farther afield from the standard repertory in her introduction of contextual
literatures.
And, of course, chapter mottos alone are not the only intertextual issue to
test a reader’s competence. You cannot enter very far within any of Smith’s works
without encountering the citation of someone else’s. A kind of inveterate intertextual collecting is a distinctive character of all of her writing, including the
poetry. Some years back I noted that, aside from Smith’s curious movement of
sonnets by characters in her novels into her own voice in subsequent editions of
the Elegiac Sonnets, about a third of these poems involve some form of ventriloquism, where she either occupies a character, as in the Werther series, or explicitly
borrows another poet’s phrasing.10 This curious practice is replicated outside the
sonnets as well, both in The Emigrants and Beachy Head.
I have been tracing this characteristic of Smith’s writing without particularly
attributing significance to it, but clearly it is a truly significant attribute of her
work and a significant stylistic innovation in how we conceive of both the concept of the literary and the integrity of the author. I know of no other writers in
the later eighteenth century, whether in prose or verse, who so continually and so
extensively incorporate other voices within their texts. The questions inevitably
arise whether she is propping herself up, or perhaps showing off. I think we can
dispense with both those suppositions. In the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets, for
instance, the adaptation of a sonnet from an original and identified Petrarchan
text testifies to her awareness of the generic source she is adapting, and her then
turning to the experience of Werther and rendering it within this form represents a carefully constructed bridge between the sonnet of complaint and the
literary expression of sensibility. In other words, Smith seems deliberately to be
establishing measuring sticks within the readers’ minds that will lead them to a
right reading of her concerns as a poet. And the continual evocation of other
writers – the last line of the opening sonnet, for instance, is taken directly from
Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ – testifies to her continuing in the main line of English
poetic tradition, as if she were saying from the outset, as Keats would later on, ‘I
think I shall be among the British Poets after my death’.11 That Smith continues
this practice throughout her career, and that she is never criticized for it, should
together fairly dispose of the question of ostentation. Indeed, she is much more
engaged in establishing the nature of a foundational authority for her voice than
she is in displaying her learning as a mere female accomplishment. In this respect
it is important to observe that Smith never associated with prominent bluestockings and, from Mrs Manley, the ungenerous caricature of Hannah Cowley
at the end of The Old Manor House, to Lady Llancarrick in Montalbert, who sets
herself up for literary fame by publicly attitudinizing as a poetess, Smith’s depiction of affected women writers is constant and sharply critical. Her inclusion of
contemporary writers within her texts or in chapter mottos generally represents
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approbation, certainly never outright disapproval, and implicitly erects a pantheon in which she forthrightly takes her own place.
To demonstrate this further, we might turn to the most concentrated example of literary interplay within her poetic oeuvre, which occurs in The Emigrants.
A reader of either book of this poem can expect to encounter a quotation early
in its course. In Book I we are told that ‘the spectre Care / … follows [us] still
/ … ’till the friendly grave / (Our sole secure asylum) “ends the chace”’.12 There
follows a footnote in which Smith confesses that she can’t remember who provided that last phrase, perhaps Edward Young.13 But then why is it there? How
is it even necessary? Why instead of ‘ends the chace’ would she not choose
something on the order of ‘ends our days’, as an original poetic alternative? How
curious, too, it is in this poem so rife with parenthetical constructions that she
should precede this quoted phrase with one of them: ‘the friendly grave / (Our
sole secure asylum) “ends the chace”’. The quoted passage likewise partakes of
the parenthetical, as two voices intermingle their thoughts one within the other;
two perspectives are superimposed as one. The characteristic appears in a different form as Smith pauses from describing the labour of a French peasant in a
vineyard he will never own to cite a Thomas Warton poem of some forty years
earlier attesting to the same disparity.14 Not long after, an entire line is given over
to Milton’s ‘Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire’,15 which is inserted into a
parenthesis describing heraldic devices. In Book II, after a motto on the destructiveness of war excerpted from Virgil’s Georgics, and as usual untranslated, Smith
almost immediately borrows another line – ‘For “Hope” still waits upon the
flowery prime’16 – which her note ascribes to Shakespeare (though as with the
Young quotation in Book I she has the wrong author; it is Edmund Waller). In
lines 77–8 she splits her own lines to incorporate ‘Famine, and Sword, and Fire,
/ Crouch for employment’ from Shakespeare’s Henry V; and fifteen lines later
she borrows ‘Oh! Polished perturbation – golden care!’17 from Henry IV, Part
II. There are two further examples of poetic incorporation late in the poem, and
they strikingly reveal a purposiveness beneath what otherwise might have seemed
a random deployment of the verses of others. In a long retrospective on her travails, Smith represents herself as grateful for the support of those who ‘bid me
go / “Right onward” – a calm votary of the Nymph’,18 and who will testify ‘That,
not in selfish sufferings absorb’d, / “I gave to misery all I had, my tears”’.19 ‘Right
onward’ is Milton’s expression of commitment to his public obligation, though
blind, in the second sonnet to Cyriac Skinner; ‘He gave to mis’ry all he had, a
tear’ comes from Gray’s epitaph in the ‘Elegy’. Inasmuch as the overarching subject of the poem is Charlotte Smith’s displacement within her own country, as a
parallel to the displaced French émigrés she encounters, the revival of her literary heritage functions to re-ground her culturally. Not only are Smith’s personal
fortunes tied through interior quotation to major voices from Britain’s literary
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past; the country’s own public fortunes are as well reinforced by the recollection
here at the beginning of yet another conflict with France of the earlier one that
is the subject of the two Shakespeare plays cited in the text. Given the cast of
Smith’s poem, however, the particular grounding has an ironic resonance. Henry
V, after all, ends his St. Crispin’s Day speech with satisfaction over what Smith
closes Book I by bemoaning: ‘the deafening roar / Of victory from a thousand
brazen throats, / That tell with what success wide-wasting War / Has by our
brave Compatriots thinned the world’.20
Phrases from England’s past are thus incorporated within the poem to achieve
a present currency. The literary life-blood of the British spirit is here revived on
a contemporary stage. But in this poem there is yet a further dimension of intertextuality that greatly magnifies the poem’s authority. In this context, we should
confront the exact terms of the encomium to William Cowper in the poem’s
dedication.
The following performance is far from aspiring to be considered as an imitation of your
inimitable Poem, The Task; I am perfectly sensible, that it belongs not to a feeble and
feminine hand to draw the Bow of Ulysses.
The force, clearness, and sublimity of your admirable poem; the felicity, almost peculiar to your genius, of giving to the most familiar objects dignity and effect, I could never
hope to reach; yet having read The Task almost incessantly from its first publication to
the present time, I felt that kind of enchantment described by Milton, when he says,
The Angel ended, and in Adam’s ear
So charming left his voice, that he awhile
Thought him still speaking. –21
In The Emigrants we too, for awhile, think that Cowper is still speaking; except
that the timbres really are somehow different. I want here to add the contemporary perspective of the British Critic, which has grasped something it doesn’t
quite know how to conceptualize and helpfully emphasizes the way in which
poetic voices continue to speak across time though with individual adjustments
of tone: ‘With respect to the structure of Mrs. Smith’s blank verse, we do not
consider it as having any claim to particular commendation. In the poem of the
Emigrants, there is neither the harmony of Milton’s pauses, nor the energy of her
justly-admired Cowper’s diction. In some few passages are expressions which
degrade the dignity of style required in such a composition …’;22 and he goes on
to cite Smith’s inclusion of the words ‘farmer’ and (to compound the sin, twice)
‘parish’. But would this critic have gone in this particular direction if Smith had
not shone him the way in her praise of Cowper. Her language, from the critic’s
perspective, is often too ‘common’ to sustain the resonance of Milton’s or Cowper’s blank verse. And in that difference Smith embodies the attribute to which
in a very few years, to quote him out of context, Wordsworth will find himself
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‘under greater obligations than are likely to be … acknowledged’, as he crafts his
own conversational blank verse on the model provided him by Smith’s poem.23
It is thus comparatively easy to see the ways in which the incorporation of earlier voices serves to deepen and enlarge the scope of Smith’s poetic utterance. She
is drawing on the same generic repository, and doing so, it might be added, just
at the time when John Bell and Robert Anderson are bringing out ‘the Works’
in multiple volumes that comprise what Thomas Warton had, in the mid 1770s,
styled for the first time as the ‘history of English poetry’. To put quotations
around phrases is to exchange empowerment for derivativeness, always to keep
the sound of the angelic voices resounding in one’s ears, even as one strives to
find a style and perspective that is uniquely one’s own. In poetry such quotation
has the ring of high cultural nationalism, or, where the literatures are multiple, of
far-thinking cosmopolitanism. But can such a purposeful intertextuality operate
within the busy, common thoroughfares in which fiction would stake its claims?
Obviously, we are now accustomed to such trafficking, but we have to ask how
much the eighteenth century was. Of course, there is Fielding inaugurating his
own novelistic career by parodying Richardson; but that is very broad, and the
kind of intertextual engagement I am looking at is far more nuanced. But with
Smith, it is there from the first.
Take the case of Emmeline. Smith proved something to herself with The
Romance of Real Life, namely, that she could tell a story in economical and stylish prose. But to write a novel would require her to find her own sufficient voice.
When in the fourth volume of Emmeline she steers almost her entire cast of
characters to eastern France, it is clear that she has an ulterior purpose in mind.
Sure enough, Emmeline must visit the Rocks of Meillerie where St. Preux had
plighted his love to Julie in La nouvelle Heloïse. We, of course, had been aware,
if only from the frequency of what Ellen Newenden in the next novel Ethelinde
will call the ‘perpetual lachrymals’24 to which the characters are subjected, that
we have been inhabiting a novel of sensibility. Now, perhaps, by reflection we
will also increase our awareness of the emotional and intellectual range of issues
involved when too many men are in love with one woman. Likewise, from the
woman’s perspective we cannot miss the extent to which she is being subjected
to the proprietorship of male authority and control. My point is that, far from
being a mere generic indicator, the insertion of the context of Rousseau serves
immediately to define how different within the apparent similarities are the
dynamics of Smith’s novel from the standard model for the novel of sensibility.
A like context is provided by the introduction of Smith’s own main fictional
model into the heart of the book. When Smith committed herself, in 1787, to
the challenge of constructing a four-volume work of original fiction, she had not
far to look for a paradigm to follow. Frances Burney’s five-volume Cecilia had
appeared just five years earlier: in length, complexity of construction, and range
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of character, it amounted to a major advance over Evelina and cemented Burney’s
reputation as the novelist in the current scene with a claim to the greatest polish
and art. Both these works of fiction, however, work within the familiar conventions of the courtship novel, and it is clear that Smith, too, with Burney as her
guide took this subgenre as her own starting-point. That she so effectively put
her own immediate stamp on it is testimony to why she, and not Burney, would
become the most influential novelist in the next decade. In the ‘General Introduction’ to the Pickering & Chatto Works, I argue that the insertion of the verses
‘To my Children’ as preface to the first edition of Emmeline, even if they were
removed from the subsequent ones, had a much larger effect than offering maternal solicitude as a reason for entering the literary market.25 It also established
her credentials, unlike the unmarried Burney, to raise adult issues, particularly
sexual ones, and therefore greatly enlarge beyond Burney the arena in which her
characters could function. This aim seems reinforced in the scene, in Volume 2,
Chapter 9, in which Mrs Stafford and the unhappily married Adelina Trelawny
are being read to by Delamere’s dashing friend, George Fitz-Edward, who is soon
to establish a consensual liaison with Adelina that results in a pregnancy that
must be concealed. The book he reads from is Cecilia. Since Loraine Fletcher in
her introduction to the novel has very ably remarked the intertextual complexity
here, let me put it in her words:
Like all Burney’s heroines, Cecilia Beverley attempts to act on her own judgement
and suffers a form of mental breakdown in consequence. Burney was skeptical about
the capacity of women, however intelligent, to disregard patriarchal custom without
major damage to themselves ... Unlike Cecilia, [Emmeline] is not over-anxious about
her reputation or what people think: she risks making herself, by some standards of
the time, unmarriageable when she looks after Adelina during her confinement ...
[U]nlike Burney’s heroine, Emmeline does not marry into the aristocratic family who
despise her but marries a professional man who appears half-way through the narrative. By her overt comparison with Cecilia ... Smith can more sharply distinguish
between Burney’s reluctant resignation to the hierarchies of the class and gender and
her own increasingly feminist and anti-aristocratic politics.26
Given the emphasis Fletcher makes here about the plot’s eventual turn away
from an aristocratic connection, it is important to observe that Emmeline’s final
choice of husband, Godolphin, has not yet appeared in the plot when the reading of Cecilia establishes the class paradigm against which Smith will position
her own novel. Nor has the secondary heroine, Adelina, yet crossed into territory that Burney resolutely shuns in her novels. It is as if in this one detail, Smith
is signalling her reader to observe carefully where she is going to part company
with the author of Cecilia.
Frances Burney makes a second oblique appearance in Smith’s fiction, and it
would appear, though the effect is very different, that the intertextual signal is
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no less apparent. It occurs in the actual central chapter of Desmond, Volume 2,
Chapter 11, where Fanny Waverley is complaining to her sister Geraldine Verney of what her mother subjects her to within the marriage market of Bath. In
this instance, it is restrictions on her reading. ‘I must confine myself ’, she says,
‘to such mawkish reading as is produced, “in a rivulet of text running through
a meadow of margin,” in the soft semblance of letters, “from Miss Everida Evelyn to Miss Victorina Villars”’.27 The ‘rivulet of text’ in ‘the meadow of margin’
comes from the first act of Sheridan’s School for Scandal, a not inappropriate
resonance for a frivolous upper-class Bath social order, but the epistolary novel
alluded to in the Evelyn-Villars exchange is clearly Evelina. As this is expressed
within the animated satirical voice that Smith so artfully crafts for Fanny Waverley’s letters, the reference cannot be read as mean-spirited, but it is nonetheless
unmistakable. And the ‘soft semblance of letters’ only stresses the distinction
that is being enforced in this second epistolary novel that is so unlike its predecessor, Evelina. But why does Smith once again distance herself from Burney
through such a device? I think it is because, with Desmond, Charlotte Smith very
carefully made a decision to change the direction of her fiction. The title itself is
indicative: not Emmeline, Ethelinde, or Celestina, but Desmond – a man’s world,
and a very carefully constructed one, at that. (From this point on, it should be
noted, except for the estate that is the focal point of The Old Manor House, every
one of the novels will be centred through masculine denomination.) The entire
first volume of Desmond, in a striking achievement, is defined exclusively according to male perspectives, in the exchange of letters between Lionel Desmond
and Erasmus Bethel. Women like Mrs Fairfax and her empty-headed daughters
enter this arena as an oblique foil for the real business of the world, which is
conducted – badly conducted, for certain – but nonetheless conducted solely, by
men. Men, if they wish to see what is happening in revolutionary France, simply
hop the Channel, as Desmond does (and, thanks to Jackie Labbe’s discovery, as
we know Charlotte Smith herself did).28 Men, when they quote other writers,
quote manly ones – Laurence Sterne, for example, or Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’; as
women, in Volume 2, parody women writers. In Geraldine Verney’s reply to this
letter of Fanny’s she manages to produce as her riposte to Fanny’s satiric account
an excruciating paragraph of gushing, purple prose typical of a lady’s novel. It is
fair to say as well that the exchange of letters between these two sisters reproduces
exactly the opposite quality of that manly making-decisions and taking-control
that constitute the implicit tonality of the first volume’s correspondence. Fanny
is stuck without recourse in Bath, as Geraldine is virtually imprisoned with her
young children in Verney’s town house, at least until it is pulled from under her
in the crash of his debts.
Still, the reference to Evelina must extend further than simply promoting
differing perspectives according to gender. Fanny Waverley can rightly make
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such an allusion because she is directly in the position of Evelina, at the centre
of the marriage market, but, unlike that sheltered innocent, she has adopted a
satirical manner that is a protective shield against its impulse to commodify her.
Geraldine constitutes the spectral commodification she resists, sold off first by
her mother to Richard Verney and now faced with her husband’s scarcely veiled
attempts to prostitute her to save his crumbling fortunes. The dark realism of
Desmond, whether encountered in England or France, occupies a different arena
from the upper-class courtship rituals that the Margate and Bath settings keep
intruding upon it, as if the intertextual exchange between Burney and Smith,
housed within this simple phrase at the pivotal point in the novel, were instead
an affair of generic competition between two wholly diverse notions of where
the contemporary novel should set its sights and dig its foundations.
Desmond is a particularly complicated work on an intertextual plane. I have
endeavoured here to note the ways in which the epistolary form allows Smith to
characterize according to authorial citation as well as how she uses allusion to
contrast her own fictional milieu with Burney’s and other writers of a female-oriented fiction. But there is a pressing contemporary allusiveness in the novel that
makes it unique among Smith’s novels, one that is deployed with great subtlety
but with unremitting purposiveness.
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and the first instalment of
Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France, with their directly opposing viewpoints, were both published in November 1790. Neither work therefore could
take up the arguments of the other. Writing Desmond a year and a half later, to
put it briefly, Smith sets herself to mediate between them. Adopting the same
epistolary format as Williams, enrolling a reformed French aristocrat like Williams’ du Fossé in Montfleuri, she sends Lionel Desmond to Paris so that he can
write his first letter to Bethel to record the scene that is the subject of Williams’
initial letters, the Festival of the Federation, held on 14 July 1790, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. So the fictional Desmond is in the same
crowd as the actual Williams of her representation. But whereas Williams covers only the summer and early fall in her Letters, the action of Desmond unfolds
over something like a year and half, and Smith assertively appoints herself as
its historian. Not only can Desmond join Williams in celebrating the Festival,
but he is still in France when Bethel forwards him Burke’s Reflections, and in
Volume II, letter 6, 8 January 1791, he writes to his friend a long exposition,
beginning, ‘I own I never expected to have seen an elaborate treatise in favour
of despotism written by an Englishman’29 and goes on to arraign what he calls
Burke’s ‘well-dressed absurdities’.30 Luckily for the reader who may not be certain
of what Desmond alludes to, we have already encountered the gist of Burke’s
arguments in the mouth of the antiquated Count d’Hauteville in Volume I, letter 13, a serious satirical thrust on Smith’s part, since the Count presides over a
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dilapidated chateau on a run-down estate, the embodiment of the shabby gentility of a superannuated regime. Desmond’s witty prophecy to Bethel that he can
‘foresee that a thousand pens will leap from their standishes’31 in answer to Burke
is itself answered within the text when, three letters later, Bethel forwards him
a book containing what he terms ‘much sound sense ... however bluntly delivered’,32 which is to say, Paine’s Rights of Man. In his response Desmond seconds
Bethel’s opinion, proclaiming himself ‘forcibly struck with truths that either
were not seen before, or were (by men who did not wish to acknowledge them)
carefully repressed’.33 Not to overextend this argument, it is as if Smith, whose
August 1791 visit to France parallels Geraldine’s Verney’s and comes just days
after Williams’ return to France, had set herself to continue Williams’ series of
letters, whatever Williams herself might intend. Desmond is meant to offer an
alternative record of the history of the previous two years in the marketplace of
British opinion. And of course, there followed the September Massacres, which
for the most part determined the case. Still, this novel constitutes the boldest of
Smith’s incorporation of contemporary texts, in an experiment that is innovative
on both political and literary fronts.
There are many ways in which intertextual models infiltrate and affect the
course of others of Smith’s fictional arguments. A final example in its interesting
construction, I think, suggests again how very carefully Smith plots her novels.
Adriana Craciun, in her introduction to the Pickering & Chatto Montalbert,
offers two literary contexts that she finds determinant for the text. The first
– and her argument is persuasive – is that quotation from The Aeneid intrudes
upon the southern Mediterranean setting of Volume II the hopeless case of Dido
as context and cautionary tale. Since she has ably argued that case,34 we can leave
it to her terms in the introduction. But the second work she cites there35 allows
us to return to the question of contemporary genres of fiction and their resonances within, and, as I would wish to argue, well beyond literature. The book in
question is Ann Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance of 1790. Perhaps the Sicilian setting
need not be the actual determinant here. Simply by moving Rosalie Montalbert
to Italy, Smith invokes all the claptrap associated with Radcliffe’s gothic. Forcing
her to undergo the Messina earthquake of 1783 only adds a patina of the sublime to the usual cast of Italianate gothic: a faithless friend with designs on the
heroine; a tyrannical mother with plans for her son’s marriage among the Italian
nobility; the heroine’s kidnapping by mercenaries; a monumental and forbidding castle of great expanse and antiquity; crude and superstitious peasants;
and a surprising rescue by a gallant and immensely rich British gentleman. To
reduce this episode to those abstracted components is, perhaps, to do it injustice,
because, within the tried conventions of the form, Smith invests great energy,
genuine fear, and a determined feminism. Still, she does nothing to disguise the
conventional nature of this gothic episode that occupies the entire third quarter
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of the novel. And that is because, I believe, she wants its stark, unnuanced terms
to contrast with the discourse that occupies the second quarter before it, the
narrative of Rosalie’s true mother, Mrs Vyvian, as well as the plunge into realism
in which the novel concludes.
Brought up in a grand estate, but one isolated because of its family’s Catholic
allegiances, the first Rosalie, orphaned of her mother, attends to the well-being
of her patriarchal and demanding father. When her cousin Ormsby, a dependant
who serves her father as secretary, declares his love for her, she does what so many
young women who are not the protagonists of Smith’s novels do; she reciprocates
and finds herself pregnant with the novel’s heroine. When her father discovers
the affair (though not the pregnancy), he imprisons the boy until he can force
Rosalie to forsake him and then packs him off to India and forces his daughter’s
marriage with an older and just as narrow a man in Mr. Vyvian. The scenery in
which all this takes place, though in the south of England, is wintry, dark and
forbidding. In other words, what this narrative gives us are the conditions for a
true British gothic, with all the elements distanced by Radcliffe to the continent
– religious bigotry, parental tyranny, older men preying on a defenceless young
woman, violent emotions – transposed to a native soil. And if we do not understand the point, it will be replayed on Radcliffe’s more familiar turf a second
time immediately after the narrative ends. But in this way, what the reader is
accustomed to as fantasy is forcefully rendered within structures whose realism
cannot be disguised or denied. What allows the tyrannical men to control and
abuse the first Rosalie are the laws of England that reinforce male hegemony
and violence. And if we miss this point, the outrageous behaviour enacted by
the nastiest of the men whom Smith styles for heroes of her novels, the younger
Montalbert, takes over the last quarter of the novel and saturates it with male
entitlement and unrestrainable violence. It may be that Montalbert learns his
lesson at the end of the novel, but, if so, it can be nowhere near as well as have
the two Rosalie’s, mother and daughter, who suffer as victims of the house of
Montalbert. The real hero of the novel, Walsingham, it must be said, has every
reason to wander the world as a hopeless melancholic.
But from the point of view of an overlay of literary expectations, the intertextual play of conventional gothic machinery is what actually forces the reader to
comprehend the true terms of the narrative enacted on both sides of its eruption
in the far-off Italian locale. Smith seems to be saying that, unlike Radcliffe, I do
not indulge in the gothic to terrify my readers. If it intrudes, it is so that we may
understand it in political and social terms and in a specifically British cultural
context.
But to move too far in this direction is to take the discussion afield into other
forms of textual interplay. In the introduction and annotations to Marchmont,
for instance, Kate Field and Harriet Guest observe a constant referentiality to
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the era of the English Civil Wars, a safe arena for Smith to indulge in historical
parallels with the stresses of the 1790s. That, of course, is likewise the function,
in The Old Manor House, which was published in the year of England’s declaration of war against France, of exporting Orlando Somerive to take part in the
war against the Americans some fifteen years earlier. Or, if we want to consider
an interplay that involves not history but philosophy, we could set our sights,
with Arnold Markley in his introduction to Smith’s last conventional novel, on
the interaction between The Young Philosopher and the intellectual universe associated with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. The presence of Smith’s
complete works in a modern and richly annotated edition is bound to foster a
continuing discussion of such textual interplay.
Wherever readers look in her Works, they will find Charlotte Smith intensely
engaged with the literary world she inherited, as well as the one in which she
lived. We can witness it from the very first of her sonnets to Beachy Head, the
poem that survived the greatest disaster in her life as a writer, which was the sale
of her library. That final masterpiece of recovered personal and cultural memory
by a housebound invalid, even when it is not quoting other writers, is the final
testament to the intense interaction with which Charlotte Smith engaged the
world as text.
13 CHARLOTTE SMITH, WOMEN POETS AND
THE CULTURE OF CELEBRITY
Stephen C. Behrendt
Charlotte Smith’s influence on Romantic-era poetry was profound and longlasting. Although conventional literary history has long ignored the period’s
women poets, including Smith, her importance to her contemporaries is apparent from the many poems – by both women and men – that commemorate her
life, her work and her influence. Smith’s continuing presence in the writings of
her contemporaries and successors provides a barometer both of her own reputation and, more important, of the varieties of influence and authority she exerted
upon the British Romantic literary community. While these writings testify to
her poetry’s centrality to the literary culture, they also indicate the paradigmatic
value – especially for women writers – of a writer whose personal difficulties
were widely known and who achieved commercial success in part because of the
skill with which she mythologized her own physical and psychological experience in poems whose evocative power touched the lives and experiences of many
contemporaries. This essay examines a range of the responses – by both canonical writers like Wordsworth and unfamiliar ones like Mariann Dark, Martha
Hanson and Thomas Gent – to Smith’s poetry in particular, including public
testimonials that appeared in the periodical press following her death. It considers how these responses, which persisted into the 1820s, contributed to the
myth-making that Smith’s own writings – including the often intensely personal
pleading prefaces to her novels – encouraged among writers who read her poetry
with care and with empathy. The essay is not a literary study of Smith’s sonnets,
then, but a cultural study of reputation and influence that documents the extensive literary community that was united – at least briefly and circumstantially
– through the common theme of Smith and her writing.
It was the autumn of 1808: Charlotte Smith had been dead for just over a
year, Mary Robinson since 1800. Reviews of Smith’s Beachy Head combined
measured assessment of the verse with remarks on the recently deceased author’s
life and reputation, while Robinson had re-entered the critical conversation
following the publication in 1806 of the edition of her poems prepared by her
– 189 –
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daughter. The contemporary press’s responses to the two authors demonstrate
how very differently the culture could regard prolific women writers whose work
included poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose. The Annual Review and History
of Literature offers a striking illustration in its reviews of Charlotte Smith’s final
work, the posthumously published Beachy Head : With other Poems (in the issue
for 1807) and the three-volume Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson:
Including Many Pieces Never Before Published (in the issue for 1806).
The tone and substance of Annual Review’s comments on Robinson’s posthumous poems comes as something of a shock even to the jaded modern reader.
The tone is combative from the outset:
This ample collection of the versified effusions of the late Mrs. Robinson claims at
our hands just such a share of notice as may exempt us from the charge of careless
oversight, or contemptuous omission. It is ushered into the world by a memoir, which
appears to us sufficiently objectionable to call for a few remarks.
The critic cannot even wait to get to the poems, it seems, but must attack even the
introductory memoir that precedes them and that portrays Robinson as having
possessed ‘a sensibility of heart and tenderness of mind which very frequently led
her to form hasty decisions, while more mature deliberation would have tended
to promote her interest and worldly comfort; she was liberal even to a fault!’ To
this, the critic responds spitefully:
Sensibility is a most bewitching power, and when sensibility, under the form of
‘lovely woman’, complains of the perfidy of false friends, the ingratitude of fickle
lovers, the nothingness of pomp and pleasure, and the variety of nameless miseries
that assail from every quarter the generous and feeling heart – who but must melt
with compassion towards the charming sufferer, and glow with indignation against
a base unfeeling world? But let us stop a moment, to enquire from what description
of people these pathetic lamentations most frequently proceed. Why from these very
mistresses of colonels, captains, and ensigns – from that guilty, but much enduring
class of women, who rashly bartering away the good opinion of the world, the respect
of friends, and the care of legal protectors, receive nothing in exchange but some
vague and ineffectual claims on the gratitude, tenderness, or pity, of the most base,
selfish, and profligate portion of mankind! Such a one was poor Mrs. Robinson, and
as an impressive lesson of the effects of such a course of conduct upon the mind,
temper, and fortune, her prolix and querulous effusions, her ‘miserable strain’, may be
recommended to the attention of thoughtless and inexperienced youth.1
As if to underscore the rhetorical bravura and personal animus which this
extended passage illustrates, and which has nothing whatsoever to do with Robinson’s poetry, the critic then quotes a single poem, ‘Ode to the Memory of my
lamented Father’, in which we are told we might reasonably expect to find ‘genuine expression of feeling’. But even before quoting the poem the critic dismisses
it in advance as ‘that kind of unmeaning exaggeration and decorated inanity
Charlotte Smith, Women Poets and the Culture of Celebrity
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which are the miserable resource of a cold heart, a vitiated taste, and a defective
genius’.2
In contrast, the review of Smith opens warmly: ‘It is with a kind of melancholy pleasure that we prepare to pay a tribute of posthumous applause to the
elegant genius of Mrs. Charlotte Smith’, whom it calls a ‘delightful poet and
interesting woman; long a sufferer from pain, sickness, and misfortune’:
As a descriptive writer, either in verse or prose, she was surpassed by few. Gifted in no
ordinary degree, with taste, with fancy, and with feeling, she well knew how to select
the most striking features from the face of nature ; to add the accompaniments, and to
lay on the tints best suited to the cast of sentiment in which it soothed her to indulge,
and to extract from the whole food for a most delicious melancholy. Her stile [sic]
was clear and flowing, her diction poetical, ornate, and usually pure, and unaffected.
Her ‘Sonnets’ were principally built on individual feeling. They are the breathings of
sorrow, disappointment, and complaint.3
This review itemizes what was by 1807 a familiar catalogue of the characteristics of Smith’s life and work: the pervasive tone of melancholy, the life of illness
and suffering, the remarkable productivity in multiple genres. But it does not
attempt to minimize those personal attributes that Robert Southey, for one, had
found so attractive in Smith even in her later life, when she was sorely plagued
by physical and emotional stresses. He had included Smith among a group of
‘Living Remarkables’ he named in a letter of winter 1802, calling her ‘a woman
of genius, good sense, and pleasant manners’,4 a description that is echoed by
many of her contemporaries and which flavours the Annual Review’s comments.
Interestingly, though, the Annual’s notice makes no direct mention of Smith’s
novels, though it does remind its readers of a previous review of her Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804). Indeed, from the review one would not suspect
that Smith had produced a total of sixty-three volumes, including poetry, novels, translations and books for children, including among the latter a remarkable
introduction to poetry and poetics, the Conversations Introducing Poetry.
The tone of the two reviews could not be more different, nor could the moral,
political and ideological judgments that inform them. And yet both authors did
in fact suffer physically, emotionally and certainly economically; both expressed
in their works their indignation over the injustice of it all, especially as women
trapped in a system which denied them personal and property rights; both suffered reversals in public reputation (and consequently in fortune, or income)
when they expressed their political and social dissent; both embodied their personal sufferings in their poetry’s (and their prose’s) personae; both died relatively
young; both largely disappeared from the landscape of Romantic-era British literary history in the following century and a half; and both have been recovered
and favourably reassessed in recent decades. While I am concerned here with
Smith and with her place within the literary culture especially of Romantic-era
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women writers, what I shall say necessarily requires that we bear in mind the
example of Mary Robinson, whose notorious public behaviour seems to have
ensured that she would not get anything like a fair hearing as an artist among the
conventional critics of her time. Her case is a painful reminder of the pervasive
power of a self-anointed coterie of predominantly male critics who considered
themselves custodians of national public morality. Among this critical establishment, a woman like Robinson could not, apparently, be permitted to elude the
stigma that followed her ‘hasty decisions’, perhaps especially in the wake of the
publication in 1804 of her self-serving four-volume Memoirs.5 At the same time,
Smith seemed to be largely spared this sort of ad hominem vilification. The British Critic’s initial remarks in its 1808 review of Beachy Head are typical:
Most sincerely do we lament the death of Mrs. Charlotte Smith. We acknowledged
in her a genuine child of genius, a most vivid fancy, refined taste, and extraordinary
sensibility. We could not, indeed, always accord with her in sentiment. With respect
to some subjects beyond her line of experience, reading, and indeed talent, she was
unfortunately wayward and preposterous; but her poetic feeling and ability have
rarely been surpassed by any individual of her sex.6
Not wishing to speak ill of the dead, the writer here minimizes previous objections to Smith’s liberal social and national politics (presumably the ‘some
subjects’), electing instead to be gracious in praise.
But Robinson was dead, too, and the Annual Review had no compunction
about speaking ill of the dead in her case. In fact, it is clear that Robinson’s life
– and the ‘after-life’ we can trace in her troubled public reputation – largely
precluded the widespread and protracted public testimonials to Smith that
appeared for most of the Romantic period. Robinson had publicly combined
revolutionary politics, radical feminism and unconventional heterosexuality
in ways that Smith had not, and unlike Smith she was widely regarded as the
instigator rather than the victim of her misfortunes. Robinson was frequently
caricatured, often in overtly sexual fashion, in contemporary caricature prints,
and her lifestyle, including her notorious affair with the Prince of Wales, furnished the stuff of scandal and satire alike. Not even the literary works she had
published for a full quarter of a century could offset the widespread public scorn
and critical savagery, even though as Jacqueline Labbe and others have noted,
Robinson’s love poems were ‘immensely popular’ during her lifetime,7 her novels sold well, and her Lyrical Tales of 1800 seemed poised to rival the Lyrical
Ballads whose authorship Wordsworth and Coleridge were about to acknowledge. From the moment of her death, Smith performed a different sort of public
function within the contemporary British culture, even apart from her works
themselves (if one can ever entirely separate the two, which Smith herself seems
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so determined not to permit us to do), than Robinson did. My purpose here is to
examine what it was in Smith’s situation that made this so.
Writing to her friend Sarah Rose about a year before her death, Smith assumed
her characteristic attitude toward life: ‘I would not be low spirited or thankless but – What is life worth to me? The flowers are fallen never to reappear;
the thorns remain; I try to fancy a twig or two among them, but it will not do.
They are like Autumnal flowers, scentless and pale.’8 But if life itself meant little
to Smith in 1805, battered as she was in body and spirit, there was no question
about how she valued her work. Writing at about this same time (August 1805)
to Thomas Cadell, Jr, and William Davies, whom she was lobbying to publish
her final volume of poetry in a format uniform with the first two volumes of the
expanded Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, she observed that doing so would
make it physically ‘a member of the collection of all I have written, & I confess it
is my ambition, as the time cannot be far off when my literary career will close,
to make the whole as perfect as it will admit of – As it is on the Poetry I have
written that I trust for the little reputation I may hereafter have & know that it is
not the least likely among the works of modern Poets to reach another period.’9
Despite her astonishing output in prose, Smith always valued poetry as her finest
work and trusted that upon that body of work would rest her claim to immortality.
She was right. The Elegiac Sonnets alone succeeded even beyond Smith’s
initial hopes, becoming over the course of the twenty-two years that followed
their first appearance in 1784, when ‘only about eighteen were printed, as I recollect’,10 an expansive and hugely influential collection not just of sonnets but
also of other poetic forms, many of them grounded in the elegiac mode but all
testifying to the fertility of Smith’s imagination and to the continually growing sophistication of her poetic abilities. When in 1833 Rev. Alexander Dyce
published his Specimens of English Sonnets, he included nine pages of Smith’s
sonnets, more than Anna Seward (seven), Bowles (six), Coleridge (two) and
Keats (one); only Wordsworth (with fourteen sonnets) is more fully represented
among poets after Milton.11 And in his Specimens of British Poetesses (1825),
Dyce observed that ‘considered as a poetess, [Smith] has been excelled by few of
her countrywomen’.12 Daniel Robinson calls Smith’s sonnets ‘the most copiously
imitated poems of the last quarter of the century’, while Stuart Curran ranks The
Emigrants (1793) as ‘the finest piece of extended blank verse in English between
Cowper’s The Task (1785) and Wordsworth’s unpublished initial version of The
Prelude (1799)’.13 She was what Paula Backscheider calls both ‘an enabling writer’
and ‘a competitive presence with which to reckon’.14 Paradoxically, though, while
her influence as a poet was so great that it was ‘absorbed into the mainstream of
Romantic poetry’, ‘Smith’s fate was to encourage the creativity of other poets and
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become herself by the second half of the nineteenth century largely forgotten by
literary history’.15 We need only compare Keats’s line from ‘When I have Fears’
with Smith’s from ‘To the Moon’ to see how seamlessly she entered (and then
disappeared from) that mainstream:
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour (Keats, l. 9)
And oft I think, fair planet of the night (Smith, l. 7)
The fact is that widespread evidence of Smith’s influence abounds, especially in
poems composed during or soon after her lifetime. Anne Bannerman, for example, interacts with Smith’s sonnets in her own, often reworking them in her own
voice, as Backscheider sees happening in Bannerman’s ‘The Soldier’ (published
1800), which recycles Smith’s 1795 ‘Written at the Same Place, on Seeing a Seaman Return Who Had Been Imprisoned at Rochfort’.16 Amelia Opie included
in her 1802 Poems a number of sonnets whose interlocking rhyme schemes seem
indebted to Smith’s experiments, while Helen Maria Williams’s very popular
‘Sonnet: To the Strawberry’ comes so close to Smith in substance and in style
to seem like a ‘deliberate imitation’,17 while her ‘Sonnet to the Moon’ (which
appears in her 1790 novel, Julia) is one of the period’s many sonnets on that subject that tend in one way or another to be in dialogue with Smith’s own famous
sonnet.
Other echoes of Smith’s sonnets are evident in the works of poets of both
sexes, canonical and otherwise. There are sonnets by men like the literary dilettante Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and by unknowns like James Lacey, whose The
Farm-House contains twenty-five sonnets with clear traces of Smith; there are
the sonnets of John Taylor, including poems to and about not just Smith but also
Mary and Maria Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Mary Russell Mitford and Anna
Maria Porter.18 There are also poems by women, including whole volumes of sonnets (or collections with large groups of them) by Anna Maria Smallpiece, Mrs
Edward Iliff, Martha Hanson, Mary F. Johnson, Mariann Dark and Sarah Hamilton, to some of which I shall turn shortly.19 All these poems testify not only
to Smith’s pervasive influence upon the poetry, but also to the extent to which
the Romantic writing community was an interactive and dialogic one in which
intertextuality of this sort was clearly deliberate in some cases and probably
unintentional in others. That authorship, identity and attribution was genuinely
meaningful to at least some readers is apparent from a brief poem from John
Taylor’s 1827 Poems on Various Subjects, ‘On Seeing in a Public Print the “Ode to
the Poppy”, written by the Late Charlotte Smith, Ascribed to Another Person’:
And shall the hapless Muse, whose plaintive song
Can touch the heart with Pity’s softest pow’r,
Lose the fair honours that so well belong
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To her sweet strains on Sorrow’s fav’rite flow’r!
No! Time shall ne’er annul her rightful claim,
Nor rob that flow’r of its poetic bloom;
Secur’d from spoilers by protecting Fame,
It decks in native beauty Charlotte’s tomb.20
Ironically, Taylor has his facts wrong, since the ‘Ode to the Poppy’ was in fact
not by Smith but by her friend Henrietta O’Neill. Smith first included O’Neill’s
ode in Desmond (1793, vol. 3) and subsequently in the second volume of Elegiac
Sonnets.
Taylor’s concern that Smith’s work receive its appropriate credit is an interesting indicator of the gendered nature of responses to Smith, for, as we shall
see, among women there was far greater concern that her life receive the credit
it deserved. For men – and especially for ‘writing men’ like Taylor – it was of
course one’s ‘work’ that defined the man: that was both the quantifiable product
of his professional craft and the qualifiable measure of his cultural capital. For
women, for whom both professions and private (or public) capital were decidedly uncommon, one’s life necessarily became the measure of the woman. This is
one reason why I quoted at length from the Annual Review’s vicious attack on the
dead Mary Robinson: it dismissed the ‘work’ and denigrated the ‘life’, in effect
denying her a presence in either sphere and thus at once both de-professionalizing and de-humanizing her, something it did not attempt to do in Smith’s case.
Even so, her more fair-handed treatment by her critics did not cement Smith’s
place in the period’s literary history.
Because traditional literary history has customarily privileged male writers
at the expense of female ones, for much of the last century and a half Smith
(like many other women) was routinely relegated to the margins when she was
remembered at all. Thus William Lisle Bowles was widely credited with resurrecting the sonnet with the publication of his Fourteen Sonnets in 1789, a
misperception to which Coleridge perhaps unintentionally contributed in the
Biographia Literaria, where he praises those sonnets without mentioning Smith,
whose own sonnets predated Bowles’s by some five years and demonstrably influenced them. It is an error that has been repeated often since. At the time, though,
many writers saw matters correctly; Charles Lamb, for instance, linked the names
of Smith and Bowles as sonneteers,21 as indeed Coleridge had properly done in
his own Poems of 1797. Moreover, Smith did not entirely disappear from the
literary scene, as is apparent from the appearance of a posthumous 1827 edition called Sonnets, and Other Poems,22 a small-format book probably intended
for the pocket. More significantly, in 1851 Smith’s poetry was included in the
fourth volume of the Cabinet Edition of the British Poets published by Henry G.
Bohn,23 who specialized in anthologies of multiple authors that featured tiny text
arranged in double columns. In addition to Smith’s poems, this volume includes
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the work of seven men, including John Dryden and Robert Bloomfield. Smith’s
inclusion in this collection suggests that nearly half a century after her death she
was still remembered and read.
Wordsworth’s 1833 remark that Smith was ‘a lady to whom English verse is
under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’24 is often taken as that canonical poet’s statement of his own debt to
Smith’s poetry (which he had been rereading during his first major spurt of sonnet-writing in 1802–3).25 But Theresa Kelley has suggested that Wordsworth
may have been thinking about much more than just the sonnet form, and that
his comment ‘may also subliminally acknowledge the poetics of loss and selffashioning that Smith forged and that Wordsworth soon took up in The Prelude
and subsequent poems and essays’. For this reason, Kelley continues, Smith offers
a particularly interesting illustration of ‘the Romantic impulse to laminate biography and poetic identity with public as well as personal ends in view’.26 This
tendency to infuse details of her personal life into the emotional and aesthetic
texture of her poetry and fiction, a distinctive characteristic of all of Smith’s writing, may in fact have been rooted, both aesthetically and ideologically, in the
undeniably difficult situation in which countless Romantic-era British women
found themselves. For those who were not possessed of independent wealth
or who had not married into it, the few economic options were depressingly
familiar: service (domestic or otherwise), child care (whether as governess or
teacher), ‘entertainment’ (including public theatricals but also prostitution and
associated activities) – and writing. Smith’s own situation became well known
among the public, as a result of both what she said (and intimated) about her
personal circumstances in her prefaces – and in her fiction’s plots and characters,
which were sufficiently transparent to those who knew her history – and what
her public commentators said about those works once they appeared. Smith
was a shrewd businesswoman – her entire family and personal history is almost
a paradigm of Darwinian survival – and she fully appreciated that she could
in fact profit by cultivating among her public the role of the suffering wife and
mother to which her circumstances fully entitled her: This was the figure of the
‘woman in distress’, a figure with a long history in the tradition (and codes) of
the chivalric romance upon which Edmund Burke had himself capitalized brilliantly in his effective portrayal of Marie Antoinette’s unhappy end.27 Indeed,
Jacqueline Labbe argues that Smith and Robinson both engaged in what she
sees as a calculated campaign of merchandizing their personal difficulties for
financial profit. Smith deliberately invoked the codes and mores of the chivalric
tradition as a marketing tool (even as she at the same time undermined them
by consistently presenting resilient women characters, including herself ), Labbe
explains. Doing so permitted the canny Smith to ‘capitalize on an attitude that
encloses women rather than empowers them’, and to cast herself in a role like
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that of a ‘damsel out of courtly legend awaiting her knight’. Moreover, Smith at
the same time lamented in her own contemporary, historically-grounded voice
the paradoxical nature of literary talent that potentially empowers her (at least
financially) while simultaneously reminding her of her own misery. Cultivating
this complex literary and pseudo-autobiographical persona enabled Smith to
enter the public sphere of the literary market under her own name, presenting
herself as a ‘woman stricken with loss’, and trusting that this role will shield her
from criticism against any success she may achieve at the same time that it will
act to magnify that success by appealing to popular sympathy, especially among
women.28 The strategy seems to have been an effective one, although as we know
Smith was still unable ever to turn the really substantial profit for which she so
longed.
Like innumerable contemporaries, the minor poet Thomas Gent responded
to Smith’s loss-smitten persona in the memorial sonnet that appeared in the 1808
second edition of his Poetic Sketches. There Gent celebrated Smith’s ‘sad harmonious strain, / That told, alas! too true, the grief and pain / Which thy afflicted
mind was doom’d to bear’, and that stemmed from her ‘life of woe’.29 Interestingly, the memorial poems that we can trace to male poets frequently subscribe
to the pseudo-chivalric paradigm, sometimes through direct rhetorical signals
and sometimes by alluding to the touches of chivalric behaviour that seem to
have been denied Smith while she lived. Even now, Gent writes as he contemplates her grave, Smith has no proper monument: ‘though no friendly hand on
thee bestow / The stately marble, or emblazon’d name, / To tell a thoughtless
world who sleeps below’, fame will set matters straight eventually. The contemporary world, it appears from Gent’s lines, has treated Smith unchivalrously in
denying her a memorial sculpture or other public monument. At the same time,
though, Gent implies, he has done what the world has failed to do by himself
providing the ultimate chivalric gesture, eternalizing her (and her fame) in the
sculptured form of his poem.
As I have noted, poems written by women take a different approach to
Smith, and this difference is surely grounded in the wholly different life-experiences of women, whose circumstances often had much in common with Smith’s,
even when their own individual public fame was nowhere near what hers had
been – if they were ‘known’ at all. That is, women readers in general, and women
writers in particular, read in Smith’s life and works a different message, one that
spoke eloquently at once to their individual opportunities and to the nevertheless persistent cultural obstacles to women’s achievements. Smith stood for many
of them as a brilliant – but also terrible – illustration of the woman who selflessly
devotes herself to the interests of her family, even at the cost of comfort, happiness and public approbation. For many of them, Smith’s fate was a reminder of
the appalling cost of such seemingly unrewarded self-sacrifice, especially when
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it might otherwise seem that Smith’s acknowledged visibility and influence on
the literary scene ought reasonably to have secured for her and her family both
social and economic stability. Caught up in a disastrous marriage, deprived of
her (and her children’s) rightful inheritance, writing almost non-stop to provide
an income, struggling against critical, social and ideological opposition to both
her liberal views and her profession as an author – all of which circumstances
she paraded before her readers – she naturally struck many women as proof positive of the impossibility for even a woman of extraordinary talent, energy and
resilience to ‘make it’. At the same time, however, her life and her undeniable literary achievements reminded those same contemporaries of the nobility – even
the heroism – of the struggle she had waged, and considered in this light her
example was necessarily inspirational. In this respect, women’s responses reflect
a very different sort of poetic community than men’s do: while men’s responses
are inflected by gendered rhetorical conventions, many of them reflecting that
chivalric heritage and the social and economic privilege inherent in it, women’s
resonate with a much more immediately personal and less hierarchical sense of
community, one of emulation, nurturance and shared experience despite the fact
that one poet (Smith) is universally known and acknowledged and the other(s)
often relatively obscure.
Martha Hanson began her two-volume Sonnets, and Other Poems (1809)
with a lyric, ‘To the South Downs’, whose echoes of Smith’s well-known sonnet
are unmistakable. Her poems about poetry and authorship, including those that
allude specifically to Smith and her life, indicate the importance that Smith held
for Hanson both as an individual chronologically and culturally recent woman
writing (or writing woman) and as a poet in broader terms. While undeniably
reacting on a personal level in her poems to the circumstances of Smith’s difficult life and to the implicit warning they posed to a more geographically and
culturally isolated woman writer like herself, Hanson at the same time engaged
throughout her collection in an explicit intertextual conversation with Smith’s
poetry itself. Many of Hanson’s subjects recall Smith’s, for example, and their
rhetorical structures and techniques are also frequently similar. The three sonnets
that treat Smith explicitly all examine the implied competition that accompanies
their sisterhood as poets, and in each case Hanson ruefully sees herself as falling
short of the mark:
Sweet Poetess! around thy honour’d brow,
A wreath of simple flow’rs, I fain would twine;
But when its blooms are intermix’d with thine,
(Where Poesy’s most cultur’d blossoms glow)
To thee, its wild buds could no praise impart ...30
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In another sonnet, written after reading Smith’s powerful sonnet written in the
churchyard at Middleton, Hanson assembles around Smith the tropes of the
woman in distress:
A tear, if pitying Sympathy e’er shed
‘O’er suff ’ring Excellence, ’tis due to thee;
Whose strains, each aching heart, from anguish free,
Though Grief ’s dark tempest gathers round thy head.31
Smith’s unique power, she continues, lies in her ability to wrap even the greatest
grief in ‘soul-soothing sweetness’,32 creating the distinctive aesthetics of melancholy that was Smith’s forte, something to which Hanson can only aspire:
Oh! did I rove, like thee, among the flow’rs
Cultur’d by Poesy with tender hand,
To crown thy temples, I would weave a band,
Whose buds, with Fascination’s magic pow’rs,
Should like thy lays, a lenient charm impart,
And sooth [sic], to sweet Tranquillity, thy Heart.33
Hanson’s conditional statement here uncannily anticipates Coleridge’s extended
one in the conclusion of ‘Kubla Khan’ (which did not appear until 1816).
Like Coleridge, Hanson imagines what might be the result if she could possess
Smith’s powers: like Coleridge, who ‘would build that dome in air’,34 Hanson
‘would weave a band’ that would soothe Smith’s troubled heart. And just as in
Coleridge’s poem, in Hanson’s the clear implication is that the poet’s attempt
has been (or will necessarily be) unsuccessful, owing to the admiring poet’s own
deficiencies. The glorious example becomes a goad, reminding the successor poet
of the insurmountable differences.
Finally, the ‘Stanzas, Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Charlotte Smith’, with
which Hanson conspicuously begins her second volume, represents an unusually
extended example (188 lines) of that sort of encomiastic poem in which Stuart
Curran sees ‘one woman’s looking to a predecessor or contemporary for example and support’.35 In part, Hanson laments the silencing of Smith’s ability to
impart ‘a balm to suff ’ring’ to ‘sooth [sic] the anguish’d wound of Mis’ry’s dart’.36
This is a distinctively personal loss, for Hanson details how she had encountered
Smith’s poetry in her own youth, and how it ‘taught my infant hands, to strike
the Lyre’ and ‘kindled the sparks of Emulation’s flame’.37 Predictably, Hanson
ruefully admits that ‘in vain I strove to sing / Like thee, or with thy pow’r to wake
the string’.38 But ‘though the magick of thy tuneful strain, / Never my humble
powers shall attain, / Affliction’s hand has ratified the claim, / That dares to greet
thee with a Sister’s name’.39 This claim of sisterhood is one that only a woman
can make, and make in this particular way, by invoking the bond of sympathy
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and shared experience that is implicit in Hanson’s loaded noun, ‘affliction’, and
this is what elevates the poem from a mere personal, private statement to one
with resonance for all women. Indeed, Hanson presents her own ‘affliction’ as
additional evidence of her sisterhood, observing that in her own life hope has
now fled, further cementing the parallel:
And for the Stranger, who laments thy woes,
And o’er thy urn, this wreath of wild buds, throws,
Who in thy Suff ’rings Past foretells Her Own,
Who wand’ring o’er Life’s dreary heath Alone,
Sees clouds of woe, from ev’ry quarter rise,
Ride on the blasts, and darken all the skies;
To whom, malignant Fate refused the claim.
Thy Friendship might have giv’n her Lays to Fame 40
Mentor, potential patroness, fellow-sufferer: Hanson finds in Smith both an
inspirational role model and a consolation amid disappointment. The poem’s
conclusion, which looks forward past Hanson’s own death to an eternal day
when she will at last ‘greet a Friend in Heav’n’41 associates this remarkable examination of poetic sisterhood with the tradition of consolatio, with the two poets’
shared experience – as women – furnishing the final element that sustains and
finally consoles the surviving poet, Hanson, in her own grief-stricken state, and
that offers a model to other female victims of ‘affliction’.
The sonnets of another obscure poet, Mariann Dark, likewise pay tribute to
Smith, both directly, in two sonnets in which she is the explicit subject, and in
numerous poems on subjects that appear also in Elegiac Sonnets like Dark’s ‘Sonnet XXXI. To the Nightingale: composed on hearing her first notes in the Spring
of 1813’, which recalls all three of Smith’s nightingale sonnets. In her two sonnets on Smith, Dark approached her subject much as Hanson does, beginning
with Smith as a source of inspiration and emulation and ending in disillusionment over her own prospects. In the first, ‘On Reading Mrs. Smith’s Sonnets’,
the record of Smith’s woes, ‘warbled in melancholy’s plaintive tone’,42 helps Dark
forget her own. ‘Yet similar our fates’, she continues, deceived by hope.43 From
her musings on Smith’s sonnets, Dark writes, she had concluded that ‘a kindred flame our bosoms warm’d’, so that ‘I dar’d aspire to feelings such as thine’
and prayed to Apollo that ‘he would impart the charm / Of thine own melting melody divine’.44 Like Hanson, Dark reads her own sympathetic response as
evidence of the two poets’ inherent kinship, which gives her hope that she may
achieve what Smith did. If a poet is in fact an individual speaking to other individuals (to paraphrase in non-sexist language Wordsworth’s pronouncement in
the preface to Lyrical Ballads), then every individual is potentially a poet; Dark
proceeds along this same line in her response to Smith.
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But it is not always so, as is evident from the sonnet that immediately follows
and that Dark subtitles ‘On Reviewing the Preceding’. In this second poem she
angrily declares herself ‘presumptuous!’ in her fancies. ‘No Otways warble here,
or Hayleys sing’ (l. 2),45 she writes of where she resides, nor does she see anything
in the landscape to inspire her to Smithian eloquence:
Charlotte! alas no genial breath of fame,
E’er call’d the infant buds of genius forth;
I strike the lyre unknown! My very name
Will soon be blotted from this wretched earth.
Thine, Charlotte; thine, the bright, the genuine flame,
Fosters by fair reward – the mead of worth.46
If this is a cry not just of resignation but even of despair, it is one that is prompted
by Dark’s own sense of the unequal competition in which she had imagined that
she might participate. What is important here, though, is not the dashing of her
fanciful hopes but rather the fact that they had been kindled in the first place by
the paradigmatic example of Smith’s life and works.
Not surprisingly, few authors of the period wrote in much detail about
Smith’s direct influences upon their works, although it is clear from sonnets like
Bowles’s, Coleridge’s, Wordsworth’s, Opie’s, Hanson’s, Dark’s, Keats’s and even
Anna Seward’s that her influence was wide, formative and powerful, just as it
was in prose fiction for novelists like Austen, Radcliffe, Opie, Scott and others.
Judith Stanton undoubtedly exaggerates matters, therefore, when she observes
sadly of Smith that ‘already waning in her later years, the popularity of her works
ended with her death’,47 for, as noted earlier, her poetry continued to be reprinted
through mid-century (including in Frederic Rowton’s notorious 1848 Female
Poets of Great Britain),48 while there is no question that her life itself continued
to hold real interest for many – and especially for many women – in the first
several decades following her death.
Still, it was her poetry that meant the most to Smith; it was there that she
saw her greatest hope of achieving lasting fame, for poetry had always been for
her less a commercial venture than a conversation with and among enlightened
minds – both other poets and discriminating readers – in which her participation was not a ‘profession’ (as novel-writing was) but a genuine vocation. This
fact makes all the more poignant the sentiments she expressed in what her sister,
Catherine Dorset, claimed was the last poem she wrote, ‘To My Lyre’, which
concludes with these stanzas:
In cheerless solitude, bereft
Of youth and health, thou still art left,
When hope and fortune have deceived me;
Thou, far unlike the summer friend,
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Did still my falt’ring steps attend,
And with thy plaintive voice relieved me.
And as the time ere long must come
When I lie silent in the tomb,
Thou wilt preserve these mournful pages;
For gentle minds will love my verse,
And Pity shall my strains rehearse,
And tell my name to distant ages.49
It may have taken the better part of two centuries for literary history to prove her
correct, but Smith has been vindicated as artist, as thinker and as woman by a
new and growing community of sympathy who have once again found in her life
and works an irrepressible spirit, keen even in adversity, and a mind and sensibility that is everywhere dedicated to the community of human experience, in all its
afflictions and glories. This is the Charlotte Smith whose experience spoke with
particular clarity and urgency to nineteenth-century British women, who found
in her ability to connect and to articulate her own personal suffering with the
ways of the broad public world a consolation, a guide and an inspiration.
14 ‘TELL MY NAME TO DISTANT AGES’: THE
LITERARY FATE OF CHARLOTTE SMITH
Louise Duckling
During her lifetime Charlotte Smith was a literary celebrity : her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems (1784) were continuously reprinted and widely emulated.
She was a popular and prolific author, excelling in a series of novels, collections
of verse and translations. Smith’s high volume of output, in a range of genres,
reflects the deepening financial crisis that she was working to alleviate. Smith’s
plight is well-known: she became a professional writer as a means of supporting her debt-ridden husband and nine dependent children, whilst she battled
with the trustees of her father-in-law’s will for a dwindling inheritance. Yet her
motives were not purely financial. Smith was aware of her status as a writer with
‘a reputation to lose’ and her letters reveal her ambition to be taken seriously as a
poet.1 Smith aspired to a place in posterity, but her contemporary success failed
to secure her a position within the newly-emerging national canon. Whilst
the absence of women poets from our literary histories has been a ubiquitous
complaint, Smith was not entirely forgotten: her contribution was assessed in a
variety of nineteenth-century anthologies, dictionaries and celebrations of ‘lost’
female talent. This essay will explore representations of Charlotte Smith within
these publications to reveal her colourful fate in posterity.
Smith’s place in history is strongly influenced by the nature of her contemporary popularity, and in particular by her attractive public image. Smith was a
brilliant self-promoter and exploited the marketing potential of her miserable
life, casting herself as the ‘tragic heroine’ in the theatrical performance that was
her career.2 Jacqueline Labbe has argued that Smith creates a fictional situation
in her sonnets which ‘relies on her readers seeing and reading her … in a variety of
culturally recognizable roles’, tapping into the romantic appeal of conventional
feminine types including the devoted mother and the distressed woman-inneed.3 Indeed, Smith persistently invited her readers to identify herself, the
distressed author, as the speaker of the poems: she appealed to the chivalry of
her audience to buy her books, playing the part of a ‘gentle and genteel’ woman
financially dependent on the public’s esteem.4 Yet much of the apparatus sur– 203 –
204
rounding Smith’s texts – the prefaces, endnotes and literary allusions – venture
beyond the traditionally feminine. This is apparent in Smith’s prefatory remarks
to the successive editions of Elegiac Sonnets, which become increasingly bitter,
sarcastic and querulous in tone, and in her refusal to adopt the role of a diffident
female writer. Nevertheless Smith’s public image as a helpless and needy mother
(usually) remained dominant, overriding or excusing her various trespasses in
the eyes of a sympathetic public.
Smith’s last published poem ‘To My Lyre’ concludes with the poet invoking
her own immortality: ‘Thou wilt preserve these mournful pages … And tell my
name to distant ages’.5 Typically, Smith also outlines her target readership (‘gentle
minds will love my verse’) and the sympathetic mechanism upon which her verse
depends (‘Pity shall my strains rehearse’).6 Smith turned her misfortunes into an
asset by recreating herself in the public sphere as a consumer product: even this
last poem emphasizes her ‘early sorrows’ and the ‘cheerless solitude’ of her later
life.7 Smith developed her image to suit the tastes of her market, but the same
iconography would seal her fate in posterity: not as an influential innovator or
leading poet, but as an idealized specimen of womanly excellence, a suffering
paragon of wife, gentlewoman and ‘mother-martyr’.8 This view would become
deeply entrenched in the nineteenth century, when the cults of motherhood and
the poetess were in ascendancy. These cults were at once enabling and restraining for the female artist. In a climate that increasingly promoted distinct gender
spheres, women’s writing attained ‘a very secure place’, but it was a restricted
place, ‘occupying a particular sphere of influence’, namely moral, religious, sentimental or ‘domestic’ terrain.9 Whilst in Smith’s case Pity generally presided in
posterity, rehearsing her sad story to distant ages, various indiscretions would
create problems for Smith as she was reincarnated as a poetess. She doesn’t perfectly fit the ideal of a nineteenth-century literary heroine: her writing lacked
religious overtones, she strayed into political debate and she refused to suffer her
husband‘s abuses silently. At the height of her fame, and with varying levels of
tolerance, critics had noted Smith’s self-referential performances on the page;10
later commentators would perceive her public tirades, unabashed complaints
and excessive sensibility as problematic flaws, detracting from the otherwise
feminine appeal of her authorial identity.
Regardless of any perceived improprieties, an increasingly rigid concept of
gender difference made it impossible for Smith to be recognized as an equal
alongside her male peers. Smith’s contemporaries had applauded her rehabilitation and revival of the English sonnet – Coleridge selected her poems as
exemplars of the form in Sonnets from Various Authors (1796) – but her contribution would ultimately be downgraded to that of popular female poet. Smith’s
marginalized reputation and limited prospects were recognized by Wordsworth
in his remark that she was a poet ‘to whom English verse is under greater obli-
‘Tell My Name to Distant Ages’
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gations than are likely to be acknowledged or remembered’.11 As if to confirm
Wordsworth’s assessment, two years later Smith was excluded from Housman’s A
Collection of English Sonnets (1835) on the grounds that her poems were ‘mawkish effusions’.12
Charlotte Smith’s popularity had helped to fuel a craze for sonnet writing,
with her particular brand of sonnet being tirelessly imitated in the 1780s and
1790s. Smith’s reputation clearly suffered as a result of her association with this
saturated, devalued and feminized market. Housman selects Wordsworth as the
supreme modern master of the sonnet, despairing of the ‘spurious and paltry
compositions’ that have been ‘lavished on the public’, debasing the form.13 He
criticizes Coleridge‘s definition of the sonnet, especially his desire for ‘liberty’ in
metre and rhyme, as demonstrating ‘unseemly regard’ for an honoured tradition
of poetry.14 By extension, Smith’s use of the irregular form – as well as the fact
that she popularized it – would ensure her exclusion from Housman’s book.
Whilst the literary establishment set about creating a masculine classification
of Romanticism, Smith was honoured within an alternative tradition that celebrated women writers and enthusiastically embraced her self-fashioned image
as a victimized wife and mother. Critically, the majority of nineteenth-century
accounts rely on one or two sources, with the earliest and most influential of
these appearing in 1801. The homage to Smith in Public Characters of 1800–
1801 (1801) constituted the most substantial contemporary biography outside
the author’s own self-referential works.15 The memoir encapsulates all the elements that made Smith so appealing, particularly her sensibility and survival
in the face of a distressing personal life. It has been suggested that the novelist
and historian Mary Hays wrote the piece in collaboration with Smith, which is
certainly a viable proposition given its tone – it captures the spirit of Smith’s theatrical self-projection – and its use of Smith’s personal correspondence. Smith’s
sister, Catherine Anne Dorset, makes nine references to Public Characters in her
later account of Smith’s life.16 Perhaps Dorset’s reliance on the text was motivated by the knowledge that it had been co-produced and officially approved by
her sister. Dorset quotes other material, including Sir Egerton Brydges’s Censura
Literaria: Brydges himself cites Public Characters as the source of his memoir to
Smith, due to ‘that article bearing many internal marks of authenticity’.17
Public Characters unveils an incredible story, with a plot matching the sensational narrative common to the period’s popular novels and with Smith cast
in the role of sentimental heroine. We witness the world-shattering experience
of Smith’s marriage and removal to ‘one of the closest and most disagreeable
lanes in the city of London’,18 her dramatic flight to the continent with her children to escape her husband’s creditors and the family’s dismal stay in a ‘large but
comfortless chateau’.19 Smith is portrayed as a loyal wife, grieving mother and
idealized female scholar. The tragic events and cameos within the memoir are
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cited verbatim in later renderings, and so the fictionalized version of Smith is
propelled into literary history.20 Public Characters’ prominent role as a source
document demonstrates that the melodramatic style of Smith’s story was fixed
by the turn of the century and possibly by Smith’s own pen.
Charlotte Smith’s romantic appeal, and the chivalrous response she generated, are evident in Brydges’s Censura Literaria. The opening paragraph sets the
eulogizing tone:
There is a pleasure of a very pure and elevated kind in paying a tribute to the memory
of departed genius. But there are characters which it requires a venturous spirit to
touch; the nice shades of intellectual eminence, the evanescent movements of a trembling heart, demand no common pen to delineate them.21
Written shortly after Smith’s death, Brydges is setting out to respectfully preserve her memory. He emphasizes the importance of nature and landscape on
the formation of the poet, but the commentary is predominantly concerned with
Smith’s personal story: her idyllic childhood in Sussex, her unhappy marriage,
and her efforts to support her family. Brydges is infatuated with the sentimental
image of Smith as a caring mother and loyal wife, and he conjures up a fantasy of
her early years as a young woman of acute sensibility.22
In Brydges’s glowing review of Smith’s first novel, Emmeline (1788), the
author is acknowledged for her innovation and the superiority of her novels
to that of the common circulating library stock (an accolade that would have
delighted her):
All that part of the public, who, though they were disgusted with the usual contents
of the circulating library, yet had fancy and feeling enough to judge for themselves
in spite of prejudice, received this enchanting fiction with a new kind of delight. It
displayed such a simple energy of language, such an accurate and lively delineation of
character, such a purity of sentiment, and such exquisite scenery of a picturesque and
rich, yet most unaffected imagination, as gave it a hold upon all readers of true taste,
of a new and most captivating kind.23
Yet Brydges has to remind his readers of Smith’s success, and attempts to circumnavigate commonly held prejudices about the pulp fiction of her age. He lists
Smith’s output with the express aim of emphasizing her literary quantity and
quality, for her novels have ‘not yet received their due commendation’.24 Smith’s
work already needed a champion.
Brydges provides a number of clues for Smith’s decline. He states: ‘I am
totally unacquainted with the character of Mrs. Smith from any other source
than her writings; but I consider those writings to furnish ample grounds for
the delineation both of her intellectual and moral portrait.’ Brydges presents
the character of the work as a defence of the character of the woman, who has
been charged with a ‘harshness’ of temper and ‘freedom of principles’. Even Bry-
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dges admits Smith was imprudent in speaking ‘unwelcome truths’ about people
involved in her personal affairs.25 Smith’s self-referential prefaces, fictional selfrepresentations and ruthless tirades against Chancery Suit lawyers would attract
increasing criticism as the century progressed, detracting from the quality of her
work (or more precisely, the quality of the woman embodied within the work).
Brydges gallantly defends Smith’s compositions against the charge of immorality, particularly in relation to her controversial novel Desmond (1792). The
central plot, involving Desmond’s love for the married Geraldine Verney, was
contentious in itself, but Smith’s inclusion of Desmond’s sexual misadventure
with the Frenchwoman Josephine was deeply transgressive. The sexual plot was
widely criticized, yet contemporary opinion still placed this text far beyond the
‘sub-literary’ image of the novel. Desmond was praised as a model of innovation
in the field and a source of enlightenment for its readers: in summer 1792 England was still open to political debate and the pro-revolutionary sentiments of a
woman writer. The success of the novel, however, was short-lived. Within a few
months ‘a rigid censorship descended on print culture’, accompanied by what
Stuart Curran has described as an ‘abrupt shift in receptability’ following the
collapse of the French Revolution into internecine violence.26
In Brydges’s assessment, political bias has depreciated Smith’s work. Yet in
the long term Desmond’s radical sexual politics would prove more controversial: with its exploration of the marriage system and the sexual double standard,
the novel was effectively calling for a domestic revolution. Desmond embodied
reactionary fears precisely because it carried its revolutionary principles into
the domestic sphere, as Brydges appears to acknowledge. In Smith’s defence, he
reminds his readers that she was ‘smarting under unjust oppression’: her personal
marital circumstances are offered as a justification for her novel’s theme.27
Whilst Brydges’s account suggests that Smith’s novels were in popular
decline, he is much more confident with regard to her poems, of which ‘it is not
easy to speak in terms too high’:
no reader of pure taste can grow weary of perusing them. Sorrow was her constant
companion; and she sung with a thorn at her bosom, which forced out strains of
melody, expressive of the most affecting sensations, interwoven with the rich hues of
an inspired fancy. Her name therefore is sure to live among the most favoured of the
Muse …28
Brydges’s encomium grants Smith a privileged place in posterity, but it is not her
name that endures but an iconic representation of female suffering. Obsessed
with Smith’s performance as a distressed woman, Brydges turns the female poet
into a nightingale, singing with ‘a thorn at her bosom’: he absorbs her language
and her self-styled mode of composition (‘toujours Rossignols, toujours des
chanson tristes’).29 Whilst Smith cast herself as a ‘songstress sad’, exploiting the
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emotive power of the nightingale trope, Brydges’s account denies her originality
by merging her life and work within an abstract myth. Smith is transformed into
an attractive archetype of the suffering female.
Brydges’s nightingale imagery does, however, acknowledge the female poet’s
‘strains of melody’. The singer and composer John Hindle exploited this melodious expression when he set Smith’s Sonnet IV (‘To the Moon’) to music in his
glee entitled ‘Queen of the Silver Bow’ (c. 1790). Hindle’s score was republished
throughout the nineteenth century and is still in print today.30 The popular song
format provided an alternative publicity vehicle for Smith’s poetry, which itself
maintained a presence in nineteenth-century popular anthologies.
Simultaneously Smith continued to attract some serious attention: in 1810,
Anna Barbauld included Smith in her multi-volume collection The British Novelists. In her preface to Smith’s The Old Manor House, Barbauld claims: ‘Among
those writers who have distinguished themselves in the polite literature of the
present day, Mrs. Charlotte Smith well deserves a place, both from the number
and elegance of her publications’. Barbauld reserves her highest praise for Smith’s
‘universally admired’ sonnets, acknowledging her role in cultivating the form.31
This preference is most likely a consequence of Smith’s expressive style, which is
considered inappropriate for the novel:
Poets are apt to complain, and often take a pleasure in it; yet they should remember
that the pleasure of their readers is only derived from the elegance and harmony with
which they do it … But for the language of complaint in plain prose, or the exasperations of personal resentment, he has seldom much sympathy.32
Barbauld is aware that Smith’s sentiments were sincere and authentic, but argues
that prose is simply the wrong medium in which to adopt ‘the language of complaint’. Smith’s later publications would have been better if she had ‘forgotten
herself ’, avoiding ‘the asperity of invective and the querulousness of complaint’.
Smith’s brand of self-pity, in Barbauld’s estimation, detracted from the reader’s
pleasure. Tellingly, Barbauld also characterizes Smith’s works as not ‘particularly
aiming to illustrate any moral truth’.33 Barbauld clearly had aspirations for the
novel as a serious art form: a female novelist who produced morally purposeless books simply perpetuated prejudices about sentimental pulp fiction. She was
also unlikely to achieve immortality in a culture that was in transition. As Mary
Poovey has argued, the ultimate effect of the revolutionary decade was to set
women on their journey towards the ‘Victorian pedestal’, as increasingly idealized images of femininity took hold: female artists were expected to embody
purity and goodness in their art and in their lives. Concurrently, women writers
were being marginalized by what Gary Kelly has described as a ‘remasculinisation’ of literature and culture.34
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As Kelly acknowledges, the novel was one genre in which women continued to lead, dominating the form through the 1800s and early 1810s. Barbauld
registers the influence of women novelists and ranks Smith for her original
contribution. Walter Scott also recognized female talent in his Biographical
Memoirs of Eminent Novelists, with warm praise for Smith’s novels.35 It is a testament to Smith’s ability that critics were unable to decide which of her literary
legacies was the greatest. Whilst Scott voted for her novels, he was responsible
for the publication of an alternative opinion: in her ‘tribute of affection’, Catherine Anne Dorset emphasized the popularity of Emmeline, but believed that her
sister’s reputation rested on her poetry. Yet Dorset’s memoir offers little in the
way of original analysis, choosing instead to refer her readers to the ‘elegant and
eloquent criticism’ of Sir Egerton Brydges.36 Dorset’s decision to defer to the
authority of a male critic is an interesting tactic, one that her sister would never
have countenanced, but is symptomatic of her desire to project respectability
and gentility in the memoir: she wants the family name to stand in high regard,
arguably for her own sake (for she too was a published author), as well as for the
memory of her sibling.
Dorset focuses her attention on defending Smith’s moral reputation, as she
believes ‘this admirable and much-injured woman’ has been misrepresented.37 In
particular, Dorset apologizes for Desmond, taking care to distance herself from
the book’s politics:
[In Brighton] she formed acquaintances with some of the most violent advocates of
the French Revolution, and unfortunately caught the contagion, though in direct
opposition to the principles she had formerly professed, and to those of her family.38
Desmond was ‘condemned not only on account of its politics, but its immoral
tendency’, and, Dorset claims, came into being during ‘a paroxysm of political
fever’ because her sister had associated with the wrong crowd.39 Dorset presents
an image of Smith as disempowered and lacking the capacity for independent
political thought. If she could strategically revision Smith as an innocent victim,
contaminated and labouring under the influence of others, then maybe Smith
could be excused for her serious transgression. Dorset believed that political
debate was ‘sinning against good taste in a female writer – perhaps there was a little personal spleen mixed up with her patriotism’.40 Like Brydges, Dorset alludes
to Smith’s unhappy marriage, albeit less sympathetically. The fusing of the personal and the political serves as an excuse for Smith’s action and yet another
point of embarrassment. Dorset makes no attempt to acknowledge that even
the most conservative female writers of the day had ventured into the realm of
political debate: it hadn’t been ‘sinning against good taste’ at the time. Dorset is
more understanding, however, regarding another contentious point: the lack of
religion in Smith’s work. She states: ‘I believe there is not a line that implies the
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want of it in herself … Nor was it then the fashion of the day, as it has become
since. No one then took up a novel in the expectation of finding a sermon’.41
Despite these issues, critics did rally to Smith’s cause and the cause of women
writers in general. In 1825 Alexander Dyce advertised his Specimens of British
Poetesses as a response to the careful exclusion of women from the great ‘Collections of the English Poets’. Dyce explores ‘the growth and progress of the genius
of our country-women in the department of Poetry’ making specific claims about
poetry and gender. The male pen, he argues, produces ‘the tremendous thoughts
which have impressed a successive stamp on the fluctuation of ages, and which
have almost changed the character of nations’. In contrast, women are endowed
with ‘sensibility’, ‘tenderness’ and ‘grace’.42
Dyce included a brief biographical notice of Charlotte Smith in his anthology. He references the ‘unprosperous’ affairs of Smith’s husband, the ‘harsh
treatment’ she experienced from his creditors and her subsequent decision to
share his imprisonment in debtor’s prison. After a ‘series of misfortunes’, Dyce
exclaims, she died: that is the sum of her tragic history. Her poetry, in contrast,
is afforded generous space, with seven sonnets, extracts from Beachy Head and
Minor Morals, and two further poems quoted in full. Dyce comments briefly on
Smith’s poetic ability:
Charlotte Smith, considered as a poetess, has been excelled by few of her countrywomen. Her Sonnets, once very popular, are not framed on the Italian model, and
exhibit little of concentrated thought; but they are ‘most musical, most melancholy,’
and abound with touches of tenderness, grace, and beauty.
Smith’s status as a poetess is exemplary: several pieces reveal a ‘delicacy rarely
equalled’. The Miltonic quotation provides another allusion to Smith’s attractive
incarnation as a ‘most musical, most melancholy’ nightingale. Yet, Dyce does
not recognize Smith’s intellectual achievement, commenting dismissively on the
sonnets’ irregular form and lack of ‘concentrated thought’.43
Dyce’s reclamation efforts were continued in 1848 by Frederic Rowton’s
The Female Poets of Great Britain and George Bethune’s The British Female
Poets. Rowton’s work hints at the diminutive meaning that the word ‘poetess’
had acquired, stressing that ‘our poetesses … claim to distinction has been so
far admitted as to make our wise men ask one another whether they should any
longer permit such a word as Poetess at all?’44 Rowton describes Smith as ‘one
of the most admired of our female poets’, a promising accolade in the context of
his opening panegyrics: yet she is also ‘a noble specimen of womanly excellence’.
Smith’s imprisonment with her husband is a central motif; but her problems
strangely disappear following her separation from him, when she is able to apply
herself ‘assiduously and cheerfully to literary pursuits’.45 This inaccurate portrait
sits comfortably with Rowton’s notion of female intellect. Whilst his Preface
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and Introductory Chapter argue against the intellectual inferiority of women, he
is an advocate of intellectual difference. In Rowton’s estimation, man‘s intellect
makes the world ‘stronger and wiser’, whilst the female intellect makes the world
‘purer and better’. Furthermore, female ‘endowments are of a meek, persuasive,
quiet and subjective kind’. Rowton appears to have re-invented Smith, presenting an idealized cameo of a contented woman writer. The happy sketch conforms
to Rowton’s Victorian ideal of the female as a passive, patient and modest creature of virtue, gifted with perpetual hope and blessed without despair. Charlotte
Smith’s creation of a fictional heroine, ‘Mrs Smith’, has been subsumed within a
wider fiction: the Victorian fiction of femininity.46
George Bethune’s volume was published in Philadelphia, attesting to Smith’s
international appeal. It also presents Smith as an idealized gentlewoman, noting
her ‘affectionate devotion’ and ‘self-sacrificing fidelity’ to her husband.47 Bethune’s introduction relies heavily on gendered notions of genius, with women
writers being portrayed as naturally superior in ‘the poetry of the sensibilities’:
it is … consistent with her character that the genius of woman should yield particular
delight when its themes are love, childhood, the softer beauties of creation, the joys or
sorrows of the heart, domestic life, mercy, religion, and the instincts of justice.48
Bethune traces some of these qualities in Smith’s work, noting her ‘sweet melancholy’, ‘hopeful piety’ and ‘keen perception of natural beauty’. Smith is presented
as a genteel lady worthy of attention because of her regrettable decline. Once
popular, Smith’s elegant poetry has now ‘fallen into … undeserved neglect’ and
is ‘rarely found except in libraries of collectors’. Bethune rescues Smith because
her work fits his definition of ‘moral and poetical excellence’, ‘refinement’ and
‘delicacy’. Yet she is also worthy of his protection because she is an exemplar of
a type: ‘those gifted women, whose trials of heart have been made sadly illustrious by their talent; […who…] deserve, as they receive, unqualified sympathy’. For
Bethune the critical process becomes an act of chivalry.49
In 1857, H. G. Adams’s Cyclopaedia of Female Biography perpetuated Smith’s
polite status as a poetess. Adams highlights the censure Desmond attracted for
its ‘political and moral tendency’, but notes her moral revival with the publication of The Old Manor House. Most prominent, however, is the story of Smith’s
unhappy marriage to an inferior husband, with Smith portrayed as a loyal wife,
composed and circumspect in the face of great suffering, and constant in the
support of her family. Adams’ entry closes with the simple accolade: ‘as a mother,
she was most exemplary’.50
Whilst male Victorian critics celebrated Smith as a paragon of exemplary
motherhood, their female counterparts constructed an alternative tradition.
In 1843, Mrs Elwood included Smith in her Memoirs of The Literary Ladies
of England. In her preface Elwood says that she was inspired by ‘partiality to
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the literary performances of her own sex’ and her belief that, to the best of her
knowledge, there existed no such venture in print. In this last respect Elwood’s
book was conceived as a pioneering project, but Elwood makes no such overt
claim. In fact, it is important to acknowledge that whilst these women were
groundbreakers in (re-)illuminating the successes of their literary ancestors, they
were nonetheless immersed within their culture’s restrictive gender ideologies.
Elwood’s prefatory remarks, for example, include a conventional apology for the
Memoirs, with the author begging:
to deprecate the severity of criticism, by stating that they are intended only for such of
her own sex, who, not feeling themselves equal to profound and abstract subjects, can
derive amusement and information from what is professedly too light for the learned,
and too simple for the studious.51
Elwood’s self-effacing introduction adheres to the delicate refinements Bethune
required of a literary lady, denying her work any intellectual authority. Yet there
is greater depth to be found beneath the portraits she describes as light and
simple. Like all the later biographies of Smith, Elwood relies heavily on earlier
sources, but she also presents her own, occasionally surprising, conclusions.
This is nowhere more apparent than when Elwood provides an apology for
Desmond. Whilst Dorset interpreted the novel as a serious indiscretion, Elwood
is prepared to justify Smith’s actions to her readers. Smith, after all, did have firsthand experience of the situation in France:
she had seen the degradation of the people, and the oppression of the aristocracy, and
possibly deemed any change must be for the better, unwitting of the ferocious scenes
of licentiousness and anarchy that were afterwards to ensue.52
This is a fair judgement, acknowledging the optimism that was shared by many
of Smith’s contemporaries who were, on balance, celebrating the fact that France
might at last adopt an English form of constitutional democracy. Elwood dismisses the view that Smith was unduly influenced by revolutionary contacts in
Brighton, being ‘by far too clever a woman not to judge for herself, and to form
her own public opinion upon all occasions’.53 Elwood obviously admired Smith’s
humanity, compassion and independent spirit. Yet, despite her liberal character
assessment, Elwood’s final verdict is that ‘politics are certainly out of their place
in a novel’.54 This is not a direct attack on the female politician: at face value,
Elwood is making a point about genre, not gender, yet there are obvious gender
restraints operating within Elwood’s text. The tone and content of her preface
suggest she interpreted the role of fiction as one of entertainment and original
composition: elsewhere in the memoir she celebrates those elements which she
obviously feels are at home in the novel, including Smith’s imaginative story telling and her strong delineation of character. Yet politics remain ‘out of their place’
213
in Elwood’s book, straying into the realms of ‘profound and abstract subjects’
unsuitable for her female audience, and wide of the mark of her self-appointed
role as purveyor of light and respectable amusement.
Despite Smith’s political improprieties, Elwood claims an enduring place for
her work. She celebrates Smith’s ‘highly elegant and cultivated mind’ – echoing
the praise of the male anthologists and re-enforcing Smith’s place in a tradition
of refined poetesses – but she also recognizes her ‘vigorous and penetrating
understanding’ and ‘great original talent’.55 Furthermore, Elwood makes a claim
for Smith’s popular longevity: ‘whilst the performances of most of her contemporaries have been consigned to a well-deserved oblivion … some of Mrs. Smith’s
are still read with pleasure and interest by all persons of taste’.56 Smith is a woman
of strong character, an original author, and a survivor in posterity, yet she is also
paraded as a tragic heroine. Elwood makes the most of the melodramatic opportunity, detailing Smith’s voluntary confinement with her husband in the King’s
Bench prison and their residence in the ‘large, dreary, and dilapidated chateau’
in Normandy.57 Elwood could quite easily be depicting a melancholy figure from
one of the sonnets when she describes Smith’s existence following the death of
her beloved daughter: ‘she now became more than ever unsettled, wandering
from place to place in search of that tranquillity and happiness she seemed destined never to enjoy’.58 The romantic image of Smith endures.
In the 1860s two more female writer-critics stepped forward to honour the
literary women of their nation and to celebrate Smith. Jane Williams introduces
her serious venture The Literary Women of England (1861) with a survey of previous histories, establishing herself as an expert in the field and highlighting the
desperate need for her new scholarly contribution.59 One of her selling points
is the fact that she uses material from more than one source: a valuable point
given the repetitive, plagiaristic nature of previous Smith scholarship. Nevertheless Smith’s history is characterized as ‘one of the most melancholy among
female biographies’:60 furthermore, she is portrayed as an ideal gentlewoman,
being at once a good, prudent and faithful wife, ‘a tender mother, an affectionate
friend, and in all respects an upright and honourable woman’.61 Whilst Smith’s
personal conduct is seen to embody Victorian family values, Williams raises the
usual moral concerns about Smith’s work. Smith’s lack of religious sentiment is
highlighted as a serious fault because it disables Smith from coming to terms,
in an appropriately pious way, with her sorrow.62 Desmond is described as a mistake; whilst the sonnet’s emphasis on Werther and the writings of Rousseau are
deemed regrettable faults. Williams does, however, admire Smith’s attempts to
widen her intellectual horizons, noting her efforts in a wide range of spheres,
including English literature and history ; Italian and French language, poetry
and literature, and the popular sciences of botany and natural history. Williams’s
214
appreciation of Smith is tempered by the prudence of Victorian propriety, but in
the final estimation it is a weighty accolade:
Few women have ever possessed greater advantages of capacity and ability, of acquirement and influence. Her faculties were of no common kind. Her mind had naturally
great scope, comprising the high imaginative power of an inborn poet, with the accuracy of detail and sound common sense which constitute the woman of business and
worldly wisdom. To her belonged also that attribute of noble natures, pervading sincerity ; the thoughts and feelings of her every-day existence being the opinions and
sentiments of her prose and poetry. There is that charm in her poetry which belongs
only to genius. The tone is too monotonous, the spirit too querulous; it wants the
exulting and exalting notes of the caroller who soars to the skies and dwells blissfully
in the turf, yet it has a sort of ravishment like the nightingale’s strains, ever pleasing
though plaintive.63
Like Brydges, Williams employs the trope of the nightingale, but here it describes
the poetic voice, rather than narrowly inscribing the figure of the poet. Smith
retains her individuality, and her presence, in the real world: she is at once an
‘inborn poet’ and a worldly-wise businesswoman. Smith’s work is read as a reflection of the author’s ‘everyday existence’ and admired for its sincerity and charm.
Yet it lacks the soaring exaltation that a nineteenth-century reader yearned for:
the exaltation that was associated with the poetry of the Victorian poet-prophet,
William Wordsworth and the luminary male poets of the Romantic era. Williams provides much less space to the discussion of Smith’s prose fiction, but she
admires her realism. Whilst Williams doesn’t trace anything ‘strikingly original’
in Smith’s characters, or her stories, the novels ‘excite that sort of interest which
events derive from being related by one who has taken part in them’.64 Smith’s
projection of her own life experiences in her work adds to the enjoyment of
the text, whilst at the same time it perpetuates Smith’s self-dramatization as a
romanticized female.
Julia Kavanagh’s English Women of Letters (1862) explores women’s role in
the formation of the modern novel.65 Kavanagh, like Williams, was a published
novelist and clearly saw herself as part of an important female tradition. Kavanagh ‘celebrates’ Smith as one of ten women novelists, yet her most prominent
tribute is the fact that she includes Smith in her account at all: her critical assessment is deeply ambivalent. The opening paragraph establishes the tone:
There are lives that read like one long sorrow, and that leave little save sadness and
disappointment behind them when they close in death. Such a life was that of Charlotte Smith, full of cares while it lasted, and, once it was over, doomed to fade away
from memory. She had great talent – she was one of the best novelists of the day, but
the haste and facility with which she wrote, the gloom that overshadowed her life,
robbed her of a durable literary fame. As a poetess she is forgotten; as a novelist she
but helps to fill the vacant space between Miss Burney and Mrs Radcliffe.66
215
Charlotte Smith’s gloomy life, despite its emotional force, is presented as the
cause of her decline. Smith’s role in Kavanagh’s eyes is to provide a connecting
link between the opposite schools of Burney and Radcliffe and her language is
derisory – Smith occupies a ‘vacant space’ between their superior talents.
Smith is explicitly and repeatedly written off as a popular novelist of her time
with a fragile place in posterity. Kavanagh does, however, have fun with Smith’s
life story. Her language oscillates from an Austen-like pastiche of her subject’s
engagement to Benjamin Smith towards a Dickensian portrayal of her early married life in a grimy street in London. In effect, Smith is again being fictionalized:
Kavanagh’s narrative revels in the novel-like qualities of Smith’s daily existence,
whilst it undermines Smith’s actual novel productions.
Kavanagh acknowledges that Smith ‘enjoyed a combination of powers which
rarely fail to acquire for their owner a present reputation’ but those powers are
fleeting and ‘seldom secure a lasting fame’. Furthermore, Smith’s novels are
‘tinged with a sort of mediocrity’: she wrote in haste and Kavanagh believes she
never fully developed her skill.67 In conclusion, Kavanagh contradicts her former
comment by claiming that Smith was ‘above mediocrity, but below genius’.68 Part
of the confusion here, I believe, is fuelled by Kavanagh’s conflicting emotions:
on the one hand, she genuinely admired Smith’s innovations, yet she was highly
critical of Smith’s public character and lack of ‘proper’ restraint.
Smith’s work is ultimately included because it provides the most characteristic representative, in Kavanagh’s eyes, of the ‘modern domestic novel’.69
Kavanagh focuses particularly on Smith’s development of the heroine, elevated
by Smith from the stock position of silly young love object (or as Kavanagh puts
it, ‘mere woman … the embodiment of beauty and the object of passion’) to ‘the
most perfect prototype of the lady in the modern novels of today’.70 Kavanagh
also recognizes Smith’s unique authorial voice : ‘her power is too genuine for its
originality to be doubted – freshness, vigour, and truth still mark her efforts and
have left their stamp on all she wrote’. Furthermore, she is one of the first writers
to explore the ‘association between our secret feeling and the eternal, immutable
nature which surrounds us …’.71
In light of these contributions, Kavanagh appears to regret Smith’s decline.
Her demise is largely attributed to personal flaws: she was not genial, she was
too sensitive, she could not forget her sufferings and she was too rebellious.
Kavanagh defines ‘the attribute of fine minds and of great natures’ as calmness,
epitomized in the steadiness of the celebrated female authors Burney, Inchbald
and Radcliffe. In contrast, the ‘fitful, impatient, and wearied’ Smith stands apart,
alienated from this reputable group.72 Kavanagh laments the embittered tone
that contaminates Smith’s work:
216
There is something like personal animosity in her delineation of her hateful characters, and this is a fault, and a great one; there is decidedly bad temper, a sin that can
rarely be forgiven … there is no vivid imagination, no sparkling wit, no gaiety of mind
or heart, no commanding style, to atone for the inevitable coldness, not to say bitterness, which is the tone of her writings.73
In Kavanagh’s opinion, Smith’s originality grants her a place in the study, but as a
result of Smith’s vitriolic transgressions, her writings represent ‘the most remarkable but least read’ novels of the period.74
From a critical perspective, Charlotte Smith lost intellectual ground by
the end of the nineteenth century, but women’s poetry was still a commercial
venture and her poems frequently appeared in popular anthologies.75 Eric Robertson’s contribution, English Poetesses (1883), provides an interesting barometer
of cultural taste: not because it reflects the predominant attitudes of the day,
but because it reacts against them. ‘Ladies who write verse now-a-days do not
care to be called “Poetesses”’, he exclaims, ‘yet, as they have not had the wit to
find a better designation for themselves, the name must serve …’.76 Robertson’s
provocative stance highlights the presence of the ‘New Woman‘ movement and
its feminist tendencies: the ‘Poetess’ is in decline. English Poetesses is an attempt
to sustain the traditional role of the poetess as pure and wholesome.77 Robertson
is interested in the beauty of women’s poetry but he also locates moral value in
the ‘beauty of noble lives led by pure and able women’.78 Robertson’s emphasis
on female loveliness, whether it is embodied within the realms of poetry, a pure
life or a physical body, reveals an underlying obsession: in short, it is a fantasy of
femininity, and one that sounds increasingly desperate. Smith’s ‘mother-martyr’
image fits Robertson’s ‘noble lives’ criteria, yet he doesn’t have a great deal to say
about her poetry, borrowing at length from Dorset’s account of Smith’s unhappy
life and quoting Scott‘s critical opinions. In conclusion Robertson traces in the
work ‘a vein of deep melancholy which has rather a monotonous effect on the
reader’.79 Smith’s mood may have captured the feeling of her own age, but it
did not survive well in history. J. R. de Jackson echoes Robertson’s sentiment
approximately one hundred years later when he describes the Elegiac Sonnets as
‘a gloomy collection’.80
In the early twentieth century, critical accounts focused on Smith’s contribution to the novel. In 1913, Saintsbury believed Smith was ‘something of a person
in herself, but less of a figure in history, because she neither innovates nor does
old things consummately’.81 Even the first extensive study of Smith by Florence
Hilbish, whilst highlighting many areas of innovation, arrived at the conclusion
that she produced ‘little strikingly original’ material, ultimately defining her literary contributions as ‘manifold but minor’.82 The twentieth century was not yet
ready to truly appreciate Charlotte Smith. This is evident in Ernest Bernbaum’s
217
indifferent review of Hilbish’s work, which concluded that ‘much time and care
have been devoted to it; whether deservedly, is perhaps questionable’.83
The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s generated a surge of interest in women’s writing, predominantly focused on the novel. Simultaneously, a
revived interest in the historical context of literature enabled Bishop Hunt to
demonstrate the influence of Smith on Wordsworth in 1970, although Smith
remained a minor poet.84 By the 1980s the situation was changing rapidly. Perhaps this is because, in many respects, the critical climate began to reflect the
same cultural preoccupations of Smith’s own age: a fascination with recovering
the poetry of the past, a market predisposed to female anthologies and biographies, and a feminist interest in the plight of the woman in history. Smith
had maintained a place in the popular female histories and collections of the
nineteenth century, and had begun to be taken seriously by the academy in the
twentieth century. In the 1990s, however, Smith enjoyed a popularity matched
only during her lifetime, with three separate reprints of the Elegiac Sonnets
appearing during that decade. With the scholarship of Stuart Curran, and the
academic anthologies of Roger Lonsdale, Jennifer Breen, and Andrew Ashfield
(amongst numerous others), Smith became established not only as a prominent
figure in the revised female canon, but also as a central figure in Romanticism.
This is most clearly exemplified in the recent appearance of Jacqueline Labbe’s
monograph on Smith, which explores Smith’s work beyond the constraints of
gender and establishes her as a major influence on Wordsworth. As our definitions of Romanticism have been radically redefined, Smith may have finally
achieved the winning combination of popularity and posterity.
NOTES
Labbe, ‘Introduction’
1.
C. Smith, ‘To My Lyre’, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 14, ed. J. Labbe, p. 215 (ll. 37–48).
2. C. Smith, The Old Manor House (1793), ed. J. Labbe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview,
2002).
3. C. Smith, The Old Manor House (1793), ed. A. Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969); C. Smith, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), ed. A. Ehrenpreis
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
4. A. Ehrenpreis, Introduction to Smith, Emmeline, ed. Ehrenpreis, p. xv.
5. C. Smith, The Old Manor House (1793), ed. J. Todd (London: Pandora, 1987).
6. J. Todd, Introduction to Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Todd, p. ix.
7. C. Smith, Desmond (1792), ed. J. Todd and A. Blank (Peterborough, ON: Broadview,
2001).
8. J. Todd and A. Blank, Introduction to Smith, Desmond, ed. Todd and Blank, pp. 30, 29, 17.
9. J. Labbe, Introduction to Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Labbe, p. 28.
10. Ibid.
11. J. Willson, Introduction to C. Smith, Selected Poems, ed. J. Willson (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), pp. xiv, xv.
12. S. Curran, Introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. S. Curran (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. xxv.
1 Andrews, ‘“Herself […] Fills The Foreground”’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
J. Labbe, ‘The Exiled Self ’: Images of War in Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants’, in P. Shaw
(ed.) Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2000), pp. 37–56; p. 37.
S. C. Behrendt, ‘Telling Secrets: The Sonnets of Anna Maria Smallpiece and Mary F.
Johnson’, European Romantic Review, 13:4 (2002), pp. 393–410; p. 393.
J. Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 6.
C. Smith, Preface to Elegiac Sonnets, 1st and 2nd edns, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol.
14, p. 10.
Ibid.
Ibid.
– 219 –
220
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
Notes to pages 14–23
R. Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 16.
Ibid., p. 16.
C. Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Volume I, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 20.
Labbe, Charlotte Smith, p. 6.
Monthly Review, 71 (1784), p. 368.
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Volume I, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 25.
C. Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, 5th edn (London: T. Cadell, 1789).
Smith, Preface to Elegiac Sonnets, 5th edn, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 12.
Ibid.
S. Hess, Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p.
57.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 57.
Charlotte Smith to Thomas Cadell Sr. [?Brighton, c. 16 December 1792], in The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. J. P. Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 55.
Ibid., p. 55 (note 6).
F. Burney, Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793), ed. C. L. Johnson (Los Angeles, CA: The Augustan Reprint Society, 1990), pp. 16–17.
A. Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 147.
Ibid., p. 13.
Critical Review, 6 (1792), p. 104.
Critical Review, 9 (1793), pp. 299–300.
C. Smith, Preface to The Emigrants (1793), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 121.
Ibid.
C. Smith, The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 125.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 126.
Ibid., pp. 126–7.
Ibid., p. 127.
Ibid., pp. 127–8.
Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid., p. 126.
Ibid., p. 126.
Ibid., p. 132.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Labbe, ‘Exiled Self ’, p. 43.
Smith, The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, pp. 132–3.
Labbe, ‘Exiled Self ’, p. 54.
Smith, The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, pp. 146–7.
C. Smith, Preface to Elegiac Sonnets, Volume II, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p.
66.
221
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
J. Labbe, Introduction to Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. xii.
Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Volume II, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 68.
Ibid. p. 90.
Ibid., p. 91.
Ibid., p. 93.
Ibid., p. 90.
Smith, The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 126.
Ibid., p. 127.
Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, p. 26.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 93.
W. Wordsworth, ‘Nuns Fret Not at their Convent’s Narrow Rooms’, quoted in Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, p. 253.
65. Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Volume I, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 30.
66. Ibid., pp. 23–5.
67. Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, p. 255.
2 Porter, ‘From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet’
1.
2.
3.
Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 632.
Ibid., p. 503.
For an extended discussion of Smith’s relations and negotiations with her various publishers, see J. P. Stanton, ‘Charlotte Smith’s “Literary Business”: Income, Patronage, and
Indigence’, Age of Johnson, 1 (1987), pp. 375–401.
4. Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 167.
5. Ibid., p. 610.
6. Ibid., p. 705.
7. While collections of excerpts (verse or prose) remained the most popular educational
form at the turn of the century, pedagogical fictions often eschewed quoting verse. Under
the sway of empiricist models of education, dialogue and narrative progression had
become associated with rational thought, while learning poetry by rote, as Richard Lovell
Edgeworth argued, merely ‘disposes the young student to admire and imitate, without
instructing him how to analyze and combine’ (R. L. Edgeworth, Poetry Explained for the
Use of Young People (London: J. Johnston, 1802), pp. iii–iv).
8. At least three of the reviews of Emmeline quote Smith’s sonnets instead of excerpting
from her prose, emphasising her established reputation as the author of Elegiac Sonnets.
See ‘Appendix A: The Reception of Emmeline’, in C. Smith, Emmeline, the Orphan of the
Castle (1788), ed. L. Fletcher (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. 477–82.
9. C. Smith, Rural Walks (1795), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, ed. E. Dolan, p. 3.
10. For a discussion of Smith’s engagement with social issues in her children’s books, see E.
Dolan, Introduction to Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, pp. xviii–xii. I will return to the
issue of empire below.
222
11. For women poets’ reactions to Darwin’s Loves of the Plants, see J. Pascoe, ‘Female
Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith’, in C. S. Wilson and J. Haefner (eds), ReVisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 193–209; pp. 199–200. While Darwin’s poem was
widely read and often referenced by educationalists of the period, many contemporary
works of natural history bolstered their claims by inserting original or excerpted verse. In
The Natural History of Selborne (1788), for example, Gilbert White includes excerpts in
Latin and English from Virgil, Lucretius, Dryden, Milton and John Philips, as well as an
original composition, ‘A Gentleman’s Summer-Evening Walk’, complete with scientific
annotations much like those of Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’. Smith cites White’s book in Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, ed. J. Pascoe, p.
179, and in the notes to Beachy Head.
12. Smith, Rural Walks, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, p. 5.
13. Ibid., p. 6.
14. Ibid., p. 9.
15. By paraphrasing William Wordsworth’s Ruined Cottage here – at the end of the poem,
the poet-narrator has learned to ‘no longer read / The forms of things with an unworthy
eye’ – I am drawing attention to the common lesson Smith and Wordsworth sought to
inculcate. Both works posit the observation of nature and cultivation of a poetic sensibility as pre-requisites for moral good. However, while the Pedlar and poet-narrator of
Wordsworth’s poem rest satisfied with recognizing the ‘secret spirit of humanity’ in the
matted weeds around Margaret’s now empty cottage, Mrs Woodfield urges her young
charges to benevolent actions that relieve both mental and physical distress of the poor.
See The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. J. Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1978), p. 275.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. U. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: J. Robson, 1794), p. 17.
20. Smith, Rural Walks, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, pp. 23–4. This passage closely
mirrors Gilpin’s explanation for why the views he depicts might appear differently to his
readers: picturesque scenes are affected by ‘a lowering sky, or a bright one’ and ‘rocks, and
woods take different shapes from the different directions of light; while the hues and
tints of objects (on which their effect, in a great measure depends) are continually changing’. W. Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 2 vols (London: R.
Blamire, 1786), vol. 1, pp. vii–viii.
21. Smith, Rural Walks, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, p. 24. Anna Barbauld’s brother
John Aikin concludes his Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry with a
similar assessment: ‘where the careless eye beholds an ordinary and indistinct landskip,
one accustomed to examine, compare, and discriminate will discern detached figures and
groups, which, judiciously brought forwards, may be wrought into the most striking pictures’. Aikin, Smith and many of their contemporaries shared this empiricist approach
to picturesque aesthetics. J. Aikin, Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry
(London: J. Johnson, 1777), p. 154.
23. O. Goldsmith, History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 8 vols (London: J. Nourse,
1774), vol. 1, p. vi.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
223
Smith, Rural Walks, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, p. 92.
Ibid., pp. 92–3.
Ibid., p. 92.
B. M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 214; L. Price, The
Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2000), pp.
3–4.
Benedict, Modern Reader, p. 198. Rural Walks replicates the miscellany’s concern with
moral improvement as well as cultivating an appreciation for the best of English verse
through excerpts from Shakespeare, Drayton, Milton, Prior, Pope, Thomson, Collins,
Cowper, Burns, Erasmus Darwin, William Leslie Bowles, and, of course, Charlotte
Smith.
Pitching Rural Walks to Davies, Smith described her work as ‘less desultory than Mrs.
Barbauld’s ‘Evenings at Home’ (which have had & still have an amazing sale) & calculated for young persons three or four years older’ (Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p.
131).
Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 61.
Ibid., p. 61.
H. More, Strictures on Female Education (1799), in Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed.
R. Hole (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), pp. 166–7. For Renaissance criticisms of
commonplace books and other ‘thrifty Compendiums’ of learning’, see P. Beal, ‘Notions
in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in W. S. Hill (ed.), New
Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991
(Binghamton: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), pp. 131–47; pp. 139–40.
More, Strictures, pp. 192–3.
V. Knox, The Poetical Epitome, or Elegant Extracts Abridged (London: C. Dilly, 1791),
pp. xii–xiii.
To make this claim, Knox distorts Montaigne’s point. In the passage, Montaigne argues
that those who compile commonplaces ‘may bee saide to be a buying or borrowing and
not a making or compiling of a booke’ because they ‘put their larcenies to publike view
and garish show’. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Physiognomy’, in Essays: Book III (1603),
ed. B. R. Schneider, trans. J. Florio, Renascence Editions (University of Oregon, 1999),
http://www.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/montaigne/3xii.htm, accessed 22 October 2006.
While Knox’s botanical analogy legitimates his choice not to follow a ‘regular or systematical arrangement of the component pieces’, the claim to an editor’s thread reveals the
collection’s disjunction as cultivated illusion. Other compilers were much less equivocal:
in her Preface to The Female Reader Wollstonecraft lodges the pedagogical value of her
collection in the fact that the excerpts are ‘carefully disposed in a series that tends to
make them illustrate each other’. M. Wollstonecraft, The Female Reader, in The Works
of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto,
1989), vol. 4, p. 55.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 127.
Ibid.
OED, ‘subject, n.’ 10, 14a.
224
44. H. Sloane, The Will of Sir Hans Sloane (London: John Virtuoso, 1753), pp. 28–9. Like
the educational works I have discussed, Sloan placed the value of such a collection in
its moral message: he dictated that his collection be preserved as a whole, ‘being fully
convinced that nothing tends more to raise our ideas of the power, wisdom, goodness,
providence, and other perfections of the Deity … than the enlargement of our knowledge
of the works of nature’ ( Sloan, Will, p. 17).
45. C. W. Peale, The Selected Papers of Charles Wilson Peale, ed. L. B. Miller, 6 vols (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 262, 269–70.
46. Ibid., pp. 9–12, 274.
47. Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, p. 227.
48. Ibid., p. 229.
49. C. Smith, ‘Flora’ (ll. 33–6), from Conversations Introducing Poetry, in Works of Charlotte
Smith, vol. 12, p. 231.
51. Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, pp. 164–5.
52. Ibid.,p. 179. Judith Pascoe notes the common thread of sensibility in Mrs Talbot’s critique of collecting and the book’s protests against the excesses of the rich ( J. Pascoe,
Introduction to Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, pp. xvi–ii).
54. Ibid., p. 109.
55. Ibid., p. 110.
56. Ibid.
57. Educational practice bears out Smith’s innuendo: by the turn of the century, numerous schools for poor children in Britain had been modelled on the system Rev. Andrew
developed during his tenure as superintendent of an orphan school in Madras.
58. See ‘The Possibilities of Print’ in Labbe, Charlotte Smith, pp. 23–63.
59. The head note for Wharton’s poem in the collection reads ‘by an eminent literary character, then a scholar of Winchester College’. See [Anon.], Salmagundi; A Miscellaneous
Combination of Original Poetry (London: T. Payne; B. White and son; and J. Debret,
1791), p. 121.
60. Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 705. Writing in July 1806 to Cadell and Davies,
Smith says: ‘My wish was to have collected all that I have lately written which appears
to good judges worth publishing & to have republished the former volumes, divested
of some pieces which I wish to remove entirely’ (Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith,
p. 739). Cadell and Davies declined Smith’s proposal and price, and the collection was
eventually published by Johnson in 1807.
61. In an August 1805 letter to Cadell and Davies, Smith provides a ‘table of the propos’d
contents’, including three sonnets, a series of fables, a rondeau, a ‘lyrical piece’, and several
‘pieces’ of unspecified genre, as well as the ‘local poem’, ‘Beachy Head’ (Collected Letters
of Charlotte Smith, p. 705).
62. John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642) is often cited as the origin of the topographic poem
(also referred to as the local or prospect poem); the form continued to be popular into
the nineteenth century. In a letter to Davies, Smith cites a contemporary prospect poem,
William Crowe’s Lewesdon Hill (1786), as an example of a publication that was well
under the number of pages she proposed for her final collection (Collected Letters of
Charlotte Smith, p. 740).
63. C. Smith, Beachy Head: With Other Poems (1807), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14,
pp. 151–210; p. 154.
225
64. Ibid., p. 154.
66. J. Ellison, ‘The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility’, in Wilson and Haefner (eds),
Re-visioning Romanticism, pp. 228–55; p. 228. Ellison also notes that fancy ‘is bound up
with the prospect, the view from mental heights’, and in late century poetry often became
a site for reflections on empire (as it does in Beachy Head). See p. 229.
67. As Labbe notes, the prospect view held associations with masculine breadth of vision
and political dominance, making Smith’s position in the opening lines pointed claim to
authority in itself (Labbe, Charlotte Smith, p. 143).
68. Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 165 (ll. 368–72).
69. Ibid., p. 165 (ll. 368, 374).
70. Ibid., p. 165 (ll. 356–67).
71. D. R. Ruwe, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Sublime: Feminine Poetics, Botany, and Beachy Head’,
Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 7 (1999): pp. 117–32; pp. 122–3.
72. Labbe argues that the act of ‘remembering – that is, putting together – a version of self
acts more to destabilise than establish selfhood’, a to point to which I will return in the
conclusion of this essay (Labbe, Charlotte Smith, p. 152).
73. Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 165.
75. Ruwe notes a similar instance of borrowing in which Smith remakes a passage in Minor
Morals into the opening lines of Beachy Head. Through this conjunction, Ruwe rightly
argues that Smith’s children’s books incite the ‘botanic poetic’ that distinguishes her later
poems from those of Elegiac Sonnets. Ruwe, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Sublime’, pp. 124–6.
76. Labbe, Charlotte Smith, pp. 152, 79. For the impact of Smith’s annotation practice on her
construction of identity, see also J. Labbe, ‘“Transplant’d into more congenial soil”: Footnoting the Self in the poetry of Charlotte Smith’, in J. Bray, M. Handley and A. C. Henry
(eds), Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2000), pp. 71–86.
77. For Smith’s proposed table of contents, see Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 705.
79. Labbe also notes the speaker’s ‘declension into silence by poem’s end’, and argues that
the multiplication of speakers ‘calls into question the viability of an authoritative, disengaged “I”’ as well as ‘undercutting the poetic authority her initial speaker claimed’
(Labbe, Charlotte Smith, pp. 144, 153–4). I would agree while adding that such multiplicity is a product of Smith’s re-articulation of her authorial identity through her role as
collector and editor.
3 Lokke, ‘The Figure of the Hermit in Charlotte Smith’s
Beachy Head
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 175 (l. 686).
Ibid., p. 155 (l. 1).
Ibid., p. 164 (ll. 309–10).
Ibid., p. 169 (ll. 482–3).
J. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: 1730–1840: An Approach to the
Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 155 (ll. 12–17).
226
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
‘Thomson ... feels he must control nature in order not to be controlled by it, and it is
in this respect that the, so to speak, moral significance of his insistence on describing
landscape from a high viewpoint is best understood. The crucial phrase here is perhaps a
‘commanding height’, a phrase borrowed of course from the language of military tactics,
and by no means used, by eighteenth-century poets, without a sense of embattled hostility to what is being commanded, the landscape below’ (Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, pp.
24–5).
J. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)
See Labbe’s related discussion of Smith’s use of the subjunctive in the opening of the
poem as a sign of her hesitation to claim the prospect view (Romantic Visualities, pp.
29–30).
Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 156 (ll. 59, 60).
Ibid., p. 159 (l. 151).
Ibid., p. 160 (ll. 167–9).
Ibid., p. 166 (ll. 390–2).
Ibid., p. 165 (ll. 368–71).
Ibid., p. 167 (ll. 419–22).
Ibid. (ll. 434–9).
Ibid., p. 168 (l. 442).
Ibid., p. 175 (l. 685).
Ibid., p. 176 (l. 709). This choice of focus on one small figure set against a sublime landscape corresponds to the emphasis on particularity and minuteness that Judith Pascoe
finds central to Smith’s aesthetic in ‘Female Botanists’. For analysis of the sublime scenes
that open and close Beachy Head in relation to the picturesque as well as Smith’s representation of the science of geology, see A. D. Wallace, ‘Picturesque Fossils, Sublime
Geology? The Crisis of Authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head’, European Romantic
Review, 13:1 (2002), pp. 77–94.
Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. xxvii.
Ibid., p. xxvii.
Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 176.
From Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Schiller’s On the Sublime, eighteenth-century theorists of the sublime emphasized that the sublime aesthetic response
is possible only from a vantage point of distance and safety in relation to nature’s power
or grandeur. In contrast, as Labbe asserts in Romantic Visualities, ‘[m]any women writers
situate themselves within the landscape, a part of it, interactive and without the advantage of the (legal) proprietary eye’ (p. xiii).
J. M. Anderson, ‘Beachy Head: The Romantic Fragment Poem as Mosaic’, in A. K. Mellor,
F. Nussbaum and J. F. S. Post (eds), Forging Connections: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Huntington: Huntington Library Press, 2002), pp. 119–46; p.
119.
Janet Todd, for example, in Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), p.
6, asserts that ‘Because sensibility is reactive and unstable, the sentimental work of prose
or poetry meanders rather than moves logically to its destination. Or it may have no
destination at all and pretend to be, or actually be, unfinished … The poetry of Gray and
Thomson is similarly broken by hiatuses, seeming closures and juxtapositions of conflicting points of view and contrary moods.’ Furthermore, Beachy Head arguably corresponds
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
227
to the ‘poetry of process’ that Northrup Frye, in his classic article, sees as typifying the
age of sensibility. See N. Frye, ‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’, English Literary
History, 23 (1956), pp. 144–52.
For a discussion of Smith’s conception of her role in literary history, see K. Lokke, ‘“Dark
Forgetfulness” and the “Intercession of Saint Monica”: Charlotte Smith and Literary
History’, Women’s Studies, 27 (1998), pp. 259–80. In ‘Saint Monica’ Smith figures her
poetic oeuvre as an ever-changing ruin. For Smith and British Romanticism, see D. Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim’, European
Romantic Review, 6 (1995), pp. 98–127, S. Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism and
History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 39–72 and Labbe,
Charlotte Smith.
M. Wollstonecraft Godwin, ‘Extract of The Cave of Fancy. A Tale’, Posthumous Works of
the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), 2 vols (Clifton, NJ: Augustus
M. Kelley, 1972), vol. 2, p. 99. Though I am not trying to make a case for influence here,
I think it quite likely that Smith read this volume of Wollstonecraft’s work, given her
respect for her fellow author and member of Joseph Johnson’s circle, her friendship with
Godwin, and her wide reading habits. Smith’s little-known letter to Godwin after Wollstonecraft’s death contains an eloquent expression of friendship for Wollstonecraft and
sympathy for Godwin. For this letter, see A. Craciun and K. Lokke, Rebellious Hearts:
British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany, NY: State University of New
York 2001), p. 6.
Wollstonecraft translated an abridged version of Johann Kaspar Lavatar’s Physiognomy
in 1790. It was never published; Thomas Holcraft’s translation came into print first. She
had included selections from Lavatar’s work in her A Female Reader, an anthology aimed
at children and published in 1789. See V. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The
Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 1992),
pp. 19–21.
Wollstonecraft Godwin, ‘Extract of The Cave of Fancy’ in Posthumous Works, vol. 2, p.
107.
Ibid., p. 110.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 104.
Ibid., p. 125.
Ibid., p. 134.
Ibid., p. 153.
Ibid., p. 149.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., p. 354.
Ibid., p. 151–2.
Ibid., p. 135–6.
Craciun and Lokke, Rebellious Hearts, p. 6.
Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, pp. 174–5 (ll. 655–69).
Ibid., p. 175 (ll. 670–1).
Ibid., p. 172 (ll. 574–6).
228
46. See W. Richey, ‘The Rhetoric of Sympathy in Smith and Wordsworth’, European Romantic Review, 13 (2002), pp. 427–43, for analysis of the tensions among humanitarianism,
complacency and self-absorption in the poetry of Smith and Wordsworth.
47. Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 175 (l. 686). Of the hermits
in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lane Cooper writes suggestively, ‘In both
poets, of course, the really curious thing about these holy men is the fact that they always
dwell in the woods. They are not enamoured of the heath or the sandy waste. They are
lovers of shade, of ivy, moss, and oak. They are amateurs in the contemplation of foliage’ (‘The “Forest Hermit” in Coleridge and Wordsworth’, Modern Language Notes, 24:2
(1909), pp. 33–6).
48. The hermit in Smith’s earlier work ‘The Story of Henrietta’ from The Letters of a Solitary
Wanderer (1800) who devotes his life to abolitionist work in Jamaica is a similar idealized, utopian figure set against the racism of virtually all the other characters, including
the novella’s hero and heroine. For the tensions in Smith’s own life over the institution of
slavery and her willingness to profit from the sale of the slaves on her family’s Barbados
sugar cane plantation, see Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution, pp.
171–8.
49. S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ll. 518–26.
50. Ibid., l. 545.
51. Ibid., l. 581.
52. P. H. Fry, ‘Wordsworth in the “Rime”’, in P. H. Fry (ed.), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), pp.
315–42.
53. W. Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, l. 15.
54. Ibid., ll. 22–3.
55. For a summary of critical responses to the hermit in ‘Tintern Abbey’, see D. W. Davies, ‘Hermits, Heroes, and History: Lamb’s “Many Friends”’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, 97
(1997), pp. 9–29.
56. Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 174 (ll. 631, 655).
57. Ibid., p. 175 (ll. 676–80).
58. Ibid (ll. 687–91).
59. J. Pipkin, ‘The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets’, Studies in English Literature, 38 (1998), pp. 597–619; pp. 614, 612, 612.
61. Labbe, Charlotte Smith, p. 156. See also Labbe’s discussion of Smith’s first hermit/solitary as a critique of Wordsworth (pp. 155–6).
62. Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 176 (l. 731).
63. A. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, Epistemologies of Emotion Hume to Austen (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 70.
64. M. Hays, ‘The Hermit: An Oriental Tale’, Universal Magazine, 78 (1786), pp. 204–8,
234–8; M. Robinson, ‘The Hermit of Mont-Blanc’, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems,
ed. J. Pascoe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), pp. 224–9; S. Owenson, The Missionary: An Indian Tale, ed. J. Wright (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002).
65. Hays, ‘The Hermit’, p. 204.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., p. 205.
68. For an excellent discussion of the relation of Robinson’s life and poetry, see the Introduction to Pascoe’s Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, pp. 19–61.
229
69. Robinson, ‘The Hermit of Mont-Blanc’, in Mary Robinson: Selected Poems, p. 224 (ll.
13–14, 17).
70. Ibid., p. 225 (ll. 51–3).
71. Ibid. (ll. 60–2).
72. Ibid., p. 224 (ll. 24–6).
73. Ibid., p. 229 (ll. 194–7).
74. Comparing Robinson’s marginal and solitary figures to those of the Lyrical Ballads, Stuart Curran, in ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales’ (in Wilson and Haefner (eds), Re-Visioning
Romanticism, pp. 17–35), writes that ‘She observes the outcast and the marginal from a
participant’s standpoint ... One result is poems of grotesque, even extreme alienation, as
the initially marginalized are cut off from whatever moorings are still at their disposal’ (p.
32). ‘The precariousness of her existence seems to have invested her poems with a more
urgent sense ... of the stark contingency of human desire’ (p. 26).
75. Owenson, The Missionary, p. 73.
76. For an incisive discussion of sensibility as providing the moral framework for The Missionary, see Wright, Introduction to The Missionary, pp. 30–40.
77. Owenson, The Missionary, p. 257.
4 Bode, ‘The Subject of Beachy Head’
1.
See, for example, N. Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie
(1984) (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1988).
2. Aristotle, On Poetics, in The Works of Aristotle (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1987), vol. 2, p. 685 (=1450b).
3. See W. Dilthey, ‘Entwürfe zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft’, in H.-G. Gadamer and
G. Boehm (eds), Seminar: Philosophische Hermeneutik (1976) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1979), pp. 189–220.
4. See C. Bode, ‘And what were thou ...?’: Essay über Shelley und das Erhabene (Essen:
Blaue Eule, 1992); C. Bode, John Keats: ‘Play On’ (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1996); C. Bode, ‘Das Subjekt in der englischen Romantik’, in R. L. Fetz,
R. Hagenbüchle, P. Schulz (eds), Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivität, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 872–900; C. Bode, ‘Plus ça change...
– Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities and the Negotiation of Alterity’, in J.
Schlaeger (ed.), REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 20:
Metamorphosis: Structures of Cultural Transformations (Tübingen: Narr, 2005), pp.
27–38.
5. J. Keats, ‘Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817’, in M. H. Abrams (gen. ed.), The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th edn, 2 vols (New York, London: Norton,
2000), vol. 2, p. 887.
6. J. Keats, ‘Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818’, in Abrams (gen. ed.), Norton
Anthology, vol. 2, p. 894.
8. Ibid., p. 155 (ll. 1–10).
9. P. R. Feldman, British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology (Baltimore, MD,
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 677.
230
11. See K. K. Cook, ‘The Aesthetics of Loss: Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants and Beachy
Head’, in S. C. Behrendt (ed.), Approaches To Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period (New York: MLA, 1997), pp. 97–100.
12. See J. Labbe, ‘Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. D. Wu
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 204–10.
14. J. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in Abrams (gen ed.), Norton Anthology, vol. 2, p. 850 (ll.
33–5).
16. Labbe, Charlotte Smith, p. 19.
18. T. W. Adorno, ‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, Akzente, 4 (1957), pp. 8–26.
19. D. Wu (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 82.
20. F. W. J. Schelling, Schelling, Philosophie jetzt!, ed. M. Boenke (München: Diederichs,
1995), p. 132.
21. Smith, Beachy Head, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 171 (ll. 531 ff.).
22. Ibid., pp. 172–4 (ll. 577 ff.).
23. Ibid., p. 173 (ll. 615–24).
24. Ibid., p. 172 (ll. 572–6).
25. Ibid., p. 176 (ll. 712–13).
26. Ibid (l. 729).
27. Ibid. (ll. 726–31).
28. See T. Kelley, ‘Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59 (2004), pp. 281–314.
29. See also Labbe, ‘Charlotte Smith, Beachey Head’, in Wu (ed.), Companion, pp. 205, 209.
31. Ibid., pp. 165–6 (ll. 378–84).
32. Her note ends: ‘It is now many years since I made these observations. The appearance of
sea-shells so far from the sea excited my surprise, though I then knew nothing of natural
history. I have never read any of the late theories of the earth, nor was I ever satisfied with
the attempts to explain many of the phenomena which call forth conjecture in those
books I happened to have access to on this suject’ (ibid., p. 165; emphases added).
33. Kelley, ‘Romantic Histories’, p. 300.
35. Ibid., p. 166 (ll. 384–9).
36. Ibid. (l. 394).
37. Ibid., pp. 166–7 (ll. 401–19).
38. Collins English Dictionary.
39. N. Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 2004), p. 176.
40. I should like to thank Tilottama Rajan for suggesting I should make this implication
explicit. Perhaps needless to say, this is not her position. But her intervention helped me
hone my argument.
41. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1971), p.
115.
42. A. K. Mellor and R. E. Matlak (eds.), British Literature 1780–1830 (Fort Worth, PA:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996), p. 226.
231
43. See P. Bradshaw, ‘Dystopian Futures: Time-Travel and Millenarian Visions in the Poetry
of Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith’, Romanticism on the Net, 21 (February 2001),
http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n21/005959ar.html (accessed 4 February
2008).
44. Kelley, ‘Romantic Histories’, p. 314.
46. Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. xxvii.
47. Ibid. p. xxviii. This is, for example, quoted in Cook, ‘Loss’, p. 99, and in D. R. Ruwe,
‘Charlotte Smith’s Sublime’, p. 123.
48. W. B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, l. 39.
5 Tarling, ‘“The Slight Skirmishing of a Novel Writer”’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Works of Charlotte Smith.
In the US, the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence are commonly
known as the American Revolution and the military conflict as the Revolutionary War.
The use of the term ‘American War of Independence’ is perhaps more usual, though by
no means universal, in Britain. Eighteenth-century British commentators usually refer to
the conflict as the ‘American War’.
G. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, translated from the German by H. and S. Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1962).
For a comprehensive list see R. B. Heilman, America in English Fiction 1760–1800: The
Influences of the American Revolution (1937) (New York: Octagon Books, 1968).
For contested definitions of patriotism, see H. Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National
Identity, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 57–89. On the
division of opinion in Britain, see, amongst others, J. H. Plumb, In the Light of History
(London: Penguin, 1972); J. E. Bradley, Popular Support and the American Revolution
in England (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); L. Colley, Britons: Forging
the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 144–5; K. Wilson, The Sense of
the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 237–83.
A. Garnai, ‘A Letter from Charlotte Smith to the Publisher George Robinson’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 19:4 (Summer 2007), pp. 391–400, p. 399.
C. Smith, Desmond (1792), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, ed. S. Curran, p. 3.
Analytical Review (August 1792), p. 428.
European Magazine ( July 1792), pp. 22–3.
Monthly Review (December 1792), p. 406.
Critical Review (September 1792), p. 100.
Smith, Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, p. 127.
Ibid., p. 286. E. Burke, Speech of Edmund Burke Esq. on American Taxation, April 19,
1774, 2nd edn (London: J. Dodsley, 1775); E. Burke, Speech of Edmund Burke Esq., on
Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775 (London: J.
Dodsley, 1775).
J. Labbe, ‘Gentility in Distress: A New Letter by Charlotte Smith (1749–1806)’, Wordsworth Circle, 35 (2004), pp. 91–3.
232
17. Direct quotation of the most [in]famous passages from Reflections occurs only after
Desmond receives the book. A parody of Burke’s lament over the unchivalrous treatment of Marie Antoinette appears in the letter dated 8 January 1791, in which Desmond
acknowledges receipt of his copy (Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, p. 128).
Desmond’s reference to Burke’s use of the term ‘swinish multitude’ appears in the letter
dated 10 April 1791 (p. 145).
18. N. J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 39; M. A. Favret, Romantic
Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 10.
19. Smith, Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, p. 3.
20. Ibid., p. 59.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. F. M. Turner (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 173.
25. Burke, Reflections, pp. 36–7.
26. Ibid., pp. 38–45.
27. Smith, Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, p. 59.
28. Ibid., p. 60.
29. Ibid.
30. C. Smith, The Banished Man (1794), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, ed. M. O.
Grenby, pp. 108–9.
31. Smith’s use of the Burkean castle metaphor has been widely discussed; see, in particular,
L. Fletcher, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Emblematic Castles’, Critical Survey, 4 (1992), pp. 3–8.
32. S. J. Pratt, Emma Corbett, or The Miseries of Civil War (Bath: Pratt and Clinch; London:
R. Baldwin, 1780); R. Bage, The Fair Syrian (1787), reprinted in facsimile (New York:
Garland, 1979); [Anon.], Caroline, The Heroine of The Camp (London: W. Beilby, 1790).
33. J. E. Bradley, ‘The British Public and the American Revolution: Ideology, Interest and
Opinion’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (London:
Longman, 1998); Wilson, Sense of the People; D. Andrew, London Debating Societies
1776–1799 (London: London Record Society, 1994).
34. C. Smith, The Old Manor House (1793), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, ed. I. Ferris,
pp. 308–9.
35. Ibid., p. 118.
36. Ibid., p. 254.
37. Ibid., p. 252.
38. Ibid., p. 127.
39. Ibid., p. 118.
40. Ibid., p. 284.
41. Ibid., p. 214.
42. Ibid., p. 307.
43. Ibid., p. 308.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. See, for example, Pratt, Emma Corbett; R. Bage, Mount Henneth (1782), reprinted
in facsimile (New York: Garland, 1979) and The Fair Syrian; H. Scott, Helena: or,
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
233
the Vicissitudes of a Military Life (Cork: James Haly, 1790); H. M. Williams, Julia
(1790), reprinted in facsimile with an introduction by P. Garside (London: Routledge/
Thoemmes, 1995).
Burke, Reflections, p. 186.
Ibid., p. 179.
Smith, The Old Manor House, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, p. 309.
K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 169.
For a recent account of the controversy see T. Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon,
2005), pp. 243–71.
See, in particular, Bage, Mount Henneth; [Anon.], Reveries of the Heart during a Tour
through Part of England and France: In a Series of Letters to a Friend (London: J. Johnson, 1781); [Anon.], Caroline, The Heroine of The Camp; E. Parsons, The Voluntary Exile
(London: William Lane, 1795).
A. Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 98.
Annual Register, 1779, pp. 8–14.
Smith, The Old Manor House, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, 310n.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 310.
Bickham, Savages within the Empire, p. 255.
T. Anburey, Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, 2 vols (London: William
Lane, 1789), vol. 1, pp. 368–75; R Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the Late American War from its Commencement to the Year 1783 (Dublin:
Wilkinson and Courtney, 1809), pp. 145–7; J. Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times,
3 vols (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1816), vol. 1, pp. 230–2; J. P. Baxter, The British
Invasion from the North: The Campaigns of Generals Carleton and Burgoyne from Canada,
1776–1777, with the Journal of Lieut. William Digby of the 53rd, or Shropshire Regiment
of Foot (Albany, NY: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1887), pp. 235–7; J. Fliegelman, Prodigals and
Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 137–40.
C. Smith, The Young Philosopher (1798), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 10, ed. A. A.
Markley, p. 66.
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 183.
Ibid., p. 368.
Smith, The Young Philosopher, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 10, p. 327.
R. Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting–House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great
Britain (London: T. Cadell, 1789).
234
6 Markley, ‘Charlotte Smith, the Godwin Circle and the
Proliferation of Speakers in The Young Philosopher’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Ibid., p. 4.
P. Clemit, ‘Charlotte Smith to William and Mary Jane Godwin: Five Holograph Letters’,
Keats-Shelley Journal, 55 (2006), pp. 29–40; p. 30.
Ibid., p. 33.
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 37. Clemit points out that Smith refers here to a lawsuit that her sister Catherine
Dorset was currently entering against their brother Nicholas Turner (p. 37, n. 41).
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 38.
Bodleian (Abinger) deposit e. 204, as noted ibid., p. 38, n. 43 and p. 39, n. 48.
In early 1800 Coleridge had been attempting to find a company to produce his Osorio,
and Smith wrote the prologue to Godwin’s Antonio later that year. See W. St Clair, The
Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 231–2. Smith’s What Is She had been staged for several days the
year before with Godwin in attendance on 27 April 1799.
See Smith’s letters to Cadell and Davies and to George Robinson and Co., both dated 1
August 1797, in Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, pp. 283–5.
For the theory that Smith feared that George Delmont would be compared with Caleb
Williams see Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 285, n. 1. For the significance of
George’s physical appearance, see E. Kraft, ‘Encyclopedic Libertinism and 1798: Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher’, Eighteenth-Century Novel, 2 (2002), pp. 257–88.
Ibid., p. 3.
Godwin would also experiment with pushing the Gothic to an extreme by using elements of the supernatural, but that experiment would not come until the following year
with the publication of St Leon (1799).
W. Godwin, Preface to the 1832 Standard Novels edition of Fleetwood; reprinted in W.
Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), ed. G. Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough,
ON: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 448.
Ibid.
See the letter from Holcroft to Godwin dated 9 September 1800 and published in C.
K. Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (London: H. S. King,
1876; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1970), vol. 2, p. 25; cited by P. Clemit in The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 46, n. 38. Clemit also cites a note from Godwin dated 1800,
Abinger MSS, b. 228/9.
G. Kelly, ‘Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 6:4 ( July 1994), pp.
369–88; p. 379.
Ibid.
235
24. J. H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) p. 58. For another assessment of this aspect of the
novel see G. A. Barker, ‘The Narrative Mode of Caleb Williams: Problems and Resolutions’, Studies in the Novel, 25 (1993), pp. 1–15.
25. W. Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. M. Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), vol. 3, ed. P. Clemit,
p. 9, and (Variants) p. 281, n. 29. Cited by G. A. Barker, ‘Narrative Mode’, p. 5.
26. Godwin, Caleb Williams, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 3, p.
107; quoted by Barker, ‘Narrative Mode’, p. 7.
27. Godwin, Preface to the 1832 edition of Fleetwood, in Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed.
Handwerk and Markley, p. 447.
28. Godwin, Caleb Williams, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, vol. 3, p. 275.
29. See L. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1998), p. 279; and Kraft, ‘Encyclopedic Libertinism’, p. 244.
30. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), p. 413.
31. E. Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Period (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 216. See also M. Myers, ‘Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft’s
Maria’, Wordsworth Circle, 11 (1980), pp. 107–14; p. 110.
32. M. Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria (1798), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), vol. 1,
p. 84.
33. M. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 96.
34. Myers, ‘Unfinished Business’, p. 111.
35. C. Smith, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 2,
ed. J. P. Stanton, p. 196.
36. M. Wollstonecraft, Review of Emmeline, by C. Smith, Analytical Review ( July 1788),
reprinted in Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 7, p. 27.
37. Particular examples of the use of letters for such a purpose can be found in The Banished
Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), and Marchmont (1796), among others.
38. C. Smith, A Narrative of the Loss of the Catharine, Venus, and Piedmont Transports
(1796), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, p. 319. See also Elizabeth Dolan’s Introduction to this edition, p. xxv.
39. Ibid., p. 320.
40. S. Curran, General Introduction to Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 1, p. xviii.
41. W. Scott, Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists, Vol. II (1821), in W. Scott, The
Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 27 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell; and
London: Whittaker and Co., 1834–6), vol. 4, p. 66. The quotation is cited by Curran,
General Introduction to Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 1, p. xix.
42. Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 1, p.
181.
43. Smith, The Young Philosopher, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 10, p. 4.
44. Dolan, Seeing Suffering, p. 231.
45. C. Smith, Preface to Rural Walks, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 12, p. 3.
46. I am most grateful to Pamela Clemit, Stuart Curran, Elizabeth Dolan, Jacqueline Labbe,
and Judith Stanton for their contributions to the development of this essay.
236
7 Garnai, ‘The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in The
Letters of a Solitary Wanderer’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer has an uneven publication history. The five volumes
of the book appeared in two separate editions: Vols I–III were published by Sampson
Low in 1800, however, following his death, the manuscripts were auctioned off and the
remaining two volumes were eventually published in 1802 by Longman and Rees.
E. Sparrow, ‘The Alien Office, 1792–1806’, Historical Journal, 33:2 (1990), pp. 361–84,
p. 362. J. R. Dinwiddy points out that much of the demand for such measures against
foreigners came from the newspapers, ‘in which the public suspicion of Frenchman in
England and the demand for some control and investigation of them were frequently
expressed’. J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘The Use of the Crown’s Power of Deportation under the
Aliens Act, 1793–1826’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 41 (1968), pp.
193–211, p. 193.
Alien Act, 33 Geo. III, c. 4, preamble.
Quoted from the report on the debate over the Alien Act as it appeared in the European
Magazine, 23 (1793), p. 50. See also Dinwiddy, ‘Deportation under the Aliens Act’, p.
194.
For a detailed discussion of the reception of the French emigrants in Britain, see K. Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789–1802 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999). Carpenter acknowledges both the hostility and suspicion, on one
hand, but also instances of generosity and compassion with which the emigrants were
greeted in Britain.
C. Johnson, Introduction to H. More, Considerations on Religion and Public Education (1793), and F. Burney, Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy
(1793), Augustan Reprint Society Publication Number 262 (Los Angeles, CA: William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California 1990), p. iv.
Ibid., pp. iv–v.
T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 4th edn (London: T. Becket, 1797), p. 18, Mathias’s emphasis.
Ibid., pp. 20–1, Mathias’s emphasis.
For example, in her pamphlet Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy,
Burney repeatedly emphasizes ‘the abundance we have received’ and the fact that she,
and the audience she is addressing, are ‘flourishing and happy ourselves’ (pp. 10–14).
Smith, Preface to The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 121.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., p. 145.
Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. xxiv.
Ibid., p. 360. Smith mentions specifically Caux, Rouen and Balbec as the departments in
which de Foville’s name appeared. The full name of the list to which Smith referred was
the ‘General List in Alphabetical order of Émigrés from throughout the Republic’, kept
from 1792 until abolished by Napoleon in October 1800. See ‘Émigrés’ in F. Furet and
M. Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. A. Goldhammer
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 324–31, and ‘Émigrés’ in S. F. Scott and B. Rothaus (eds), Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution,
1789–1799 (London: Aldwych Press, 1985), pp. 351–5.
237
18. Sparrow quotes the Duke of Portland, the Home Secretary, who told William Wickham,
the superintendent of aliens, that he was going to take ‘any proper means of being well
informed of the descriptions and abodes of all foreigners’, ‘The Alien Office, 1792–1806’,
p. 365.
20. De Foville eventually left England. In August 1802, Smith writes to William Hayley that
he ‘is now returned to France’, Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 435. As Carpenter
explains, late 1801–2 was the period in which most of the emigrants returned to France,
p. xxiii. The general amnesty for the emigrants was decreed on 26 April 1802.
21. For a detailed account of politics and social change in Hungary during this period, see B.
K. Kiraly, Hungary in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York and London: Columbia
University Press, 1969).
22. C. Smith, The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800; 1802), in Works of Charlotte Smith,
vol. 11, ed. D. L. Macdonald, p. 323.
23. Ibid., p. 324. Smith also refers to the political upheavals in Poland her novel The Banished Man when she introduces the Polish rebel, Carlowitz (who appears as an obvious
allusion to the freedom fighter, Kosciusko) and his daughter Alexina. As Angela Keane
writes, Carlowitz can be seen as ‘an outlet for republican discourse that can no longer be
articulated sympathetically through a French subject’ (Women Writers and the English
Nation in the 1790s, p. 94). Carlowitz and Alexina (who later marries the secondary
hero, Ellesmere) also contribute in a more general sense to the portrayal of cosmopolitan
exile that is one of the main features of the novel.
24. For a general discussion of military, political and diplomatic activity on the Continent
during the 1790s, see M. Duff y, ‘British Diplomacy and the French Wars 1789–1815’,
in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1989), pp. 127–45. Regarding Poland, Duff y writes, ‘As far as they could,
[British ministers] tried to pretend that the Polish problem which dominated the attention of the military powers between 1793 and 1795 did not exist’, p. 138.
25. These three novels present plots in which much emotional distress and financial anxiety
are experienced by the protagonists (who are invariably younger brothers) as a result of
the dissipated lifestyle of their first-born siblings. Smith explicitly links this imperious,
anti-social behaviour to primogeniture, for example, through the thoughts of the elder
brother Adolphus Delmont in The Young Philosopher: ‘Impressed with ideas of primogeniture at a very early age, he could never submit to any mention of equality even among
brethren. Nothing, he said, was more infamous than the change made that respect in
France …’ (Smith, The Young Philosopher, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 10, p. 246).
26. Smith, The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 11, p. 360.
27. See S. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and S. Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT, and London:
Yale University Press, 2004) for discussions that examine the changing response to Napoleon by the British public, among them, progressive writers, and the difficulty they had in
classifying him politically.
28. A. Mellor, ‘Embodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic Writer’, European
Romantic Review, 17:3 (2006), pp. 290–300, p. 292. Whereas Mellor briefly discusses
Smith’s novels Desmond, The Banished Man and The Young Philosopher, the other literary
texts that she examines are plays: Marianna Starke’s The Widow of Malabar, Elizabeth
Inchbald’s Such Things Are and Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey.
29. Ibid., pp. 293, 297.
238
30. See Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s; W. Brewer, ‘Charlotte
Smith and the American Agrarian Ideal’, Modern Language Notes, 40:4 (2003), pp.
51–63; L. Maunu, ‘Home is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in
Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher’ European Romantic Review, 15:1 (2004), pp.
51–71; and Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution.
31. Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution, p. 153. Craciun presents a
detailed study of Smith’s relation to cosmopolitanism, exile and national belonging and
argues that ultimately Smith sees ‘the condition of political exile as the true basis for virtuous life’ (p. 158). My argument here stresses more the sense of rejection that motivates
and informs the exilic experience.
32. Brewer, ‘Charlotte Smith and the American Agrarian Ideal’, p. 61.
33. Maunu, ‘Home is Where the Heart Is’, p. 58; Keane, Women Writers and the English
Nation, p. 106; Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution, p. 166.
34. Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 70. Smith appealed to Burney as an expert because
of his own experience – the marriage of his daughter, the novelist Frances Burney and
Alexandre d’Arblay a few weeks earlier, on 31 July 1793.
35. Ibid., p. 105. Interestingly, this quotation –’the Land that from her pushes all the rest’
appears also in The Banished Man (in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. 273). It is spoken by the autobiographical character Mrs Denzil, who, as Smith herself, dreams of
leaving England (and, unlike Smith, eventually does, when she moves to Verona at the
conclusion of the novel.)
36. Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 434. This comment appears in a letter to Smith’s
former patron, the Earl of Egremont.
37. Charlotte Smith to Sarah Farr Rose, 14 February 1804, Huntington Library HM
18034. This letter is not included in Stanton’s edition of the Collected Letters of Charlotte
Smith.
38. Smith, The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 128.
40. Johnson arrives at this subject after informing Warton of the death of the wife of the
publisher Dodsley: ‘You know poor Mr. Dodsley has lost his wife: I believe he is much
affected. I hope he will not suffer so much as I yet suffer from the loss of mine’ ( James
Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p.
196).
42 Ibid., p. 383.
43. Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation, p. 106.
44. Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. 479. Keane’s discussion
of this issue in The Banished Man focuses on how the friends of D’Alonville, the hero,
continue to engage in anti-Revolution activities as evidence for signs of this fracture.
However, I believe that it appears within the cosmopolitan community as well, appearing
not only in Mrs Denzil’s reference to the ‘cup of oblivion’ but also, for example, in Ellesmere’s admission, as he prepares to join his friends in Verona, that although he ‘love[s]
England’, social alienation nonetheless compels him to leave it (p. 475).
45. Smith, The Young Philosopher, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 10, p. 429.
47. Ibid., p. 389.
48. Ibid., p. 392.
49. Ibid.
239
50. In discussing the fact of Dousterswivel’s scam, and in referring to the possibility of the
release of another victim of the swindler, the beggar Edie Ochiltree, the magistrate in
charge of the case says to Jonathan Oldbuck, the Antiquary, ‘Aha, so we must tip that
fellow [Dousterswivel] the alien act, I suppose?’ The Antiquary replies, ‘To say truth,
I wish you would’; W. Scott, The Antiquary (1816), ed. N. J. Watson (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 366.
51. N. J. Watson, Introduction to The Antiquary, ed. Watson, pp. xv, xvi.
Significantly, it was Lake Leman to where Smith envisioned her own exilic retreat, and
which she mentions to Joseph Cooper Walker in the letter cited above (Collected Letters
of Charlotte Smith, p. 105).
8 Labbe, ‘Narrating Seduction’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, pp. 38–9.
See ibid., pp. 38–42. William H. Magee notes that Sense and Sensibility ‘recalls Charlotte Smith … frequently and closely …. Jane Austen had Charlotte Smith in general and
Celestina in particular closely in mind when writing’ the novel (‘The Happy Marriage:
The Influence of Charlotte Smith on Jane Austen’, Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975), pp.
120–32; pp. 125–6).
Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 41.
C. L. Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park’, Persuasions, 17 (1995),
pp. 59–70; p. 63.
M. Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen’s Novels in EighteenthCentury Contexts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. ix.
M. Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 60.
See, in addition to Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art, E. Ty, ‘Ridding Unwanted Suitors:
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5 (1986), pp. 327–9; A. Ehrenpreis, ‘Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen
and Charlotte Smith’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), pp. 343–8; H. R. Steeves,
Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century (London:
George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1966), p. 342; F. W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her
Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 104–5; and Magee,
‘The Happy Marriage’. See also Fletcher, whose ground-breaking biography of Smith
(Charlotte Smith) places her much more on a par with Austen. Magee concentrates on
the characters of Fanny in Mansfield Park and Monimia in The Old Manor House; in this
essay I will go much further.
Magee, ‘Happy Marriage’, pp. 121, 127.
Ibid., pp. 128, 131.
Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors, pp. 104, 105.
Steeves, Before Jane Austen, p. 317.
Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane Austen?’, p. 59.
See P. Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 126; J. F. Burrows, ‘Style’, in E. Copeland and J. McMaster (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 170–88; p. 173. In another example, Enrenpreis labels the ‘literary conversation’ in
240
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
Ethelinde (1789) ‘heavy-handed’ and contrasts it with Austen’s ‘light-fingered delicacy’
(‘Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith’, p. 347).
C. Gillie, A Preface to Jane Austen (London: Longman, 1974), pp. 55, 57.
P. M. Spacks, ‘Afterword: What Came Next’, in Novel Beginnings: Experiments in
Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp.
277–85.
I. Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, in E. Copeland and J. McMaster (eds),
The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 189–210; p. 197.
See Magee, ‘Happy Marriage’, p. 126; B. Hammond, ‘The Political Unconscious in
Mansfield Park’, in N. Wood (ed.), Mansfield Park (Buckingham: Open University Press,
1993), pp. 56–90, p. 68. See also Fletcher: ‘[The Old Manor House] had a profound and
lasting effect on Austen’s imagination; she adopted the house metaphor and aspects of
the plot for Mansfield Park twenty years later’ (Charlotte Smith, p. 189).
Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, p. 91.
For instance, Smith’s Emmeline concerns an orphan whose lineage is under question
through most of the novel but whose moral right of inheritance is always endorsed by the
narrative, while Celestina’s Willoughby becomes engaged to his cousin so that her inheritance will disencumber his own estate. In Sense and Sensibility the Dashwood women are,
of course, disinherited on account of their sex, while the entail in Pride and Prejudice has
everything to do with Mrs Bennet’s obsessive focus on her daughters’ potential marriages.
See, for instance, Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, pp. 180–6; Stewart,
Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions, pp. 105–36.
For a fuller discussion of this aspect of The Old Manor House, see my essay ‘Metaphoricity
and the Romance of Property in The Old Manor House’, Novel, 34 (2001): pp. 216–31.
Austen’s structural manipulations of The Old Manor House open up new possible
approaches to the function of Lovers’ Vows, itself a translation, and the various characters’
attitudes towards and ideas about acting and role-playing.
See, for instance, Curran, General Introduction to the Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 1,
pp. vii–xxvii, Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, and Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, passim.
J. Heydt-Stevenson, ‘“Slipping into the Ha-Ha”: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane
Austen’s Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 5 (2000), pp. 309–39; p. 313.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 34.
J. Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. J. Sturrock (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), p. 52.
Ibid., p. 234.
Ibid., p. 274.
Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 235.
Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 183.
Smith, The Old Manor House, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, pp. 416, 418.
241
41. Ibid., p. 465.
42. Ibid., p. 225.
43. Tellingly, she mistakes Philip for Orlando when she first hears his voice (Smith, The Old
Manor House, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, p. 69).
44. Ibid., pp. 70–1.
45. Ibid., pp. 374, 405, 410.
46. Ibid., p. 374.
47. Ibid., pp. 412.
48. Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 248, 298.
49. Ibid., p. 299.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., p. 459.
52. Early in the novel, Orlando’s desire is openly described: as Monimia kneels to change
Mrs Rayland’s gout cushions, Orlando ‘was surprised by her beautiful figure in her simple
stuff gown, which had such an effect on his imagination that he no longer knew what he
was reading…’ (Smith, The Old Manor House, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, p. 23).
53. Ibid., pp. 122, 237.
54. Ibid., p. 246.
55. Ibid., p. 259.
56. Ibid., pp. 279, 280, 286.
57. Ibid., p. 436.
58. J. P. Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 100.
59. This observation applies to Willoughby and Wickham easily. For another take on
Austen’s libertines, see L. A. Hall, ‘Jane Austen’s Attractive Rogues: Willoughby, Wickham, and Frank Churchill’, Persuasions, 18 (1996), pp. 186–90.
60. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 459.
61. As critics have noted, Smith attempts to re-inhabit the family estate when she signs her
first book of poems as by ‘Charlotte Smith, of Bignor Park, in Sussex’. See Labbe, Charlotte Smith, pp. 1–22.
62. Smith, The Old Manor House, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 6, p. 7.
63. Ibid., pp. 7, 8.
64. Ibid., pp. 20–1.
65. Ibid., p. 440.
66. Austen, Mansfield Park, p. 53.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., p. 61.
69. Ibid., p. 78.
70. Ibid., pp. 425, 427. Austen implies that Tom has been gambling, since Newmarket is
famous for its races: another similarity to Philip.
71. Ibid., p. 458.
72. For more details on Orlando’s fealty to Mrs Rayland, see Labbe, ‘Metaphoricity’ and J.
Bartolomeo ‘The Subversion of Romance in The Old Manor House’, Studies in English
Literature, 33 (1993), pp. 645–57; p. 647 passim.
73. Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 195, 196.
74. Ibid., p. 461. Brown notes ‘the predominance of Mrs. Norris … in closing paragraphs’, which
is reminiscent of Mrs Lennard’s in The Old Manor House (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 84).
75. Hammond, ‘The Political Unconscious in Mansfield Park’, p. 85.
242
76. Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, p. 180.
77. For instance, her faux-Gothic which has led Spacks, for one, to label the novel itself as
‘domestic Gothic’ (Novel Beginnings, p. 217). Austen’s play with genre, in particular,
operates within and around plot, in her engagement with novelistic elements established
by her immediate forebears. Something like Fanny’s refusal of Henry both evokes Monimia’s refusal of Sir John, as I have noted, and rejects a convention of genre altogether
– since at this point in the novel Henry seems to be the ideal reformed rake, worthy of
Fanny after having demonstrated his devotion in her service. When Fanny rejects him,
Austen simultaneously preserves Fanny as a romantic heroine and breaches the romance
as a genre. Fanny’s loyalty to Edmund emphasizes the text’s generic adherence to the
oddities of The Old Manor House rather than, say, the tradition exemplified by Burney.
78. See L. Toker, ‘Conspicuous Leisure and Invidious Sexuality in Jane Austen’s Manfield
Park’, Connotations, 11 (2001), pp. 222–40; p. 222; Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane
Austen?’, p. 64; Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 83. Brown (p. 39) and Patrick Parrinder
(Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), p. 195) make similar points to Toker’s.
79. Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 84.
80. K. Sutherland, ‘Jane Austen and the Serious Modern novel’, in T. Keymer and J. Mee
(eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 244–62; pp. 251–2.
81. Johnson, ‘What Became of Jane Austen?’, p. 63.
82. As I argue in my Introduction to The Old Manor House, Smith anticipates novelistic
developments of the twentieth century (pp. 28–9).
83. Avrom Fleishman says that Fanny ‘is the first young person … who learns enough of the
world to win through to success by moral effort … in itself an educative process’ (A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1967), p. 72). While Fanny’s obvious analogue, Monimia, is not given
enough space in The Old Manor House to display such a learning curve, I think it is arguable that Orlando does, even if his morality is frequently questioned by the narrator.
84. Thanks are due to Rhian Williams, whose astute comments and suggestions have
undoubtedly made this a stronger essay.
9 Astbury, ‘Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man in French
Translation’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Analytical Review, 20 (November 1794), p. 254, quoted in C. L. Fry, Charlotte Smith
(New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 160.
European Magazine, 26 (October 1794), p. 273, quoted in Fry, Charlotte Smith, p. 17.
Fry, Charlotte Smith, p. 88.
For more on the émigré novel as a genre, see C. Jaquier, F. Lotterie and C. Seth (eds),
Destins romanesques de l’émigration (Paris: Desjonquères, 2007).
See Sénac de Meilhan’s comments in the preface to L’Émigré and the Marquis de Sade’s
reflections in his Idée sur les romans. For more on the relationship between literature
and history, with particular reference to Sénac de Meilhan and Mary Robinson, see D.
Hall, ‘Fictionalizing History and Historicizing Fiction: Émigrés, Politics and Literature’,
Revolutionary Culture: Continuity and Change, Nottingham French Studies, 45:1 (2006),
pp. 89–103.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
243
See the chapter devoted to the novel in B. Didier, Écrire la Révolution 1789–1799 (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1989).
The Bibliographie du genre romanesque 1750–1800 by Angus Martin, Vivienne Mylne
and Richard Frautschi (London: Mansell, 1977) gives details of all literary works published during the Revolutionary decade.
See J.-M. Quérard, La France littéraire, ou dictionnaire biographique, Vol 8 (Paris: Didot,
1838). Quérard also lists a number of other novels falsely attributed to Smith, largely
from the 19th century.
Mercure de France, 14th November 1789, p. 32. All translations from the French in this
article are my own.
Ibid.
Journal de Paris, 12 thermidor An V [30 July 1797], p. 1283.
Ibid., p. 1284.
Journal de Paris, 2 thermidor An VIII, p. 1467.
B…Y de G…E [editor], ‘Avant Propos’, in C. Smith, Le Proscrit par Charlotte Smith,
auteur d’Emmeline, d’Ethelinde, de Célestine, de Montalbert, des Promenades champêtres,
etc, etc, traduit de l’anglais sur la seconde édition par feu L.-Antoine Marquand, 4 vols
(Paris : Le Normant, An XI- 1803), vol. 1, p. xi.
On the vogue for English novels see J. Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789: Fact,
Fiction, and Political Discourse (Geneva: Droz, 1985). The Bibliographie du genre romanesque indicates that during the Revolutionary decade, more English women writers were
translated than men. The list includes: Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Robinson, Ann Radcliffe, Regina Maria Roche, Mary Hays, and Caroline Spencer. Matthew
Lewis and William Godwin are among the male writers translated.
B…Y de G…E [editor], ‘Avant Propos’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. xvi.
Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor]’, in ibid., p. xxvi.
Ibid.
For more on the biographical elements in The Banished Man, see Fletcher, Charlotte
Smith, pp. 222–4.
Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor]’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. ii.
An extremely useful summary chronology of Emigration can be found in C. Jones’s The
Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London: Longman, 1989).
B…Y de G…E [editor], ‘Avant Propos’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. xix.
Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor], in ’ibid., p. xxix.
Ibid., p. xxx.
Ibid., p. xxxv.
Grenby, Introduction to Smith, The Banished Man and The Wanderings of Warwick, in
Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. xxx.
Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. 311; Smith, Le Proscrit,
vol. 3, p. 85.
vol. 3, p. 69.
vol. 3, pp. 137–8.
Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor]’ in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. xxxv.
Ibid., p. xxxiii.
vol. 2, p. 39.
244
33. Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. 313; Smith, Le Proscrit,
vol. 3, p. 104.
vol. 3, p. 227.
35. Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor]’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 3, p. 227n.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., p. xix.
vol. 3, p. 171.
vol. 4, p. 311, 303.
41. Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 2, p. 220.
42. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 227.
43. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 104, 227.
44. Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. 388.
46. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 198.
47. Ibid., p. 111.
48. Ibid., p. 161.
49. Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor]’, in Smith, Le Proscrit,vol. 1, p. xxxi.
50. Ibid.
vol. 3, p. 65.
53. Ibid., p. 53.
54. Ibid., p. 49.
55. Marquand, ‘Lettre à B…y de G…E [the editor]’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. xxxi.
56. Smith, The Banished Man, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 7, p. 334.
57. Ibid., pp. 355, 356, 357.
58. Ibid., p. 363.
60. B…Y de G…E [editor], ‘Avant Propos’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. xxxi.
61. Ibid., p. xxxii.
62. Ibid., p. xxxi.
63 Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 3, p. 227.
64. Ibid., p. 251.
65. Anglomania in France had lead to divergent literary practices including the adapted
novel where writers would take a basic plot but have had the freedom to abridge, re-write
and shape more explicitly to their own political and aesthetic criteria (and more importantly to French taste), and the novel ‘imitated’ from the English which would be an
original literary work allegedly based on British fiction so that it would sell more copies.
Modern notions of faithfulness to an original novel start developing in the nineteenth
century. For more on translation practices in France see M. Ballard and L. d’Hulst (eds),
La Traduction en France à l’âge classique (Lille: Septentrion, 1996).
66. B…Y de G…E [editor], ‘Avant Propos’, in Smith, Le Proscrit, vol. 1, p. xviii.
67. The research for this article was made possible by a grant from the British Academy,
whose support is gratefully acknowledged.
245
10 Saglia, ‘“This Village Wonder”’
1.
C. Smith, What Is She? A Comedy, in Five Acts (1798), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol.
13, p. 7 (I.i).
2. Ibid., p. 8 (I.i).
3. On the conflict between freedom and control in the ‘republic of letters’ of the 1790s, see
P. Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 25–75.
4. See, for instance, the strategic importance of secrets in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795), in
Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796) and the novels of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. About the latter, see J. Moore, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Secrets’, Women’s Writings, 4
(1997), pp. 247–60. On secrets and curiosity in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, see B. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, IL, and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 228–43.
5. Benedict, Curiosity, pp. 229, 230.
6. Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 25 (III.ii).
7. Ibid., p. 8 (I.i).
8. Ibid., p. 10 (I.i).
9. J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 10 vols (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832), vol.
7, p. 439.
10. The use of clichéd character types and plotting devices is a distinctive feature of eighteenth–century comedy. See R. D. Hume’s stringent comment on its ‘unimaginative use
of stereotyped elements’ in ‘The Multifarious Forms of Eighteenth-Century Comedy’, in
G. W. Stone Jr (ed.), The Stage and the Page: London’s ‘Whole Show’ in the EighteenthCentury Theatre (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 3–32;
p. 25. Even Smith’s title, in addition, is far from being an original invention, because an
enigma on identity with an interrogative or exclamation mark is not unusual in the titles
of eighteenth-century comedies, as in Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder! A Woman Keeps
a Secret (1714), one of her most popular plays that entered the theatrical repertoire, or
later in the century, Hannah Cowley’s Who Is the Dupe? (1779) and Which Is the Man?
(1782), Mary Robinson’s Nobody (1794), Margaret Holford’s Neither’s the Man (1799)
and Jane West’s How Will It End? (1799). Mention must also be made of Jane Austen’s
youthful spoof The Mystery: An Unfinished Comedy, first printed in James Leigh’s 1870
Austen Memoir and, in the genre of prose fiction, Anna Austen Lefroy’s unfinished novel
Which Is the Heroine?
11. The play gestated over a long period of time, as Smith begins to plan a comedy in the
late 1780s. Near the end of the decade, her friend Charlotte Collins, Lady Bolingbroke,
insists that she write plays, and there is evidence that the author is working on a comedy
(possibly the future What Is She?) between the publication of Emmeline in 1788 and
Ethelinde in 1789. Approximately in the same period, Smith starts to discuss dialogue
with her patron and advisor William Hayley and George Colman the Elder, playwright
and manager of Covent Garden. See Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 103. The length of the
play’s composition is important especially in view of its thematic and ideological connections with Smith’s parallel novelistic production, as well as with the entire tradition of
eighteenth-century comedy.
12. C. Smith, Celestina (1791), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 4, ed. K. Straub, p. 214;
246
13. Keir Elam defines ‘ostension’ as ‘the most “primitive” form of signification’ proper to
theatrical communication, in that it ‘involves the showing of objects and events (and the
performance at large) to the audience, rather than describing, explaining or defining
them’ (The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980),
pp. 29, 30). In addition, ‘ostension’ may be seen as a central component in the constellation of meanings of ‘theatricality’ as explored in T. C. Davis and T. Postlewait (eds),
Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
14. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, vol. 7, p. 362. Allardyce Nicoll reports the date
of the first performance as 17 April 1798 in A History of English Drama 1660–1900, 6
vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), vol. 3: Late Eighteenth-Century
Drama 1750–1800, p. 324.
15. L. G. Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press, 1989), pp. x, 6. On the cultural power and impact of masquerades and
disguises, see Terry Castle’s classic study Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque
in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986) and Dror
Wahrman’s The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century
England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 157–65.
16. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, p. 111.
17. Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 8 (I.i).
18. Ibid., p. 14 (II.i).
19. Ibid., p. 20 (II.iii).
20. Ibid., p. 19 (II.ii).
21. Ibid., p. 51 (V.iii).
22. Ibid., pp. 50–1 (V.iii).
23. Ibid., p. 9 (I.i)
24. On the structural, thematic and ideological importance of marriage in eighteenth-century
comedies by women, see M. G. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century
Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
25. R. D. Hume mainly identifies ‘farcical’ and ‘satiric’ types of comedy in the early eighteenth-century tradition, and dismisses the idea of a dichotomy between ‘laughing’ and
‘sentimental’ comedies (‘Multifarious Forms of Eighteenth-Century Comedy’, p. 14).
For an examination of this traditional distinction, see J. Beavis, The Laughing Tradition:
Stage Comedy in Garrick’s Day (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
26. Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 10 (I.i).
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 10–11 (I.i).
30. Ibid., p. 20 (II.iii).
31. Ibid., p. 22 (III.i).
32. Ibid., pp. 22–3 (III.i).
33. Ibid., p. 13 (I.i).
34. Ibid., p. 28 (III.ii).
35. Ibid., p. 27 (III.ii).
36. Ibid., p. 47 (V.i). Acknowledging Mrs Derville’s moral superiority, Lady Zephyrine says:
‘Forgive me, you have taught me a lesson which that heart will never forget. From this
moment I relinquish my assumed follies, and dare to be myself ’ (ibid., p. 46 (V.i)). Later
she adds: ‘to you I am indebted for the best of triumphs, the triumph over my own fol-
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
247
lies’ and seals her conversion by ‘taking her hand’ (ibid., p. 48 (V.i)). On the sub-genre
of ‘reform comedy’, see Hume, ‘Multifarious Forms of Eighteenth-Century Comedy’, p.
14.
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, p. 198.
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, pp. 119, 124.
Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 20 (II.iii).
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 43 (IV.ii).
Interestingly, Lady Zephyrine’s definition of Mrs Derville as a ‘village wonder’ (ibid.,
p. 22 (III.i)) also recalls one of the loci classici of late eighteenth-century curiosity, the
episode of the ‘lady of the haystack’. In 1778, in the village of Bourton, near Bristol, a
mysterious girl (given the name of ‘Louisa’) made her abode in a haystack and her story
soon acquired national resonance to such an extent that Queen Charlotte herself took
an interest in the enigmatic woman. See A. Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 54–5. Smith makes a possible reference to this episode in Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, p. 263.
Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 8 (I.i).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 33 (III.v).
On sentimental drama and comedy, see E. Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility: A Sketch
of the History of English Sentimental Comedy and Domestic Tragedy 1696–1780 (1915)
(Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958), A. Sherbo, English Sentimental Drama (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957), and, more recently, F. H. Ellis, Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
R. D. Hume, by contrast, subdivides sentimental comedy into ‘humane’ and ‘reform’
types for the earlier part of century, then into ‘serious comedy’ (comprising the drama of
sensibility, pathetic drama, moral melodrama and the humanitarian problem drama) for
the later part (‘The Multifarious Forms of Eighteenth-Century Comedy’, pp. 14, 22).
Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 9.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 52 (V.iii).
Ibid., p. 33 (III.v).
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid.
C. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace,
1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. xv, 7.
Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, pp. 52–4 (V.iii).
Ibid., p. 42 (IV.ii).
As Mrs Derville confesses: ‘At an early age I was deprived of my parents, and left to the
guardianship of an uncle, whose bigotry and avarice suggested to him the design of burying the claimant of a fortune, to which he was next kin, in a convent. Aware of his design
– averse to a cloister, and irritated by persecution, I accepted of the assistance of a young
248
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
Englishman, whom chance threw in my way, and eloped from the convent where I was
placed’ (ibid., p. 53 (V.iii)).
Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 54 (V.iv).
Ibid., pp. 54–5.
W. Hazlitt, ‘On Play-Going and on Some of Our Old Actors’ (London Magazine, 1
( January 1820)), reprinted in W. Hazlitt, Criticisms and Dramatic Essays of the English
Stage (London: Routledge, 1851), p. 44.
Smith, What Is She?, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 13, p. 55 (V.iv).
Ibid.
Smith, Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, p. pp. 248, 247.
Smith, The Young Philosopher, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 10, pp. 80, 78.
H. Guest, ‘Suspicious Minds: Spies and Surveillance in Charlotte Smith’s Novels of the
1790s’, in P. de Bolla, N. Leask and D. Simpson (eds), Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–
1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), pp. 169–87; p. 171.
W. Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London:
G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), pp. 88, 147.
Scott, Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists, Vol. II, in Miscellaneous Prose Works of
Sir Walter Scott, vol. 4, p. 62.
Inchbald implicitly recognized the seriousness of Smith’s comedic project by including
What Is She? in vol. 10 of her collection The Modern Theatre, 10 vols (London: Longman
et al, 1811).
N. Thomas, ‘Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages’, in J. Elsner and R. Cardinal
(eds), The Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp.
116–36; p. 122.
11 Stanton, ‘Recovering Charlotte Smith’s Letters’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, 5 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86), vol. 4, p. 281.
S. Zimmerman, ‘Varieties of Privacy in Charlotte Smith’s Poetry’, European Romantic
Review, 18:4 (October 2007), pp. 483–502; p. 493.
E. Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the Novel (New York: Holt, Reinhart, Winston, 1954), p.
107.
For more information on Turner, his technical writing, and eventual university career,
see J. C. Press (ed.), Directory of American Scholars, 6th edn (New York: R. R. Bowker,
1974).
A. D. McKillop, ‘Charlotte Smith’s Letters’, Huntington Library Bulletin, 15 (1951–2),
pp. 237–55.
P. W. Gledhill, ‘The Sonnets of Charlotte Smith’ (Phd dissertation, University of Oregon, 1976); D. Bowstead, ‘Convention and Innovation in Charlotte Smith’s novels’ (Phd
dissertation, City University of New York, 1978); J. P. Stanton ‘Charlotte Smith’s Prose:
A Stylistic Study of Four of her Novels’ (Phd dissertation, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1978); and J. Piorkowski, ‘“Revolutionary” Sentiment: A Reappraisal
of the Fiction of Robert Bage, Charlotte Smith, and Thomas Holcroft’ (Phd dissertation, Temple University, 1980). C. L. Fry’s 1978 dissertation Charlotte Smith: Popular
Novelist was published by Arno Press (New York, 1980). A chapter of Bowstead’s dis-
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
249
sertation appeared as ‘Charlotte Smith’s Desmond: The Epistolary Novel as Ideological
Argument’, in M. A. Schofield and C. Macheski (eds), Fetter’d or Free? British Women
Novelists: 1670–1815 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp. 237–63. Fry went on
to write a biography in 1996, Charlotte Smith.
G. Luria (ed.), The Feminist Controversy in England 1788–1810 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974).
Liverpool also has the only known contract for a Smith novel. It is with G. G. and J.
Robinson for Desmond, then titled The Wandering Lover, made with and signed by her
estranged husband.
Sadly, I lost track of Mr Wenger. In 1981 he kindly squired me around Petworth House
and drove me to Stoke-next-Guilford to show me the church where Smith is buried with
its wall plaques to her and to Charles and George, her two sons who died while serving
in the West Indies. Mr. Wenger had also tracked down the reredos in her memory at
the church at Elsted, which is now lost. His research on Stoke Park, Smith’s childhood
home, led to three articles which shed light on the now razed homeplace which was last
a school. ‘Musical Chimneypieces’, Buxton Antiques Fair (May 1989), pp. 12–13, gives
an illustration and description of a white marble chimneypiece made in the workshop of
John Bacon in 1782 for the music room at Stoke Park. Two earlier articles were ‘Story of
Stoke from the days of the Saxons’, Surrey Advertiser, 2–3 May, 1981, and ‘Notable and
Notorious Men Lived at Stoke’, Surrey Advertiser, 16–17 May, 1981. With thanks to
Carole Garrard of the Surrey History Centre for this information.
Labbe, Charlotte Smith.
Zimmerman, ‘Varieties of Privacy’, p. 493.
Written from 9August 1801 to 26 August 1802. See Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith,
especially p. 376.
Ibid., p. 445.
Ibid., p. 596.
The Registers of Marriages of St. Mary le Bone, Middlesex 1796–1801. Publication of the
Harleian Society ed. W. B. Bannerman (London: Harleian Society, 1924), vol. 54, part
vi, p. 50.
These ten-inch round reels consisted of 2,400 inches of tape and could store as much data
as forty floppies. Today a single CD can hold as much data as a dozen old round reels.
Richard Altick’s The Scholar Adventurers (New York: Macmillan, 1950 chronicles forgeries and famous discoveries relating to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats.
V. Blain, P. Clements, and I. Grundy (eds), Feminist Companion to Literature in English
(New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 996.
M. Butler, ‘Mrs. Smith and Mr. Cadell’, Sussex County Magazine, 30 (1950), pp. 330–4.
M. Butler, ‘The History of a House’ (On the Rippon and Sargood families. With genealogical tables) [London, 1953].
With grateful thanks to William P. McCarthy for sharing his discovery of Sir Richard
Phillips’s 21 November 1806 letter to William Hayley. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
University, Hayley MSS XXX. 19.
Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, p. 584n1.
Ibid., p. 558.
Labbe, ‘Gentility in Distress’; Garnai, ‘A Letter from Charlotte Smith to the Publisher George
Robinson’; Clemit, ‘Charlotte Smith to William and Mary Jane Godwin’. The letter Labbe
found confirms Smith’s stay in Paris in the fall of 1791. In Garnai’s letter Smith proposes
250
changing the title of The Wandering Lover to Desmond: the Exile of Honour (It became Desmond: A Novel.) And the five letters Clemit unearthed in the Abinger Collection of Godwin
papers at the Bodleian shed welcome light on Smith’s friendship with the Godwins.
25. N. Trott, ‘Too Good for Them: Charlotte Smith Found Luck in Literature but Not in
Law or Love’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 2004.
26. Hawkins bought Bignor Park from Smith’s younger sister Catherine Dorset and her husband Michael. The letter to Hawkins was labelled ‘Private and confidential’ at the top of
the first page and signed only ‘Hermit’, but internal evidence as well as the handwriting
show the letter clearly to be Hayley’s. William Hayley, unpublished letter from ‘Hermit’ to Sir John Hawkins, 9 February 1807 formerly at the West Sussex Record Office,
Hawkins Papers, Box 2, Part 2. In another testament to the vicissitudes of research, the
Hawkins Papers have since been moved to their more appropriate home at the Cornwall
Record Office, which I never visited ( John Hawkins papers, AD1443/1).
12 Curran, ‘Intertextualities’
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
Ibid., p. 416.
Ibid., p. 683.
Ibid., p. 677.
E. Helme, Louisa, or, The Cottage on the Moor, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: G. Kearsley,
1787), vol. 1, p. vi.
There are none in Redgauntlet (1824); the practice in The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827) is
off and on; mottos appear in the early chapters of The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), but are
abandoned later. Scott’s mottos are invariably drawn from texts in English or in Scots
dialect: the few that originate in German texts are rendered in English translation.
Some Victorian novels retain the practice: e.g., George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) and
Middlemarch (1874). The second chapter of the latter uses a passage from Don Quixote
in the original Spanish.
See, for instance, the section entitled ‘The Property Romance’ in Jacqueline Labbe’s edition of The Old Manor House, pp. 19–26.
This could reflect Smith’s own recognition that when Radcliffe is unable to find a suitably contextual motto, it is clear that she simply invents one: the signal is the wooden
blank verse characteristic of them all. Scott appears to have adopted this practice as well;
wherever his motto is attributed to an ‘Old Play’, one can be sure that he is its author.
S. Curran, ‘Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism’, South Central Review, 11:2
(1994), pp. 64–78; p. 72.
The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 394.
Smith, The Emigrants, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 127 (I.90–4).
Labbe has identified the phrase as originating in a popular hunting song; see ibid., p. 240,
n. 20.
Ibid., p. 129 (I.173).
Ibid., p. 131 (I.256).
Ibid., p. 137 (II.22).
Ibid., p. 139 (II.95).
Ibid., p. 145 (II.368).
Ibid. (II.386).
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
251
Ibid., p. 134 (I.379–82).
Ibid., p. 121.
British Critic, 7 (1793), p. 405.
The exact phrase, which occurs in a note that Wordsworth’s attached to his 1833 poem,
‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steam boat off Saint Bees’ Heads’, is ‘a lady to whom English verse
is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered.’
See The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. A. J. George (Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 1902), p. 903.
C. Smith, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1789), in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol.
3, ed. S. Curran, p. 291.
S. Curran, General Introduction to Works of Charlotte Smith, vol..1, p. xi.
L. Fletcher, Introduction to Smith, Emmeline, ed. Fletcher, p. 16.
See Labbe, ‘Gentility in Distress’, pp. 91–3.
Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., p. 146.
A. Craciun, Introduction to C. Smith, Montalbert (1795), in Works of Charlotte Smith,
vol. 8, ed. S. Curran and A. Craciun, pp. xv–xix.
Ibid., pp. vii–viii.
13 Behrendt, ‘Charlotte Smith, Women Poets and the Culture of
Celebrity’
1.
[Anon.], Review of The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson: Including Many
Pieces Never Before Published, 3 vols (London, 1806), Annual Review and History of Literature for 1806, 5 (1807), pp. 516–19; pp. 516–17.
2. Ibid., p. 517.
3. [Anon.], Review of Beachy Head: with other Poems, by Charlotte Smith (London, 1807),
Annual Review and History of Literature for 1807, 6 (1808), pp. 536–8; p. 536.
4. New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 269–70.
5. M. Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. With some Posthumous Pieces, 4 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1801). The first two volumes contain the
memoirs, the third and fourth prose and poetry.
6. British Critic, 30 ( July–December 1808), p. 170.
7. J. Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the Marketing of
Poetry’, Wordsworth Circle, 25 (Spring 1994), pp. 68–71, p. 70.
8. Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, pp. 701–2; to Sarah Rose, c. August 1805.
9. Ibid., pp. 705–6; to Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 18 August 1805.
10. Ibid., p. 718; to Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 20 October 1805. James Dodsley had published the small first edition at Smith’s own expense, after expressing his poor
opinion of the poems and their likelihood for success.
11. A. Dyce (ed.), Specimens of English Sonnets. Selected by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (London: W. Pickering, 1833). The collection is dedicated to Wordsworth, which suggests
252
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
why he is represented by comparatively many sonnets. In a brief note, Dyce praises the
Elegiac Sonnets (7th edn), ‘in which softly-coloured description and touching sentiment
are most happily combined’ (p. 220).
A. Dyce (ed.), Specimens of British Poetesses; Selected and Chronologically Arranged by the
Rev. Alexander Dyce (London: T. Rodd and S. Prowett, 1825), p. 254. By way of comparison, in this anthology Dyce gives Smith twenty-four pages, Anna Seward twenty-one,
Anna Letitia Barbauld fifteen and Mary Robinson only nine.
D. Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet’, p. 114; Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte
Smith, p. xxiv.
P. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency,
Inventing Genre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 349.
Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. xix.
See Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, pp. 341–3. Bannerman’s poem
appeared in Poems by Anne Bannerman (Edinburgh: Mundel; London: Longman,
1800).
Backscheider, Eighteenth Century Women Poets, p. 347.
Sir S. E. Brydges, Sonnets and Other Poems [‘a new edition’] (London: White, 1795)
and Poems, 4th edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme... and J. White, 1807);
J. Lacey, The Farm-House, a Tale. With Amatory, Pastoral, Elegiac, and Miscellaneous
Poems, Sonnets, &c (London: Vernor, Hood & Sharpe, 1809); J. Taylor, Poems on Several
Occasions (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1811) and Poems on Various Subjects, 2 vols
(London: Payne and Foss, 1827).
A. M. Smallpiece, Original Sonnets, and Other Small Poems (London: n.p., 1805); Mrs
E. H. Iliff, Poems, upon Several Subjects. By Mrs. Iliff (London: n.p., 1808); M. Hanson,
Sonnets and Other Poems, 2 vols (London: J. Mawman and T. Lake, 1809); M. F. Johnson, Original Sonnets, and Other Poems (London: n.p., 1810); M. Dark, Sonnets and
Other Poems (London: Printed for the author, 1818); [S. Hamilton], Sonnets: Tour to
Matlock, Recollections of Scotland, and Other Poems. By a Resident of Sherwood Forest
(London: J. Mawman, 1825).
Taylor, Poems on Various Subjects, vol. 2, p. 99.
See Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet’, p. 116.
C. Smith, Sonnets, and Other Poems (London: n.p., 1827); the main title page and the
facing frontispiece, both of which are decoratively engraved, are followed by a second
title page in conventional letterpress bearing the alternative title of Elegiac Sonnets, and
Other Poems.
Cabinet Edition of the British Poets, 4 vols (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851).
See Wordsworth’s note to ‘Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off Saint Bees’ Heads’. The
Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), vol. 4, p. 403n.
Dorothy Wordsworth noted in her journal for Christmas Eve 1802 that ‘William is
turning over the leaves of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets’. The Grasmere Journals, ed. P. Woolf
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 135. When Rev. Alexander Dyce was preparing his Specimens of British Poetesses, Wordsworth particularly advised him to include
Smith’s ‘To Night’ (‘I love thee, mournful, sober-suited night’).
Kelley, ‘Romantic Histories’, p. 286.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
See Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows’, pp. 68–9. Labbe develops this point in greater detail
in Charlotte Smith.
253
29. T. Gent, ‘On the Death of Mrs. Charlotte Smith’ (ll. 6–9), in T. Gent, Poetic Sketches; a
Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry, 2nd edn (London: Longmans and Co., 1808), p. 53.
30. M. Hanson, ‘Sonnet XXXI. To Mrs. Charlotte Smith’, in Hanson, Sonnets and Other
Poems, vol. 1, p. 112.
31. M. Hanson, ‘Sonnet XL’, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 100 (ll. 1–4).
32. Ibid. (l. 6).
33. Ibid. (ll. 9–14).
34. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, l. 46.
35. S. Curran, ‘Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self ’, in I. Armstrong and V. Blain
(eds), Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820 (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 145–66, p. 161. Curran also discusses Mariann Dark’s
responses to Smith.
36. M. Hanson, ‘Stanzas Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Charlotte Smith’, in Hanson, Sonnets and Other Poems, vol. 2, p. 2 (ll. 17–18).
37. Ibid., pp. 5–6 (ll. 68, 72).
38. Ibid., p. 6 (ll. 73–4).
39. Ibid., p. 8 (ll. 101–4).
40. Ibid., pp. 12–13 (ll. 171–8).
41. Ibid., p. 13 (l. 188).
42. M. Dark, ‘On Reading Mrs. Smith’s Sonnets’, in Dark, Sonnets and Other Poems, p. 40 (l.
2).
43. Ibid. (l. 4).
44. Ibid. (ll. 9–14).
45. M. Dark, ‘On Reviewing the Proceeding’, in ibid., p. 42 (l. 2)
46. Ibid. (ll. 9–14).
48. F. Rowton (ed.), The Female Poets of Great Britain, Chronologically Arranged: with Copious Selections and Critical Remarks (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans,
1848). As Florence Hilbish observed in her early critical biography of Smith, as late as
1863 Julia Kavanagh paid considerable attention to Smith’s life and works in English
Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, 2 vols (London, 1863). See F. Hilbish, Charlotte
Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749–1806) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1941).
49. Smith, ‘To My Lyre’, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 215 (ll. 37–48).
14 Duckling, ‘“Tell My Name to Distant Ages”’
1.
2.
3.
4.
Smith shares her anxieties about preserving her reputation in a letter to her publishers
(19. July 1790). In later correspondence she claimed that ‘ … it is on the Poetry I have
written that I trust for the little reputation I may hereafter have & know that it is not the
least likely among the works of modern Poets to reach another period’. Collected Letters
of Charlotte Smith, pp. 331, 706.
J. Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 16.
Labbe, Charlotte Smith, pp. 1–22.
See Labbe, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows’.
254
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
10.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
Smith, ‘To My Lyre’, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 215 (ll. 45, 48). The poem
was printed by Smith’s sister, Catherine Anne Dorset, as part of her memoir published
by Walter Scott.
Ibid. (ll. 46, 47).
Ibid., pp. 214, 215 (ll. 9, 37).
J. Hawley describes Smith as a ‘mother-martyr’ in ‘Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets:
Losses and Gains’, in Armstrong and Blain (eds), Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment, p.
188.
The quotations are from Isobel Armstrong’s study of the poetess in Victorian Poetry:
Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 320–1. See
also S. Brown, ‘The Victorian Poetess’, in J. Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 180–202.
Judith Pascoe highlights the mixed reception to Smith’s self-referential technique in
reviews of The Emigrants. See Romantic Theatricality, pp. 108–9.
Cited in Curran, Introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. xix.
R. F. Housman, Preface to A Collection of English Sonnets (London: Simpkin, Marshall,
and Co., 1835), p.xxxi.
Ibid., p. ix.
Ibid., p. xxvi.
Public Characters of 1800–1801 (London: R. Phillips, 1801), pp. 42–64.
Reprinted as ‘Charlotte Smith’ in Scott, Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists, in
Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir W. Scott, vol. 4, pp. 20–70.
Sir E. Brydges, Censura Literaria, 2nd edn, 10 vols (London: Longman et al, 1815), vol.
7, p. 255. Brydges’s memoir is dated 11 January 1807.
Public Characters, p. 45.
Ibid., p. 56.
Dorset’s memoir mirrors the text of Public Characters so closely that on occasion she uses
direct paraphrase: subsequent accounts continue this tradition of paraphrase or direct
plagiarism, ensuring the Smith myth is passed down virtually verbatim, e.g. Smith’s hellish existence ‘in one of the narrowest and most dirty lanes in the city’ is paraphrased by
Dorset and later employed by Mrs Elwood, Julie Kavanagh and Eric Robertson.
Brydges, Censura Literaria, vol. 7, p. 239.
‘With that liveliness of perception, and that eloquent simplicity of language, which
women of sensibility and talent possess, more especially at an early age, in a degree so
superior to the other sex, she must not only have been highly attractive, but have exhibited such a brilliancy of imagination, and of sentiment, yet unsubdued by sorrows, as
cannot have vanished unrecorded without justifying the severest regret’ (ibid., p. 242).
Ibid., pp. 247–8.
Ibid., p. 248.
Ibid., pp. 250–1.
S. Curran, Introduction to Desmond, in Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 5, pp. xvi–xvii.
Brydges, Censura Literaria, vol. 7, pp. 252–4.
Ibid., pp. 254–5.
‘Always nightingales, always sad songs’. C. Smith, Preface to Elegiac Sonnets, 6th edn, in
Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, p. 13. See also Sonnet III, ‘To a Nightingale’(p. 14).
‘Queen of the Silver Bow’ was first published in The Professional Collection of Glees (London: Longman and Broderip, c. 1790) and is published today by Stainer & Bell.
255
31. A. Barbauld, Preface to The Old Manor House (1793), 2 vols, in A. Barbauld (ed.), The
British Novelists, 50 vols (London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1810), vol. 36, part 1, pp.
i–iii.
32. Ibid., p. v.
33. Ibid., pp. vii–viii.
34. Poovey, Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, p. 33. For the remasculinization of culture
and writing in the revolutionary aftermath, see G. Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
35. See Scott’s concluding remarks to Dorset’s memoir in Biographical Memoirs of Eminent
Novelists, in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 4, p. 69.
36. Ibid., p. 29.
37. Ibid., p. 53.
38. Ibid., p. 49.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p. 57.
41. Ibid., p. 56.
42. Dyce, Preface to Specimens of British Poetesses, pp. iii–v.
43. Dyce, Specimens of British Poetesses, p. 254.
44. F. Rowton, ‘Introductory Chapter’, in Female Poets of Great Britain, p. xix.
45. Rowton (ed.), Female Poets of Great Britain, p. 182.
46. Rownton, ‘Introductory Chapter’, in ibid., pp. xxvi, xxiv, xxii.
47. G. W. Bethune, The British Female Poets (Philadelphia, PA: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1848),
pp. 88–9.
48. Bethune, Preface to ibid., p. iii.
49. Bethune takes his gallantry seriously. In case anyone should find him ‘too lenient in his
criticisms’, he reminds his readers that ‘Finding fault is even an unwelcome office, but
especially distasteful to an American when a lady is the subject’, Preface, p. vi.
50. H. G. Adams, A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography (London: Groombridge and Sons,
1857), p. iii. Smith’s entry appears on pp. 700–1.
51. Mrs Elwood, Preface to Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, 2 vols (London:
Henry Colburn, 1843), vol. 1, pp. v–vi.
52. Elwood, Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England, p. 301.
53. Ibid., p. 303.
54. Ibid., p. 301.
55. Ibid., pp. 285, 308.
56. Ibid., p. 303.
57. Ibid., p. 295.
58. Ibid., p. 305.
59. J. Williams, Introduction to The Literary Women of England (London: Saunders, Otley,
and Co., 1861), p. 4.
60. Williams, Literary Women of England, p. 217.
61. Ibid., p. 223.
62. In her self-defence, Smith had argued against the opinion that she was irreligious and
absorbed in self-pity at the close of The Emigrants (Book the Second), ll. 389–410
(Works of Charlotte Smith, vol. 14, pp. 146–7).
63. Williams, Literary Women of England, pp. 224–5.
64. Ibid., p. 228.
256
65. J. Kavanagh, English Women of Letters, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), vol. 1,
ch. 7 (‘Mrs Charlotte Smith’), ch. 8 (‘Emmeline – Ethelinda – The Old Manor House’),
pp. 187–234.
66. Ibid., p. 187.
67. Ibid., pp. 194–5.
68. Ibid., p. 234.
69. Ibid., p. 195.
70. Ibid., pp. 198, 201.
71. Ibid., pp. 231–2.
72. Ibid., p. 233.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. See W. Thornbury, Two Centuries of Song (London: Sampson Low et al, 1867), W. C.
Bryant, A New Library of Poetry and Song (New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1876).
76. E. Robertson, Introductory Note to English Poetesses (London, Paris and New York:
Cassell & Company Limited, 1883), p. v.
77. Susan Brown describes Robertson as ‘influential for later critics who found in him an ally
for excluding women writers from the canon’ (‘The Victorian Poetess’, p. 197).
78. Robertson, Introductory Note to English Poetesses, p. xvi.
79. Robertson, English Poetesses, p. 69.
80. J. R. de J. Jackson, Poetry of the Romantic Period (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980), p. 270.
81. G. Saintsbury, The English Novel (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913), p. 174.
82. Hilbish, Charlotte Smith, pp. 495, 563.
83. E. Bernbaum, ‘Review of Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist’, Modern Language Notes,
59 (1944), pp. 137–9.
84. B. C. Hunt, Jr., ‘Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith’, Wordsworth Circle, 1:3 (1970), pp.
85–103.
WORKS CITED
Works by Charlotte Smith
(For translations, see the list in Chapter 9.)
The Banished Man (1794), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 7, ed. M. O. Grenby.
Beachy Head: With Other Poems (1807), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran,
14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 14, ed. J. Labbe.
Celestina (1791), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 4, ed. K. Straub.
The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. J. P. Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2003).
Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran,
14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 13, ed. J. Pascoe.
Desmond (1792), ed. A. Blank and J. Todd (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997).
Desmond (1792), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 5, ed. S. Curran.
Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems (1784), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 14, ed. J. Labbe.
Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems (1784), 5th edn (London: T. Cadell, 1789).
The Emigrants (1793), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 14, ed. J. Labbe.
Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), ed.. A. Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971).
Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), ed. L. Fletcher (Peterborough, ON: Broadview,
2003).
Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran,
14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 2, ed. J. P. Stanton.
Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake, (1789) in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 3, ed. S. Curran.
– 257 –
258
The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800; 1802), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S.
Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 11, ed. D. L. Macdonald.
Montalbert (1795), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 8, ed. S. Curran and A. Craciun.
A Narrative of the Loss of the Catharine, Venus, and Piedmont Transports (1796), in The Works
of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7),
vol. 12, ed. E. Dolan.
The Old Manor House (1793), 2 vols, in A. Barbauld (ed.), The British Novelists, 50 vols (London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1810), vol. 36.
The Old Manor House (1793), ed. A. Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
The Old Manor House (1793), ed. J. Todd (London: Pandora, 1987).
The Old Manor House (1793), ed. J. Labbe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002).
The Old Manor House (1793), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 6, ed. I. Ferris.
The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. S. Curran (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1993).
Rural Walks (1795), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 12, ed. E. Dolan.
Selected Poems, ed. J. Willson (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003).
Sonnets, and Other Poems (London: n.p., 1827).
What Is She? A Comedy, in Five Acts (1798), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 13, ed. J. Pascoe.
The Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. S. Curran, 14 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7).
The Young Philosopher (1798), in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. S. Curran, 14 vols
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–7), vol. 10, ed. A. A. Markley.
Manuscript Letters
Letter of William Hayley (‘Hermit’) to Sir John Hawkins, 9 February 1807. Cornwall Record
Office, Hawkins Papers, AD1443/1.
Letter of Sir Richard Phillips to William Hayley, 21 November 1806. Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge University, Hayley MSS XXX.19.
Letter of Charlotte Smith to Sarah Farr Rose, 14 February 1804. Huntington Library, HM
18034.
Contemporary Periodicals
Analytical Review.
Annual Register.
Annual Review and History of Literature.
Works Cited
259
British Critic.
Critical Review.
European Magazine.
Journal de Paris.
London Magazine.
Mercure de France.
Monthly Review.
Primary Sources
Adams, H. G., A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1857).
Aikin, J., Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (London: J. Johnson, 1777).
Anburey, T., Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, 2 vols (London: William
Lane, 1789).
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INDEX
allusion 9, 10, 109, 185, 204, 210
America 8, 39, 86, 107, 110, 161
Americans 188
American War of Independence 7, 86, 94,
118, 188
ancien régime 55, 74, 76, 77, 78, 86, 151
Austen, Jane 3, 8, 128, 159, 172, 201, 215
autobiography 6, 27, 58
desire 5, 50, 55, 56, 62, 75, 113, 114, 115,
118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 128, 146, 152,
155
drama 88, 145, 146, 148, 147, 149, 151, 153,
154, 155, 157, 158, 170
Barbauld, Anna 29, 34, 209, 252
biography 4, 135, 196, 217
botany 30, 33, 213
Burke, Edmund 7, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86,
146, 185, 186, 196
Burney, Fanny 3, 17, 97, 103, 104, 113, 114,
116, 130, 162, 176, 185, 214, 215
Byron, Lord 59, 140, 175, 177
celebrity 202, 203
church 103, 249
Coleridge, S. T. 4, 6, 48, 52, 53, 59, 60, 88,
173, 177, 192, 193, 195, 199, 201, 204,
205
comedy 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 154, 157,
158
correspondence 1, 7, 9, 29, 74, 88, 105, 108,
109, 159, 173, 175, 203
cosmopolitanism 86, 101, 110, 182
Cowper, William 18, 31, 32, 34, 116, 159,
162, 176, 178, 182
curiosity 9
Dark, Mariann 189, 194, 201
Darwin, Erasmus 30, 31, 178
debt 203, 210
eminence 206
Enlightenment 6, 50, 54, 135, 146
Europe 8, 9, 17, 39, 41, 46, 57, 61, 71, 83,
84, 86, 106, 107, 129, 130, 131, 136,
138, 143
fame 82, 179, 197, 201, 204, 214, 215
femininity 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18,
26, 46, 57, 83, 95, 98, 72, 145, 146,
149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158,
176, 179, 182, 185, 191, 195, 196, 197,
198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205,
206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214,
215, 216, 217
feminism 119, 186, 192
feudalism 77, 81
France 8, 17, 22, 23, 78, 82, 84, 118, 143,
181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 188, 212
French Revolution 7, 8, 21, 55, 71, 72, 73,
77, 84, 102, 111, 143, 207, 209
gender 2, 4, 5, 10, 154, 183, 184, 195, 198,
204, 210, 211, 212, 217
Germany 130, 135, 141, 143
Godwin, William 7, 99, 146, 157, 175, 178,
188
Goldsmith, Oliver 32, 176, 177
– 273 –
274
Index
Hanson, Martha 189, 194, 200, 201
Hayley, William 8, 159, 171
Hermit, the 6, 45, 56, 64, 98
history 66, 68, 72, 81, 111, 127, 128, 186,
188, 213, 217
imagination 15, 52, 59, 82, 193, 206, 216
inheritance 77, 85, 118, 125, 126, 198, 240
Italy 186
Keats, John 59, 62, 63, 172, 175, 177, 179
labour 9, 29, 30, 31, 35, 38, 40, 42
law 4, 22, 85, 88, 101, 103, 105, 110, 111,
112, 139, 163, 187
lawyers 163, 168, 207
liberalism 79, 84, 86, 89, 129, 156, 190, 192,
198, 212
literary debt 91
literature 6, 7, 9, 48, 54, 58, 59, 130, 146,
175, 186, 208, 213, 217
Marquand, Louis-Antoine 129, 132, 133,
134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141,
142, 143, 243
masculinity 4, 5, 10, 46, 48, 50, 57, 61, 72,
86, 105, 107, 113, 116, 153, 154, 155,
156, 182, 184, 187, 192, 195, 197, 204,
205, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214
masquerade 9, 151, 153, 154, 156
maternal instinct 135, 183
memoir 190, 206, 210
memory 5, 6, 42, 54, 62, 67, 104, 110, 188
metaphor 2, 4, 6, 8, 35, 54, 68, 77, 82, 115
miscellanies 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40,
43, 44
More, Hannah 34, 103, 104, 177
museum 38, 40
narrative 2, 3, 8, 21, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38,
39, 47, 51, 59, 64, 68, 72, 74, 77, 78, 81,
83, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 147,
156, 205
nature 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49,
50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 61, 64, 66, 67, 69,
109, 138, 191, 206, 215
novel 2, 3, 5, 7, 30, 71, 72, 74, 89, 92, 97, 99,
106, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138,
140, 141, 142, 143, 158, 159, 167, 175,
176, 182, 183, 184, 185, 206, 207, 209,
213, 216, 217
epistolary 73, 74, 93, 185
odes 14
peace 21, 23, 48, 56, 75, 104, 156
place 13, 14, 52, 64, 65, 118, 181, 204
poetic debt 177, 194, 196
poetry 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 14, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26,
30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 48, 60, 63, 64, 67,
159, 176, 181, 182, 189, 191, 193,194,
196, 198, 199, 201, 204, 205, 208, 209,
211, 213, 214, 216, 217
politics 1, 4, 7, 10, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25,
27, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 81, 87, 112, 118,
143, 128, 183, 192, 204, 207, 209, 212
prefaces 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 23, 24,30, 34, 35,
72, 87, 89, 98, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141,
176, 178, 183, 189, 196, 204, 207, 208
property 76, 85, 191
publishers 1, 16, 17, 29, 87, 105, 168, 171
quotation 9, 10, 48, 82, 109, 182, 186
Radcliffe, Ann 116, 160, 177, 187, 201, 214,
215
rebellion 80
reform 7, 22, 32, 71, 74, 77, 84, 86, 155,
157, 158
rhyme 25, 43, 51, 194
Robinson, Mary 54, 55, 130, 191, 192, 193,
194, 195, 196
romance 2, 3, 72, 77, 81, 115, 122, 128, 196
Romanticism 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15, 27,
47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60, 63,
67, 68, 69, 71, 113, 114, 122, 140, 141,
151, 159, 172, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194,
196, 203, 205, 206, 213, 214, 217, 242
Schelling, Friedrich 63
Scott, Walter 71, 97, 111, 157, 177, 201,
209, 216
seduction 8, 114, 115, 118, 119, 123, 125,
126, 127, 128
Seward, Anna 32, 33, 177, 193, 201, 252
sex 30, 50, 107, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121,
122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 152, 183,
192, 207
Index
Shelley, Percy 47, 59, 62, 171
sincerity 5, 73, 150, 214
Smith, Benjamin (husband) 13, 51, 168,
169, 171, 172, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213,
249
Smith, Charlotte
children 4, 24, 85, 169, 170, 171, 172,
183, 198, 203, 205, 213
as mother 162, 167, 196, 203, 204, 205,
206, 211, 213, 216
as wife 169, 196, 204, 205, 206, 211, 213
works
The Banished Man 9, 106, 107, 110,
143, 161, 177, 178
Beachy Head 7, 44, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55,
56, 57, 162, 173, 188, 189, 190, 192,
210
Beachy Head: With Other Poems 69
Celestina 7, 30, 107, 114, 115, 117, 119,
132, 133, 147, 184
Conversations Introducing Poetry 6, 31,
33, 34, 41, 61, 191
Desmond 3, 4, 7, 17, 18, 25, 71, 72, 76,
84, 86, 87, 89, 93, 107, 119, 132, 158,
161, 186, 195, 207, 209, 211, 212,
213
Elegiac Sonnets 27, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40,
48, 54, 178, 179, 193, 195, 200, 203,
204, 216, 217
The Emigrants 8, 27, 62, 104, 105, 179,
182, 193, 257
Emmeline 2, 3, 4, 7, 30, 89, 93, 96, 115,
119, 132, 133, 147, 159, 161, 183,
184, 206, 209
Ethelinde 7, 132, 134, 182, 184
The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer 8, 99,
112, 168
Marchmont 30, 89, 99, 168, 177, 178,
187
Minor Morals 168, 210
275
Montalbert 94, 95, 132, 133, 168, 177,
179, 187
The Natural History of Birds 61
The Old Manor House 2, 3, 4, 7, 72, 84,
86, 89, 94, 96, 97, 119, 122, 124, 126,
128, 132, 133, 157, 159, 160, 161,
177, 179, 184, 188, 208, 211
Rambles Farther 30
The Romance of Real Life 182
Rural Walks 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 38, 42,
133
The Wanderings of Warwick 94, 95
What Is She? 158
The Young Philosopher 7, 8, 30, 71, 72,
86, 87, 89, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 106,
107, 110, 147, 157, 161, 170, 177,
178, 179, 188
sonnets 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 26, 40, 42, 179,
194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205,
208, 210
style 5, 95, 97, 140, 206, 208, 216
voice 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 19, 20, 27, 43, 44,
61, 74, 81, 82, 91, 95, 97, 155, 169,
197, 214, 215
wanderings 101, 110, 145, 213
war 22, 23, 71, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 101,
118, 127, 135
Williams, Helen Maria 186, 194
Wollstonecraft, Mary 8, 29, 30, 33, 51, 72,
88, 89, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 160, 162,
165, 173, 178, 188
Wordsworth, William 4, 6, 26, 48, 51, 52,
53, 59, 62, 67, 172, 173, 177, 181, 189,
192, 193, 196, 200, 201, 204, 205, 214,
217

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