Charlotte Smith
Early in April of 1784, behind the grime-streaked walls of King’s Bench Prison in south London, a twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Smith received news of her first publication. The poet wasn’t locked away on her own account. When Charlotte was fifteen, her father had arranged for her marriage to Benjamin Smith, the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful West India merchant and director of the East India Company, Richard Smith. The plan had been for Benjamin to assume his father’s assets as he matured. Instead, he drove himself dangerously into debt. When Benjamin was sentenced to seven months in debtors᾽ jail, beginning in December of 1783, Charlotte accompanied him (as was the custom for eighteenth-century wives). The couple’s children—they had ten at the time, later to total twelve—were left with Benjamin’s brother.
Now, the letter in Charlotte’s hands, signed “Sir William Hayley, Esq.,” offered a chance for the Smiths’ liberation. Until 1877, King’s Bench operated as a profit-making institution. Inmates were expected to pay the jailers periodically throughout their sentences, in addition to a large sum required upon their release.
Charlotte sought anxiously to arrange those funds during her months behind bars, negotiating with Benjamin’s creditors and refining her previously unpublished sonnets in the hopes that they might sell. Her writing’s initial rejections from esteemed publishers James Dodsley and Edward and Charles Dilly did nothing to quiet her worries. But the letter from Hayley—a biographer, poet, and Charlotte’s former neighbor in Sussex—provided an opportunity. As long as Charlotte was prepared to front the costs, her poetry would be compiled and sold as a collection. Of course, Hayley couldn’t guarantee profits. Whether or not the volume garnered readers, much less enough money to secure the couple’s release, was up to the public.
The svelte quarto—or roughly ten-by-eight-inch, twenty-six-page booklet—printed in Chichester and London in early June of 1784, was priced at two shillings. It contained twenty of Smith’s poems: fourteen sonnets and six installments in free verse. By both eighteenth-century and contemporary standards, these are relatively hackneyed. Writes biographer Loraine Fletcher: “The [early] sonnets give little sense of a world beyond the speaker; she feels pleasure in flowers or moonlight for a moment but reverts solipsistically to her own suffering, looking back at the past with regret.” Still, likely because of the widespread late-eighteenth-century vogue for sentimental literature, the volume sold. Not enough to secure the Smiths’ release, but enough to substantially contribute.
The Smiths set out from King’s Bench on July 2, 1784, following two terrifying months during which their fellow prisoners attempted to escape by blowing up the jail walls. In correspondence months later, Charlotte described how “after such scenes and such apprehensions, how deliciously soothing to my wearied spirits was the soft pure air of summer’s morning, breathing over the dewy grass.” Riding along rock-studded roads in a brisk carriage and surveying the lush English countryside, she must have felt immeasurably far from her former cell—Charlotte’s letter ends with the recollection that “after all my sufferings, I began to hope I might taste content, or experience at least a respite from calamity.”
Had her marriage and children’s wellbeing taken a different course, she might have enjoyed that respite. Published a few months after the first, the second volume of Elegiac Sonnets earned even greater profits. These not only allowed the poet to singlehandedly secure shelter and feed her children (Benjamin fled to France three weeks after the couple’s release) but began to establish her celebrity in literary circles. This celebrity endured throughout Smith’s tumultuous lifetime only to dwindle in the mid-nineteenth century, rendering her a poet “to whom”—as William Wordsworth declared in reference to her later, form-pushing nature poetry—“English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered.” The opening lines of Smith’s masterwork, the seven hundred and forty-two-line blank verse poem “Beachy Head,” undergird this praise:
"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; 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 …"
Today, the many original editions of Smith’s poetry are housed in various libraries and archives at the University of Oxford. To visit and examine this writing in chronological order isn’t simply to trace the emergence of an exceptional nature poet; it’s to follow the path of a singularly resilient woman’s life. It’s to marvel at the enduring force of a poet’s passion: birthed early out of the nearby natural world, nurtured diligently despite overwhelming obstacles, and finally—reunited with those original landscapes of inspiration—granted the space and language it deserved.
Charlotte Turner was born in London on May 4, 1749. She was the first of Nicholas Turner’s three children; her mother, Anna Towers, died giving birth to her younger brother Nicholas when Charlotte was three. Despite significant property ownings in England, the elder Nicholas left his young children to pursue business and pleasure on the continent after Anna’s death. Charlotte and her sister, Catherine Anne, stayed behind with their aunt, Lucy Towers.
Like many of her contemporaries, Lucy believed “cerebral” education was unattractive in an upper-class woman. But dancing, music, and the visual arts were fair game, and Charlotte proved especially skilled at drawing. She passed the bulk of her early childhood sketching on her father’s sprawling Bignor Park estate in Sussex, where she cultivated the close eye for local flora and fauna that imbued her later writing—observing delicate variegations among leaf veins, or the distinctive lilt of individual flowers’ stamens. This “passion,” Fletcher notes, not only “lasted all her life, [it] matured into a philosophy.”
At school back in London, Charlotte excelled. She acquired French early and later claimed to have written small fragments of poetry at the age of six or seven. She read widely: Shakespeare, Otway, and Collins, as well as the newly serialized, societally disdained novels from which even her father—by then returned to England—failed to dissuade her.
Her father, Nicholas, had other things on his mind. On the continent, his gambling habit had morphed into an addiction. Efforts to mitigate his consequent debts by selling various properties were unsuccessful. In 1763, he began pursuing Henrietta Meriton, a woman of independent means who Charlotte immediately, intensely disliked. Nicholas and Henrietta were married in 1764, on the condition that Charlotte would move out.
Aiming to ease both familial tensions and financial concerns, Lucy Towers set Charlotte up with a wealthy husband. Years later, in a letter to her long-time friend Sarah Rose, Charlotte would describe herself as “sold, a legal prostitute” to Benjamin (emphasis hers). By Fletcher’s account, though, the two appeared friendly upon their introduction in London. They were engaged shortly after Charlotte’s fifteenth birthday and married in February of 1765, two months before Charlotte turned sixteen.
Benjamin’s father, Richard Smith, considered Charlotte too young for the whole arrangement. Still, Richard quickly grew fond of his daughter-in-law. He remained her ardent supporter throughout the rest of his life, striving to ensure the money from his will would reach his grandchildren rather than his irresponsible son (typically, a firstborn son’s inheritance was guaranteed). Richard certainly had no shortage of grandchildren. Charlotte became pregnant a few months after her wedding; biographer Carol Fry relates that “for the first fifteen years of her marriage, she would be either pregnant or recovering from childbirth.” Although this first birth seems to have gone smoothly, there’s no record of the boy’s name or birth date—he died a day after Charlotte’s second baby, Benjamin Berney, was born in April of 1767.
Ultimately, six of Charlotte’s twelve children would die before her. The first loss thrust Charlotte into profound, enduring depression. Even so, events carried forward: Lucy Towers and Richard Smith married; the younger Smiths moved first to a house in Southgate, and then to one in Tottenham; Charlotte continued to self-educate despite near debilitating melancholy and the birth of five more children. Amid all of this, her sister Catherine observed that her “natural vivacity [now] seemed extinguished by the monotony of her life.” And then there was Richard Smith’s failing health, Benjamin’s callous treatment and growing debt, and the family’s move out of the city to the hundred-acre Lys Farm in Hampshire. This was late 1774 or early 1775—Charlotte had just turned twenty-five.
Richard Smith and Benjamin Berney (then ten years old) died quickly after the move. Outwardly, Charlotte handled their absences with grace. She took her children, including the newborn Lucy Eleanor, for walks in the Hampshire countryside and taught them to draw, write, and sing. But her poems from the period exhibit a sustained preoccupation with suicide. Among them are five sonnets written from the perspective of Goethe’s Werther—translations of The Sorrows had become popular in England by the late 1770s—which were published as part of the third edition of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets in 1786. Sonnet XXII, “By [Werther]. To Solitude,” for example, chronicles Charlotte’s obsession with the end of mortal life:
Oh, Solitude; to thy sequester’d vale
I come to hide my sorrow and my tears,
And to thy echoes tell the mournful tale
Which scarce I trust to pitying Friendship’s ears!
[…] sure some story of despair and pain,
In yon deep copse, thy murm’ring doves relate;
And hark! methinks in that long plaintive strain,
Thine own sweet songstress weeps my wayward fate!
Ah, Nymph! that fate assist me to endure,
And bear awhile—what Death alone can cure!
Here, the conventional Shakespearean sonnet scheme reflects the speaker’s confinement in their earthly body and aching psyche. Smith’s near-perfect rhymes evoke a sense of inevitability (wrenchingly, it’s only “love” which isn’t supplied an exact partner). The poem is steeped in surreality: the “wild woods” and “untrodden glades” of the second quatrain are the metaphorical functions of Solitude, as are the “deep copse” and “murm’ring dove” of the third quatrain. Put another way: the speaker doesn’t really see nature. She looks out instead on figurative, fungible extensions of herself—a self which she’s sorely tempted to end.
Understandably so. Whatever safeguards Richard had put in place didn’t prevent Benjamin from immediately, illicitly acquiring—and spending—a third of his late father’s legacy. Despite Charlotte’s liberal politics and support of the colonists, Benjamin was heavily invested in Britain winning the American Revolution. The loss dealt a final blow. In 1783, he was arrested and sent to King’s Bench for debt and embezzlement of his father’s trust fund. Charlotte, as we know, went with him.
Charlotte was five months pregnant when she left prison in October 1784. Benjamin, who’d bought a crumbling chateau in Normandy to escape his creditors and pursue his latest scheme breeding canaries, ordered her and their nine children to join him. Charlotte had no legal right to resist. Writing to a friend a year later, she recalled the harrowing seventeen-hour trip. She described how her “children, fatigued almost to death, harassed by sea-sickness, and astonished at the strange noises of the French postillions, whose language they did not understand, crept close to [her], while [she] carefully suppressed the thoughts whether it were possible for [them] to reach, without some fatal accident, the place of [their] destination.”
That winter was one of the coldest in the eighteenth century. For Charlotte, stocking up on firewood required walking twelve miles from the chateau. Frozen inside those lonely days, thoughts of a writing career must have been rare, elicited only by occasional dispatches from England detailing the commercial success of her poetry. Really, Charlotte’s situation in Normandy evoked the plaintive (albeit slightly banal) opening quatrain of her Sonnet VII, “On the Departure of the Nightingale”:
Sweet poet of the woods, a long adieu!
Farewell, soft minstrel of the early year!
Ah, ‘twill be long ere thou shalt sing anew,
And pour thy music on the ‘night’s dull ear.’
It was monks who ultimately changed Benjamin’s mind about returning to England. Four months after their arrival in France, Charlotte gave birth to a son, George. The delivery went smoothly and, a day later, Benjamin left for Dieppe. That afternoon, Charlotte woke to an odd chanting in the chateau hallway. The door opened to admit a line of eight monks who tried to baptize George by force. According to Catherine’s memoir, Benjamin was furious. Whether by him, by Charlotte, or by some rare agreement between the two, the decision was made: when Charlotte was well enough to travel, she and the children would go home.
Another, more private conclusion was reached around this time: Charlotte resolved that, back in England, she would separate from Benjamin to the greatest extent permissible by law. As Fletcher writes, “all that remained undecided was when and how to do it.”
Six months in Normandy had almost cost Charlotte and her children their lives. But there was cause for hope. Soon, the Smith children would grow old enough to receive what remained of their inheritance from Richard. And, as correspondence from friends and publishers indicated, Charlotte’s poems continued to sell. That winter, she had begun translating the French novel Manon Lescaut by Antoine François Prévost, which offered even greater potential profits if it was well received. (It wasn’t; still, the germ of the novel-writing idea held.)
Charlotte and Benjamin separated in April of 1787, a year after the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets emerged. The volume’s publication was overshadowed not only by the break, but by the death of Charlotte’s sixteen-year-old son, Braithwaite—an entanglement of poetic success and personal tragedy that remained firmly knotted throughout the writer’s life. She and her remaining children moved around continuously during the years that followed, from Charlotte’s brother’s home in Bignor Park to London, Oxford, and various other towns in the southeast. Benjamin fought Richard’s will savagely, and, under relentless pressure to support her large family, Charlotte began to write novels. Her first, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, was published by Cadell in April of 1788; her tenth and last, The Young Philosopher, hit stationers’ shops exactly a decade later. (Judith Stanton, editor of Smith’s letters, observes that Charlotte regularly reserved final drafts in exchange for “food, lodging, and expenses for her children.”)
Smith also vigorously revised and developed her poetry. Published in 1789 by Thomas Cadell and William Davies, the fifth edition included twelve more sonnets, as well as carefully commissioned illustrations, and began to draw on the language of the “sublime” and “picturesque” introduced by Edmund Burke in his 1756 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Similarly, the seventh, further expanded edition of Elegiac Sonnets I demonstrated Smith’s comprehensive understanding of the precise botanical vocabulary newly developed by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Again, though, Smith’s letters evince small pleasure in her achievement. No matter that her poetry sold well in England and the States—her favorite child, Anna Augusta, died only three months after the seventh edition’s release in 1795.
There’s a tragic irony, then, that during the five years between Elegiac Sonnets I’s seventh edition and the emergence of Sonnets II, Smith wrote so many books for children. On the surface, these purported to foster good manners. Yet they demonstrate a striking educational focus on ecology, promoting morals by way of wry botanical observation, clever zoological parables, and general instruction in “natural history.” The earnings from these works and her novels gave the writer freedom to experiment more in her own poetry; their emphasis on “the genuine beauties of nature” in “all seasons and situations” also carried organically over into the first edition of Sonnets II, published in 1797.
Smith’s second collection begins to display her true faculty as a nature poet. Sonnets like LX, “To an Amiable Girl,” and LXIV, “Written at Bristol in the Summer of 1794,” continue to traffic in some of the familiar, pastoral scenery of Smith’s previous collections. A significant number of others, though, home in on a meticulously recorded natural world. Take LXVIII, “To the Insect of the Gossamer”:
O’er faded heath-flowers spun, or thorny furze,
The filmy Gossamer is lightly spread;
Waving in every sighing air that stirs,
As Fairy fingers had entwined the thread:
A thousand trembling orbs of lucid dew
Spangle the texture of the fairy loom,
As if soft Sylphs, lamenting as they flew,
Had wept departed Summer’s transient bloom…
Yes, Smith is playing fast and loose with mythic imagery. Still, observe the depth and precision of her natural vocabulary. Descriptors like “filmy” and “thorny” prickle with literality, while the poet’s verbs (“spangle”) animate the finely rendered landscape.
Notably, fifteen of Sonnets II’s thirty-nine poems abandon the sonnet scheme entirely. These weren’t Smith’s first forays into alternate verse forms. But the expanding proportion of Sonnets II occupied by non-sonnets suggest the writer’s growing attentiveness to subjects resistant to the fourteen-line form’s constraints. It also indicates a shift in artistic priorities: a rebalancing between realistic representation of nature’s protean energies and observance of classical poetic traditions. In “Apostrophe to an Old Tree,” for example, Smith toys with more liberated lyric structures to capture the sheer majesty of enormous growth. Stacking couplets to create a column of poetry visually and rhythmically evocative of a towering trunk, she writes:
Where thy broad branches brave the bitter North,
Like rugged, indigent, unheeded, worth,
Lo! Vegetation’s guardian bands emboss
Each giant limb with fronds of studded moss,
That clothes the bark in many a fringed fold
Begemm’d with scarlet shields, and cups of gold,
Which, to the wildest winds, their webs oppose,
And mock the arrowy sleet, or weltering snows …
Consider the inversion—where, before, Smith had called on ecological imagery to evoke human experiences, she here calls upon human images (arrows, clothes, cups of gold) to honor the tree’s grandeur. “A Descriptive Ode” also employs a more freewheeling lyric form to describe, among other scrupulously sketched natural phenomena, “felon winds / That heave the billows with resistless force / Commixing with the blotted skies …”
Smith proves herself an even sharper observer of nature among Sonnets II’s supplementary “Notes.” The poet’s letters indicate not only the extent of her effort in composing these, but the degree to which that effort revolved around her ecological commentary. Writing Cadell and Davies in early March of 1797, she vowed “not [to] be told as I was before (by Dr. Darwin & another judge) that I was deficient in correctness of natural History.” (Sadly, no trace of her original correspondence with Darwin survives.) The consequent twenty-six-page annotative apparatus is incredibly thorough. Many individual notes are extensive—addressing “the Pile-wort (Ranuncula Ficaria) and the Wood Anemone (Anemone Nemerosa),” for instance, the writer explains how
Of this latter beautiful species there is in Oxfordshire a blue one, growing wild (Anemone patensis pedunculo involucrato, petalis apice reflxis foliis bipinnatis—Lin, Sp. Pl. 760.) It is found in Whichwood Forest, near Cornbury quarry. (Vide Flora Oxonensis). I do not mention this by way of exhibiting botanical knowledge […] but because I never saw the blue Anemone wild in any other place, and it is a flower of singular beauty and appearance.
In a letter from August of 1789, two years following her separation from Benjamin, Smith miserably declared herself “compelled to live only to write & write only to live.” And the novels she churned out annually certainly helped broker food and shelter for the poet and her family. But the second volume of Sonnets complicates this declaration. Often, the collection exhibits a difficult-to-overlook celebratory impulse—an admiration for nature that reads as joyful, even life-sustaining, itself.
Smith stayed in London following the widely successful publication of Sonnets II. There, she wrote more children’s books and novels. She also sought help for an extensive and painful inventory of physical problems. Writing the Earl of Egremont in November of 1802, she describes “having been oblig’d to put leaches on [her] temples for the pains in [her] head”—adding that she had “brought on such an inflammation or swelling throughout [her] face & eyes that [she] was blind for two days.” In June of 1804, she apologized to Sarah Rose for the “hardly legible” nature of her handwriting, confiding that she was unable to “stoop to my desk my blister pains me so, & I am so nervous I can hardly hold a pen.” And a letter from November of 1805 to Cadell and Davies confesses that she had not yet returned their books on account of being “unable to go out of my drawing room or attend to any thing.” Today, literary historians attribute this range of afflictions to rheumatoid arthritis.
All the while, Smith pursued language for the natural world which was, for her, both an emotional refuge and an imaginative laboratory. As early as August of 1797, Smith had written to Cadell and Davies about compiling a third volume from “some fragments of unfinished Sonnets & other Poetical sketches of which I have finished four of five very much to my mind.” Her letters indicate that by 1802 she was earnestly at work.
Smith had serious ambitions for the collection, which she intended to make “the whole as perfect as it will admit of.” She averred that “as it is on the Poetry I have written that I trust for the little reputation I may hereafter have … I shall publish nothing that is not allowed by less partial judges than myself to be worth publishing.” Her health posed a major obstacle in fulfilling these desires. A letter to Cadell and Davies of October 1805 expresses doubts about her ability to complete “Beachy Head”:
Gentn, The state of health in which I return’d from Brighton is such—& I find myself so unequal to the attention necessary to finish so long a work as the local poem […] with the care which wd be necessary not to commit my reputation—that I have determin’d to lay it by till returning health, if ever it dose return, enables me to finish it as well as I think it is begun.
But she did finish it. Not only the “local poem,” “Beachy Head,” but the entire volume of verse—one which celebrates “vast encircling seas” and “endless swarms of creatures.” Nine of the collection᾽s thirteen poems concentrate definitively on nature (the other four account for only nine of the volume’s 220 pages).
Beachy Head’s nature is vast and varied. Gone are any pastoral props or vague, anthropocentric analogies. Smith’s speakers admire “stupendous ocean[s] wide” and, “with more enquiring eyes … behold innumerous changes rise”; they stoop to examine “the more humble children of the ground, / Freak’d pansies, fumitory, pimpernel …”. And the speaker of “Saint Monica” expresses fascination with “nature … ever lovely, ever new,” noting how
Often still at eve, or early morn,
Among these ruins shagg’d with fern and thorn
A pensive stranger from his lonely seat
Observes the rapid martin, threading fleet
The broken arch: or follows with his eye,
The wall-creeper that hunts the burnish’d fly;
Sees the newt basking in the sunny ray,
Or snail that sinuous winds his shining way …
If the entire volume is exquisite in its appreciation of the natural world, the titular poem transcends:
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 …
It not only catches the “shrill, harsh cr[ies]” of seabirds, those “inmates of the chalky clefts,” but the quieter moments when
The high meridian of the day is past,
And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven,
Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low
The tide of ebb, upon the level sands.
The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still,
Catches the light and variable airs
That but a little crisp the summer sea,
Dimpling its tranquil surface.
Even as she exalts nature’s plenitude, Smith doesn’t remove herself from her work. The opposite: she describes herself as an “early worshipper at Nature’s shrine,” who “loved [Nature’s] rudest scenes—warrens, and heaths, / And yellow commons, and birch-shaded hollows …” Present, too, are the same melancholic and nostalgic impulses which suffused her earlier verses:
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 …
Unlike in Elegiac Sonnets, however, Smith doesn’t superimpose human sadness on a clichéd or metaphorical Nature. Here, Smith’s melancholy stems from the Enlightenment-infused knowledge that—no matter how searching her poet’s gaze or forensic her scientific understanding—her humanity restrains her from unmediated participation in the very real, very beautiful scenes in front of her.
The collection’s backmatter provides an additional demonstration of awe. Extending for an extraordinary seventy-eight pages, Smith’s annotations challenge their own status as “notes.” They appear less an accessory to the text than a continuation of the text itself—really, they might be understood as a kind of final, epic prose poem, burrowing even deeper into the particularities of Smith’s assembled ecology. Of the volume’s one hundred and thirty-nine individual annotations, all except for eleven focus on natural subjects. This commentary ranges from succinct recordings of “precise time[s] of the day in which the flowers of different plants open, expand, and shut,” to sprawling first-person anecdotes about how she “think[s she] saw, in what is now called the National Museum at Paris, the very large bones of an elephant, which were found in North America …”
Put simply, Beachy Head is an expression of deepest love: for the natural world and Smith’s ongoing, expansive place in it.
Charlotte Smith died on October 28, 1806, at Tilford in Surrey. She was buried next to her daughter Anna Augusta at Stoke Church, three months before the publication of Beachy Head.
In many ways, the years leading up to the poet’s death were among the most tragic of her life. Her health continued to deteriorate, and she witnessed the deaths of two more of her children. Yet she managed to outlast Benjamin by eight months (fittingly, he died in debtor’s prison in February of 1806), and passed away secure in the knowledge that both the rest of Richard’s legacy and the profits from her writing would reach her surviving children. She also finally achieved the creative freedom which remained unattainable for so much of her tumultuous career and motherhood. Throughout the late nineties and early 1800s, she and her sister Catherine planned a book of botanic drawings and poems for students. During the last five years of her life, Charlotte wrote three more ecology-inspired children’s books. And then, of course, there was Beachy Head.
Those who can visit Charlotte Smith’s poetry in its original incarnations at Oxford and among archives elsewhere will find themselves turning brittle, rarely fingered pages. They’ll sift through one edition of Sonnets after another, and, in doing so, ingest a substantial amount of dust. They’ll also uncover the work of a woman who, against all odds, wrote her way out of debtor’s jail and back into the childhood landscapes which were “most dear” to her—the work of a woman who traveled by the sheer force of her pen from France and London to the very edge of Beachy Head’s chalky, boundless cliffs. Picture her there, wholly freed: lungs embracing “pure, keen air” like ferns opening in spring; “enquiring eyes” soaring forth like gulls aloft at sea.