SOURCE: Fry, Carrol L. “The French Revolution in Charlotte Smith's Works: Desmond, The Emigrants, and The Banished Man.” In Charlotte Smith, pp. 64-88. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Fry discusses Smith's innovative use of contemporary political events in her novels and poetry.]

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!(1)

So wrote Wordsworth of the early days of the French Revolution after he arrived in Paris in 1791, the times that Charlotte Smith describes in volume 3 of Celestina. While he is in France, Willoughby mentions “hearing, and but hearing, at a distance, the tumults, with which a noble struggle for freedom at this time (the summer of 1789) agitated the capital, and many of the great towns of France” (III, 181). Later, in the digression that tells his life, Bellegarde praises the “glorious flame of liberty”—the fall of the Bastille—which released him from the prison where he was held by his father's lettre de cachet, one of the hated tools of the French monarchy.² Bellegarde's story demonstrates what could happen to a “victim of despotism” during the ancien régime, and the old count is the pattern aristocrat to English liberals. A few years later, the language of this passage would have attracted the wrath of the Anti-Jacobin and other reactionary voices; but in 1791, the year Celestina was published, the reviewers took no notice. Most British liberals believed the French were simply achieving the freedoms that the British had long enjoyed, freedoms that the youthful Wordsworth had seen as “a gift that rather was come late than soon.”³

But Smith would go on to take the novel to a level of political discourse that this developing genre had not seen. It is a curious fact that she was nearly the only British novelist to address the contemporary events in France that would leave Europe in flames for 20 years and forever change the course of history.⁴ In Desmond, published in 1792, Smith's hero articulates a moderate republican position. The Emigrants (1793), a long, meditative poem, reflects disappointment with the violence that had marred the revolution and asks for tolerance toward French refugees; but the author's republican views remain unchanged. Finally, The Banished Man (1794), while one of Smith's most self-indulgent and least successful works when judged as art, remains an interesting insight into British liberal thought after the French experiment in democracy resulted in anarchy and terror. In the latter two works, Smith condemns the leadership of the revolution but upholds the original ideals.

Desmond stands as a turning point in Smith's career. All of her novels following 1792 contain political commentary and criticism of social injustice. Gone is the focus on proper female conduct and domestic problems as central issues. Smith would continue, however, to use the techniques she had established in her first three novels. Her characters fit the nature/art dichotomy, and she uses polarities of thought similar to the concordia discors concept. She decorates the novels with her poetry, and she continues to use landscape description to establish scenes or reflect the mood of characters. Although she makes her distaste for gothic paraphernalia all too apparent in asides and prefaces, she felt she had to include the sort of gothic thrills that she had used in her early novels and that Ann Radcliffe and others popularized. But in all of her novels after 1791, Smith adapts the conventions of fiction to present social and political issues from a republican perspective. Although The Banished Man and later works show her disappointment with the revolution in France, her republican principles remained intact throughout her life. Her prefaces and occasional textual comments suggest that she used her novels to bring otherwise unavailable political issues (as well as information ranging from history to botany) to her largely female audience. Her political novels evidence a different sort of didacticism from that of her early works.

DESMOND, A NOVEL

Desmond is a historical novel, of sorts. The dates of the letters that compose this epistolary work track the recent history of the early 1790s. The first letter is dated June 9, 1790, and the final one February 6, 1792. The author's Preface carries the date June 20, 1792. Thus, the novel's action covers the period following the fall of the Bastille on June 14, 1789, through the early days of reform, the bringing of the royal family and the National Assembly to Paris, the nationalization of the church, the initial war with Prussia and Austria, the attempt of Louis XVI and his family to escape, and the development of the French constitution.

Desmond articulates, then, the early euphoria that British liberals felt at the success of the revolution. Ironically, if Smith sent her final copy to the publisher in June, the book must have arrived in bookstores at nearly the same time the Parisian mob massacred approximately 1,200 prisoners on September 2-6, 1792, an event that dismayed many of those in England friendly to the revolution. But the positive reviews, which began appearing in September, show that the reaction against the revolution had not set in. A reviewer for The Critical Review, for instance, notes the lack of balance in Smith's presentation of political ideas but concedes that “history may confirm the sentiment and confute ours.”⁵

Smith satirizes both the smug conservatism of the British ruling classes and the reactionary ire of the French aristocracy. Against these positions, she juxtaposes the favored liberal views of Desmond, her hero. He is another of her Werther characters, a man dominated by passion. In the context of the novel, Smith balances Desmond's republican ideas against the comments of Bethel, the young man's chief correspondent, who provides something like a center point. But Desmond differs from Smith's other novels in that the hero's actions as a Werther character prove to be the norm, despite the fact that his views (or at least his rhetoric) are somewhat more liberal than Bethel's.

Thus, on one level Desmond is a novel of ideas, with various speakers contributing to the interplay of political dialogue. On another level, the novel offers much of the appeal of Smith's earlier works. Smith blends the discussion of politics with the story of Desmond's hopeless love and gothic melodrama to keep her readers' interest. She enlists sympathy for republican ideas by putting them in the mouth of conventional characters from the sentimental tradition.

The plot grows from Lionel Desmond's attachment to Geraldine Verney. Desmond is a well-to-do young British landowner who has just come into his patrimony. In this epistolary novel, the hero addresses most of his letters to Erasmus Bethel, his friend and mentor. Geraldine is another autobiographical character: a woman whose family pressed her into marriage with a feckless husband. As the story progresses, Desmond tries to help Waverly, Geraldine's brother, a hopelessly scatterbrained and constitutionally indecisive young man, by taking him to France. There Desmond fights a duel to save Waverly from a disastrous marriage and is wounded. Desmond later lives incognito near Geraldine in England, to protect her, and then goes to France when Mr. Verney tries to sell his wife to the unscrupulous Duc de Romagnecourt, a corrupt French aristocrat who has fleeced Verney in high-stakes gambling. Desmond arrives in time to save Geraldine in a blood-and-thunder sequence with enough gothic thrills for the most avid devotee, and Mr. Verney is conveniently killed, leaving Desmond free to wed his Geraldine.

The love story is quite different from Smith's earlier novels of didactic sensibility. Desmond is in love with a married woman, and he consistently defends his feelings against Bethel's criticism. Moreover, while in France, he has an affair with Josephine Boisbelle, the sister of his friend Montfleuri, a French aristocrat with republican sentiments. Like Geraldine, Josephine is a married woman, separated from her émigré husband. She nurses Desmond after his duel and bears his child.

Smith's comments in the preface show her concern as to how her readers might respond to Desmond's passion for a married woman: “In sending into the world a work so unlike those of my former writings … I feel some degree of the apprehension which an Author is sensible of on a first publication.”⁶ She goes on to defend her hero's behavior: “No delineation of character appears to me more interesting, than that of a man capable of such a passion so generous and disinterested as to seek only the good of its object; nor any story more moral, than one that represents the existence of an affection so regulated” (ii). But she does not mention the affair with Josephine Boisbelle. Were there no political discussions in the work, the love story would seem revolutionary enough for British fiction of the 1790s.

The letters from Desmond describing his political discussions provide the central focus of the novel. In the preface, Smith acknowledges that the political content of the work may offend some and attributes the ideas she presents to “conversations to which I have been a witness, in England, and France, during the last twelve months.”⁷ She also acknowledges her republican bias when she adds that “if those in favor of one party have evidently the advantage, it is not owing to my partial representation, but to the predominant power of truth and reason, which can neither be altered nor concealed” (ii-iii). Smith's assumption of reason's infallibility echoes the thinking of Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, and other British republican writers.

The Desmond/Geraldine love story provides the structure of the novel and the opportunity for Desmond to move from place to place and report his conversations to Bethel. His friendship with Montfleuri leads to discussions with both liberals and conservatives on the continent, and he corresponds with the Frenchman when he returns to England. Through these letters, Smith gives her readers insights into both political issues and recent historical events. Despite a spirited defense in the Preface of a woman writing on politics, Smith must have felt insecure in undertaking such subjects. She puts most of the political discussion into the mouths of male characters. Apparently, she felt that while her audience might accept political novels from women writers, the actual ideas were best spoken by male characters.

DESMOND AS HISTORICAL NOVEL

Desmond reflects the rush of events in France and the polarities of response those incidents inspired in Great Britain. The events of 1789 and 1790 caused little trepidation there. British liberals had long deplored conditions in France. Six years before the Bastille's fall, William Cowper wrote in The Task,

There's not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye [the Bastille] were fall'n at last; to know
That ev'n our enemies, so oft employ'd
In forging chains for us, themselves were free.(8)

Cobban quotes a letter from The Analytical Review published after the Bastille's fall that seems typical of the British reaction: “As men, and as Britons, we most sincerely wish them success; and pray that no dissentions amongst themselves may obscure the glorious prospect before them.”⁹

Britain, though, had more radical thinkers. Dissenters believed that the Test Act kept them from full political participation, since those who could not subscribe to the “Thirty-Nine Articles” of the Anglican faith were not eligible for government service and there were ambiguities regarding freedom of worship. These individuals, and others concerned about the corruption all too common in government, wanted parliamentary reform. Many organized groups existed, and they became the meeting places for reformers. Agendas varied for those who attended, ranging from the more radical who wanted to do away with monarchy and aristocratic titles to moderates who focused on reforming the parliament.¹⁰

In 1789 the London Revolutionary Society, named for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, planned a commemoration of the anniversary of the revolution, and on November 4, Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister, presented a sermon entitled “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country.” Price celebrated the gains in toleration achieved in 1688 and praised the revolution in France. His conclusion was heady stuff for its time: “Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! … Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses before they and you are destroyed together.”¹¹

The speech touched off a war of pamphlets. Edmund Burke responded with Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790, attacking Price specifically and republican principles in general. Mary Wollstonecraft replied within a month with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a republican response to Burke's conservative broadside. But the event that polarized the debate was the publication in March 1791 of The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (a second volume followed in 1792). Both Paine's and Wollstonecraft's titles come from the French General Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on August 26, 1789.

Paine, an accomplished propagandist,¹² attacked Burke's defense of monarchy in a work with great popular appeal, by one estimate selling more than two million copies.¹³ Paine's book won him friends in Paris, where he was elected to the General Assembly, taking his seat in 1792. But he was tried for sedition and found guilty in absentia in England, an ominous note for the British revolutionary movement. Dozens of books and pamphlets appeared siding with Paine or Burke (primarily the latter as repression deepened).

Desmond is a fascinating historical novel in its own right. But the work is also a shot fired in this war of pamphlets, books, and magazine articles, and it is the only novel to address the subject. Smith attacks Burke through the comments of Desmond and Bethel. Thus, the Burke/Paine controversy is part of the recent history that the novel reports, as well as a central point in the discussion of ideas.

If, as was her usual practice in producing a novel, Smith spent approximately one year in composing Desmond, it is possible that she adapted the novel's discussions to events as she wrote it. Her surviving letters provide no evidence, so whether she might have responded to current events cannot be proved. Yet the novel is a unique amalgam of fiction, events of the day or very recent history, and political discussion.

One looks in vain for a specific reason for the sudden change in Smith's work. Her letters provide few clues. She does write to Joel Barlow on November 3, 1792, complementing him on his tracts “Advice to the Privileged Orders” and “Letter to the National Convention” (Huntington). An American, Barlow was a well-known sympathizer with republican France, and perhaps he is the sort of person to whom Smith's sister, Catherine Anne Dorset, refers when she mentions that at Brighthelmstone (Brighton) Smith “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.”¹⁴ William Hayley, her mentor, was of the republican camp. And Smith's acquaintance with Helen Maria Williams,¹⁵ a friend of the revolution in its early stages whose Letters from France, which presents an idealized view of revolutionary reforms, is the only other solid evidence of connections with those sympathetic to the revolution.

Smith borrowed from Williams's Letters in Desmond at several points. The two writers certainly express similar ideological views on the French Revolution, but there are more specific points of comparison. In 1785 Williams became friends with the wife of the Comte du Fosse, who had married against his father's will, leading to persecution similar to that which Smith's Montfleuri describes in Desmond and Bellegarde in Celestina. Both of Smith's characters are aristocrats who support the revolution and utter the same sentiments as those that Williams reports from du Fosse. Also, Smith's portrayal of happy peasants dancing on the village green at Montfleuri's estate closely resembles passages in Williams's letters describing a visit to du Fosse's estate. A more precise bit of borrowing is the passage in Desmond in which the hero reports on “the furious manner in which the carriages of the noblesse were driven through the streets, where there are no accommodations for the foot passenger—and where the proud and unfeeling possessors of those splendid equipages … have been known to feel their rapid wheels crushing a fellow creature …” (I, 108). The passage goes on at some length, as does a similar report in the Letters: “One subject of complaint among the aristocrates [sic] is, that, since the revolution, they are obliged to drive through the streets with caution. …”¹⁶

Williams first went to France in July 1790 and returned to England in September; later that fall she began publishing her Letters. Textual parallels suggest that Smith read the first volumes of the Letters, and perhaps her acquaintance with that work gave her ideas for the development of Montfleuri and Bellegarde as characters. Certainly Smith's and Williams's political sentiments run parallel. Both admire the Comte de Mirabeau,¹⁷ express views consistent with republican moderates on parliamentary reform and war, and defend the general effectiveness of the British constitutional system, if improved.

TWO PERSPECTIVES ON DINING WITH A FOOTMAN: POLITICAL DIALOGUE IN DESMOND

In her review of Desmond for The Analytical Review, Joseph Johnson's publication, Mary Wollstonecraft praises the novel's subordinate characters because they are “sketched with that peculiar dexterity which shoots folly as it flies.”¹⁸ Wollstonecraft alludes to the variety of individuals with whom Desmond reports dialogues, showing that the folly Smith describes comes from both British conservatives opposed to the revolution and aristocrats in France.

The dialogue begins when Desmond visits the Fairfax home while waiting for Waverly to arrive for their projected tour. General Wallingford decries the National Assembly as “a collection of dirty fellows” who have “abolished all titles and abolished the very name of nobility” (I, 60). Mrs. Fairfax's addition to the discussion is especially interesting because it reflects the kind of sensibility that Smith and other British liberals had come to reject: “Heavens! how my sympathizing heart bleeds, when I reflect on the numbers of amiable people of rank, compelled thus to the cruel necessity of resigning those ancient and honorable names which distinguished them from the vulgar herd!” (I, 63). In Smith's later poetry and novels, true sensibility brings empathy for victims of social injustice. Mrs. Fairfax is a false sentimentalist.

Desmond expresses satisfaction with the overthrow of the feudal system. But Mrs. Fairfax's response focuses squarely on the basic fears of the English middle class: “Good Heaven! I declare the very idea is excessively terrific; only suppose the English mob were to get such a notion, and in some odious riot, begin the same sort of thing here!” Desmond's response is that of British moderate republicans: “Perhaps there may never exist here the same cause: and, therefore, the effect will not follow” (I, 68-69). He goes on to demonstrate that the British and French aristocracy are quite different and that many of the abuses being corrected in France do not exist in England.

Smith does not allow the withers of British aristocracy to go unwrung, however. Lord Newminster is a republican's portrayal of the aristocrat, a rude, ignorant lout to whom the middle-class Fairfaxes compulsively genuflect. In one scene, he comes into the Fairfax home while the family is having tea, stretches out on a sofa with his boots on, and embraces a dog, cooing “Oh! thou dear bitchy—thou beautiful bitchy—damme, if I don't love thee better than my mother or my sisters.” He then feeds the dog chocolate, crying, “[W]as it hungry? … was it hungry, a lovely dear?—I would rather all the old women in the country should fast for a month, than thou shouldest not have thy belly full” (I, 57). The double-edged satire hits not only the bad manners of the aristocrat but the toadying attitude of the middle-class Fairfaxes to a titled boor.

Desmond's letters report similar debates with conservatives in France. When a young abbé defends the old way, Montfleuri responds by saying that “the antiquity of an abuse is no reason for its continuance” (I, 123) and lectures the abbé on the taille, the gabelle, tax farming, lettres de cachet, and other abuses. Smith follows with a long passage that amounts to a history lecture from Montfleuri, tracing the events that led to the Revolution, replete with quite erudite allusions to Millot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others. Part of Montfleuri's lecture involves references to the French king, Henry IV, a name that appears often in the writings of British republicans.¹⁹ The founder of the Bourbon line stood as a symbol for liberals of the good king.

A visit to Montfleuri's uncle, the Count de Hautville, provides an opportunity for another lengthy conservative/liberal dialogue, capped by an interesting allusion to James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which had been published in 1791. Smith must have read the Life either immediately before beginning Desmond or during the book's composition. In a bit of historical irony, Johnson's attacks on republicans made him a target of opportunity in the pamphlet wars long after his death. Under the date of 1763, Boswell writes, “He [Johnson] again insisted on the duty of maintaining subordination of rank.” He then quotes the Great Lexicographer as follows:

Sir, there is one Mrs. Maccaulay in this town, a great republican. One day when I was at her house, I put on a very grave countenance, and said to her, “Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, and well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.” I thus, Sir, shewed her the absurdity of the leveling doctrine. …²⁰

Mrs. Catherine Maccaulay remained “a great republican” from 1763 until her death, ironically in the year of the Life's publication. She wrote a number of histories of England (particularly of the Stuarts) from a republican perspective, and even wrote one of the many pamphlets by republicans attacking Burke's Reflections.

Smith alludes to Johnson's antirepublican sentiments during a conversation between Desmond and de Hautville, a typical aristocrat of the ancien régime. Desmond asks de Hautville “whether you really think, that a dealer in wine, or in wood, in sugar, or cloth, is not endued with the same faculties and feelings as the descendant of Charlemagne” (I, 236). In a passage that echoes Johnson's put-down of Mrs. Maccaulay, de Hautville asks why Desmond's footman is a servant if they are equals. Smith explains in a footnote that this question had previously been called unanswerable. But Desmond has a ready response:

Because—though my footman is certainly so far upon an equality with me, as he is a man, and a free-man; there must be a distinction in local circumstances; though they neither render me noble, or him base—I happen to be born heir to considerable estates; it is his chance to be the son of a labourer, living on those estates.—I have occasion for his services, he has occasion for the money by which I purchase them: in this compact we are equal so far as we are free.—I, with my property, which is money, buy his property, which is time, so long as he is willing to sell it.—I hope and believe my footman feels himself to be my fellow-man; but I have not, therefore, any apprehension that instead of waiting behind my chair, he will sit down in the next.—He was born poor—but he is not angry that I am rich—so long as my riches are a benefit and not an oppression to him. He knows that he never can be in my situation, but he knows also that I can amend his.

(I, 237-238)

The lecture goes on for almost two more pages, concluding with a quotation from Voltaire that supports the speaker's conclusions.

The word “compact” explains Smith's answer to the vexing questions that the existence of a servant class must have posed to British republicans. Smith no doubt agreed with the views of Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract, that the third essential duty of government is to fill citizens' wants. But not as a gift. In his Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau writes: “This duty is not, we should feel, to fill the granaries of individuals and thereby to grant them a dispensation from labor, but to keep plenty so within their reach that labour is always necessary and never useless for its acquisition.”²¹

The letter from de Hautville's estate is rich in ideological dialogue of the day. Desmond, for instance, carries on a discussion with a member of the high clergy, who execrates the General Assembly not only for its confiscation of church property and establishment of civil status for clergy but also for leveling the incomes of all ecclesiastics, an action that increased the income of local priests but greatly diminished that of the hierarchy. This long letter is another example of Smith's practice of matching recent historical events with fictional scenes, as it is dated September 30, 1790, about two months after the Assembly's reconstitution of the church.

DESMOND, BURKE, AND PAINE

Desmond abounds with references to the controversy that arose over Burke's Reflections. The first appears in a letter dated January 8, 1991, two months after the publication of the book. After reading the Reflections, Desmond writes to Bethel, “I own I never expected to have seen an elaborate treatise in favor of despotism written by an Englishman, who has always been called one of the most steady, as he undoubtedly is one of the most able of those who were esteemed the friends of the people” (II, 62). The tone of disappointment may arise from Burke's opposition to the British war with the American colonists, an opposition shared by Smith and other republicans. But Desmond goes on to accurately, if hyperbolically, predict, “I foresee that a thousand pens will leap from their standishes (to parody a sublime sentence of his own) to answer such a book” (II, 63) In an April 10 letter, Desmond writes, again to Bethel, “Leave him then, my friend, to waste in swinish excess, sums, which he has earned by doing dirty work, at the expence of those who are now called the ‘swinish multitude,’ hundreds of whom might be fed by the superfluities of his luxurious table” (II, 114).

Smith attributes the phrase “swinish multitude” to Burke. She uses it satirically in a variety of contexts in Desmond and other works that follow, as did many republican writers. Politics for the People: or A Salmagundi for Swine, a republican magazine published in 1794 and 1795, used “swinish multitude” as something of a logo, publishing satirical poems and essays signed by “Old Hubert” or “a brother grunter.” There were many other responses to “swinish multitude,” including “The Rights of Swine: An Address to the Poor” (1794).²² The satirical sallies on his unfortunately chosen phrase characterize Smith's attacks on Burke in the novel, which come up again and again in the dialogues between Desmond and Bethel. The attacks become more vitriolic as the novel progresses, with Desmond labeling the British statesman “the champion of the placeman—and the apologist of the pensioner” (III, 209).

References to Paine's The Rights of Man turn up on schedule from a historical perspective when Bethel sends Desmond a copy with a letter dated March 18, 1791, the month when the book appeared, noting that it is written by an “obscure individual, calling himself the subject of another government” and that it “could never have attracted so much attention, or have occasioned to the party whose principles it so decidedly attacks, such general alarm, if there had not been much sound sense in it, however bluntly delivered” (II, 92). Desmond answers on April 10, responding that he is “forcibly struck with truths, that either were not seen before, or were (by men, who did not wish to acknowledge them) carefully repressed” (II, 115-116). Desmond goes on to predict the attack that will be (and was) mounted against Paine and notes that “those who feel the force of his abilities, will vilify his private life, as if that was any thing to the purpose” (II, 117). Smith, who would have written the passage a few months after volume 1 of The Rights of Man appeared, thus acknowledges the ad hominem attacks on Paine's marital difficulties and his failure as an exciseman before immigration to America. In the same letter she predicts the government's sedition trial of Paine in 1792 by having an effete British lordling whom Desmond meets in France cry, “I wonder they don't punish the author, who, they say, is quite a low sort of fellow.” He goes on to articulate, as does Mrs. Fairfax in England, the underlying fear of the privileged classes in England: “I hope our government will take care to silence such a demagogue, before he puts it into the heads of les gens sans culotes [sic], in England, to do as they have done in France, and even before he gets some of the ragged rogues hanged—They rights! poor devils, who have neither shirts nor breeches!” (II 121).

Part 2 of The Rights of Man appeared in February 1792, and Paine's attack on the monarchy provoked government reaction. Wilson and Ricketson report that “Prime Minister Pitt undertook a smear campaign against the character of Paine and initiated court action which eventually resulted in the libel conviction.”²³ Thus, Smith's letters in Desmond dated April 1791, may be reactions to the events that continued into the spring and summer of 1792. It is worth noting that Desmond appeared at almost the same time that Paine left England for France, with a writ out for his arrest.

Other historical milestones come up in the letters between Bethel and Desmond. In a letter dated June 28, 1791, Bethel notes “the flight of the King of France and his family” being reported in England, and on July 2, Desmond responds, calling attention to the “magnanimity shown by the French people, on the re-entrance of the King into Paris: This will surely convince the world that the bloody democracy of Mr. Burke, is not a combination of the swinish multitude, for the purposes of anarchy, but the association of reasonable beings, who determine to be, and deserve to be, free” (III, 89). He goes on to compare the moderation of the French people in receiving the returned king with what might have happened had the monarchists succeeded in overthrowing the revolutionary government.

Also, war with Austria and Prussia impended in 1791, the date of the final letters in the novel. Desmond takes note of this possibility, deploring the actions of the “Northern Powers” but asserting that such actions will hardly “destroy the lovely tree that has thus taken vigorous growth in the finest country in the world.” He goes on to regret that despite the pacific intentions of the French toward their neighbors, “its root must be manured with blood” (III, 207-208). The tree metaphor was rather common in France at the time. Doyle notes that in 1789, peasants planted liberty trees on land owned by aristocrats. “They called them Mays, from a much older tradition, festooned them with symbols of seigneurialism, and claimed that if they stood for a year and a day their lord's rights would be extinguished.”²⁴

Some of the most interesting letters reflect differences between Bethel and Desmond. Bethel's given name, Erasmus, alludes to the author of The Praise of Folly, a work that proposes a sane, balanced view of life, and the name suggests his political position. Bethel speaks with the authority of experience (Smith tells his history in a long letter at the outset) and reason. In a letter dated July 6, 1791, Bethel begins by suggesting that Desmond is “far gone … in what are called (but, I think, improperly called) the new doctrines, that you would contest this opinion with me,” and goes on to praise the English constitution, which though flawed, is “undoubtedly the best in the world.” He insists that “it may, I believe, be truly asserted, that in no age or country, has there existed a people, to whom general happiness has been more fairly distributed, than it is among the English of the present day.” Moreover, he reads trouble on the horizon in France. He hopes the French will find a government superior to the British, but, “I am compelled to say,” he writes, “that the proceedings of the National Assembly, since the death of Mirabeau, gives [sic] me too little reason to believe they will.” He regrets the absence of “some great leading mind” to guide the revolution, because “[t]he despotism of superior ability is, after all, necessary; and it is the only despotism to which reasonable beings ought to submit” (III, 101-103). Bethel's republicanism is of the most moderate sort, and he lacks Desmond's passion.

Desmond soon answers, with a criticism of the English constitution. He quotes Boswell's Life on the subject of the British Parliament, in which “any question, however unreasonable or unjust, may be carried by a venal majority,” and he goes on to answer Bethel's assertion that the British system brings general happiness more effectively than any other by saying that “this rather proves that their condition is very wretched, than that ours is perfectly happy.” He deplores British attitudes toward slavery, and concludes with a statement that ends up not very far from that of Bethel and seems a good summation of British liberal—as opposed to radical—thought of the period:

I think that our form of government is certainly the best—not that can be imagined—but that has ever been experienced; and, while we are sure that practice is in its favor, it would be most absurd to dream of destroying it on theory.—If I had a very good house that had some inconveniences about it, I should not desire to pull it down, but I certainly should send for an architect. … But I should be very much startled if my architect was to say, “Sir, I dare not touch your house—If I let in more light, if I take down those partitions, and make the other changes you desire, I am very much afraid that the great timbers will give way, and the party-walls crush you beneath their ruins”

(III, 165∗-166∗).²⁵

Neither Bethel nor Desmond articulates a specific political agenda, and their comments about change differ more in Desmond's impassioned rhetoric than in substance. Both support moderate reform, and the dialogue between them provides a springboard for Smith's presentation of republican ideas.

DESMOND AND FICTIONAL CONVENTIONS

Despite the ideological tone of Desmond, Smith relies on the fictional conventions that she had both inherited and created in her earlier novels. Moreover, she juxtaposes opposites as she does in those works, cues the reader with the repetition of words and the evocative language of the sentimental novel, and includes a bit of gothic melodrama at the conclusion.

In volume 3 Desmond follows Geraldine to France, where she has been lured by her husband. In scenes that would do justice to Radcliffe at her best, Desmond rescues her from banditti who glower “with the terrific look which Salvator gives to his assassins” (III, 274-275).²⁶ The scenes abound with ruined castles, hollow groans, and all the paraphernalia of the developing gothic mode—considerably intensified from Smith's earlier novels.

Smith's characters are cut from the cloth of the sentimental-gothic tradition and the nature/art dichotomy. Geraldine admires Desmond because he “has so much taste, and so much genuine enthusiasm” (II, 217). Despite his revolutionary fervor, Desmond can admire a picturesque ruin on Montfleuri's estate, even though it reflects the ancient tyranny of the church, commenting to Bethel, “I, who love, you know, every thing ancient, unless it be ancient prejudices, have entreated my friend to preserve this structure in its present state—than which, nothing can be more picturesque” (I, 171). Both Geraldine and Desmond display the alienation of the hero and heroine of sensibility. Desmond, for instance, confesses in one of his letters to being “a strange, eccentrick being, and not much like any other” (II, 233). Like the conventional sentimental characters in so many other novels, both Geraldine and Desmond eschew the materialist lifestyle, and both respond to the needs of the unfortunate. Geraldine, for instance, writes to her sister that the “only pleasure I have lost in losing high affluence, is that of having the power to befriend the unhappy, to whom I can now give only my tears” (II, 197). The properly disposed reader would respond to Desmond and Geraldine as fellow sentimentalists.

In his powerful feelings, at least, Desmond is a lineal descendant of Delamere and Sir Edward Newenden, an “English Werter” (III, 60), as his friend Bethel calls him. In the concordia discors of reason and feeling, Desmond fails to control his passion. When he follows Geraldine into the countryside, he writes to Bethel that “much eloquence will be necessary to supply the defect of reason, which I know you will think my conduct betrays” (II, 233-234). But, as he later writes, “I find, that seven-and-twenty is not the age of reason, or, at least, where the heart is so deeply concerned” (II, 235-236). When Smith has him quote Saint-Preux from La Nouvelle Héloïse, Desmond's identification with passion is complete: “‘There are,’ says St. Preux, in those enchanting letters of the incomparable Rousseau, ‘but two divisions of the world, that where Julie is, and that where she is not’” (II, 240). He goes on to compare his feelings for Geraldine to these sentiments.

Other characters reflect an excess of passion over reason. Perhaps Smith panders to a British audience's cultural assumptions about the French or perhaps she shares them. But her Gallic characters, Josephine Boisbelle and her brother Montfleuri, are at the mercy of their passions. Although Josephine writes no letters, the novel suggests that she initiated the affair with Desmond. And while Montfleuri may follow sweet reason in his politics, his letters after meeting Fanny Waverly, Geraldine's sister, demonstrate a stereotypical Gallic impetuosity.²⁷

Smith counterpoises Desmond's apparent excess of passion with Geraldine (who remains a dutiful wife despite her obvious attachment to Desmond) and Bethel. The latter expostulates with Desmond throughout the novel over his conduct, and the word “reason” recurs consistently in his letters, identifying his position for the reader. He advises Desmond, for instance, to “sit down for some months, at least, quietly in Kent, where I hope you will recover your reason” (III, 85). Desmond's powerful feelings contrast with what the younger man calls Bethel's “cold and calm philosophy” (I, 161). Later, when the Duc de Romagnecourt arrives in England, insisting that Geraldine accompany him to France, she fears that Desmond will challenge the Frenchman. She reasons that if she persists in refusal, Romagnecourt will go away. But, she writes to her sister, “nor would Desmond be persuaded that I ought patiently to endure this transient evil—I saw consequences attending his applying to Monsieur de Romangecourt, of which I could not bear the idea without terror” (III, 19). The fiery Desmond has already fought one duel at this point and seems ready for another.

Smith's presentation of a Werther figure who becomes the moral norm of the work reflects the dawning of a romantic sensibility in Great Britain and on the continent. Schama writes:

The drastic cultural alteration represented by this first hot eruption of the Romantic sensibility is of more than literary importance. It meant the creation of a spoken and written manner that would become the standard voice of the Revolution, shared by both its victims and its most implacable prosecutors. The speeches of Mirabeau and Robespierre as well as the letters of Desmoulins and Mme. Roland and the orchestrated festivals of the Republic broadcast appeals to the soul, to tender humanity, Truth, Virtue, Nature, and the idyll of family life.

Schama goes on to quote Mercier: “‘Reason with its insidious language can paint the most equivocal enterprise in captivating colors but the virtuous heart will never forget the interests of the humblest citizen. Let us place the virtuous statesman before the clever politician.’”²⁸ Charlotte Smith's novels never display the distrust of reason that characterizes French radical thought, but in Desmond and the novels that follow, the feelings become an ever more important guide to her virtuous characters.

“THE SACRED FLAME OF LIBERTY BECOMES A RAGING FIRE”: THE EMIGRANTS

Since the Preface to Desmond carries a date of June 1792, we can assume that the novel could not have reached bookstores or circulating libraries until at least late summer. By then the swirl of events in France had taken a new direction. In early September, the Parisian mob killed approximately half of the 2,600 people held in nine prisons, nearly all of the deaths outright murders or executions after proceedings in kangaroo courts.²⁹ The Jacobin clubs—revolutionary groups that met across France—insisted on the removal of the king and the establishment of a republic. And after the king's attempted escape, despite the attempts by moderates in the Assembly to justify keeping Louis on the throne, radicals demanded that he be brought to trial, a demand supported by the ever more powerful Parisian mob. The trial and subsequent execution of Louis XVI took place in December 1792 and January 1793. The sans culottes of Paris dominated the Legislative Assembly, sometimes by terror, and the nation veered toward chaos.

Long before the Reign of Terror, thousands fled the country. By 1791, half of the officer corps had left France. Many stayed on the French borders, and Koblenz was a center of émigré activity. A far larger number of aristocrats, terrified at the castle burnings in the countryside, and priests who refused to accept the civil constitution of the clergy (designated as “refractory”) also left. The émigrés were a source of concern in the Assembly from the beginning, and on November 8, 1791, it passed a decree threatening them with a death penalty if they did not return by January 1. Many of these emigrants came to England, where they sometimes received a cool welcome.

English liberals were shocked at the turn of events. Charlotte Smith's poem The Emigrants, the Dedication for which is dated May 10, 1793, at Brighton, less than a year after the publication of Desmond, is a response to the changed situation.³⁰ It expresses the disappointment that British republicans must have felt at the chaos in France, attempts to enlist readers' sympathy and understanding for émigrés, and warns of what can happen if people are denied liberty too long.

Undoubtedly, Smith spoke with both the Chevalier de Faville, her son-in-law, and other exiles during the months before Augusta's marriage. Thus, The Emigrants is in part a plea for tolerance of those who fled the troubles in France, albeit a rather cool one. Smith demonstrates ambivalence in her feelings about those who fled France, however, and in some respects, the poem can be read as another entry in the pamphlet war.

In her dedication to William Cowper, Smith notes that in Britain, “those who are the victims of the Revolution, have not escaped the odium which the undistinguishing multitude annex to all the natives of a country where such horrors have been acted.” The phrase “undistinguishing multitude” is surely an ironic allusion to Burke's “swinish multitude.” She continues in a passage that reflects the uneasiness republicans must have felt in a time of building repression:

… by confounding the original cause with the wretched catastrophes that have followed its ill management; the attempts of public virtue, with the outrages that guilt and folly have committed in its disguise, the very name of Liberty has not only lost the charm it used to have in British ears, but many, who have written or spoken, in its defence, have been stigmatized as promoters of Anarchy, and enemies to the prosperity of their country.³¹

The author sets the poem on the beach at Brighton on “a morning in November, 1792.” She establishes the meditative and elegiac mood by writing “Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy! / How many murmur at oblivious night / For leaving them so soon” (I, 8-10). As in Elegiac Sonnets, Smith establishes herself as narrator and generalizes about the woes of the world before introducing a group of émigrés.

Behold, in witness of this mournful truth,
A group approach me, whose dejected looks,
Sad Heralds of distress! proclaim them Men
Banish'd for ever and for conscience sake
From their distracted Country, whence the name
Of Freedom misapplied, and much abused
By lawless Anarchy, has driven them far
To Wander. …

(I, 95-101)

She makes her republican sympathies and ambivalence about the French emigrants apparent when she notes that their sole hope is that German armies may scourge France, “that pleasant land” (I, 104), and continues, “Whate'er your errors, I lament your fate” (I, 107-108).

In the lines that follow, she introduces four clerical figures: a monk, a high churchman, an abbé, and a parish priest. Smith's republican principles do not permit her to describe them with much sympathy. The monk, “in a moping cloister long comsum'd” (I, 114), had thought that “To live on eleemosynary bread, / And to renounce God's works, would please that God” whom he worshiped (I, 118-119). Next she describes the high official of the church who “declines / The aid he needs not” (I, 125-126), while he looks back to what he had lost, services “Where, amid clouds of incense, he held forth / To kneeling crowds the imaginary bones / Of Saints suppos'd, in pearl and gold enchas'd” (I, 132-134). In France, he was believed “To hold the keys of Heaven, and to admit / Whom he thought good to share it” (I, 137-138). The higher clergy in France was almost exclusively composed of younger sons of the aristocracy.³² Thus, this priest can afford to decline aid. She next describes the abbé (a priest who would serve in a well-to-do family) in only marginally sympathetic fashion. She then praises the selfless devotion of the parish priest, but notes that he “Taught to the bare-foot peasant, whose hard hands / Produced the nectar he could seldom taste, / Submission to the Lord for whom he toil'd” (I, 172-174). She goes on to establish a tone of disapproval that he has left and some justification for the violence in France:

… even such a Man
Becomes an exile; staying not to try
By temperate zeal to check his madd'ning flock,
Who, at the novel sound of Liberty
(Ah! most intoxicating sound to slaves!),
Start to license[.]

(I, 190-95)

Smith includes disclaimers in footnotes, noting that “nothing is farther from my thoughts, than to reflect invidiously on the Emigrant clergy,” but the description of them strikes a decidedly negative tone.

She introduces two other émigrés, an aristocrat and his wife. The latter dreams of the glories of Versailles, where “Beauty gave charms to empire” (I, 226). Neither she nor her husband in their “high consciousness of noble blood” can see the true cause of the revolution, because “luxury wreathes with silk the iron bonds, / And hides the ugly rivets with her flowers” (I, 278-279). Smith asks of the aristocrat,

… could he learn,
That worth alone is true Nobility?
And that the peasant who, “amid the sons
Of Reason, Valour, Liberty, and Virtue,
Displays distinguish'd merit, is a Noble
Of Nature's own creation!”

(I, 239-44)

In a footnote that reflects the growing mood of repression in Great Britain, Smith credits James Thomson for the quoted lines (from his adaptation of Coriolanus), noting that many now view the egalitarianism of Thompson's lines not as “commonplace declamation but sentiments of dangerous tendency.”

Smith describes tax farmers (fermiers generaux) who have also become émigrés and “… unlamented sink, / And know that they deserve the woes they feel” (I, 294-295). She then addresses “Fortune's worthless favorites” in England, “Who feed on England's vitals” (I, 315-316), and in a passage whose tone foreshadows Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities writes,

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!

(I, 332-37)

The phrase “raging multitude” in this passage refers once again to Burke's “swinish multitude” and warns that when the masses are treated as “swinish,” they are likely to react as did the French.³³

Book 2 opens on the South Downs in Sussex and is dated April 1793. The narrative reflects the changes that time had wrought. Smith again establishes the persona from Elegiac Sonnets as narrator, noting that, like her, the emigrants have known better times; and while she asks for tolerance and humanity in their treatment, most of Book 2, like Book 1, reflects the reaction of British republicanism to the chaos in France. She asks what promise the young year will bring those “who shrink from horrors such as War / Spreads o'er the affrighted world” (II, 45-46). Referring to French moderates, she observes that they see the “Temple, which they fondly hop'd / Reason would raise to Liberty, destroy'd (II, 48-49). She refers to “The headless corse of one, whose only crime / Was being born a Monarch” (II, 54-55) and to the war that had begun in February 1793. She hopes that when France revives, a free people will choose a king, speculating that such a ruler will be like the much-admired Henry IV.

But Smith still speaks for the original goals of the revolution, while the world “shrinks, amaz'd, / From Freedom's name, usurp'd and misapplied” (II, 80-81), and sees tyranny the greater evil. Before rejecting liberty, the reader, she writes, should consider the “black scroll, that tells of regal crimes / Committed to destroy her” (II, 88-90). Book 2 contains a lengthy description of the horror of war in France and closes with a meditation on the human condition:

… my soul is pained
By the variety of woes that Man
For Man creates—his blessings often turn'd
To plagues and curses: Saint-like Piety,
Misled by Superstition, has destroy'd
More than ambition; and the sacred flame
Of liberty becomes a raging fire,
When Licence and Confusion bid it blaze.

(II, 412-19)

In this poem, Smith, as she observes in her Preface, imitates the blank verse style of Cowper's The Task. But The Emigrants resembles Elegiac Sonnets in its description of natural scenery, the general tone of melancholy, and the ubiquitous autobiographical persona. The Emigrants stands apart from early editions of Elegiac Sonnets, however, in its powerful political statement. While the poem's ostensible subject is the unfortunate plight of those who have left France, it offers at best a mixed sympathy. The aristocrat has failed to understand what caused his fall, as have the refractory clergy she describes. Much of the poem is an apology for the early phases of the Revolution, mixed with the disappointment of a British republican that it had failed, resulting in yet another tyranny.

THE BANISHED MAN

Smith's seventh novel,³⁴ published in 1794, a year after The Old Manor House and within months after The Wanderings of Warwick, is one of her least satisfying from an artistic standpoint. It is her seventh novel in six years, and during the same time period she had published The Emigrants and three editions of Elegiac Sonnets, a remarkable production under any circumstances, but especially impressive considering the author's family obligations. In The Banished Man, however, she seems written out. The novel has a numbingly long autobiographical digression, in the form of Mrs. Denzil's story, and an aimless plot. Also, the text of the first edition is riddled with typographical errors.³⁵ The only real interest the work holds is the author's interpretation of events in France and the British reaction to them.

The story again reflects recent history, beginning in October 1792, in Austria near the French border at the castle of the Baron de Rosenheim. The baron is away, and the baroness and her daughter fearfully await the arrival of the French troops after their victory over the Prussian-Austrian army. Smith may refer to the battle at Valmy, in the passes of the Argonne, on September 20 of that year, although it did not precipitate the sort of wholesale retreat the novel describes. The baroness hears groans outside and eventually discovers the Chevalier d'Alonville and his father, the Viscount de Fayolles, both of whom had fought against the revolutionary forces. Fayolles is fatally wounded, and after his death, d'Alonville escorts the ladies to Koblenz, where they rejoin their husbands.

After d'Alonville returns to the castle and retrieves an important legal document for the baroness, he meets the Marquis de Touranges, an embittered aristocrat searching for his wife and mother and accompanied by the Abbé de St. Remi. He also meets Ellesmere, a young Englishman with whom he forms a friendship. After traveling about the German states, the group eventually goes to England with Ellesmere.

While d'Alonville ponders his future, he visits Ellesmere's family, meets Henrietta Denzil, another autobiographical character, and falls in love with her daughter, Angelina—a parallel, of course, to Augusta Smith. But d'Alonville feels he has to visit his brother in France, who has gone over to the revolutionary side and adopted the name du Fosse.³⁶ D'Alonville is caught, but his brother saves him, hoping to convert him to the revolution. D'Alonville steadily refuses and eventually, with his brother's help, escapes and returns to England, bringing jewelry given him by du Fosse for safekeeping. He briefly serves as a tutor to the children of Lord Abedore, fights a duel with a rake who has designs on Angelina, and marries his true love. With Mrs. Denzil, the couple then move to the continent, where they can live on d'Alonville's modest income from the sale of the jewelry given him by du Fosse, who was guillotined during the Terror.

Despite the work's artistic flaws, it has historical interest in its treatment of incidents of the time. Like Desmond, the novel describes recent events, the action beginning in 1792. The Abbé de St. Remi, for instance, tells of Madame de Touranges being held in prison during the September massacres, spattered with the blood of the slain, and released by the whim of the mob. Coblenz, where d'Alonville spends some time, was an important rallying point for emigrants, and the description of their community rings true. In volume 2, d'Alonville's captivity in Paris and his experience of seeing from his prison window 11 prisoners (three of them women) guillotined resembles contemporary accounts. The times were stormy in Paris in 1793, with the mob gaining ever greater control of the Assembly.

Smith introduces another historical allusion in Carlowitz, the Polish patriot whom d'Alonville and Ellesmere meet in Dresden. The revolutionary fervor of the times inspired a movement toward greater freedom in Poland, and the Poles were able to establish a constitutional monarchy in 1791. Later, Russia, Prussia, and Austria invaded. From the spring of 1794 until the fall, the Poles, led by Kosciusko, put up a determined resistance.³⁷ But the superior armies of the enemy and the nation's internal class divisions brought about eventual defeat, and the three powers partitioned Poland out of existence.

The Polish revolution would have been in progress as Smith wrote The Banished Man. Thus, the novel is yet another instance of the author's introduction of topical material. The peaceful revolution in Poland was inspired by the American and French experiments in democracy. However, we hear very little about Carlowitz's specific philosophy. He insists, “While I have any remains of strength I must use it, though my country exists no longer” (I, 163), but he addresses no issues. The Polish people and their friends abroad must have known that national extinction would be the result of defeat, and the novel surely reflects liberal sympathy for Polish Jacobinism during the days in 1794 when Poles fought for independence. Thus, the Carlowitz character instructs readers on current history.

In addition to using Carlowitz to introduce contemporary historical events, Smith juxtaposes his political liberalism against d'Alonville's hatred of republicanism and gives the Polish patriot the most stirring arguments. Even d'Alonville is nearly convinced, saying, “Had I been a Polonese, I might have thought and have acted as you have done. Had you been a native of France, you would have seen her monarchy exchanged for anarchy infinitely more destructive and more tyrannical, with the same abhorrence as I have done” (I, 164). And so it goes, when Carlowitz eventually makes his way to Paris seeking help for his country. D'Alonville meets him on his way back to England after his adventure in France, where the Pole was imprisoned for debt. Carlowitz tells of his disappointment:

I thought I should have found in the new land of freedom, persons in whom I should meet congenial sentiments, and be admitted to serve the cause in which my whole soul was engaged; but how cruelly I was disappointed, you may imagine, when I tell you that I quitted almost immediately a place where I saw and heard actions and language more inimical to the cause of the real liberty and happiness of mankind, than could have proceeded from the united efforts of every despot that had ever insulted the patience of the world.

(II, 163)

But Carlowitz remains a republican, and at the end of the novel, Smith describes him engaged in friendly discourse with d'Alonville: the Pole convinced that “worth alone is true nobility and true honor” and intent on returning home to “rouse the dormant or timid virtue of his country” (II, 172); d'Alonville remaining equally adamant against republican philosophy. Ellesmere, who had been wounded in battle on the continent, speaks the position of the author. He adheres “to that system of government as the best under which his own country had become the most flourishing in the world,” but “he seldom thought the bold assertions of Carlowitz were carried too far” (II, 172-173). Through Ellesmere, Smith sums up the views of moderate British republicans in a letter to d'Alonville: “You think, that even in its first germination it [the French Revolution] threatened to become the monster we now see. … I still think, that originating from the acknowledged faults of your former government, the first design, aiming only at the correction of these faults, at a limited monarchy and a mixed government, was the most sublime and most worthy [purpose] of a great people” (II, 321).

Smith provides an amusing political polarity in Sir Maynard Ellesmere, who is a Tory of the old school, and Mr. Nodes, “whose money was obtained by making buttons.” Much to the disgust of Sir Maynard, Nodes “impudently built a better house than Eddisbury Hall itself; placed a bust of Franklin in his vestibule; … had Ludlow among his books, quoted Milton to his companions, and drank to the rights of man” (II, 151). He also has pictures of Richard Price and Joseph Priestly in his house, two heroes of the British republican movement. Nodes seems the sort of republican one might have met at meetings of the local revolution society.

The conservative magazine The British Critic, which reviewed few novels, took note of The Banished Man, welcoming Smith back into the fold of correct politics. “We must not close this article,” the reviewer writes, “without congratulating the lovers of their King and the constitution, in the acquisition of an associate like Mrs. Charlotte Smith. … She makes full atonement by the virtues of The Banished Man, for the errors of Desmond.”³⁸ Both the fact that such a magazine would review Smith's novel at all and the tone of respect for the author demonstrate Smith's status, even though the political views expressed in her novels had damaged her reputation.

Yet the reviewer surely responds only to the sentiments of the novel's hero and ignores those of Carlowitz and Ellesmere. The political dialogues in The Banished Man, while not so effectively embedded in the plot as are similar passages in Desmond, demonstrate no real difference in the writer's politics. D'Alonville is the most charismatic character in the work, and he expresses political principles appropriate for a French émigré. Smith balances liberal against reactionary views, however, and the tone of the work favors the liberal.

Smith is never specific in her republicanism, and she creates no real political agenda. Her ideas come from Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and certainly John Locke. She valued liberty and hated tyranny. Desmond, The Emigrants, and The Banished Man show sympathy for the early ideals of the French Revolution and with the reform movement in England. Her heroes express the sentiments of moderate British republicanism; and one suspects that while Charlotte Smith might not care to dine with her footman (if she had had one), she would certainly have defended him as a fellow citizen and member of the social compact.

Notes

1. The Prelude, XI, 108-9, in Knight, 352.

2. A lettre de cachet could bring imprisonment without trial for the person against whom it was issued. Smith, by the way, does not criticize that instrument when Lord Montreville places his erring daughter, Frances Croft, in a French convent via the same device in Emmeline, published three years earlier.

3. The Prelude, IX, 247-48, in … [The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed William Knight (London: Macmillan, 1896)], 315.

4. Allene Gregory, in The French Revolution and the English Novel (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennekat Press, 1965), refers to only one British novel that was actually set in France during this time, The Bastile, or The Adventures of Charles Townley (1789), and Tompkins cites only Lindor and Adelaide (1792), which she describes as a conservative reaction.

5. Critical Review 2 (September 1792): 100.

6. Charlotte Smith, Desmond, a Novel (New York and London: Garland, 1974), I, i. Further references will be cited in the text.

7. Neither Smith's early biographers nor her letters mention a visit to France at this time. But in a letter to Joel Barlow dated November 18, 1792, she asks him to deliver a note to a friend in Paris and to make an enquiry there for she is “trying to go over in March or April—an enquiry which is so important in this plan on which my rebellious heart is set” (Huntington). This and other letters suggest that Smith hoped to leave England.

8. From Poetical Works, 4th ed., H. S. Milford (London, Oxford University Press, 1967), V, 388-392.

9. Alfred Cobban, ed., The Debate on the French Revolution: 1789-1800, 2d ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960), 55.

10. Conservative journals, such as The Anti-Jacobin, express a level of paranoia in discussing these groups reminiscent of McCarthyism in the United States in the 1950s. Surviving papers suggest that most members were moderate in their reform agenda. But some radical elements had connections with French officials. According to Mary Thrale, “The French were aware of the LCS [London Corresponding Society] and planned that a conquered Britain should have Thomas Hardy as Minister of Police and another prominent LCS member, John Thelwall, as one of the five members of an English Directoire.” See Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792-1799 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), xv.

11. Cobban, 64.

12. Paine, an Englishman, had traveled to America in time to help persuade the colonists to establish a new nation with works such as The American Crisis and Common Sense.

13. Samuel Edwards, Rebel: A Biography of Tom Paine (New York: Praeger, 1974), 121.

14. Dorset [The Lives of the Novelists, ed. Sir Walter Scott (London and New York: Dent and Sons, n. d.)], 322. Clifford Musgrave notes that the Duc d'Orléans (who later took the name Phillipe Égalité) was in Brighton in 1790, temporarily exiled by Louis XVI because of his republican sentiments. Brighton seems to have been a resort for Anglophile French for several years before the revolution, many of whom, no doubt, brought the radical thought of the continent to the city. See Life in Brighton from the Earliest Times to the Present (London: 1970), 105-106.

15. That Smith was acquainted with Williams can be demonstrated by one of Wordsworth's letters. He mentions stopping to see Smith in Brighton before leaving England for France in 1791. He reports that Smith treated him cordially and gave him a letter of introduction to Williams. See Ernest de Selincourt, The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787-1805) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), I, 66-67.

16. Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1955), II, 52. This edition condenses eight volumes to two.

17. See Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) for a fascinating and brief discussion of the flamboyant Mirabeau. Smith's and Williams's admiration for the man probably stems from his relative conservatism. He spoke in favor of a constitutional monarchy, but Schama (532-534) and other historians note that Mirabeau was in the pay of the king.

18. The Analytical Review 13 (August 1792), 428.

19. Williams, Smith, and others refer to Henry IV repeatedly as a model king, and they apparently got this perception from French reformers in the early stages of the Revolution, when many assumed that a constitutional monarchy might be the best model. Peter Burke reports that Good King Henry's name came up often in the Cahiers (letters from the provinces solicited by the Estates-General) as the sort of ruler the nation needed. See Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: NYU Press, 1978), 151.

20. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Heritage Press, 1963), I, Aetat 54: 317.

21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Everyman's Library, 1950), 311.

22. Cited in Goodwin, 539.

23. Jerome D. Wilson and William F. Ricketson, Thomas Paine (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 82.

24. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 130. The metaphor of the liberty tree manured with blood was probably a popular expression of the day. Thomas Jefferson's statement from a letter to W. S. Smith written in 1787, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure,” is another variation, although the earlier date is puzzling. See J. P. Foley, ed., The Jefferson Cyclopedia (New York: Russell and Russell, 1900), I, 499. Smith uses the metaphor again in Marchmont, when Althea comments on the death of a friend's husband who had gone “in search of a higher fortune … to those climates where the soil, manured with blood, seems to produce only disease and death” (III, 58). And a long footnote in The Young Philosopher details the sins of European kings, noting that “England … has seen its best blood manure its fields” in wars begun by tyrannical rulers (I, 88).

25. The asterisks are present in the text and result from a printer's error in this edition.

26. Allusions to the paintings of Salvator Rosa became de rigueur in gothic fiction.

27. In a curious letter at the end of the novel, Montfleuri declares his passion for Fanny in a letter to Desmond, which makes the sexuality of his response quite apparent, as opposed to Desmond's disinterested love for Geraldine. Montfleuri jokingly refers to Mrs. Waverley's concerns about his financial prospects and the danger to Fanny's soul in marrying a Catholic. He then affirms that her soul is not the object of his desire: “I shall not lead [her] out of the path that has been followed by the souls of her ancestors, or divert, from any other, it may like better to follow—My ambition lying quite in another line.” Later in the letter he writes, “My Fanni is a little angel, and I must have her—There is a good many chances of being reasonably happy with her, at least, for three or four years, and that is as much as any body has a right to expect” (III, 237-240). Perhaps Smith intended to contrast Montfleuri's carnal passion and clear-eyed realism about sexual attraction to Desmond's purer love, or perhaps she indulges in cultural stereotypes. But this “man talk” about women was unique in British sentimental fiction of the time, where sexual references were disguised by the language of sensibility.

28. Schama, 153.

29. Lefebvre, I, 241-242.

30. In a letter to Joseph Cooper Walker dated December 16, 1792, to an unnamed correspondent, Smith mentions “a Poem in two Books—which I am writing—about 1000 verses I think—& which will be sold here in quarto at 4. and then printed in a small edition to make a second volume to the Sonnets and other poems already published” (Huntington).

31. Curran [The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)], 133-134. Since the poem is organized into two books, citations are to volume and line number in Curran's edition.

32. See Schama, 49 ff, for a discussion of the inequities of income between high officials of the church and lower clergy.

33. Smith's comment about the excesses of the masses in France is probably another republican commonplace. Mary Wollstonecraft suggests that the excesses of the mob in Paris stems from centuries of repression in her Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794).

34. In a letter to Joseph Cooper Walker dated January 20, 1794, she mentions having finished the first volume of “the Novel called ‘The Exile’” (Huntington). Apparently she later changed the title to The Banished Man.

35. Reviewers had begun to note the number of errors in Smith's texts. She scolded William Davies in letters for sloppy work by his compositors, who, she writes, had “suffer'd many words to pass, which are not in English or any other language” in The Banished Man (August 29, 1794, Beinecke).

36. Du Fosse was the friend with whom Helen Maria Williams stayed in France. There seems no connection between him and Smith's turncoat aristocrat other than the fictional character's rejection of the ancien régime.

37. See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Princeton University Press: 1959), 411-435, for a discussion of Polish Jacobinism.

38. The British Critic 4 (December 1794): 623. The early approval of Desmond soon changed, as evidenced by a letter from William Cowper to William Hayley written in 1793: “There goes a rumour likewise which I have with equal confidence gainsaid, that Mrs. Smith wrote her Desmond bribed to it by the democratic party, by whom they say she is now actually supported.” Cowper also reports rumors that Hayley actually wrote Desmond. See The Correspondence of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright (New York: Haskell House, 1969), IV, 407-408.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Curran, Stuart, ed. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Contains nearly all the original poems published in the nine editions of Elegiac Sonnets during Smith's lifetime, as well as The Emigrants, Beachy Head, some of the children's poems, and the prologue to William Godwin's play Antonio. Also has an excellent introductory discussion of Smith's poems.

Smith, Charlotte. The Banished Man. 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Cadell, 1795. Cadell published the first edition in 1794.

———. Beachy Head, with Other Poems. London: Johnson, 1807.

———. Beachy Head, with Other Poems. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1993. Introduction by Terrence Hoagwood.

———. Celestina, a Novel. 3 vols. Dublin: Cadell, 1791.

———. Conversations, Introducing Poetry; Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History for the Use of Children and Young Persons. 2 vols. London: Johnson, 1804.

———. Desmond, a Novel. 3 vols. London: J. Robinson, 1792.

———. Desmond, a Novel. 3 vols. New York and London: Garland, 1974. Introduction by Gina Luria.

———. Elegiac Sonnets. London: Dodsley, 1784. Eight more editions would appear in Smith's lifetime.

———. Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle. Cadell: London, 1788.

———. Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle. London: Oxford English Novels, 1971. Introduction by Ann Ehrenpreis.

———. Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake. 5 vols. London: Cadell, 1789.

———. History of England, from the Earliest Records to the Peace of Amiens: In a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School. London: 1806. 3 vols. Vol. 1 and 2 by Smith; vol. 3 by Charlotte Mary Smith.

———. Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, Containing Narratives of Various Descriptions. 5 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1800.

———. Marchmont, a Novel. 4 vols. London: Low, 1796.

———. Marchmont, a Novel. 4 vols. in one. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1989. Introduction by Mary Anne Schofield.

———. Minor Morals, interspersed with sketches of natural history, historical anecdotes, and original stories.

———. Montalbert, a Novel. 3 vols. London: Lowe, 1796.

———. Montalbert, a Novel. 3 vols. in one. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1989. Introduction by Mary Ann Schofield.

———. A Narrative of the Loss of the Catherine, Venus and Piedmont Transports, and the Thomas, Golden Grove and Aeolus Merchant Ships Near Weymouth. London: Sampson Low, 1795.

———. The Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons. London: Johnson, 1807.

———. The Old Manor House, a Novel. London: J. Bell, 1793.

———. The Old Manor House, a Novel. Edited by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis. London: Oxford English Novels, 1969. Ehrenpreis includes an introduction.

———. Rambles Farther: A Continuation of Rural Walks: In Dialogues Intended for the Use of Young Persons. 2 vols. London: Cadell and Davies, 1796.

———. The Romance of Real Life. 2 vols. Dublin: 1787. A translation of Les Causes Célèbres.

———. Rural Walks: In Dialogues Intended for the Use of Young Persons. 2 vols. London: Cadell and Davies, 1795.

———. The Wanderings of Warwick. London: J. Bell, 1794.

———. What Is She. In Modern Theatre. Edited by Elizabeth Inchbald. 10 vols. London: Hurst Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811. Attribution is uncertain.

———. The Young Philosopher, A Novel. London: Cadell and Davies, 1798.

———. The Young Philosopher, a Novel. 4 vols. New York: Garland, 1974. Introduction by Gina Luria.

Letters

Beinecke Library, Yale University. New Haven, Conn. Charlotte Smith's Letters.

Harvard Library. Cambridge, Mass. Charlotte Smith's Letters.

Huntington Library. San Merino, Calif. Charlotte Smith's Letters.

Princeton University Library. Princeton, N.J. Charlotte Smith's Letters.

Secondary Sources

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. Introduction to The Old Manor House. London: F. C. and I. Rivington, 1820. Vol. 36 and 37 in Barbauld's British Novelists series.

Bowstead, Diana. “Charlotte Smith's Desmond: The Epistolary Novel as Ideological Argument.” In Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986. Bowstead finds that Smith used narrative voice in order to present a number of distinctive political positions. Brief mention of Smith's works appears in other essays of the collection.

Bray, Matthew. “Removing the Anglo-Saxon Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith's Later Work.” Wordsworth Circle 43 (1993): 155-158. Bray argues that Smith's later works, including her children's books, demonstrate “a vision that went against the patriotic Anglo-Saxonism” current in England during the war with France.

Brydges, Samuel Egerton. Censura Literaria. Vol. 7. London, 1815. Brydges, a poet himself, was acquainted with Smith and defends her against those who disliked her political views.

Curran, Stuart. “The I Altered.” In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Curran places Smith in the context of other women poets of the late 18th century and the development of romanticism.

Dorset, Catherine Ann. “Charlotte Smith.” In Sir Walter Scott. The Lives of the Novelists. London and New York: Everyman Library, n.d. Dorset, Smith's sister, wrote this biographical essay, which Scott included preceding his evaluation of the author's novels.

Foster, James R. “Charlotte Smith, Pre-Romantic Novelist.” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 43 (1928): 463-475.

———. History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England. New York: PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 1949.

Fry, Carrol L. Charlotte Smith: Popular Novelist. New York: Arno, 1980.

Hilbish, Florence M. A. Charlotte Smith: Poet and Novelist. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941. An excellent biography with copious references to letters and other historical documents.

Kavanagh, Julia. “Charlotte Smith.” In English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, Vol. 1. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863.

Phillips, Richard. British Public Characters of 1800-1801. Vol. 3. London, 1798. The discussion is apparently based on an interview with Smith.

Rogers, Katherine M. “Inhibitions on Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 11 (1988): 63-79.

———. Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. A fine study of the work of women writers in this period, with insightful commentary on Smith's works.

Scott, Sir Walter. “Charlotte Smith.” In The Lives of the Novelists. London and New York: Dent, n.d. Scott's discussion offers interesting insights into a more or less contemporary perspective on Smith's work.

Stanton, Judith. “Charlotte Smith's Literary Business: Income, Patronage, and Indigence.” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 6 (1987): 375-401. Stanton's study of Smith's correspondence offers interesting insights into the career of letters in the 1790s, as well as the author's life.

Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. A thorough study of the British novel from 1770 to the early 1800s.

Zimmerman, Sarah. “Charlotte Smith's Letters and the Practice of Self-Presentation.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 53 (1991): 50-77. Zimmerman uses Smith's letters to show the author's establishment of a public image.