SOURCE: Stanton, Judith. “Charlotte Smith and ‘Mr. Monstroso’: An Eighteenth-Century Marriage in Life and Fiction.” Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 7, no. 1 (2000): 7-22.

[In the following essay, Stanton examines Smith's letters and concludes that her husband, Benjamin Smith, provided the model for many of the antagonists in her novels.]

Benjamin Smith was rich, charming and handsome. Yet his miserable 41-year marriage to Charlotte Smith was an almost textbook case of the atrocities a man could legally inflict upon his wife and children in eighteenth-century England Her two most reliable biographers until recently¹ shed little light on what led the 37 year-old Charlotte Smith to leave her husband, taking her seven children with her. Catherine Ann Dorset, Charlotte's sister, was no doubt being discreet about her brother-in-law's outrages. F. M. A. Hilbish, writing in the 1930s, brings more serious charges against him, but only by shrewdly interpreting Charlotte's barely veiled fictional accounts of similar men and marriages.

Charlotte Smith's 430 letters, which I have edited, provide a great deal of information about Benjamin's degraded and ill-spent life. On the whole, the letters confirm Dorset's memories, substantiate Hilbish's surmises, and add to both. Even more interesting, new details in the letters permit us to identify Charlotte's many and varied uses of her husband as a model for antagonists in her fiction. The letters not only confirm facts from earlier accounts of her life but also reveal how very autobiographical her fiction is. In particular, they invite us to continue, as Hilbish did, to plunder Smith's fiction for her life story, especially where biographical information is scant.

Previous biographies, surviving estate papers, and especially the letters supply tantalizing glimpses of Charlotte and Benjamin's life. On 23 February 1765, 15 year-old Charlotte Turner was married to 24 year-old Benjamin Smith in an ill-considered but carefully orchestrated match (16 July 1804).² For two reasons, her father and the aunt who raised her thought the match to be advantageous, even necessary.

First, Charlotte may have been in the way at home. Her father, Nicholas Turner, “a gay man of the world” (Dorset, p. 25) whose properties once produced £4000 a year (2 July 1805), needed money. His bride-to-be, Miss Henrietta Meriton³, came with a much-needed fortune of £20,000 (Hilbish, p. 36). Dorset speculates that Turner wanted to protect his much-loved daughter Charlotte from her new mother-in-law (pp. 24-25). Hilbish, drawing on pointedly autobiographical material from Letters of a Solitary Wanderer and Emmeline, extends Dorset's speculation and concludes that Charlotte and Miss Meriton disliked each other intensely (pp. 41-45). Whichever the reason, Smith later bitterly wrote that her father and aunt “sold [me] like a Southdown sheep” (4 February 1803).

Second, marriage to Benjamin promised Charlotte financial security. He was partner to his father Richard Smith, a respectable merchant from the West Indies and a director of the East India Company. In an interpolated story in Celestina, Charlotte depicts a husband burdened by gambling debts. The West Indian background of Elphinstone's family duplicates that of the Smiths. Like Benjamin's father Richard Smith, Elphinstone's father holds property in the West Indies (Antigua rather than Barbados) but returned to England with a wife, two sons, and three daughters, the exact composition of Benjamin's family. As with Benjamin, too, when Elphinstone's marriage to an innocent young woman is being arranged, his character is not scrutinized.

In any case, young Charlotte Turner was bright, beautiful, cheerful and accomplished: she read, drew, danced and acted, and had published her first poem. An elegant schooling in Kensington prepared her for the life of a gentleman's daughter and for a handsome and charming suitor. On their brief acquaintance⁴, Benjamin probably appeared to be both. In later years, she took pride in their handsome children although she was preoccupied with the darker side of their resemblance to him: “Would to God none of the children partook of his nature” (3 March 1803), she wrote on one occasion. And again, “Would to God any one of them were not like him in some way or other” (26 April 1806).

Charlotte's aunt and other relatives set out only to ensure Charlotte's fortune by securing Benjamin's interest. Indeed, Charlotte may even have fallen in love—as a 14 year-old girl properly managed might do. Writing in 1803 to her patron, the Earl of Egremont, Charlotte was distressed to find that Benjamin was spreading a rumor that she had loved him. Yet several of her fictional self-portraits depict young women in love with debauchees in the making. Mrs Elphinstone, for one, admits to loving “him; he was the most cheerful and sanguine creature in the world” (Celestina, [London: T. Cadell, 1791], II, pp. 274-275).

Doubtless, Benjamin Smith had charm. However degenerate the characters modeled on him are, most of them are charming, from Mr Stafford and Delamere in Emmeline to Elphinstone and Vavasour in Celestina to Philip Somerive in The Old Manor House. Moreover, after the Smiths separated, while Benjamin lived in exile in Scotland, he successfully used his charm to convert Charlotte's supporters to his side. By 1803, the Earl of Egremont yielded to Benjamin's ingratiating qualities and turned against Charlotte. Inexplicably, and to Charlotte's great mortification, Egremont called her scapegrace husband “the best of the bunch” (5 March, 16 July and 13 August 1804). The best, he meant, of Richard Smith's heirs, a large, litigious family.

Whether Benjamin was educated or even literate is uncertain. In 1805, Charlotte complained that, among his other follies, he collected rare books, “tho he cannot write, even in his own language” (14 February 1805). Complete illiteracy seems unlikely on two accounts. First, two of her letters to him survive, written in terms that suggest he could read, as does the fact that he was a merchant. Second, one letter by him survives, written from his final residence, the Berwick jail (23 September 1805). Although the letter could have been written for him, the handwriting matches a signature of his from the 1770s and reproduced in Hilbish (p. 52). The truth is more likely what Hilbish surmises, drawing again on accounts in Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. Benjamin was probably typical of ill-educated rich boys from the West Indies, who were often placed in schools where they were abused, considered stupid, and paid other boys to do their lessons and take their floggings (pp. 46-47).

Charlotte Smith's depiction of the two Elphinstone brothers in Celestina only muddies the question. Like Benjamin and his only brother Richard, they were born and partially educated in the West Indies. The elder has “more money and less understanding than any boy of his age”, is “tyrannical,” and “as much hated for his overbearing temper as despised and laughed at for his ignorance and vanity” (II, p. 251). The younger, who figures in the novel, is “open, good humoured, and undesigning; too gay and careless to think, too quick to learn … [W]hen he neglected to do his business somebody or other was always willing to do it for him” (II, p. 251). The truth of Benjamin's character may lie between these two, with some part of him lending traits to each one. Certainly Smith's letters capture his mentality and intelligence: Benjamin Smith emerges from her correspondence as bright but ignorant, overbearing, and undisciplined.

Thus matched only in looks, extroverted temperament, and high expectations for fortune, the couple lived unhappily together for over 22 years. Catherine Dorset wrote that the marriage was still young when Charlotte Smith began to face “the mortifying conviction that she was subjected to one so infinitely her inferior”. In what appears to be Smith's earliest surviving letter, she wrote a grim epigraph for her life:

No disadvantage could equal those I sustained; the more my mind expanded, the more I became sensible of personal slavery; the more I improved and cultivated my understanding, the farther I was removed from those with whom I was condemned to pass my life; and the more clearly I saw by these newly-acquired lights the horror of the abyss into which I had unconsciously plunged.

(p. 218)

In several stories of wives as ill-matched in marriage as she, Smith did not hesitate to re-create her experiences in this abyss. Each of these alter egos—Mrs Stafford, Mrs Elphinstone and Mrs Verney—has an improved and cultivated understanding and a sharp sense of being condemned for life to living with an inferior being. Smith describes the debasement and triumph of each woman in much the same language. Each morally inferior husband seeks out the town where he can practise his vices. Each condemned wife retreats to remote country locations. There the wives restore their own and their children's health and live modestly, adapting to reduced circumstances.

Details of Charlotte Smith's fictional bad marriages echo events and patterns of the 22 years she lived with her husband. During that time, Charlotte bore 12 children, nine of whom lived into adulthood. The Smiths moved several times, resorting early to moving to escape creditors, a frequent pattern of their later lives together and apart. From 1765 to 1768, they lived in London in a cramped, gloomy house. Southgate next provided a country location more congenial to Charlotte's health. In 1771, they returned to Tottenham near London, where Richard Smith hoped to rein in his son's spending. From 1774, they lived at Lys Farm in Hampshire until financial disaster struck in 1783. The 9 years in Hampshire may have held some happiness for both: Charlotte was always healthier and more comfortable in the country, and Benjamin achieved enough standing to be appointed sheriff in 1781.

Nevertheless, Charlotte's fate had long been sealed. Dorset and Hilbish give full, familiar accounts of the years of debt and desperation that led to the couple's separation (Dorset, pp. 26-48; Hilbish, pp. 57-101). In 1776, while the couple still lived at Lys Farm, Richard Smith's death opened the door for real misery. Spurning legal advice, he had written his own will. Complex and contradictory, it begged for litigation. Worse yet, he foolishly made Benjamin its executor, along with Charlotte and his wife Lucy.⁵ The two women were powerless. No more suited to manage a trust than a company, Benjamin was charged in a devastavit by his brother-in-law, Thomas Dyer, for debts he had incurred against the estate (9 October 1793,? December 1802).⁶ While he was at King's Bench Prison, until 2 July 1784, Charlotte dutifully spent much time with him and arranged to have her first volume of poems published to secure his release. By October, acting out of a sense of duty worthy of her most honorable heroines, she fled with him for a day to establish him in Dieppe, just ahead of creditors. After returning to England for the children, she joined him at a castle he had leased in Normandy. There the family spent a cold, harsh winter.

The imprisonment and flight to France deeply shook Charlotte's nerves and sense of security. As a novelist, she rehearsed some version of these events with each of the three couples modeled on her marriage. For Mrs Stafford, “nothing remained but to follow her husband to a prison, or prevail on him to go to the continent while she attempted anew to settle his affairs” (Emmeline, [London: Oxford University Press, 1971], p. 301). After sending her husband ahead, Mrs Stafford takes out a mortgage on the estate and then embarks for Dieppe with her friend Emmeline (p. 302). The novel emphasizes “the fatigue of travelling with small children”: Mrs Stafford traveled with three children younger than 5. Charlotte herself managed the journey with an infant, a toddler, two adolescents and no companion. Though Mr and Mrs Elphinstone in Celestina also travel with children, their trip to Antigua is not so desperate. Smith develops the most detailed and sinister flight to France in Desmond.

In the spring of 1785, Charlotte returned to England with her husband and children to settle in Woolbeding in Sussex, still in such financial straits that she had no choice but to seek needed funds by publishing. The third and fourth editions of Elegiac Sonnets came out in 1786. A potentially more lucrative venture into publishing fiction failed, however, after Thomas Cadell withdrew her translation of Manon Lescaut. This loss of hoped-for funds no doubt hastened the end of an already shaky marriage.

On 15 April 1787, Charlotte Smith “quitted Mr Smith to avoid personal ill treatment on [the] one hand & an execution from Mr Silver [an unidentified creditor] on the other that would have stripped my family of the very beds they slept on” (? September 1802). Her biographers have shed little light on this event. Dorset criticizes Charlotte, however, for failing to make legal arrangements that would settle money on her and the children. This serious oversight meant that all the interest money on her three small fortunes of £2000, 2000 and 3000 legally belonged to Benjamin. She had no security but her wits. Similarly in Desmond, Geraldine Verney cannot get at her own small fortune because it was not properly settled on her during her lifetime, but on him ([London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1792], III, p. 13). As to Benjamin's life after the separation, Charlotte's contemporary biographers are silent.

Smith's later letters paint a darker picture of Benjamin than one of mere financial irresponsibility. Imprudence, depravity, deceit, and abuse of others marked his entire life. During their London years, he regularly overspent his income of £2000 (the household costing £900 of that), a sum considerably greater than a mere competency. When funds dwindled, he enlisted his wife to beg more money from his father (10 February 1803). The harsh satire of Benjamin as Mr Stafford in Emmeline also depicts him as a foolish projector, which he was. Charlotte joked to friends that her husband would turn anything into a project. Destitute in 1804, Charlotte complained that he was “flourishing away at an handsome house & has sent for Guinea fowl, peacocks & a filtring stone” (13 August and 8 September 1804). He also begged for money for “a collection of scarce books, a new hobby horse of his” (14 February 1805).

Benjamin's fiscal transgressions, however, far exceeded the fictional Stafford's folly of trying to make money by fertilizing fields with discarded wigs. They more nearly resemble Philip Somerive's destruction of his family's estate under the watchful but powerless eye of his father in The Old Manor House. Mr Somerive, a gentle, ineffective father, suggests a portrait of Charlotte's father-in-law, who lent the couple great sums of money without inquiring too closely into their needs. In fact, the Somerives closely resemble Richard Smith and his children. Richard Smith even tried to effect Benjamin's reform by buying him houses—one in the country where Smith hoped to keep his son out of trouble, then one in town where he hoped to keep an eye on him. One of the two Somerive sons, Orlando, aspires to the priesthood, which Benjamin's older brother Richard attained. Both the real and fictional families have three daughters: the youngest Smith girl, a stepdaughter, was peripheral to family concerns; similarly, the eldest Somerive daughter is safely married and living in Ireland.

The most telling parallels lay in Philip's trespasses: gambling, wild spending, excessive drinking and violence. Benjamin squandered almost half of Richard Smith's estate, valued at £36,000 when his father died. Charlotte writes that Benjamin's executorship “consisted of dissipating about £16,000” (13 September 1802) or “in taking about seventeen thousand pounds more than could possibly belong to him” (? December 1802).⁷ The loss, coupled with the estate's entanglement in litigation, drove three of Smith's five sons into the military for occupations suitable to their status, just as Philip's fiscal irresponsibility forced Orlando to join the army.

After Benjamin's separation from Charlotte, he lived primarily in Hamilton, Scotland, under an alias—Bryan, or Brian, Symmonds⁸—to escape prosecution for debt (14 April 1801). At Hamilton, he supported himself and a second family on money that he periodically recovered from his wife. A few years after the separation, Charlotte believed he had “another family by a cook who livd with him” (9 October 1793). This woman was doubtless “Mrs. Millar”, whom Charlotte variously calls his “housekeeper”, a Scotch cook (8 September 1804), his “bedmaker” (? August 1805) and “his femme de charge” (16 October 1803). It especially disgusted Charlotte that her husband supported his mistress with interest money from her own marriage portions:

I am distressed for the means of paying for his family's food while he cocks his hat on one side, looks knowing & buckish & struts off with more than is left to any one of his children for his ‘dear Mrs. Miller (“who had 300£ to her fortune & saved his life once.”)’

(14 October 1803)

Usually he traveled incognito to England to claim Charlotte's interest money and sometimes her book money. But when her payments arrived in July and January, he thought the weather was too severe for travel:

he will not trust his invaluable life & most precious person while the weather is cold. Nor will he hazard the vernal equinox. He will only venture his butterfly form when the sun is in Taurus—or Gemini∗.

(10 February 1803), ∗ i.e. in May or June

Charlotte recaps these unwelcome visits late in The Old Manor House with Benjamin in a cameo role. Monimia's unfeeling guardian consigns her to live with a Mrs Newill, a woman of sour temper and relaxed morals. When Mrs Newill's “brutal and extravagant husband” unexpectedly returns to town, those who had been “willing to promote her welfare, grew cold when they found their bounty served only to support the husband in drunkenness” ([London: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 478). Interestingly, although several friends gave Charlotte money when asked, she never notes that Benjamin's presence cost her their support.

She does, however, remark upon Benjamin's “barbarous & unnatural conduct towards his children” (19 March 1802). Usually it manifested in his refusal to support them while claiming for himself money they needed desperately. Not only did he cost her children nearly half of their inheritance and impede the settlement of the estate by mismanaging it, but he also controlled her marriage portions. In 1801, he claimed most of the interest payments on one of the £2000 portions and would not allow her interest on the other due to her when her stepmother Mrs Chafys died (23 August 1801). He tied up the £3000 portion when he bought woodland from Sir James Lake (3 December 1802).

In Desmond, Charlotte draws on the debacle of her marriage portions to intensify her heroine's plight. Geraldine Verney owns that she would have given up her marriage portion to support her children, but could not: “‘I have nothing during Mr. Verney's life, but a trifling allowance by way of pin-money, which I have never asked for, and he has never paid’” ([1792], III, p. 13).

Near the end of her life, Charlotte fought to ensure that her fortune would be settled on her three children born after Richard Smith died and so omitted from his will (25 January, 20 March, 1 June, 5 and 14 July 1804). In this one small matter, she ultimately succeeded. Nevertheless, it rankled that Benjamin provided for his mistress using the interest income from her marriage portions (25 January 1804). Never mind that it legally belonged to him. An honorable man, Charlotte believed, would never rob his children. Nor would he be petty. Much of Benjamin's financial high-handedness was on a grand scale, but some of it was niggling and mean-spirited: when she wrote him on business, he would return her letters unopened and unread to put her to extra expense (13 August 1804).

The children's maintenance money from the estate should have secured them modest support. But almost as soon as Charlotte separated from Benjamin, he learned to appropriate their money for his own use. In that year, he demanded and got £2520 for the care of his children in 1787, care which he did not provide (? September 1802). Elsewhere she claims that he received £2700 of their maintenance money and £700 more for trumped-up business expenses (? December 1802). In Emmeline, Lord Montreville's illegal appropriation of his niece's rightful estate shadows this practice.

What Charlotte called abuses and Benjamin claimed as a legal right continued throughout his life. From 1799 to 1803, he received £918 from the estate. Of all that, he gave £20 to George, £10 to Lionel, and “one whole pound” to his daughter Harriet, gravely ill from malaria. Despite that scant outlay for his children, he “got into Embarrassment again” (10 February 1803). In 1801, Charlotte tried but failed to compel him to support George for an ensigncy in the Army (31 July 1801). He did give his youngest son £20 (4 November 1801) but asked for it back (9 September 1802a). He returned to Scotland with £400 in all. In 1802, Lord Egremont urged Charlotte to send Benjamin £50 of medical bills incurred for Harriet's dangerous fevers, but he refused to pay even the first one for £13.8s. (11 August 1802). Egremont responded that “he did not consider him so honest a Man as an highwayman” (23 August 1802). In 1803, Benjamin received £744 in 6 months while Charlotte and the children received nothing (13 January 1804). During this time, she was nearly destitute.

Lucy Smith Newhouse, Charlotte and Benjamin's third daughter, was perhaps the neediest of all the Smith clan. Years after her father had left, Lucy married against her mother's wishes. The death of Lucy's husband, who had treated her brutally, left her with three young children. In spite of Charlotte's earlier opposition to the match, she took pains to provide for the hapless family. Benjamin took none. On one of his forays into England, as Charlotte recounted to Egremont, Lucy's “barbarous father with 500£ in his pocket pass'd her poor Cottage in a post chaise & pulld up the glass the moment he saw her who accidentally stood at the gate with those helpless Orphans” (14 and 15 October 1803). A year later, Charlotte quotes Benjamin as saying, “‘if his daughter & her children were starving & perishing for want at his gate he would not give her a farthing to save their lives’” (13 August 1804).

Of all Smith's married antagonists, Verney in Desmond seems most clearly modeled on Benjamin's paternal practices. When Verney returns home unannounced after a 5-week absence with a dissolute companion, he runs his wife Geraldine out of the room in front of her guest, her kind friend Bethel. “‘There, get ye along to the nusery [sic], that's the proper place for women and children’” (II, p. 36). Then, to Bethel, Verney claims the children are “‘encumbrances’”:

“Poh,” replied [Verney] carelessly, “I don't neglect her—but children—when one has a house full of them, as I think I am likely to have, pull confounded hard; and as to their promising I know nothing that they promise, but to grow up, to pull harder still, and find out that I am in their way before I have any mind to relinquish the enjoyments of this life”.

(II, p. 39)

In the letters, Charlotte supports her negative assessments of Benjamin by citing the opinions of two men of character who had dealt with him. William Augustus Bettesworth, “a very good Lawyer” in Hampshire and “much trusted as a Man of integrity and abilities,” considered Benjamin Smith's conduct “Weak & extravagant” (3 December 1802). Mr Tayler, long involved with the trust settlement, concluded that Benjamin Smith was “quite incapable of governing or acting for himself” (4 November 1801). Their evaluations, along with Charlotte's many financial clashes with Benjamin, support her damning assertion that he was “as troublesome as some idea of power, extreme folly & total want of principal can make a Man” (15 March 1802).

Less frequently but with burning anger, Charlotte Smith wrote of physical abuse at the hands of her husband. He was “the wretch who has embitterd her life, insulted her, robbed her, struck her, attempted in the frantic jealousy of conscious unworthiness, to rob her of her character” (8 September 1804). Four accounts of incidents from their life together survive. She claimed to have witnesses good enough for court for two of them:

once in his Coach going to dine at Lord Clanricardes he threw a large bunch of keys at me & hurt me on the breast, without any provocation but my saying we should make Lady Clanricarde wait & put her out of humour … another [witness], a relation of mine … has seen him strike & kick me, & once at table, throw a quartern loaf at my head without provocation at all but the phrenzy, for so it seemed at the moment.

(25 January 1804)

Returning to Brighton in 1805, Smith recalls that years before she tried:

to negociate [sic] with his Creditors for his return, & have watched at the window for Bailiffs, while he sat within, uttering curses against me, & while my ten children, one then at the breast, often clung round me in terror as his violence threatend my personal safety.

(10 September 1805)

She first mentioned her danger in a 1793 letter to Joseph Cooper Walker: Benjamin's temper was “so capricious & often so cruel that my life was not safe” (9 October 1793). Not long after the separation, at the urging of friends, she agreed to see him again, thinking his visit would last only a few days. He stayed for 3 weeks. At first, he “treated me with more than his usual brutality—threatening to sell the furniture, the Books, and every necessary which I have twice saved from the rapacity of his creditors” (14 January 1788). Near the end of his stay, “a new fit of frenzy has seizd him; he has broke open all my drawers where my papers were”. Then he left for London, planning to claim her earnings from Thomas Cadell, her publisher. This was the only account written during one of his “visits”; the rest are retrospective.

Remarkably, Smith depicts no such abuse in the novels, it being beyond the bounds of good taste in fiction, if not in life. I would argue, however, that she draws on her experience with her gin-soaked husband for much of the disrespectful, drunken and seductive behavior in her antagonists and minor characters. When Verney curses, his oaths suggest Charlotte's years of exposure to Benjamin Smith. Ignoring his wife, Verney greets Bethel:

“Damme, Bethel, how long is it since I saw you last? I thought you were gone to kingdom come.—Here's Newminster and I, we came only last night from his house in Norfolk,—Damme, we had to raise the wind together; for I have had the Philistines in my house and be cursed to them, who had laid violent hands on all my goods and chattels, except my wife and her brats, … I wish I could find out who is so damned generous, I'd try to touch them for the ready I want now”.

(II, pp. 35-36)

After banishing Geraldine from the room, Verney tries to buy “‘a hellish clever trotting mare’” from Bethel and swears “‘by heaven’” his amazement that his mother-in-law has paid some of his large debts, for he thought “‘she'd have seen me at the devil’” first (II, p. 38).

Finally, the letters give abundant examples of Benjamin's degraded life. Soon after they were separated, he admitted—or perhaps boasted—to Charlotte of his connections with people who indulged in “the desperation of gaming houses” (14 January 1788). She could not have been surprised. Benjamin certainly drank; she once described him as “this unhappy Man, who is drunk with Gin half his time & sleeps most of the rest” (5 December 1802). He may have eaten to excess: after one tormenting visit, Charlotte notes that he “waddled off to Hamilton” (14 October 1803). She first mentions his “infidelity, and with the most despicable objects” in 1793 (9 October). She knew that while married he “used to trespass with the kitchen staff”, a practice she would have borne but for his violence. And of course, though the Smiths were never divorced, Benjamin managed to acquire a second family by living for many years with Mrs Miller in Scotland.

Apart from this anecdotal evidence, Charlotte gave few details about the nature of his gross debaucheries. Three of her revelations are suggestive. First, his relationship with his daughters is open to interpretation. While still at home, he committed “the most gross violations of decency and morality before his daughters” (5 November 1802). We can only speculate whether Charlotte considered these acts to be his usual drunkenness, his dallying with the female servants, or something worse, such as a sexual assault on one of the daughters. If he molested his daughters, it is unlikely that Charlotte would have been explicit. He was not above making sexual overtures, or worse, to women much younger than he. Once while passing through Petworth, he flirted with Harriet, his youngest daughter, perhaps not recognizing her as he batted “those amiable ogglers of his” at her (30 July 1804). Second, already burdened with his Scottish family, he attempted bigamy by trying to take a second wife (5 December 1802):

a Miss Gordon—On whom he passd himself for a single Man, a person of fortune, under a temporary cloud—To this Woman, he actually lent my books, saying I was a relation of his familys!—& things went so far, that the wedding presents were bought.

(10 July 1804)

Worst of all, after he died at 63, Charlotte discovered that he had promised to marry an 18 year-old girl, “the niece of his old Concubine, with both of whom he lived in common!—and by the former, he has left a child which he desires his family to protect & bring up!” (26 April 1806). Thus, from the grave, he managed to mock his wife's moral sensibilities with a final lewd insult.

In the last 6 years of her life, Charlotte often describes her husband's trespasses specifically, mostly to the Earl of Egremont. Unfortunately, her candor turned Egremont against her and in Benjamin's favor. However debauched Benjamin was, Egremont found her reports of that debauchery unacceptably haranguing and indiscreet. Nor could she have helped her cause by constant complaints about Benjamin's failure to do his duty by the children. The Earl had six children by his long-time mistress, Elizabeth Iliffe. Though a man of his class would have considered himself far above a mere author's censure, his unhappy marriage to Iliffe in 1801 was surely untimely for Smith. Nor did he legitimize the children. The title passed to a cousin.

I suspect a further indiscretion in the sexual suggestiveness of Smith's many claims to being “degraded by belonging to such a monster” (3 March 1803). It disgusted her to be “yoke fellow with this idiotic brute” (23 August 1801). These allusions to the horror of her sexual bondage crystallized only once into an explicit statement. To her friend Sarah Rose, she laments that she was ever “sold, a legal prostitute, in my early youth, or what the law calls infancy” (15 June 1804).

Charlotte Smith had read widely in the melodramatic fiction of her day: gambling, debauchery, seduction and ruin were effective, routine plot devices. And yet the story of her life, as revealed by Dorset, Hilbish, and her own amazing letters, was scarcely superseded by anyone else's fiction. It is tempting to wonder just how far Benjamin Smith went. Smith's most degraded characters, Philip Somerive and Mr Verney, share too many factual points of similarity to Benjamin to dismiss their worst behavior as if it did not derive from his.

Near the end of Desmond, when Verney flees to France ahead of his wife Geraldine, he sends a friend back to get her. She is to leave the children behind, but she does not. The Duc de Romagnecourt “considered the sums he lost to Verney as a sort of passport to her favour” (III, p. 3). Bethel, Desmond, and Geraldine herself see this; in fact, Desmond agonizes that Verney has “sold her to him [the Duc]” (III, p. 42). The Duc attempts to seduce her and belittles her coldness, assured that she belongs to him. Geraldine leaves for France, “‘myself a miserable slave, returning with trembling and reluctant steps, to put on the most dreadful of all fetters?—Fetters that would even destroy the freedom of my mind’” (III, p. 71).

No doubt Charlotte strongly identified with this heroine. Only the novelist Mrs Denzil is more autobiographical. Geraldine's image of the married woman as slave is also Smith's. She writes of her personal experience of enslavement in her letters as well as her novels, always in a cry of outrage and despair: She is worse off than “the veriest slave that ever drudged in a counting house” (7 July 1802) and “a wretched slave” (13 September 1802). Her life is “this weary pilgrimage, this worse than African bondage” (4 February 1803). While Geraldine's husband dies—surely a bit of authorial wishful thinking—Charlotte knew no release from bondage. Because true confessions were beyond the pale for a woman of Smith's class and sensibilities, she never would have admitted the depths of any degradation she might have experienced with her husband.

For again and again, the worst actions of Charlotte Smith's most despicable antagonists resemble Benjamin's known actions, as preserved in her letters, enough to lend credence to the many epithets she invented for him: “this ideotic [sic] brute” (23 August 1801), this “madman and a fool” (13 June 1802), this “biped” and “wretched monster” (1 November 1802), “this voracious unfeeling Monster” (9 January 1803), this “nauseous hypocrite” (8 September 1804), a “being, human only in form” (14 February 1805), “Mr. Monstroso” (16 July 1804). Even if Benjamin never sold his wife's favors, he must have been capable of anything. “Vicious animals”, she wrote of him in 1802, “always become worse as they grow older” (5 November).

Hard documentary evidence of Benjamin Smith's shortcomings is limited. Estate papers confirm that sizeable amounts of money were awarded to him while he lived in exile in Scotland, and the address on one surviving note shows that he used an alias while there. His two prison terms for debt, the first in 1784 and the second from early 1804 until his death on 23 February 1806, confirm a lifelong pattern of fiscal irresponsibility. An article presenting Charlotte Smith's view of her husband is necessarily partisan. Her outrage will lead some, now as then, to blame her for not submitting to tradition and to law. Any money Benjamin secured from the Smith trust or his wife's marriage articles was his under the laws of his day.

Some might dismiss Charlotte's “Mr. Monstroso” as merely the construct of a wronged woman. Yet we must consider when, why, and for whom she constructed this portrait—not merely friends or even business associates but the Earl of Egremont. As her one-time patron and Trustee to the Smith estate, he was the one man who had the power to make or break her. In 1798, because he assumed the Trusteeship, she abandoned her lucrative novel writing, believing that her troubles were over. When Egremont repeatedly sided with Benjamin, she complained. When he exhorted her to be silent, she continued to confront him with the story of Benjamin Smith's dishonorable conduct toward his children and herself, insisting on her version of the truth. As a woman and as a wife in late eighteenth-century England, she had limited rights and little recourse to justice other than what she could obtain with her pen.

In 1802, Egremont suggested that if Charlotte and her children lived with Benjamin, the Trust income would be sufficient. Indignant, Charlotte explained her objections to the Earl's ill-considered proposal:

This idea I could easily convince you is erroneous, but it would be by an history of the former life and conduct of Mr B Smith which would be too long for you to read—If continual & unmeaning waste of money which he refusd to the absolute support of his children, if the most brutish & unmanly personal insults towards me so that my life was often in danger, if the most gross violations of decency and morality before his daughters, & if the entire annihilation of my faculties by terror of his frantic & furious passions on [sic] one hand, and on the other of Bailiffs that beseiged the doors, if all these circumstances would contribute to make the income do, then it might be a matter of prudence.

But I am sure your Lordship must see that the Man who is the horror of all his family, whose whole life has been a tissue of folly varied only by wickedness & without one virtue to redeem his bad qualities, who, whether as a Son, a brother, husband, father, or Guardian has invariably undone every one with whom he was connected as far as was in his power, & who now avails himself even of his vices to deprive his children of their support arising from my fortune after having spent all his own, & even that which ought to have been settled on me according to those very articles of which he now takes advantage: Your Lordship is too correct a judge of human nature not to be convinced that no good could possibly arise from my living with him.

(5 November 1802)

Moreover, she claims that she “can bring persons who will prove” that leaving him was “absolutely necessary”, persons whose evidence would hold up in court. But she had never had the wherewithal to afford divorce proceedings. Within months, this stand cost her security, patronage, and what was left of her popularity and her career. Egremont, once her patron, was still in a position to be her strongest advocate. By insisting on telling him her version of the truth, she risked all and lost all. Even after Egremont forbade her to write to him, her outrage over the law's injustice and her husband's offenses against her and her hapless family echoes through the letters. Idealistically she believed in a code of honor and a cult of sensibility even after they failed her. Those beliefs compelled her to continue to anatomize her husband's offenses at any cost. The fact that she did so lends credibility to her story.

Notes

1. Dorset, “Charlotte Smith” in Sir Walter Scott, Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists (Edinburgh, 1834); Florence May Anna Hilbish, Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist (1749-1806) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941). Loraine Fletcher's Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan, 1998) discusses the marriage throughout her study. Carrol Fry's Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne, 1996) focuses on Smith's literary achievement.

2. Benjamin Smith was 3 years old in 1744 when he came to England from Barbados in the hold of a cargo ship. For references to Charlotte Smith's letters, see the “List of Correspondence Cited”.

3. Petworth House Archives 8204, West Sussex Records Office, Chichester.

4. A copy of an 18 August 1773 deed of settlement between Nicholas Turner, Charlotte's father, and Benjamin Smith mentions a deed between Turner and Miss Meriton from 24 and 25 August 1764. This suggests that only 6 months elapsed between Nicholas Turner's formal involvement with Miss Meriton and his success in marrying Charlotte off. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK, 8204.

5. Lucy Towers Smith, remarkably enough, was the maternal aunt who raised Charlotte and masterminded her marriage to Benjamin. She married Richard Smith on 15 May 1767, just over 2 years after Charlotte's wedding, and became a very wealthy woman.

6. In the two letters, Charlotte merely says the family brought the charges that sent Benjamin to King's Bench Prison. On a copy of Richard Smith's will with notes in her hand, she names Dyer (Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK, 8202).

7. Dorset explicitly claims that £20,000 was lost “[b]esides what was expended in law, and what was wasted by improvidence” because Richard Smith let his solicitor persuade him to “lend that sum to a distressed baronet on mortgage” (p. 37).

8. The alias is given in two letters (13) June 1802 and 14 October 1803). A third letter, to Benjamin, preserves the alias and gives his Scottish address: “Bryan Symmonds, Esq^re / Camberwell / Hamilton”. Benjamin refused the note, putting her to the double expense of return postage. She sent the canceled noted to William Tyler, the Earl of Egremont's steward.

List of Charlotte Smith's Correspondence Cited

Letter to Thomas Cadell, Sr. 14 January 1788. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

Letter to Joseph Cooper Walker. 9 October 1793. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 14 April 1801. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 31 July 1801. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 23 August 1801. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 4 November 1801. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 15 March 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 19 March 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 13 June 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 7 July 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 11 August 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 23 August 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to Samuel Rose. 9 September 1802. Mills Memorial Library. McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont.? September 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 13 September 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 1 November 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 5 November 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont.? December 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 3 December 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 5 December 1802. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 9 January 1803. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 4 February 1803. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 10 February 1803. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 3 March 1803. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 14 October 1803. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 16 October 1803. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 13 January 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 25 January 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 5 March 1804. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 20 March 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to Thomas Cadell, Jr, and William Davies. 1 June 1804. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 15 June 1804. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Letter to Benjamin Smith. 5 July 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 10 July 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to William Tyler. 14 July 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 16 July 1804. Houghton Library. Harvard University, Boston, MA.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 30 July 1804. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 13 August 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to George Brian, the Earl of Egremont. 8 September 1804. Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, UK.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 14 February 1805. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 2 July 1805. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Osborne Collection. Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 10 September 1805. Houghton Library. Harvard University, Boston, MA.

Letter to Sarah Rose. 26 April 1806. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.; The John Comyn Collection.