SOURCE: Zimmerman, Sarah M. “‘Dost thou not know my voice?’: Charlotte Smith and the Lyric's Audience.” In Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, pp. 39-72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, Zimmerman explores Smith's strategy of appealing to the readers of her sonnets by developing a persona that is completely absorbed in private sorrow and oblivious to her audience.]

O! grief hath chang'd me since you saw me last,
And careful hours with time's deformed hand
Have written strange defeatures in my face:
But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?

—The Comedy of Errors (V.i.298-301)

No other grief that ever sighed has worn so much crape and bombazine.

—Viscount St. Cyres on Smith (1903)

Two poems addressed to Charlotte Smith appear in the August 1786 edition of the European Magazine, one submitted by “W. P.,” another by a “constant Reader.” The poems respond to the author of Elegiac Sonnets, a collection that had been “universally admired” (in Anna Letitia Barbauld's words) when it appeared two years earlier.¹ The poem by a “constant Reader,” a sonnet, begins by admitting that propriety recommends against the intensely autobiographical quality of Smith's lyric poems: “'Tis said, and I myself have so believ'd / ‘Fiction's the properest field for Poesy.’” Yet it is the suspect quality that arouses a response: “For sure than thine more sweet no strains can flow, / Than thine no tenderer plaints the heart can move, / More rouse the soul to sympathetic love; / And yet—sad source! they spring from REAL WOE.”² Despite the reader's qualms, it is Smith's “REAL WOE” that is engaging. Many critics proved no more immune than this “constant Reader” to the spectacle of Smith's autobiographical speaker lamenting her plight in natural settings. And like this reader, they responded to the sonnets' forging of high emotion and believability. Readers and critics often reacted with “sympathy,” their responses similarly personal in tone. According to Richard Phillips's British Public Characters of 1800-1801, “an elevation of sentiment, a refinement of taste, a feeling, and a delicacy, breathe through her productions, which by moving the affections and engaging the sympathy of the reader, excite in him a lively and permanent interest.”³

Smith had practical reasons for needing to generate an “interest” both “lively” and lasting. Elegiac Sonnets was published for her family's support after her husband's imprisonment at the King's Bench for debt in December 1783. Smith had been born into far different circumstances: her father owned estates in Sussex and Surrey, and a townhouse in London. She experienced a social fall into economic instability only after a marriage at age fifteen proved emotionally and financially disastrous. The second son of Richard Smith, a West Indian merchant and a director of the East India Company, Benjamin Smith plunged the family into debt. Richard Smith's death might have alleviated the family's precarious situation, but their circumstances were actually worsened by his intricate will, which was, ironically, meant to protect Charlotte and the children from Benjamin's unreliability. When her husband was sent to debtor's prison, Smith turned to publication as a way to maintain the family's social standing until the estate was settled and her children could be educated as she desired. But the will generated legal entanglements that remained unresolved throughout her career; the Chancery suit was not finally settled until after her death. As a result, Smith's temporary venture into the literary marketplace lasted twenty-two years.

Elegiac Sonnets succeeded—both in providing financial respite and in establishing Smith as a popular poet who would earn her family's primary income after the couple separated in 1787. What follows is an account of how she found her audience with an unlikely vehicle: quiet, reflective sonnets featuring a solitary speaker lost in private sorrow. Rather than reaching out directly to the readers she needed so urgently, Smith turned away from them, performing the gesture that Northrop Frye describes as characteristic of the lyric poet, who “turns his back on his audience.”⁴ Smith made an important discovery about the mode, which counters prevailing views of it: that a lyric speaker could win readers and hold their attention precisely by appearing to ignore them, by seeming absorbed in thought and oblivious to her surroundings. She became aware, in other words, of the impact that her poet could have on an audience on whom she turns her back in only the most literal sense. Smith's strong popular appeal illuminates the relationship between lyric poet and reading audiences as a dynamic exchange, a different account from predominant paradigms, which generally characterize the lyric's auditor as passive and silent. The availability of a wealth of contemporary responses to Smith's lyric poet by critics and readers illuminates a neglected aspect of the period's lyric poetry, for the mode's rhetorical capacities have been eclipsed by a conventional focus on psychological and emotional subtlety.

The discrepancy between Smith's immediate popularity and her virtual disappearance in the later arena of twentieth-century literary criticism recommends a return to her contemporaneous readers and critics. The contrast between their eager responses and her subsequent obscurity in literary history is telling. Qualities now generally deemed antithetical to the mode did not appear so to her readers: her sonnets combine self-consciousness with sincerity, introspection with rhetorical power. Popular success is not necessarily precluded in canonical models (although Byron's exclusion from M. H. Abrams's account of the “greater Romantic lyric” is suggestive), but a focus on the poet's subjectivity has discouraged consideration of readers' responses to lyric poems and lyric poems' responsiveness to their environments.⁵ Smith's example suggests a method for reading the period's lyric poems—within the specific circumstances of their production and consumption, and within the trajectories of poets' careers. Smith's own readers included those who have defined canonical Romanticism—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and John Keats. Together, Smith and her reading audiences bring into focus the mode's potential for a more dynamic relationship to its social contexts than we have come to expect.

Smith's sonnets are an important measure of how the Romantic canon was shaped according to one particular version of Romantic lyricism, a model based largely on the poems and critical prose of two of her successors, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wordsworth's debts to Smith are political and poetic: he visited her in Brighton on his way to France in 1791, and he was given letters of introduction to her acquaintances, including Helen Maria Williams (who had left Orléans by the time he arrived). His literary debts to her begin at Hawkshead, where he read Elegiac Sonnets, and are formally acknowledged in a lavish 1835 explanatory note, expanded in 1837, to “Stanzas Suggested in a Steam-boat Off St. Bees' Heads.”⁶ Wordsworth describes Smith as “a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered”: “She wrote little, and that little unambitiously, but with true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English Poets; for in point of time her earlier writings preceded, I believe, those of Cowper and Burns.”⁷ Coleridge's admiration of William Lisle Bowles has become a critical commonplace, and Bowles was, as Stuart Curran observes, one of Smith's “followers.”⁸ Yet the connection between Coleridge and Smith is even more direct: in his “Introduction to the Sonnets” (1796), Coleridge cites Smith and Bowles as the poets who “first made the Sonnet popular among the present English,” and he feels “justified” in “deducing its laws” from their works. According to their examples, the sonnet is a “small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed,” preferably “deduced from, and associated with, the Scenery of Nature.”⁹

The qualities responsible for Smith's appeal to Wordsworth and Coleridge—solitariness, an attraction to natural scenes, and an emphasis on feeling—are recognizable in foundational accounts of Romantic lyricism, including Abrams's influential definition of the “greater Romantic lyric.” Abrams bases his paradigm largely on Coleridge's and Wordsworth's early poems, written in the period in which Smith's influence on them was keenest. It is not surprising, then, that the qualities that Coleridge and Wordsworth exclude in their laudatory portraits of Smith were also qualities subsequently deemed antithetical to canonical Romantic lyricism: a proven rhetorical ability that made her a popular poet. What was lost to canonical paradigms in Smith's example was an understanding of the mode's potential for engaging readers and responding to social concerns. Her poetry is especially provocative for the task of revising critical expectations of the period's lyric poems because her work resembles Wordsworthian poetics in important ways, and yet manifests marked differences, which cluster around the issue of her popular success. Thus, Smith helps to blur the lines between popular and canonical lyricism.

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Smith's most important challenge to conventional assumptions about Romantic lyricism is her success in winning readers by seeming oblivious to them. Her example restores the significance of an overlooked corollary to Frye's famous description of the poet turning away from an audience: an acknowledgment that the audience, despite being ignored, remains on the scene. Smith knows that by seeming to forget her readers she gives them the pleasure of “overhearing.” She employs the rhetorical allure of eavesdropping, making shrewd use of what is perhaps lyricism's most appealing quality, that of intimacy. Like Wordsworth, Smith finds in lyricism a vehicle for foregrounding the reflections and feelings of the poet. And like him, she drew charges of “egotism” for her intense introspection.¹⁰ Yet Smith's sonnets disrupt an equation familiar to canonical accounts of the mode: that lyricism = disengagement. In her case, an intense autobiographical lyricism served a social function: it elicited responses that often matched her own in intensity.

Sir William Jones's comments on her sonnets exemplify the reaction that Smith desired. En route to India to assume a judgeship, Jones undertook a course of reading that included Elegiac Sonnets. In a letter, he thanks the friend who had given him “the tender strains of the unfortunate Charlotte, which have given us pleasure and pain.” He reserves special praise for her most autobiographical poems: “[T]he sonnets which relate to herself are incomparably the best.”¹¹ The Gentleman's Magazine concurs in its notice of the third edition (1786) of Elegiac Sonnets, judging that the “pieces … which are the genuine offspring of her own fancy, are by far the most interesting in her whole collection.”¹² Although, from the first edition, the collection included both poems other than sonnets and translations of others' sonnets (Goethe, Petrarch, and Metastasio), the autobiographical sonnets that Jones admires established Smith's reputation.¹³

In her hands, an emphasis on interiority, which would also define the poetics of her canonical successors, turns a focus on the personal into a cult of personality. Smith's emphasis on the personal in Elegiac Sonnets is underlined by the collection's frontispiece portrait, which appeared in the first edition and in some subsequent editions. It is an engraving from a crayon drawing by George Romney, under which she places the first three lines cited in my epigraph, from The Comedy of Errors (lines that she slightly misquotes).¹⁴ The lines from Shakespeare are printed in cursive, as if the poet had written them herself, and thereby taken personal possession of them. She omits the fourth line that I cite, but this is the line that, I would argue, underlies her poetic strategies: “But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?” Because Smith articulates private sorrows in the sonnets, readers came to feel as if they knew her, and so might respond to her as a familiar face in future volumes. A reviewer for the British Critic, quoting Smith, describes her appeal to readers: “So exquisite are the charms of Mrs. Smith's poetry, that it would indicate the utmost degree of insensibility not to be affected by her ‘tale of tender woe, her sweet sorrow, her mournful melody.’”¹⁵ Critics and readers not only associated the sonnet speaker with the poet herself, they also often addressed her as someone with whom they were personally acquainted, in reviews and in letters and poems submitted to periodicals (such as the sonnet by a “constant Reader”).

The sonnets themselves aim to present the poet with the vividness of a portrait. In the poems, Smith allows readers ample opportunity to observe her, since she articulates her reflections and feelings while wandering through natural scenes. Readers respond because nothing, apparently, is demanded of them. “To the moon” (“Sonnet IV”) is an especially apt example because it is accompanied, in some editions, by an engraving featuring a solitary female figure, one hand on her heart, the other extended before her as she gazes on the moon. The engraving visualizes, in the upward tilt of her head and the expressive position of her arms, the stylized verbal gestures of Smith's poetry, an unsurprising congruence given that she was closely involved with the production of her volumes and provided instructions for the plates commissioned for Elegiac Sonnets.¹⁶ The first half of line one appears underneath the engraving:

Queen of the silver bow!—by thy pale beam,
Alone and pensive, I delight to stray,
And watch thy shadow trembling in the stream,
Or mark the floating clouds that cross thy way.
And while I gaze, thy mild and placid light
Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast;
And oft I think—fair planet of the night,
That in thy orb, the wretched may have rest:
The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go,
Released by death—to thy benignant sphere;
And the sad children of Despair and Woe
Forget, in thee, their cup of sorrow here.
Oh! that I soon may reach thy world serene,
Poor wearied pilgrim—in this toiling scene!

Smith's speaker is characteristically occupied in observing her natural surroundings and pursuing the thoughts they prompt, leaving the reader free to observe her. In poem and engraving, she looks away from an audience (in the portrait by Romney, Smith's gaze is also averted). Addressing her thoughts not to the reader, but to the moon, the speaker turns to the “fair planet” and imagines transcendence. Not only does she fail to notice auditors, she also envisions leaving the quotidian arena that she shares with them for another “benignant sphere.” She wants to “forget,” and she succeeds in losing sight of an audience and her environment. In the final couplet, the intensely personal nature of her meditations becomes apparent, with her confession that she is one of the “wretched” of whom she has spoken. The poem ends with a sharp focus on the speaker herself, as a “[p]oor wearied pilgrim.”

Yet how do we account for the voyeuristic pleasure that Smith's sonnets provided a popular audience? What is the mechanism of this appeal? Michael Fried makes a relevant argument in his treatment of French painting in the second half of the eighteenth century. He describes the powerful effect on the viewer of watching a human figure who is absorbed, either in thought or in an event taking place. This air of distraction can create a “supreme fiction”: that of the beholder's absence. The illusion of being ignored has an unexpected side effect—the beholder may experience the sensation of entering the picture, precisely because he or she is not made self-conscious in the act of watching, an awareness that can produce resistance. Smith's sonnets achieve a similar effect, via the poet's apparent obliviousness to an audience. What seems to be a desire on her part to turn away from social scenes as she wanders, “alone and pensive,” proves captivating. Fried describes a “paradoxical relationship between painting and beholder”: the painter seeks “to neutralize or negate the beholder's presence, to establish the fiction that no one is standing before the canvas.” Yet “only if this is done can the beholder be stopped and held precisely there.”¹⁷ Fried's paradigm helps make explicit what is implicit in Elegiac Sonnets: just as on the stage, the social world is not excluded by the gesture of turning one's back to an audience. Like a member of a theater audience or the beholder of a painting, the reader of a lyric poem must lose the self-consciousness of spectatorship, must feel forgotten in order to forget himself or herself and make the necessary leap of identification.

Fried's argument is particularly relevant to Smith's sonnets because the poems resemble small tableaux in the collection's layout. There is one poem per page in most editions, and their intensely autobiographical quality renders them miniature, verbal self-portraits. Thus the reader is also a viewer, or spectator. The sonnets' copious natural images emphasize their pictorial quality, and the engravings that accompany several sonnets visualize the scenes that the poems describe, sometimes elaborately framing those scenes. An ornate border for the oval engraving of “To the moon” features thick foliage and an owl—presumably Athena's—atop a book. The speaker addresses Diana, whose unstrung bow and quiver frame the bird, as if the god has turned aside from the hunt to other topics. These emblems develop the portrait of the poet, who is thus associated with wisdom, purity, and female strength. The engraving significantly supplements the act of reading the poems, for readers can “see” the poet as they read her words. They can also “hear” her: working within the conventions of sensibility, Smith's liberal use of exclamations, sighs, and pauses strives to approximate the cadences of spoken language.

The emphasis on the visual in Elegiac Sonnets contributes to a theatrical dynamic that structures the poet's relationship to her audiences. It might seem that the dramatic cast of Smith's sorrows could alienate potentially distrustful readers. Early in her career, before she had made explicit the biographical sources of her elegiac tenor, a critic ventured to hope that her sorrows were fictitious: The Gentleman's Magazine reviewer cannot “forbear expressing a hope that the misfortunes she so often hints at, are all imaginary,” since “[w]e must have perused her very tender and exquisite effusions with diminished pleasure, could we have supposed her sorrows to be real.”¹⁸ Yet as David Marshall explains, presenting oneself sympathetically, as Smith urgently needed to do, demands a measure of theatricality. Drawing on Adam Smith, Marshall argues that “since we cannot know the experience or sentiments of another person, we must represent in our imagination copies of the sentiments that we ourselves feel as we imagine ourselves in someone else's place and person.” This means that “acts of sympathy are structured by theatrical dynamics that … depend on people's ability to represent themselves as tableaux, spectacles, and texts before others.”

Smith uses all available verbal and visual means to represent vividly to readers the emotions her poet experiences. Her efforts to create a fullness of presence which might captivate readers are rendered explicit in the frontispiece portrait, which depicts Smith as a Shakespearean character. The sonnets demonstrate a theatrical dynamic in the lyric's often overlooked relationship between poet and auditor: her poems make clearer the implications of Frye's representation of the poet turning his back to an audience. What seems to be pure unself-consciousness on the poet's part, and passive reception by the reader, actually operates more dynamically: the poet presents herself in a particularly revealing way by expressing her reflections and emotions as in a soliloquy. The reader's ideal response is the going-out-of-oneself that Coleridge describes as readerly or sympathetic identification. Smith learned what Marshall, quoting Diderot, claims that good actors know: that it is “more important for the spectator to feel forgotten rather than literally be forgotten.”¹⁹

In his account of the sonnet's “laws” derived from Smith and Bowles, Coleridge suggests that the reader's role involves an act of identification. He describes a mode of consumption which encourages a sense of intimacy: “Easily remembered from their briefness, and interesting alike to the eye and the affections, these are the poems which we can ‘lay up in our heart and our soul,’ and repeat them ‘when we walk by the way, and when we lie down, and when we rise up.’” The reader identifies so strongly with the poet's “moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings” that they seem to be his or her own, and “hence they domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity.”²⁰ In a letter to Smith, William Cowper exemplifies the kind of response that Coleridge describes:

I was much struck by an expression in your letter to Hayley, where you say that ‘you will endeavor to take an interest in green leaves again.’ This seems the sound of my own voice reflected to me from a distance, I have so often had the same thought and desire.²¹

Smith's poems and her letter to Hayley operate similarly: she succeeds in convincing others that they can understand her sorrows. In reading her words, Cowper mistakes her voice for his own and equates his thoughts and desires with hers. In Cowper's case, Smith wins not just sympathy but the practical assistance it inspires: he allowed her to dedicate The Emigrants (1793), her first long poem, to him. According to Marshall, when an act of sympathy is successful, the viewer may be moved to respond not just emotionally, but materially. He describes “the more specific response to a scene of tragedy, danger, or suffering that not only leaves one affligé but calls upon one to come to the assistance of someone in distress.”²² Thus Cowper reacts appropriately when he writes to William Hayley, who had himself aided Smith by accepting the dedication of Elegiac Sonnets: “I never want riches except when I hear of such distress.”²³

Accounts of Romantic lyricism have traditionally emphasized the poet's capacity for sympathetic identification with other persons or with beloved natural places; Smith's sonnets highlight another, less noticed structure of identification—between reader and poet. It is not that the reader has been entirely forgotten in paradigms of Romantic lyricism, but that figure is generally considered either tangential to the mode's main concerns—the identifications and understandings of the poet—or subordinate to them.²⁴ The intense identificatory relationship between reader and poet is, however, a primary site of the mode's rhetorical salience. The theatrical dynamic that informs Smith's lyric poems recommends a revision of paradigms that emphasize a standard of sincerity, without an attention to how this quality operates rhetorically. As the period's “poetic norm,” the lyric has seemingly embodied its premium on sincerity, a quality traditionally associated with a naturalness of emotion and an emphasis on expressivity.²⁵ As a result, the theatrical dynamic established by the lyric scenario of “overhearing” articulated emotion has been neglected. Smith's sonnets foreground one of the mode's key complexities: the unexpected complementarity of sincerity and theatricality for contemporaneous readers, an issue to which I will return.

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First, however, I want to address more specifically how Elegiac Sonnets won a popular audience. Smith's shrewd attention to the framing of her sonnets in the collection recommends a strategy for analyzing the rhetorical capacity of lyric poems: by reading them in the context of the volumes in which they appear. Smith is an excellent candidate for this kind of analysis because she reinforced the appealing self-portrait of the sonnets by carefully surrounding these poems with prefaces, explanatory notes, and engravings. The publication history of Elegiac Sonnets suggests that Smith keenly understood the nature of her readers' receptivity to her solitary poet. She took an active role in what Judith Phillips Stanton calls, quoting the poet, her “literary business,” and this effort included crafting the collection to capitalize on the popularity of her melancholy speaker.²⁶ From the first edition, the collection's prose sections contributed to its success by enhancing the poems' portrait of the poet. In successive editions, Smith added new prefaces and expanded a section of explanatory notes that identifies literary allusions and the flowers, animals, and places mentioned in the poems. The prefaces and notes, with their conversational, quotidian prose, throw into bolder relief the poems' emphases on solitude, introspection, and a desire for transcendence. In a “memoir” published after Smith's death, the Monthly Magazine testifies to a contemporaneous association of her sonnets with an impulse toward transcendence. The critic speculates that Smith pursued her career after the sonnets' initial success because doing so “contributed to divert her thoughts, and to lead her mind into the visionary regions of fancy, rendering the sad realities she was suffering under, in some measure less poignant.”²⁷

In the sonnets themselves, Smith provides her audience with the pleasure of watching a poet removed from all that is mundane by the very language in which she spoke. Despite some experimentation with English and Italian forms, the poems follow strict rhyme schemes and use formal diction, a strategy that enhances a sense of the poet's detachment from daily experience. Thus, in addition to their strong focus on subjectivity, Smith's sonnets conform to another of the main ways in which lyricism is often assumed to distance itself from social contexts: a specialization of language that removes the poem from “the ordinary circuit of communication,” in Jonathan Culler's terms.²⁸ In “Written at the close of spring” (“Sonnet II”), an explanatory note establishes the poem's linguistic difference from “ordinary” speech. The sonnet begins by describing how “[t]he garlands fade that Spring so lately wove, / Each simple flower which she had nursed in dew, / Anemonies, that spangled every grove, / The primrose wan, and harebell mildly blue.” A brief explanatory note consists of two alternate names for the anemone: “Anemony Nemeroso” and “[t]he wood Anemony.” Smith's gloss of “anemone” seems to translate from the rarefied language of poetry into the language of scientific classification and the vernacular. In the process the flower is transformed from poetic prop into an object from the reader's environment. In the poem, the anemone is significant only as a natural detail, which reminds the poet of her own lack of rejuvenation. In the explanatory note, the focus shifts to the flower as a natural object in the reader's environment, and the effect is to distinguish between poet's and readers' worlds.

A sense of the poet's remove from the ordinary is augmented by the establishment of a different temporality in the sonnets. Within the volume, the poet is held in a moment of perpetual sorrow that contrasts with a world of process in the prefaces and notes. “Written at the close of spring” thematizes the atemporality of the poet's world by juxtaposing the progress of the seasons with her unchanging state. The closing couplet asks, “Another May new buds and flowers shall bring; / Ah! why has happiness—no second Spring?” Thus the lyric, frequently associated with a desire for immortality and transcendence, seeks to wrest itself out of the cause and effect of social history, an impulse which prompted a new historical critique of the Romantic ideology. “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex” (“Sonnet XLIV”) and its accompanying note exemplify how Smith's sonnets seem to register fleeting moments detached from their narrative contexts:

Press'd by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides,
While the loud equinox its power combines,
The sea no more its swelling surge confines,
But o'er the shrinking land sublimely rides.
The wild blast, rising from the Western cave,
Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed;
Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!
With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore
Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
But vain to them the winds and waters rave;
They hear the warring elements no more:
While I am doom'd—by life's long storm opprest,
To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

The sonnet records an almost gothic moment: the sea, driven by the moon, washes on shore in a wave that removes dirt from the village cemetery, uncovering the dead. By using the present tense, Smith emphasizes the transitoriness both of the poet's view of the white bones and of her flash of recognition that unlike herself, the dead can no longer be “opprest” by “life's long storm.” Natural event and psychological revelation occur instantaneously. The reader who turns to the back of the volume to read the accompanying note finds, in contrast, a world of gradual but inexorable change:

Middleton is a village on the margin of the sea, in Sussex, containing only two or three houses. There were formerly several acres of ground between its small church and the sea, which now, by its continual encroachments, approaches within a few feet of this half-ruined and humble edifice. The wall, which once surrounded the church-yard, is entirely swept away, many of the graves broken up, and the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea; whence human bones are found among the sand and shingles on the shore.

The note contains the prehistory and the aftermath of the sonnet's moment—its context. It reads as if the viewer has pulled back to a place from which the human and natural consequences of a transformative lyric instant could be surveyed. Smith's explanatory notes document a world of myriad change, embodied here in the erosion altering the landscape and the villagers' lives, while the speaker remains in an unalterable state of melancholy.

The sonnets' sense of timelessness is so pronounced that Smith eventually found it necessary publicly to defend her lingering sorrow. She addresses the issue in the preface to the sixth edition (1792) by reporting an exchange with a friend who had recommended that she try “‘a more cheerful style of composition.’” The person who made what St. Cyres describes as this “highly unfortunate suggestion” receives in response a pointed justification: an account of continued misery. Recalling her early sonnets, she explains, “I wrote mournfully because I was unhappy—And I have unfortunately no reason yet, though nine years have since elapsed, to change my tone” (5). Smith's poet continues to hold her melancholy pose: it is as if she has been caught in one repeated moment of intense sorrow. Her sonnets seem to epitomize Sharon Cameron's description of how lyric poems “fight temporality with a vengeance,” although Smith claims that her stasis is involuntary.²⁹ Yet St. Cyres cannily points to the rhetorical effect of this sense of lyric timelessness: “Having chosen to come forward as a Laureate of the Lachrymose, she thought herself bound in honour to live consistently up to her part, and treat whatever subject happened to engross her pen in terms of undiluted lachrymosity.” Variety, she intuited, was not what her readers wanted. St. Cyres speculates that “quite an appreciable proportion of her tears was due to purely literary requirements,” reminding us that she “was the servant of the public, and her many-headed master called for a melancholy tune.”³⁰ His ironic commentary on Smith's career recognizes the rhetorical salience of a turn away from quotidian temporality and into an interior realm of the emotions, which have a chronology of their own.

I have been arguing that Smith's sonnets won readers by demonstrating her obliviousness to their presence, a pose enhanced by her formal language and what Cameron calls “lyric time.” Yet her success depended equally upon her believability: the reader must have the sensation of witnessing “real woe” in order to respond with the sympathy and loyalty she required, publishing on average one work per year. The sonnets' success required both extreme emotions and a perception of their authenticity, a combination of exaggeration and actuality, theatricality and sincerity, which contemporary readers did not find contradictory. Leigh Hunt confirms her success at combining these qualities in her sonnets, testifying that several of them “are popular for their truth alone”: “[E]verybody likes the sonnets because nobody doubts their being in earnest, and because they furnish a gentle voice to feelings that are universal.”³¹

That most of Smith's readers seemed persuaded of the sonnets' truthfulness is especially remarkable given their self-consciously theatrical tenor. Moreover, as Adela Pinch points out, Smith's habitual use of literary allusions raises epistemological questions about the sources of her sorrow, since she borrows so many phrases to express it. How are her readers, or even the poet herself, to be sure that the despair she voices is hers?³² Yet by the time that the first edition of the sonnets appeared in 1784, Smith's potential readers were well schooled in the conventions of sensibility, a tradition that collapsed the ostensible boundaries between life and art by presenting codes of behavior to be followed by poets, novel characters, and readers alike. As Janet Todd explains, “[i]n all forms of sentimental literature, there is an assumption that life and literature are directly linked, not through any notion of a mimetic depiction of reality but through the belief that the literary experience can intimately affect the living one.”³³ Thus, Smith's readers would not necessarily question the authenticity of her poet's lamentations, even though her responses to loss were modeled on literary figures who had experienced a similar despair. The symbiotic relationship between art and life that sensibility prescribed would have encouraged Smith to borrow from other poets, even as her readers would feel encouraged to model their own expressions of grief on her poet—as contemporaneous sonnets addressed to or about Smith in periodicals suggest that many did.

In the preface to the first edition, Smith stakes her claim to the poems' sincerity by explaining their compositional origins: “Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought” (3). The explanatory notes support this claim to autobiographical veracity by grounding the poems in Smith's extensive reading and in her very public biography. A note to the poem, “Written in Farm Wood, South Downs, in May 1784” (“Sonnet XXXI”), glosses a reference to “Alpine flowers”: “An infinite variety of plants are found on these hills, particularly about this spot: many sorts of Orchis and Cistus of singular beauty, with several others.” The note contextualizes the poem autobiographically: the sonnet was written on walks in Smith's native Sussex, where “Alpine flowers” grew. Sir Walter Scott, who preferred her novels to her poetry, comments: “It may be remarked, that Mrs. Smith not only preserves in her landscapes the truth and precision of a painter, but that they sometimes evince marks of her own favourite pursuits and studies.”³⁴ The notes' attention to natural historical detail lends an authenticity to the volume that in turn lends credence to her emotional claims: her poet's extreme sorrow is more believable because Smith situates her in a carefully documented environment. Thus, although Smith sets up a contrast between the self-consciously poetic natural imagery of the sonnets and the empirical and vernacular vocabulary of the notes, the notes serve to confirm the poems' truthfulness by showing that her descriptions—of her environment and, by implication, her emotions—are accurate.

John Clare testifies to the effectiveness of what might be termed a rhetoric of empirical evidence in the notes. In Clare's description of “[t]he Fern Owl or Goatsucker or Nightjar or nighthawk” in one of his unpublished Natural History Letters, he alludes to Smith's poem, “Composed during a walk on the Downs, in November 1787” (“Sonnet XLII”). He says of her poems, “I felt much pleasd with them because she wrote more from what she had seen of nature then from what she had read of it there fore those that read her poems find new images which they had not read of before tho they have often felt them & from those assosiations poetry derives the power of pleasing in the happiest manner.”³⁵ Clare echoes Cowper's sense that reading Smith's sonnets is like finding one's own reactions recorded in them. For Clare, it is not emotions, but responses to natural scenes, that seem familiar, yet “new.” He testifies to the pleasure of this experience as a reader and incorporates her example into his own poetics, especially his early, richly descriptive sonnets. What Clare learns from Smith is that a sense of the sincerity of the poet's responses to a natural environment could be compelling, a lesson he proves himself with his initial success in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. Thus the notes both verify the poet's sentiments and confirm the timelessness of her plight. They remove the poet from her readers' quotidian experience even as they render her more accessible to their understanding.

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In the sonnets, Smith learns to exercise the rhetorical potential of the often overlooked relationship between the lyric poet and an audience; in her longer poems, The Emigrants and “Beachy Head,” she most fully demonstrates that understanding, employing the capacity of lyricism for social ends. By turning her pen to specific causes, including but extending beyond her own financial relief, Smith pursues the implications of her discovery of the considerable appeal of an autobiographical lyric speaker lost in sorrowful reflections. In these poems, the implications of Smith's poetics for revisions of canonical models of Romantic lyricism are most fully evident.

These long poems represent not a departure from the sonnets but an extension of their poetic strategies. In The Emigrants, Smith makes a case for the émigrés arriving on British shores in 1793. Her rhetorical strategy remains lyric: she simply expands the sonnets' sharp focus on her autobiographical poet to include others whom she perceived as like her. Smith associates the émigrés with her already popular cultural figure, and thus attempts to lend to them some of the sympathy she had generated for herself. Stuart Curran describes the poem's “underlying metaphorical strategy,” which is “to connect Charlotte Smith as center of perception to the exiles from France's Terror.”³⁶ A strong sense of the poet's presence remains in the poem, even though the title figures are usually in the foreground. As the European Magazine observes, “we can discover” the poet “almost at the bottom of every page, as we may the portrait of some of the most renowned painters in the corner of their most favourite pictures.” The critic recognizes the poem's lyric impetus by noting that “[t]he whole Poem may be considered as a soliloquy pronounced by the authoress.”³⁷ Although much of the poem is devoted to describing the émigrés' circumstances, the speaker remains at its center, the filtering consciousness through which we view their wandering forms; their plight is seen through her melancholy lens.

Smith identifies herself with the émigrés by recalling her own experience of exile in Normandy, where the family fled from her husband's creditors, from fall 1784 to spring 1785. Smith seems to have accompanied her husband, with their children, because he could not speak French; she immediately returned to England in an effort to appease his creditors, but her failure prompted her return for the winter. She explains in the poem's dedication to Cowper that she was drawn to represent the plight of the émigrés because their figures “pressed upon an heart, that has learned, perhaps from its own sufferings, to feel with acute, though unavailing compassion, the calamity of others” (132). The émigrés were also attractive to Smith because their circumstances could easily be drawn into parallel with her own. Stanton points out that Smith emphasized her genteel origins in her works; she identified herself by her father's family estate in the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets by calling herself “Charlotte Smith, of Bignor Park, Sussex.” In The Emigrants, she associates herself with French aristocrats, particularly a mother who sits disconsolate, surrounded by her children, on the Sussex shore. Smith features the clergy and nobility, whose falls from privilege made their histories resonate with her very public biography, although estimates of the social status of the émigrés have suggested that 25 percent were clergy, 17 percent nobility, and 51 percent from the Third Estate.³⁸

Following Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine's rebuttal in The Rights of Man, Smith enters the revolution debate with a poetics of sympathy pitched at middle- and upper-class readers. In the poem, she models for readers the kind of sympathetic response toward the émigrés that she wants them to imitate. The Emigrants is important to an understanding of the rhetorical salience of Smith's lyricism because it tests how successfully it could respond to social topics. Two facets of Smith's lyricism come into focus in The Emigrants: its potential for moving readers about others' causes, and the liabilities of this strategy for the poet. With The Emigrants, she learned that the strength of her poet's appeal could be turned against her, in that many critiques of the poem were highly personal in tone. Yet the negative responses that Smith received also testify to a contemporary understanding that lyric poetry could be an effective vehicle for addressing social events.

The poem appears in the same year as The Old Manor House Smith's fifth novel, and after the sixth edition of Elegiac Sonnets, (1792). It was published early in the summer of 1793, in the wake of the September massacres, the trial and execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, and the outbreak, ten days later, of war between France and England. Smith's positive representation of revolution in France and reform in England in Desmond (1792) was followed by The Emigrants and The Banished Man (1794), a poem that promotes sympathy for the émigrés and a novel that features an émigré protagonist. These works are part of what Florence Hilbish calls Smith's “French period,” which included works published from 1791 to 1793, written “out of the author's sympathy for those oppressed, whether politically, socially, or economically.”³⁹ The publication of Smith's “French” works follows a trajectory similar to the autobiographical narrative that Wordsworth provides in The Prelude, detailing his change of heart after the declaration of war and the increasing violence of the revolution's aftermath. Smith intimates a similar conversion in the poem's dedication to Cowper. Yet although she laments the excesses of the revolution, she does not renounce radical ideals, as does Coleridge in “France: An Ode.” In fact, Smith circumspectly defends her radical ideals in the dedication, arguing that “by confounding the original cause with the wretched catastrophes that have followed its ill management,” the revolution itself has unfairly become tainted, and “the very name of Liberty” has “lost the charm it used to have in British ears.” But Smith publicly distances herself from radical politics in defending the exiles of the ancien régime.

She joins instead a popular middle-class cause, promoted by conservative figures such as Hannah More, who published two pamphlets to raise money for the émigrés' support, one titled An Elegant and Pathetic Address for the Ladies of Great Britain on behalf of the French Emigrants. More's profits were contributed to a “Fund for the Relief of the Suffering Clergy of France in the British Dominions,” begun by John Eardley Wilmot, son of the lord chief justice, in September 1792. Wilmot had advertised for a meeting to organize relief, one prominent enough to be reported in the Gentleman's Magazine, which had a solidly middle-class audience.⁴⁰ The meeting was attended by such prominent figures as Edmund Burke, William Wilberforce, and the bishops of London and Durham. Other groups were simultaneously being formed for similar purposes. In 1795 the duchess of York organized a committee specifically for “‘female emigrants who were ill or en couches.’”⁴¹ Thus when Smith represents an émigrée surrounded by her children in The Emigrants, she features a figure already prominent in the popular imagination.

The poem opens with an expansive description of the poet's view of the Sussex coast, a scene that prompts reflections on the contrast between its tranquility and human suffering. We recognize Smith's autobiographical poet “on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex” on “a Morning in November, 1792.” She watches a group of exiles: several members of the Catholic clergy, a mother with children, and a nobleman who speaks to the woman. They are “Fortune's worthless favourites” (I.315) and, as such, Smith can align their circumstances with hers. Solitary sorrow gives way to shared misery as she exclaims, “Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy!” In the sonnets, the poet is usually the sole unhappy figure in the scenes she surveys, yet the emigrants are easily incorporated into the poet's contemplations. They are linked with the poet formally by repeated turns in thought, which join their plight with hers. After describing several members of the clergy wandering along the Sussex cliffs, the poet's reflections shift to her own sorrows:

                                                  …—Still, as Men misled
By early prejudice (so hard to break),
I mourn your sorrows; for I too have known
Involuntary exile; and while yet
England had charms for me, have felt how sad
It is to look across the dim cold sea,
That melancholy rolls its refluent tides
Between us and the dear regretted land
We call our own—as now ye pensive wait
On this bleak morning, gazing on the waves
That seem to leave your shore …

(I.153-63)

The passage begins with the poet observing “men misled” from a distance, but she quickly recognizes her affinity with them, practicing the sympathetic identification that she models for readers, as “I” becomes “us” and “we.” She literally puts herself in their position: she recalls gazing “across the dim cold sea” toward home during her self-exile in France. In fact, meditation upon her own circumstances encourages the poet to detect signs of distress in others. She is drawn to the exiles because they resemble her; there is clearly a narcissistic impulse in her response to them. Yet that impulse also serves to keep her attention on their circumstances, and as a result she incorporates them into her meditations.

Like the poet of the sonnets, she observes her surroundings and then reflects upon what she sees. This turn inward is often assumed to mark the eclipse of the external world, yet here an internalizing impulse actually projects the poet into social scenes:

Long wintry months are past; the Moon that now
Lights her pale crescent even at noon, has made
Four times her revolution; since with step,
Mournful and slow, along the wave-worn cliff,
Pensive I took my solitary way,
Lost in despondence, while contemplating
Not my own wayward destiny alone,
(Hard as it is, and difficult to bear!)
But in beholding the unhappy lot
Of the lorn Exiles; who, amid the storms
Of wild disastrous Anarchy, are thrown,
Like shipwreck'd sufferers, on England's coast,
To see, perhaps, no more their native land,
Where Desolation riots: They, like me,
From fairer hopes and happier prospects driven,
Shrink from the future, and regret the past.

(II.1-16)

The poet begins the passage “solitary” and “lost in despondence,” but in the act of “contemplating” her “own wayward destiny,” she begins to consider the “lorn Exiles.” She demonstrates that the lyric's progress toward interiority need not lead to disengagement. The poem suggests that introspection should not be equated with solipsism, that a desire for transcendence can coexist with social feeling.

Moreover, the poem thematizes the poet's decision not to look away from what she sees. Near its opening, she confesses a desire for retreat, for the kind of detachment we expect of the lyric poet:

How often do I half abjure Society,
And sigh for some lone Cottage, deep embower'd
In the green woods, that these steep chalky Hills
Guard from the strong South West; where round their base
The Beach wide flourishes, and the light Ash
With slender leaf half hides the thymy turf!—
There do I wish to hide me …

(I.42-48)

The poet longs to be “embower'd” and alone, and thus seems to exemplify a desire that has characterized Romantic lyricism in canonical paradigms. She does not want to “witness” the suffering she describes, and imagines that turning away from it might bring relief of her own unhappiness: she “might better learn to bear” the “woes” that “injustice, and duplicity / And faithlessness and folly, fix on me” (I.57-60). She feels an impulse to forget “human woes,” one she ignores only because she understands that no bower “Can shut out for an hour the spectre Care” (I.90). In Smith's account, the sharp self-consciousness of the lyric poet results in an inability to “shut out” others' sorrows, rather than the protection of a strictly interior realm.

In Smith's poem, memory exceeds the categories with which it is associated in canonical models of Romantic lyricism: it is not reduced to private consolation, nor does it serve the ideological work of obscuring traumatic historical scenes. In Abrams's account of the “greater Romantic lyric,” recollection marks the moment in which the speaker turns away from a world of daily events to a personal past and to private emotions; much new historicist work concurs.⁴² In The Emigrants, in contrast, the poet's memory becomes the vehicle for the émigrés' recollections. She “remembers” their social scenes: “Shuddering, I view the pictures they have drawn / Of desolated countries, where the ground, / Stripp'd of its unripe produce, was thick strewn / With various Death” (II.216-19). In Smith's poetry, the act of recollection need not distance the poet from others, nor is it inherently an isolating practice. The poet connects her own recollections of happier times with similar reflections by the exiles, whose thoughts she seems to overhear like the omniscient narrator of a novel.

Memory here is double-edged: it restores images of a blissful childhood even as it resuscitates a traumatic past. After rehearsing the emigrants' recollections, Smith turns to another set of memories for consolation. As Wordsworth will do in “Tintern Abbey,” she reverts to childhood scenes for recovery from loss. But in The Emigrants, that loss is explicitly social:

                                                                                          … Memory come!
And from distracting cares, that now deprive
Such scenes of all their beauty, kindly bear
My fancy to those hours of simple joy,
When, on the banks of Arun, which I see
Makes its irriguous course thro' younder meads,
I play'd; unconscious then of future ill!

(II.328-34)

The “future ill” she refers to is the “chicane and fraud” that have prolonged the Chancery suit and necessitated her “never-ending toil” (II.355, 350). In an echo of Gray's “Eton Ode,” the remembrance of former happiness involves reflection upon its dissolution. For Smith's poet, recollection provides both reassuring images of youthful vitality and a reliving of sorrows that, in The Emigrants, are decidedly social. Far from being the vehicle of her individual history alone, her memory cannot be distinguished from historical consciousness. Her memory does not excavate an isolated past, but rather brings with it traces of social history in the form of the contingent details associated with specific events.

Memory is social in Smith's poetry in another way—it strengthens the identificatory bond between poet and readers, and by extension, she hopes, between readers and émigrés. The faculty of memory is an intimate one, and it furthers Smith's efforts to make readers feel that they know her well enough to pity her and her subjects. As Walter Benjamin puts it, the “two elements of memory” are personal and social history: “Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past.”⁴³ Smith's poet shares with readers both her past and the émigrés' former lives. Memory plays a role in the sonnets—underlying their mournful tone is a quintessential phrase from “Beachy Head”—“I once was happy” (line 282). But in The Emigrants, her memories are allowed to develop. The effect is an enhancement of the intimacy between poet and readers fostered by the theatrical dynamic of “overhearing” private thoughts. The poet's disclosure of events in her past strengthens lyricism's autobiographical quality and lends emotional weight to the cult of personality generated by Elegiac Sonnets.

In considering how Smith develops the rhetorical uses of memory, I want to turn briefly to “Beachy Head,” unfinished at the time of her death, because in this poem she expands her repertoire of the historical uses to which her poet's memory may be put. “Beachy Head” features an antiquary who is Smith's alter ego in the poem, a figure who collects artifacts such as the “enormous bones” of the “huge unwieldy Elephant” (lines 412, 417), as the poet recalls the natural historical events such evidence indicates. Like The Emigrants, the poem opens with an embodiment of the lyric speaker's characteristic stance: she sits with her back toward us, on the “projecting headland” of Beachy Head, where she commands a vast perspective literally and figuratively. She begins, as in the sonnets and The Emigrants, by observing her natural surroundings: in the opening section, she follows a single day's passage, until she can see only a skiff “crossing on the moonbright line” before being “lost in shadow” (lines 115-17). After sweeping paragraphs of natural description comes the expected turn inward. The speaker compares herself to the familiar figure of “Contemplation,” and the other primary figure associated with Romantic lyricism, “Memory.” But here, the processes of reflection and recollection are the vehicles of both personal and social history. Repeated turns in thought link the Norman Conquest, the use of slave labor, theories of evolution, and her own past. As in The Emigrants, “Contemplation” raises social questions, and the evocation of “Memory” is followed by historical scenes:

                                                                                          … Contemplation here,
High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit,
And bid recording Memory unfold
Her scroll voluminous—bid her retrace
The period, when from Neustria's hostile shore
The Norman launch'd his galleys, and the bay
O'er which that mass of ruin frowns even now
In vain and sullen menace, then received
The new invaders …

(lines 117-25)

The speaker recalls, alternately, her own childhood and England's settlement; memory constructs a history of the ground on which she stands. The Sussex coast is both the site of her childhood and the setting for historical events. Memory's scroll is a historical record that documents the “growth,” not only of a “poet's mind” but also of a nation. In “Beachy Head,” Smith aligns the lyric poet's practice of recollection with the historian's recovery of a social past.

In the poem, “Contemplation” and “Memory” facilitate social consciousness. The speaker begins her meditations by describing the scenes before her, the human and natural activity on the Channel, including “fishing vessels” and a “ship of commerce.” Speculating on the ship's cargo leads the poet to reflect upon a political topic, namely, the use of slave labor for gathering pearls. Drawing on Robert Percival's Account of the Island of Ceylon, she imagines “the round pearl[s]” that the slave

With perilous and breathless toil, tears off
From the rough sea-rock, deep beneath the waves.
These are the toys of Nature; and her sport
Of little estimate in Reason's eye:
And they who reason, with abhorrence see
Man, for such gaudes and baubles, violate
The sacred freedom of his fellow man—
Erroneous estimate! …

(lines 53-60)

These contemplations are especially pointed in a poem written before the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. This commentary is thoroughly integrated into wide-ranging speculations upon events past and present, human and natural, social and private. From these thoughts, the speaker turns her attention to the fishing boats returning home at evening and then to the Norman invasion, a brief account of which is incorporated into a description of the place. After narrating a setback to the British and Dutch forces in a 1690 naval battle against the French fought off Beachy Head, the speaker's “reflecting mind returns / To simple scenes of peace and industry” (lines 168-69).

Smith's success in gaining her primary end in The Emigrants is confirmed by critics who manifest the sympathy that she advocates.⁴⁴ The Analytical Review reports: “[S]he draws several interesting and affecting pictures of their misfortunes, and applauds that generous sympathy, which ministers relief to a brother in distress, without listening to the chilling remonstrance of national or political prejudice.”⁴⁵ The Monthly Review also credits Smith with arousing readers' sympathy for the emigrants:

Whatever is capable of exciting the generous emotions of sympathy is a proper subject of poetry, whose office is to afford pleasure by presenting interesting objects to the imagination. The sufferings of the French emigrants certainly furnish a subject of this kind; and poetry, like charity, will dwell only on such circumstances as are best fitted to excite its proper feelings. In the poem before us, Mrs. Smith has judiciously confined her attention to those particulars in the case of the emigrants, which have excited sympathy in the minds of the humane of all parties; and she describes their condition with that propriety and tenderness, which those who are acquainted with her former productions will be prepared to expect.⁴⁶

Although Smith is praised here for choosing a “proper” subject and for treating it “with propriety and tenderness,” these terms indicate the danger to Smith herself of her own poetic strategies: once she entered political debates, she submitted herself to critiques as a woman writer. In critical responses to The Emigrants, Smith discovered the risk to herself of turning her poet's personal appeal to political ends. Her poems' autobiographical focus made her particularly visible as a woman writer and thereby censurable along gendered lines.⁴⁷

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Smith's deft use of the lyric mode in Elegiac Sonnets made her a popular poet by drawing readers to her autobiographical lyric speaker. Yet Smith's prominence in her own works—in her poems' lyric speakers and her novels' autobiographical characters—had complex consequences for her career. In the early editions of the sonnets, Smith makes herself a sympathetic figure partly by presenting herself as reserved and solitary by nature. Adopting a familiar trope of modesty, she confides that she submits herself to public view only at others' urging: “Some of my friends, with partial indiscretion, have multiplied the copies they procured of several of these attempts, till they found their way into the prints of the day in a mutilated state; which, concurring with other circumstances, determined me to put them into their present form” (3). In the 1792 preface to the sixth edition, she assures readers, “I am well aware that for a woman—‘The Post of Honor is a Private Station’” (6). But in the course of her career, it became clear that she continued to appear in public willingly, if under financial duress.

Smith risked gendered critiques even more directly when she eventually explained the biographical sources of her poet's habitual elegiac tenor. The sixth edition of Elegiac Sonnets marks a turning point in the volume's history: for the first time, Smith assigns a material cause to her unhappiness by referring to her legal battle with the trustees of her father-in-law's estate. Critics have noted that in her novels, her anger emerges in her villainization of lawyers, the judicial system, and extravagant and abusive husbands. Her rage also surfaces in her poems and prefaces. In 1792, she elaborates her story in the context of the conversation with the friend who suggested she might venture “a more cheerful style of composition”:

The time is indeed arrived, when I have been promised by ‘the Honourable Men’ who, nine years ago, undertook to see that my family obtained the provision their grandfather designed for them,—that ‘all should be well, all should be settled.’ But still I am condemned to feel the ‘hope delayed that maketh the heart sick.’

(5)

I turn now to the implications of Smith's eventual attribution of a precise source of agency to sorrows that in early editions seemed almost existential. For in making a more explicit call for sympathy from readers, as she does in this preface, Smith relinquished some of the indirection that had constituted the sonnets' appeal, and in doing so she discovered the rhetorical limits of her lyricism for a woman writer.

These restrictions were, however, not formal but social. An increasing ambivalence on the part of many of Smith's reviewers reflected not lyricism's rhetorical incapacity, but rather restrictions on what a woman poet with radical sympathies and a proven ability to move readers could say in a politically turbulent period. For Smith's new specificity about the sources of her sorrow gave her lamentations a political inflection that she increasingly employed not only to argue her own case in the court of public opinion but also to speak for others whom she considered fellow sufferers. Later editions of the Sonnets reflected this shift in Smith's public profile, when she added poems that alluded more explicitly both to the biographical sources of her poet's despair (such as “Written at Bignor Park in Sussex, in August, 1799” [“Sonnet XCII”]) and to social events (such as “The Sea View” [“Sonnet LXXXIII”], which expresses antiwar sentiments). More strikingly, in the same year that the preface to the sixth edition of the sonnets appeared, Smith published her fourth novel, Desmond, which features an English protagonist who travels to revolutionary France and is persuaded by its ideals.

Smith's increasing explicitness about the material conditions of her own melancholy was prompted by her frustration with the Chancery suit and the exhausting pace of her career. She established herself with the sonnets, but soon found it necessary to turn to a more remunerative genre, the novel. Emmeline appeared four years after the first edition of Elegiac Sonnets, which was then in its fourth edition. After the success of this novel, she published nine others between 1788 and 1798. She also entered the burgeoning marketplace for children's literature, beginning with Rural Walks (1795). Smith took several breaks from writing (in 1801, 1803, and 1805) in order to devote herself to her campaign to have Richard Smith's estate settled when it seemed that the Chancery suit might be resolved.⁴⁸ But persistent legal frustrations, and the continued financial needs of her family, kept her writing until her death in 1806; two works appeared posthumously: Beachy Head, with Other Poems, its title poem unfinished, and The Natural History of Birds, which also appeared in 1807. Smith also suffered the intermittent returns of her husband, who had legal rights to her earnings despite their separation. A book contract for Desmond named Benjamin, rather than Charlotte, as the legal party.⁴⁹

In its notice of volume 2 of Elegiac Sonnets (1797), Joseph Johnson's politically liberal Analytical Review exemplifies the ideal response to her growing frankness. The reviewer advances Smith's bid for sympathy, and thus attempts to lend her the practical assistance that Cowper also wanted to provide: “We have chosen to extract these passages from the preface of our author, for the purpose of contributing, so far as lies in our power, to the notoriety of her injuries, and of exciting the public attention to the peculiar circumstances of aggravation which attend them.” The critic anticipates that, not only would publicizing Smith's cause fan the flames of popular support, but it might also shame her adversaries in the Chancery suit into greater benevolence: “As to her oppressors, however they may be dead to honesty and humanity, we can scarcely believe it possible that they should have outlived all sensibility to shame: no man is not gratified with the smiles of the world, or is any one so completely hardened, that he would not feel mortified at one universal frown of contempt and indignation.” Thus the critic becomes Smith's advocate, publicizing her cause and using the periodical's influence to pressure her “oppressors.”⁵⁰

Yet critics from both ends of the political spectrum—including the Analytical Review—were alarmed when it became clear that Smith understood her influence as a popular cultural figure, and that she was willing to use it to address social issues. They recognized that even Smith's habitual practices of self-promotion and self-defense were political gestures, for as Curran notes, many of her works reflect “her recognition that the law is a social code written by men for a male preserve, and that the principal function of women within its boundaries can only be to suffer consequences over which they have no control.”⁵¹ Critics have identified different moments as inaugurating a decline in Smith's popularity, and have attributed this decline to various causes, including her prolific output. Yet there is a persuasive consensus among Smith's latter-day critics that this decline begins sometime in the years in which her public figure became politicized, with the publication of the sixth edition of Elegiac Sonnets, Desmond, The Old Manor House (1793), The Emigrants (1793), and The Banished Man (1794).⁵² In the two latter works, Smith renders sympathetic French émigrés from the nobility, aristocracy, and clergy in works that some critics read as a retraction of her support of revolution abroad and reform at home in Desmond.

Critical responses to The Banished Man by the British Critic and the Analytical Review testify to a keen contemporaneous recognition of the influence that Smith could exert in treating political topics. The British Critic, delighted with Smith's seeming change of heart about the revolution, deems that “she makes full atonement by the virtues of the Banished Man, for the errors of Desmond,” and closes its review by “congratulating the lovers of their king and the constitution, in the acquisition of an associate like Mrs. Charlotte Smith.” The critic concludes by declaring with evident satisfaction that “[s]uch a convert, gained by fair conviction, is a valuable prize to the commonwealth.” The legitimacy of this boast is supported by the simultaneous lamentation of the Analytical Review for its perceived loss of Smith as an ally: “As commonly happens to new converts, she is beyond all measure vehement in her exclamations against the late proceedings of the french.”⁵³

Although critics such as these often directly assailed Smith's politics, others employed a more ingenious strategy, by censuring Smith's conduct as a woman writer. She was assailed for the very quality that had initiated her success—her works' intense autobiographical focus—when critics charged her with “egotism,” a critique particularly damning for a woman whose literary success was greatly facilitated by her personal appeal. The European Magazine focuses on the autobiographical impulse of Smith's works in its review of The Banished Man. The critic explains that “the apology she makes for her frequent recurrence to family distresses will have its full weight with us,” yet “we would have her rail like a gentlewoman always.” Smith is warned that the strong language she uses for her enemies in the legal battle over her father-in-law's estate is reserved for men: “terms of abuse,” she is told, have been “appropriated” by the “male sex,” and their rights to them are not to be “invaded” by women, with one significant exception, “those resistless nymphs who deal out the scaly treasures of the ocean from a certain part of this metropolis.”⁵⁴ Smith is publicly warned that her writings are taking her out of the company of respectable women and placing her in the company of the fishwives who populated Billingsgate Fishmarket, and whose colorful and unusually inventive obscenities have earned them a place to this day in encyclopedias of English culture and language.

In the course of her career, Smith discovered that she could only act indirectly, winning readers who might become advocates by turning away from them and asking for nothing. In the lyric, she found a mode in which she could render herself sympathetic by expressing her sorrows, ostensibly to herself, her solitary stance proof against charges that she had designs upon readers. Smith's averted gaze in the sonnets was both effective and necessary. Readers, including patrons and critics, were often glad to act for her, and Smith received generous assistance from publishers (especially her first publisher, Thomas Cadell Sr.), and from various patrons throughout her career. But she discovered that she was reliant upon their continued sympathy, and upon the sustained interest of her readers. She similarly lacked the ability to act for herself in the Chancery suit: she could not prod its resolution directly because women could not act as legal agents. The necessity of enlisting the help of others, including Sir George O'Brien Wyndham, third earl of Egremont, and continually urging them to act eventually cost her patrons, including Egremont and Hayley. In the sonnet “To Dependence” (“Sonnet LVII”), Smith's poet laments: “Dependence! heavy, heavy are thy chains.” In the poem, Smith alludes to the Chancery suit in declaring her determination to devote herself to “the Mountain Nymph,” (Milton's Liberty in “L'Allegro”) even “tho' Pride combine / With Fraud to crush me.”

In its final review of her poetry, published after her death, the British Critic provides a clear assessment of Smith's predicament. The review opens by acknowledging, “[w]e could not, indeed, always accord with her in sentiment.” The critic chastises her in gendered terms: “With respect to some subjects beyond her line of experience, reading, and indeed talent, she was unfortunately wayward and preposterous; but her poetic feeling and ability have rarely been surpassed by any individual of her sex.” Yet this censure is qualified by the review's close: “We take our leave of this author with unfeigned regret and sympathy.” The critic explains why:

Her life was embittered by sorrow and misfortune, [and] this gave an unavoidable tinge to her sentiments, which, from the gay and the vain, and the unfeeling, may excite a sneer of scorn and contempt; but in the bosoms of those who, like Charlotte Smith, with refined feelings, improved by thought and study, and reflection, have been compelled, like her, to tread the thorny paths of adversity, will prompt the generous wish, that fortune had favoured her with more complacency; and will induce the disposition to extenuate such portions of her productions, as sterner judgment is unable to approve.⁵⁵

This eulogy of Smith, patronizing and “generous,” censorious and admiring, testifies to her precarious position throughout her career: she could win sympathy but could not state her case bluntly without risking her income and her gentlewomanly reputation.

In the lyric, Smith found a formal vehicle of indirection and complexity: by appearing to be lost in mournful reflections, she won a popular audience; in presenting herself as a mother writing only to support her children, she gained a public position from which to pressure the trustees of her father-in-law's estate. Her career makes plain that for a woman writer dependent upon her earnings, the lyric offered the necessary guise of modesty, the proper stance of an averted gaze. Smith's pragmatic view of the form is highly instructive. By continuing to present her readers with more sonnets in the multiplying editions of Elegiac Sonnets, she proved herself wise enough to know that she had found in the sonnet's “small plot of ground” a rare and viable, yet sharply circumscribed, forum for a woman to make public the sorrows of dependence.

Notes

1. Anna Letitia Barbauld, introduction to The Old Manor House, by Charlotte Smith, in The British Novelists (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1810), 36:iii.

2. Unsigned “Sonnet to Mrs. Smith,” European Magazine 10 (1786): 125.

3. Richard Phillips, British Public Characters of 1800-1801 (London: Richard Phillips, 1801), 3:65.

4. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 271.

5. Abrams, “Structure and Style,” 201-29.

6. Bishop C. Hunt Jr. describes a copy of the fifth edition (1789) owned by Wordsworth at Cambridge, which contains Wordsworth's marginalia. Hunt provides an extensive account of Smith's influence on Wordsworth in “Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith,” Wordsworth Circle 1 (1970): 85-103.

7. William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. William Knight (London: Macmillan, 1896), 7:351. Kari Lokke explains that Wordsworth's citation of this poem is particularly significant, because the poem represents Smith's self-conscious statement of her poetic enterprise. See “Charlotte Smith and Literary History: ‘Dark Forgetfulness’ and the ‘Intercession of Saint Monica,’” Women's Studies 27 (1998): 259-80.

8. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 32.

9. Coleridge, “Introduction to the Sonnets” (1796), in The Complete Poetical and Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Dykes Campbell (London: Macmillan, 1938), 543.

10. In her preface to The Banished Man (1794), Smith reports, “In the strictures on a late publication of mine, some Review (I do not now recollect which) objected to the too frequent allusion I made in it to my own circumstances.” See The Banished Man (London: T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1794), 1:viii. Other defenses against charges of egotism are found in the prefaces to Marchmont (1796) and to volume 2 of Elegiac Sonnets (1797).

11. William Jones to J. Shore, Esq. (16 August 1787), in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, by John Shore, Lord Teignmouth (London: John Hatchard, 1804), 2:139.

12. Unsigned notice of Elegiac Sonnets, Gentleman's Magazine 56 (1786): 334.

13. From the first edition, Elegiac Sonnets contains poems other than sonnets, but the sonnets continually outnumber them. These poems, like the sonnets, multiplied with expanding editions. “Metastasio” is Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782).

14. The lines Smith puts in her own mouth are Egeon's. Smith slightly misquotes him: “Oh! Time has Changed me since you saw me last, / And heavy Hours with Time's deforming Hand, / Have written strange Defeatures in my Face.” Shakespeare's lines are quoted correctly in my epigraph.

15. Unsigned review of The Emigrants, British Critic 1 (1793): 403.

16. One of a group of Smith's letters housed by the Princeton University Library contains instructions for an engraver about altering the frontispiece portrait and one of the collection's engravings. I quote the letter at length in “Charlotte Smith's Letters and the Practice of Self-Presentation,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 53 (1991): 50-77.

17. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 108.

18. Unsigned notice of Elegiac Sonnets, Gentleman's Magazine 56 (1786): 333.

19. Marshall, Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 5, 107.

20. Coleridge, “Introductions to the Sonnets,” 543.

21. William Cowper to Charlotte Smith (26 October 1793), in The Correspondence of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), 4:462.

22. Marshall, Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 128.

23. Cowper to William Hayley (29 January 1793), in Correspondence of William Cowper, 4:363.

24. Vendler and Bahti consider the role of the lyric's reader carefully, but each views that role as more passive and subordinate than I do. Vendler describes a lyric poem as “a role offered to a reader.” Her notion of the reader's identification with the poetic speaker is absolute: “[T]he reader is to be the voice speaking the poem” (“Tintern Abbey: Two Assaults,” 184). Vendler's decisive account of the reader's capacity for sympathetic identification with the lyric speaker explains something important about that relationship: its potential for intensity. I view the relationship as more of a precarious exchange, however, and I would instead emphasize the potential for marked ambivalence by both parties. For Bahti's account of this relationship, see chapter 1, n. 70.

25. For Abrams's account of the significance of sincerity to Romantic poetry, see Mirror and Lamp, 317-19. For “the lyric as poetic norm,” see ibid., 84-88. A number of critics have complicated Romantic accounts of sincerity. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) and Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

26. Judith Phillips Stanton, “Charlotte Smith's ‘Literary Business’: Income, Patronage, and Indigence,” in The Age of Johnson, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 375-401.

27. This account of Smith's life appears in a section entitled “Memoirs of Eminent Persons,” Monthly Magazine 22 (1807): 246.

28. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 166. Culler follows Frye's claim that in the lyric “we turn away from our ordinary continuous experience in space or time, or rather from a verbal mimesis of it.” According to Frye, this detachment requires a rejection of “the kind of language we use in coping with ordinary experience.” Frye, “Approaching the Lyric,” 31, 34.

29. Cameron, Lyric Time, 203.

30. Stafford Harry Northcote, Viscount St. Cyres, “The Sorrows of Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” Cornhill Magazine, n.s., 15 (1903): 686-96.

31. Leigh Hunt, The Book of the Sonnet, ed. Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1867), 1:85.

32. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, from Hume to Austen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

33. Todd, Sensibility, 4.

34. Sir Walter Scott, The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1849), 2:64.

35. John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 34.

36. Curran, “The I Altered,” 200.

37. Unsigned review of The Emigrants, European Magazine 24 (1793): 42.

38. Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 112.

39. Florence May Anna Hilbish, “Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist 1749-1806” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1941), 151.

40. The Gentleman's Magazine noticed and praised Elegiac Sonnets early in its publication history (in 1786). The periodical also published poems and letters from readers addressed to her. For its initial notice of the sonnets, see Gentleman's Magazine 56 (1786): 333-34.

41. Margery Weiner, The French Exiles, 1789-1815 (London: John Murray, 1960), 103.

42. For instance, in Levinson's reading of “Tintern Abbey” in Wordsworth's Great Period Poems, memory obliterates an awareness of social history. Liu's definition of memory in Wordsworth's poetry as “the supervision of time by selfhood” similarly stresses the subjugation of a social environment to subjectivity. See Wordsworth, 204.

43. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 159. Pinch makes a relevant argument in her reading of Jane Austen's Persuasion: she defines lyricism in the novel as “a particular way of rendering consciousness' apprehension of the social.” She too turns to Benjamin for aid in constructing a model of the lyric as social. See “Lost in a Book: Jane Austen's Persuasion,” Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993): 99.

44. The European Magazine was less pleased, complaining that “no particular character, or even species of misfortune, is suffered to dwell long enough upon the mind to produce any very great and concentrated degree of anxiety and interest.” The result is that “[w]e pity all too much to suffer acutely any one.” Yet the critic concedes Smith's success in making readers aware of the ongoing violence across the Channel, worrying that “[t]here is but too much reason to fear, that this creature of her imagination has been many times realized in the course of the last two years, and that similar scenes are transacting at the very hour in which we are amusing ourselves with the contemplation of these fictitious sorrows!” Unsigned review of The Emigrants, European Magazine 24 (1793): 45.

45. Unsigned review of The Emigrants, Analytical Review 22 (1793): 91.

46. Review signed “E.,” Monthly Review 12 (1793): 375.

47. As Mary Poovey has argued, women writers faced the necessity of remaining “proper ladies,” and were chastened when they were judged to have lapsed from rigorous social codes. See The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

48. Stanton, “Charlotte Smith's ‘Literary Business,’” 393.

49. Ibid., 376-77.

50. Unsigned review of vol. 2 of Elegiac Sonnets, Analytical Review 26 (1797): 158-59.

51. Curran, introduction to Poems of Charlotte Smith, xxi.

52. Stanton makes a cogent case that “after her first three conventional novels, Smith had begun [in The Old Manor House] to test the limits of what a woman might write.” Derek Roper points out that, with the exception of the Critical Review, the major periodicals viewed this novel positively. He argues that Smith's decline in popularity began with her next novel, The Banished Man, since this and subsequent novels were “of less interest.” See Stanton's introduction to The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ix; and Roper, Reviewing Before the “Edinburgh,” 1788-1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), 130.

53. Unsigned review of The Banished Man, British Critic 4 (1794): 623. Unsigned review of The Banished Man, Analytical Review 20 (1794): 254.

54. Unsigned review of The Banished Man, European Magazine 26 (1794): 276. A reviewer for the Critical Review makes a related charge about Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. The critic suggests that “the story of the Hermit speaks to every one's bosom; and the affectionate sensibility of Frank Maynard is equally interesting and pathetic.” Yet the critic goes on to suggest: “To similar tales of domestic life and domestic feelings perhaps Mrs. Smith might, with propriety, confine her exertions.” Unsigned review of Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, Critical Review 32 (1801): 39.

55. Unsigned review of Beachy Head, with other Poems, British Critic 30 (1807): 170, 174.

Works Cited

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———. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Reprinted in Romanticism and Consciousness, edited by Harold Bloom, 201-29. New York: Norton, 1970.

Bahti, Timothy. Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Cowper, William. The Correspondence of William Cowper. Edited by Thomas Wright. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Curran, Stuart. “The I Altered.” In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, 185-207. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

———. Introduction to The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

———. “Approaching the Lyric.” In Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, edited by Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker, 31-37. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Levinson, Marjorie. Wordsworth's Great Period Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Roper, Derek. Reviewing Before the Edinburgh, 1788-1802. London: Methuen, 1978.

Stanton, Judith Phillips. “Charlotte Smith's ‘Literary Business’: Income, Patronage, and Indigence.” In The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin, 375-401. New York: AMS Press, 1987.

———. Introduction to The Old Manor House, by Charlotte Smith, edited by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986.

Vendler, Helen. “Tintern Abbey: Two Assaults.” In Wordsworth in Context, edited by Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy, 173-90. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1992.