[In the following essay, Hoagwood describes the content of Smith's poetry as surpassing the usual poetic concerns to embrace social, political, and intellectual issues.]

Charlotte Smith, an influential poet and extraordinarily successful novelist, was the author of sixty-three volumes, altogether,¹ including bestseller novels with social themes (saliently feminist and politically revolutionary themes) and books of widely-admired poetry, of which the volume here reprinted was her last. Admirers of her work included Sir Walter Scott, Queen Caroline, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Smith regarded her own poetry as more important than her fiction; she not only established anew for English literature the importance of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence (in ways that were formative for the subsequent work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, by their own admission), but she also developed other genres in aesthetically and intellectually influential ways. For example, her use of the topographical and narrative meditation in blank verse (as in The Emigrants of 1793 and “Beachy Head,” reprinted here) was revolutionary and influential.

Characteristically, in these poems, landscapes (especially the coast, the sea, the rising sun, and the turbulent waters between England and France) furnish Smith with symbolic imagery, with which she represents the stormy political times of democratic revolution and its aftermath, in iconographic form. Wordsworth's The Prelude, Swinburne's A Forsaken Garden, and Eliot's Four Quartets display the ways in which her genre—and frequently her particular symbols—shaped major poetry to come after her.

Smith's concerns, however, were not specialized poetic concerns; they involved, rather, some larger social, political, and intellectual goals. As Florence Hilbish has written, in her exemplary scholarly biography, Smith contended across her career that “poverty and ignorance [were] due to unjust laws,” and she also advocated democracy, which included abolition of privileges owing to birth, sympathy for the American colonists, and the French, hatred of war and prejudice; humanitarianism towards the prisoner, beggar, insane, and slave.”² In the period of the democratic revolutions, the counter-revolutionary war, the treason trials, the Gagging Acts, censorship, and imprisonment of authors and publishers for dangerously democratic utterances, Smith's ability and determination to persist in the fictional and poetic projection of these contentions, with integrity, consistency, and (in her poetry) artistic excellence, amount to a remarkable achievement even within a large view of the history of English literature.

This achievement, however, has been largely screened from the public view. With a few exceptions—preeminently Hilbish—writing about Smith has been limited chiefly to the genre of the short biographical narrative, typically in the form of encyclopedia articles and introductions to her novels.³ Like other genres, this one has its conventions, and in Smith's case the conventions have operated lugubriously to cover her historical importance and her social vision under a dark blanket of overbearing personal misery. Her mother died when she was three years old; to facilitate his remarriage to a wealthy woman, her father arranged her marriage at age fifteen to an abusive profligate, whom she followed into debtor's prison, “amidst scenes of misery, of vice, and even of terror.”⁴ Prisoners twice attempted to effect their escape by blowing up the walls of the prison. Leaving her loveless, violent, and exploitative husband, she lived as a single mother, and, according to Anna Barbauld, she saw the deaths of six of her twelve children (her first baby died while her second was being born).⁵ While raising those of her children who did survive, she was on occasion reduced to sleeping in the public road.

With rare exceptions, scholarly and critical accounts of Smith have been dominated by the melancholy recitation of these unhappy personal circumstances (and others, including some long-standing legal problems that kept her in penury and frustration). Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, one of the best scholars to write about Smith in the fifty years since Hilbish's book appeared, advises readers in these terms: “for details of her miserable life, see my introduction to The Old Manor House.”⁶ The tradition of enveloping her work with a morose concentration on her miserable life goes back a very long way: within four years of Smith's death, for example, Barbauld wrote that Smith had “lost her mother when very young,” was “plunged into the cares of married life” while a teenager, suffered “vexation” and “perplexities,” and generally underwent a life of trouble that “gave to her writings that bitter and querulous tone of complaint which is discernible in so many of them.”⁷

The theme of the biographical parable was thus established by 1810, and it has been carried on from that day to this.⁸ In 1834, Sir Walter Scott expresses admiration for Smith's novelistic skill (especially her use of language and her skill at characterization) but he also reproduces a biographical memoir written by Mrs. Dorset, a surviving sister of Charlotte Smith. What is probably the most sustained and unmitigated example of the genre (the morose biographical parable) was published by Julia Kavanagh in 1863; Kavanagh begins with a tone impressively calculated to dampen enthusiasm: “There are lives that read like one long sorrow, and that leave little save sadness and disappointment behind them when they close in death. Such a life was that of Charlotte Smith, full of cares while it lasted, and once it was over, doomed to fade away from memory.”⁹ That is surely one of the least inspiriting introductions to a major author one could readily find. Kavanagh continues: upon her marriage, Smith was moved to a “house in one of the narrowest and dirtiest lanes in the City, and in which the sun's beams had never shone” (p. 189); her husband was “foolish, ignorant, pleasure-seeking, and dissipated,” and (when she was living with her vicious husband in the house of her father-in-law) the sound of the elder Smith's creaking shoes made Charlotte hide whatever she was doing (p. 190). Kavanagh reports that Charlotte Smith was in prison for a while, and that from the time of her imprisonment until her death, “her life was a succession of cares, with few respites” (p. 190).

My point about this genre (the mournful parable of Smith's miserable life) is that it is doubly misleading, obscuring the meanings of both her life and her art.¹⁰ Barbauld's negative judgment about the “bitter and querulous tone of complaint” that is supposedly discernible in Smith's writings established a tone that many others have repeated. If it were true that Smith merely (or chiefly) complained about her personal sufferings (and it is not true), it seems to me that it would still be odd to register surprise or disapproval at the fact. I remember recently hearing a Benefits Officer of a private corporation indicating candidly that she did not object to the sickness, pain, and suffering of the helpless people she heard from, so much as their constant whining about it.

Smith, however, did not produce self-absorbed whining; she produced vigorous, intelligent, positive, and even profound social criticism in imaginative forms. Smith was not reduced to the shrunken privacy of personalistic sadness, which is what the mythos of self-pity would imply; instead, she was unusually industrious and she maintained an unusually large vision of social and cultural issues. As I have said, Smith wrote sixty-three volumes altogether; this massive productivity is not consistent with chronic self-pity.¹¹

A second way in which the traditional and generically miserable short story of her life obscures her meanings has to do with her works' intellectual content. If we understand her poetry as referring principally to her self, to her unique and private sorrow, then we remain deaf to its larger meanings. Smith's poetry characteristically adopts a symbolic form, rather than openly political polemic, a fact which should not surprise us, when we recall that during this period Paine, Thelwall, Holcroft, Tooke, and dozens of other authors and publishers were convicted and imprisoned for the promulgation of social views like Smith's. This shift of socio-political polemic into figurative form can be understood as one of the major tendencies of the literary culture of Romanticism: Wollstonecraft's turn to fictional form, in Wrongs of Woman, and Thelwall's turn to poetic symbolism, as in his Hope of Albion (written after his trial for treason) are two obvious examples; and so are Joanna Baillie's displacement of French Revolutionary politics and war into exotic analogies (as in Constantine Paleologus), and Byron's displacement of contemporary European conflicts into historically removed settings (as in Wemer) or mythic symbols (as in Heaven and Earth and Cain). Even more clearly than these writers, Smith embeds her historical vision in the symbolic form of her ostensibly topographical poems.

Smith's characteristic imagery includes conventional political icons from the revolutionary movements, though some of her later readers have been stunningly willing to take them literally and only literally: these images include sunrises, floods, earthquakes, feudal ruins, and springtime renewal. She writes in plain prose (in the preface to her novel Desmond) that “the political passages dispersed through the work … are, for the most part, drawn from conversations to which I have been a witness, in England, and France.” Smith is not moping but taking a progressive and defiant position when she writes the following sentence, in the same preface: “But women it is said have no business with politics—why not?”¹² In the dedicatory preface to her poem, The Emigrants, Smith writes not of her personal sorrow or her miserable private life, but rather the “reciprocal hatred so unworthy of great and enlightened nations” and her work's ambition “to humanize both countries … and at length annihilate the prejudices that have so long existed to the injury of both.”¹³ To interpret Smith's fiction or her poetry as if it were privatized moping about her miserable life is to obscure not only the truth of her productive life, but also the meanings of her socialized themes.

As Mary Anne Schofield has said, Smith's works include tales “of political exploitation and imprisonment that deftly teach insurrection and revolution”; her work is positive, vigorous, and even optimistic in its purposes, revolution (obviously) implying optimism. All her adult life, Smith meant “to show her readers how to deal with despotic, domineering men, especially tyrannical fathers.” What Schofield calls Smith's “strength of mind and character” enables her to show “her readers that they do not have to accept the lies men offer, that they have a right to their own minds, selves, and lives.” Schofield points out that “Smith exposes the myths which have proliferated in the pages of the century's fictions—the notions of female dependency and … entrapment.” Further, in her poetry Smith presents this activist treatment of her society's present with a sophisticated treatment of its past, layering the present over its determining history. In poems like “Beachy Head,” Smith raises the subject from the merely particular (the landscape, and anecdotes from local lore) to the level of societal and historical change. She writes of a civilization undergoing revolutionary change, and not merely her private sorrows. Smith does not wallow hopelessly in a self-regarding slough of despond; instead, she devotes a substantial life's work to a complex representation of a legal, political, and economic structure that oppresses women, enslaves the poor, and violently opposes evolutionary change in the direction of freedom.

Beachy Head: With Other Poems was already in press when Charlotte Smith died (in 1806). In the title poem, as in The Emigrants, she produces a substantial and symbolic representation of historical and social themes, in an ostensibly topographical meditation and reminiscence. To be acquainted with the iconography of the revolutionary period will help us to interpret the poem, which begins with reference to the counter-revolutionary (Napoleonic) war that was in progress while she wrote. The opening emphasis on the “awful hour / Of vast concussion” means something more than a weather report; she is writing about the war, and not about the sensitive appreciation of nature. Looking over the channel toward France, the poem envisions a glorious sunrise (p. 2), and the sunrise is of course an icon of revolutionary hope, here as it is likewise (to mention only three examples), in William Blake's well-known print, Albion Rose, or in Wordsworth's Prelude (“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …”¹⁴), or in Swinburne's book of poems on the European revolutions, Songs Before Sunrise.

No special code of iconography should be necessary to enable us to appreciate the fact that (as on pp. 4-5) Smith's poem attacks imperialism and affirms “the sacred freedom” of all humanity. The poem refers openly enough to “modern Gallia” and to the Italian and Spanish responses to the Napoleonic war; and when, in the concluding portion of the poem, the speaker turns to the question of the value of “visionary” projections, the worth of “dreams,” surely her contemporary readers (including Wordsworth, who visited Smith in 1791, on his way to revolutionary France) would have understood that this discourse of dream and disillusion involved not an individualistic or psychological preoccupation, but rather the political history of England and Europe during the revolutionary decades and their aftermath.

In this way, a synopsis of “Beachy Head” sounds like a synopsis of Wordsworth's Prelude: the poem moves from the topics of tyranny and war to the topics of sympathy and compassion, and it concludes with an exemplary narrative about a solitary vagrant and a meditation on visionary hopes, disillusionment, and the restorative power of imagination. The poem's explicit treatment of the imagination's power to deal positively with political disillusionment is only one of the ways in which Smith's poetry bears comparison with Wordsworth's. The poem's language is both colloquial and dignified, sometimes imitating natural speech and sometimes rising to Miltonic tones. The imagery offers a literal level as an appreciation of nature, and a figurative depth involving both political history and the poetic imagination.

All of these features have long been associated with the poetry of the Prelude; but I would emphasize that it was Smith's poetry that influenced Wordsworth's, in the first instance, rather than the other way around; in fact, it was his admiration of her poetry, and particularly the Elegiac Sonnets. that led him to visit her in 1791. To appreciate her poetry's power and excellence requires our understanding of its relationships in its troubled historical moment. Smith's poetry represents the historical period's largest social and political concerns. If we are still learning to read that cultural history in its symbols, surely the availability now of some of her finest poetry—including this, her great, last book—makes possible some instruction and delight that have, in my judgment, been obscured for far too long.

Notes

1. Florence Hilbish, Charlotte Smith: Poet and Novelist. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), p. 3.

2. Both Gina Luria (in her introduction to Smith's novel, Desmond [New York: Garland, 1974], p. 9) and Mary Anne Schofield (in her introduction to Smith's novel, Marchmont [Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1989], p. 6) quote likewise this passage from Hilbish's Charlotte Smith, which is still the best source for information on Charlotte Smith.

3. In addition to Luria's introduction to Desmond and Schofield's introduction to Marchmont, the following are among good examples of biographical essays on Smith: Anna Barbauld, “Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” in The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Mrs. Barbauld, vol. 36 (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1810), pp. i-viii; Sir Walter Scott, “Charlotte Smith,” in Biographical Memoirs of Eminent Novelists, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1834); Julia Kavanagh, “Charlotte Smith,” in English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, vol. 1 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), pp. 187-93; “Charlotte Smith,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (1917; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1921-22); Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, Introduction to The Old Manor House (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Ehrenpreis, Introduction to Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Bernard Smith and Peter Haas, “Charlotte Smith,” in Writers in Sussex (Bristol: Redcliffe, 1985); Mary Anne Schofield, Introduction to Montalbert (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1989); “Charlotte Smith,” in British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1989); Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, “Charlotte (Turner) Smith,” in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Jonathan Wordsworth, Introduction to Charlotte Smith: Elegiac Sonnets 1789) (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1992).

   Blain, Clements, and Grundy report that an edition of Smith's letters, by Judith Stanton, is forthcoming. Stuart Curran informs me that his edition of the poetry of Charlotte Smith is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. For studies of Smith's fiction, see Roger D. Lund, “The Modern Reader and ‘The Truly Feminine Novel,’ 1660-1815,” in Fettered or Free? British Women Novelists. 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecelia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 398-425. One of the very few studies of Smith's poetry, since Hilbish's book, is Stuart Curran, “The I Altered,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 185-207.

4. I quote Smith's own description, from Barbauld's “Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” p. iii.

5. Barbauld, “Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” p. 5.

6. Ehrenpreis, Introduction to Emmeline, p. viii. The excellent biographical introduction to which Ehrenpreis refers appears in her edition of Smith's novel, The Old Manor House.

7. Barbauld, “Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” pp. i-ii.

8. Stuart Curran writes that “Charlotte Smith made a virtual career out of self-pity” (“The I Altered,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Mellor, p. 198.

9. Julia Kavanagh, “Charlotte Smith,” in English Women of Letters: Biographical Sketches, vol. 1 (London: Hurst and Blackett), p. 187.

10. On the art of biography, and particularly on the tendency to concentrate on personal emotion in the privacy of the subject's psyche (often to the point of slighting the public positions and contributions of a writer), I am indebted to three important books by Reed Whittemore: Pure Lives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Whole Lives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Six Literary Lives (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993).

11. At my request, Kimberly Hoagwood (a psychologist) reviewed the facts of the case and confirmed that, from a psychological point of view, the fact of that much productivity is itself sufficient to rule out the possibility that Smith suffered from chronic self-pity. I would like to thank Dr. Hoagwood for generously making her expert judgment available on this matter.

12. I quote Smith's preface to Desmond, from the facsimile edition with an introduction by Gina Luria (New York: Garland, 1974).

13. Smith, The Emigrants (London: T. Cadell, 1793).

14. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 396.