THE LEGACY OF CHARLOTTE SMITH

An article by Professor Jacqueline Labbe, English and Comparative Literary Studies

In her book Writing Romanticism, Prof Jacqueline Labbe showed how the British writer Charlotte Smith - a talented author, poor and troubled by a bad marriage - had a significant influence on the development of Romantic literature, particularly the poetry of William Wordsworth. Here Prof Labbe lifts the lid on Smith's life and her extraordinary career as a professional writer at a time when independent female voices were scarcely acknowledged.

What if there was a Wordsworth before Wordsworth, or a Jane Austen before Jane Austen? What if the things we think we know about the poetry and fiction of the late 18th century turned out to be based on only part of the truth? The British writer Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) has fascinated me since graduate school, when I first began to learn that not only did women write and publish extensively in what we call the Romantic Period (approximately 1770-1830), but that one in particular wrote poetry that sounded like Wordsworth and novels that read like Austen’s – well before either more well-known author found their voice.

Although my research spans the writing of the period, I have found myself concentrating on Smith. Born in 1749 to a landed family in East Sussex, Smith wrote poetry from a very early age (according to her sister Catherine Ann Dorset, a well-known writer of children’s tales). She concentrated at first on the natural landscape: the stunning South Downs with their rolling hills, the River Arun and its environs. But Smith’s childhood was marred by the loss of her mother when she was three, and by her father’s general lack of business nous, which meant that by the time she was a young teenager, ‘giddy and thoughtless’ in her words, the money was gone.

Her father’s solution was to marry an heiress; the heiress’s solution to having a troublesome teenage girl around was to find Smith a husband. Married at 15, a mother by the age of 16, Smith exchanged the country for the city: Cheapside, inner London, about as far from rural peace as could be found.

Smith was unlucky. Her husband Benjamin turned out to be a selfish only son, abusive and unfaithful. Her father-in-law, seeming to recognize this, made a will that bypassed Benjamin in favor of Smith’s children – but he did this without recourse to the law. The will became the bane of Smith’s life. Constructed in such a way that the executors could not agree on its meaning, the case went to Chancery where it was not resolved until seven years after Smith’s own death – that’s 37 years after it was first read. Significantly, scholars have accepted that this probably furnished Charles Dickens with his central conceit in Bleak House: the unending Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case. In the meantime, Smith bore 12 children, saw her lifestyle narrow as a result of her husband’s continual debts, found herself an exile in France to escape his creditors, and eventually, dutifully, accompanied him to the King’s Bench debtor’s prison when the creditors caught up.

It was from this unsalubrious setting that Smith established herself as an author in 1784. Although my research revealed that she had published poems in the periodicals anonymously and pseudonymously since 1782, 1784 saw the publication of Elegiac Sonnets and other essays. Crucially, Smith rejected the custom of signing herself as ‘A Lady’ or as ‘Mrs. Smith’. On the title page, she is ‘Charlotte Smith, of Bignor Park, in Sussex’: an independent woman laying claim to her childhood home in the face of a tradition that comfortably gave the estate to her younger brother and her name and body to her husband.

Soon after, Smith took the entirely unexpected step of formally separating from her husband, and took herself and her nine living children off. Other than the occasional sum released by the trustees of the contested will, Smith supported herself and her children until her death on the proceeds of her writing: a professional female author in a culture that could not even give such conduct a name.

Smith was aware of the anomalousness of her position. Her letters, poetry and fiction reveal her understanding that the social establishment sought continually to marginalize her independent voice. Despite this, she developed a poetic persona that celebrated an ungendered original genius, unfettered by social expectations of silence or decorum.

Her poetry was often tinged with a sorrow that reflected her personal circumstances: poverty, the death of beloved children, betrayal by friends. Solace offered itself in the form of ‘these beloved hills’, in ever-present memories of lost loved ones, and in the possibilities offered by composition itself: her poetry inaugurated what is commonly seen as a key aspect of Romantic-period poetry, self-reflexivity. This kind of poetry shows an awareness that the very act of writing about something creates its significance: in other words, it is not simply descriptive, it is self-analytical.

The psychological depth offered by self-reflexive poetry, usually assumed to come into being in Wordsworth’s work, allowed Smith to transform expressions of woe into statements of worth, artistry, and authority. As my latest research shows, Wordsworth learned from this how to construct his own versions of poetic authority: that is, he learned how to be Wordsworth by reading and emulating Smith.

Her novels, too, explore new territory. Although often featuring a young marriageable woman, they go far beyond the typical marriage plot. Smith did not shy away from politics: she endorses the actions of the French revolutionaries against the ancién regime, for instance, and permits female characters to retain an honourable morality even after they have lost their sexual reputation. Her heroines display what we now call clinical depression, are traumatized by violent partners, and are terrorized by unhinged lovers. Debt ruins families, parents abandon their children, and unscrupulous lawyers endeavour to victimize the penniless while toadying to the powerful. Smith was creative in her contempt for lawyers, even naming one Vampyre! And although plots involving earthquakes and shipwrecks do not feature in the works of her most famous heir, Jane Austen, those involving debt, entailed estates, hidden marriages, the dualities of sense and sensibility or pride and prejudice most certainly do. As my current research is demonstrating, Austen to an intriguing degree absorbed Smith’s fiction and relied on it in her own work.

Understanding Charlotte Smith allows for more than becoming acquainted with a once-famous, latterly-obscure female writer. It also means that literary scholars and general readers can come to a fuller, more nuanced and more informed appreciation of her contemporaries and inheritors as well.

Jacqueline Labbe is a professor in the University of Warwick's Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies; Chair, Warwick Graduate School; and Director, Humanities Research Centre.

Her research interests lie in the poetry and prose of the Romantic period and 19th-century children's literature, and cover issues of gender, subjectivity, genre, and form.

Her latest book, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784-1807, was published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan, and she is planning a new project studying the intertextual relations between Smith and Jane Austen.