Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith: 1970

Abstract

The Dove Cottage Library in Grasmere owns copy of the fifth edition of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, printed in London in 1789, which Wordsworth owned and read as an undergraduate at Cambridge. The book contains few marks and annotations by Wordsworth, his autograph signature in several places, and dated inscription in his hand, St. John's Cambridge '89. Two later sonnets by Charlotte Smith, copied out in Wordsworth's clearest early hand, are preserved on the rear fly-leaf. In themselves, the annotations are of no special significance but they call attention to an important early influence on Wordsworth which has not been exlored up to now. (1) Though nearly forgotten today, Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) became for brief period at the close of the eighteenth century one of the most popular writers of her time. Her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, which first appeared in 1784, went through nine editions by 1800. (2) She wrote two other volumes of verse: long poem on the miseries of the French Revolution, called The Emigrants (1793); and posthumous collection, Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807). After disastrously unhappy marriage she supported her large family by writing novels: Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), and five others. She also published children's stories, play, some Conversations introducing poetry, and various miscellaneous pieces including translations from the French. She achieved considerable critical reputation; Coleridge and Southey admired her work, as did Scott. (3) Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, recording the impression which Charlotte Smith created in the early seventeen-nineties, in Censura Literaria (1807) noted that the public had received her enchanting fiction with a new kind of delight: It displayed such simple energy of language, such an accurate and lively delineation of character, such purity of sentiment, and such exquisite scenery of picturesque and rich, yet most unaffected, imagination, as gave it hold upon all readers of true taste, of new and captivating kind. (Hilbish, 131) The outward aspects of Wordsworth's relationship to Charlotte Smith are fairly clear, with one exception: certain obscure business dealings with her by his family. (4) Charlotte Smith's husband Benjamin Smith, feckless and unsuccessful West Indian merchant from whom she separated, was imprisoned for debt in 1783, and the following year Wordsworth's cousin, John Robinson, M.P., managed to get Smith out of jail by agreeing to become trustee of Smith's tangled affairs. A co-trustee was Anthony Parkin, cousin of Wordsworth's father, and employer of Wordsworth's older brother, Richard Wordsworth, in London. (5) In 1793 one of Charlotte Smith's sons brought suit against Robinson, apparently for failure to administer their affairs. The result was that Charlotte Smith satirized Robinson in several of her novels, notably in the person of Sir Appulby Gorges in The Young Philosopher (1798). Exactly when the troubles between Robinson and the Smiths began, and to what extent Wordsworth was aware of it, we have no way of telling. In any case, the imbroglio had not proceeded far enough to prevent Wordsworth from acquiring her Elegiac Sonnets at Cambridge, or from visiting her home at Brighton, on the way to France, in the autumn of 1791. was detained, he wrote shortly afterwards from Orleans to his brother Richard. at Brighthelmstone from Tuesday till Saturday Evening which time must have past in manner extremely disagreeable, if I had not bethought me of introducing myself to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, she received me in the politest manner, and shewed me every possible civility. This with my best affection you will be so good as to mention to Captn. and Mrs. Wordsworth.... Mrs. Smith who was so good as to give me Letters for Paris furnished me with one for Miss [Helen Maria] Williams, an English Lady who resided here lately. …