EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NoVELS BY WoMEN

Isobel Grundy, Editor

Advisory Board

Paula R. Backscheider David L. Blewett Margaret A. Doody Jan Fergus J. Paul Hunter John Richetti Betty Rizzo This page intentionally left blank The Young Philosopher

Charlotte Smith

Elizabeth Kraft, Editor

Of MAN, when warm'd by Reason's purest ray, No slave of Avarice, no tool of Pride; When no vain Science led his mind astray, But NATURE was his law, and God his guide.

THE U NIVJERSITY PREss OF KlENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 1999 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices:The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Charlotte Turner, 1749–1806. The oungy philosopher : a novel in four volumes / Charlotte Smith ; Elizabeth Kraft, editor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8131-2111-6 (acid-free paper).—ISBN 0-8131-0962-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) I. Kraft, Elizabeth. II. Title. PR3688.S4Y68 1999 823'.6—dc21 98-32030

ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-0962-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of American University Presses CoNTENTs

Acknowledgments vu Introduction ix Chronology xxxiii Note on the Text xxxvi

The Young Philosopher Volume I 3 Volume II 81 Volume III 159 Volume IV 241

Notes to the Novel 355 Variants 391 Bibliography 395 This page intentionally left blank AcKNOWLEDGMENTs

I have incurred many debts preparing this edition, some of which I would like to acknowledge here. The University of Georgia awarded me a Senior Faculty Research Grant in support of this project, and further funds were provided by the College of Arts and Sciences. I am grateful, in particular, to Hugh Ruppersburg, Associate Dean of the College ofArts and Sciences, for his generosity in making funds available for the computer entry of the text. The staffs of the rare book collections at the University of Georgia, the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Florida were of great assistance at various times during the process of collating and annotating the novel. The Department of English at the University of Georgia also provided various kinds of support. I was fortunate to have the help of two graduate student assistants, Marlene Allen and {especially) Eric Rochester, who helped with proofreading and with annotations. An enthusiastic and generous undergraduate, Melody Alberson, devoted much time and energy to combing through volumes of poetry for lines that Smith quotes without attribution. She was remarkably successful in her efforts, and her careful attention to detail, her good memory, and her dogged persistence were of immense help early in the process of annotating this novel. I owe a special thanks, as well, to my colleague David Gants, who, before he joined our faculty, kindly took the time to employ the Chadwyck-Healey Index to search for {and find) several quota­ tions. The University of Georgia has since acquired that index, and I was able to continue to find elusive references with its aid, but David's help early on was very encouraging. For assistance with the Italian citations, I am grateful to T.E.D. Braun, who provided the translations, and to Renata Isabelle Lana, Jonathan Druker, Stefano Mengozzi, and-especially-Janice Aski for refinement and corroboration. My col­ leagues in the Classics Department of the University of Georgia, T. Keith Dix and Richard LaFleur, helped me with the Latin citations. And I owe a special thanks to Kris Peeters of the University ofAntwerp, whom I came to know over the Internet via the eighteenth-century discussion list. He aided me in translating the still largely unattributed French passages, correcting Smith's French and my translations with good nature and forbearance. Thanks also to Adria Bredeman, Catharine Sanders, and Laura Sussman for help with the French. So many of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have answered questions and provided advice that I will probably omit several in the following catalog. Some vm I Acknowledgments

that I do include may not even remember helping me. But I am grateful to all, includ­ ing Douglas Anderson, Martine Watson Brownley, Christy Desmet, Roxanne Eberle, Jay Evatt, Miranda Fouts, Bill Free, Coburn Freer, Suzanne Gilbert, Patricia Hamilton, Mike Hendrick, Elissa Henken, Nelson Hilton, Dolan Hubbard, Bill Kretzchmar, Tricia Lootens, George Mosley, Debra Taylor, Frances Teague, Greg Timmons, Anne Williams, and Jennifer Wilson. My thanks too to several people who took the time to answer queries posted on the eighteenth-century list-Harry Duckworth, Vincent Carretta, Nick Sweeney, and especially Tracy Weiner, who provided an important reference that I would never have found on my own. The other editors in the series have been kind in offering suggestions, encour­ agement, and advice. At crucial moments in the process I had enlightening conversa­ tions with Paula Backscheider, Martha Bowden, and Susan Staves. Paul Hunter's coun­ sel was both verbal and printed; his article "Editing for the Classroom: Texts in Con­ texts" (Studies in the Nove/27 [1995]: 284-94) contains the wisdom distilled from a career pardy devoted to preparing such texts. It served as a reminder to me throughout the editing process that this text is, as all classroom editions are, primarily and most importandy an instrument for teaching. I hope it will serve that purpose well. Smith scholars Loraine Fletcher and Carrol Fry were generous in answering my questions and responding to my speculations about Smith. But I owe my greatest debt to Judith Phillips Stanton and lsobel Grundy. Judith Stanton is, as anyone who works on Charlotte Smith well knows, quite simply the leading authority on this author, her life, and her works. And, to our great benefit, she is open and accessible and generous. She reviewed my introduction at two stages, read the entire manuscript at the final stage, shared letters Smith wrote around the time she was composing The Young Phi­ losopher, and spoke with me at length several times about Smith's life. Isobel Grundy; the general editor of this series, has also been of enormous help. Her meticulous atten­ tion to every aspect of the manuscript led to many revisions; she patiently corrected mistakes, suggested clarifications, and provided contextual grounding of this novel­ especially in the tradition of women's writing. Whatever limitations this edition has are mine; for its strengths I share the credit with my many collaborators-and, of course, with Charlotte Smith hersel£ INTRODUCTION

LIFE AND WoRKS

When Charlotte Smith emerged on the literary scene in 1784 with the publication of her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, she had long cultivated a talent for writing. Anecdotes from her school days tell of her composing at the age of ten a poem on the death of General Wolfe. 1 And, by her own account, she was accustomed to beguiling "melancholy moments . . . by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought."2 She had also exercised her skill as a writer of prose in the service of her father-in-law, a director of the East India Company, effectively defending him in print against a libelous charge that threatened to bring scandal upon his family and hers (Dorset, 256; Hilbish, 64). In 1784, however, Charlotte Smith became a professional author-a role she would play for the rest of her life. Given the circumstances that propelled her into print, it is a matter of some wonder just how thoroughly she envi­ sioned her professional identity from the outset. In the preface to the first edition of her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, she associates herself with "Sentiment," "sensa­ tions," "sensibility of heart," and "simplicity of taste." Her poetry, she says, derives from and expresses this complex of values, and she implies that her life does so as well. She would return to this theme repeatedly throughout the course of her successful twenty-two-year career. And the theme was no small part of that success. Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner on 4 May 1749 to Nicholas and Anna Towers Turner. She was born into auspicious circumstances. Her father was a "gentleman," a term that in the eighteenth century connoted social superiority, par­ ticularly in contrast to men of trade, for gentlemen did not have to "work'' for their money. Their wealth was generally inherited and derived from estates that produced rents and other incomes. Nicholas Turner owned considerable property in Surrey and in Sussex. The latter in particular, the estate of Bignor Park, exercised an important formative influ­ ence on his daughter Charlotte. As Florence Hilbish puts it, "the beauty of the South Downs with the Arun meandering among their swells" engendered a love of nature evident in all of Smith's works (26-27). In The Young Philosopher, Upwood, these­ cluded home of George Delmont, is modeled on Bignor Park, as is Willoughby's home, Alvestone, in Celestina. x I Introduction

Charlotte was the first child of a family that was increased within three years by the births of Catherine Anne and Nicholas Turner. With Nicholas's arrival, however, came sorrow, for Anna Towers Turner died in childbirth, leaving her three-year-old daughter and her siblings not only without a mother, but for a time without a father as well. To recover from his grief, Nicholas Turner took an extended trip to Europe. He did not return to his family for several years, and the children were left under the guardianship of a maternal aunt who cared for them and supervised their early educa­ tion. Charlotte first attended school at Chichester, near Bignor Park, where she was a pupil from the age ofsix to the age of eight, and then in London at Kensington, where she studied until she was twelve. At these schools, as Anna Barbauld put it in her preface to Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House, "she received ... rather a fashion­ able than a literary education."3 Such an education included drawing, music, needle­ work, French, manners, amateur theatrical performance, and religion.4 Barbauld points out that there was no serious study ofliterature, but in spite of that Charlotte "gratiflied] her taste for books by desultory reading, ... almost by stealth. "5 Reading was certainly an early and lasting passion, as was drawing, especially the drawing of plants. Both activities would remain constant sources ofpleasure for Charlotte Smith throughout her turbulent life. By the age of twelve, Charlotte Turner had completed all of the formal school­ ing (such as it was) she would receive. By 1761 she and her sister were living in Lon­ don with their father, while their brother Nicholas attended school at Westminster. Charlotte and Catherine were taught at home by "the best masters," who continued their training in the subjects they had begun to study at Chichester and Kensington (Hilbish, 22). Charlotte continued to be an avid reader, much to the dismay of her aunt, whose forbidding of the pastime was rendered impotent by the delight ofNicholas Turner, a great reader and sometime poet himself, who encouraged his daughter's taste for literature. Perhaps most significantly, according to Catherine Dorset's biography of her famous sister, Charlotte was at this age "introduced into society'' (254; see also Hilbish, 24-26). Although Florence Hilbish explains that "[t]his entrance into society would seem to mean the appearance at public places of amusement, such as the theatre and opera, rather than a debut into society in the present sense," Charlotte's marriage only four years later, a few months before her sixteenth birthday, suggests that her coming out was meant at least in part to draw attention to her availability as a marriage part­ ner (24). It was a precipitate social introduction; commentators of the time referred to it as early, occurring at an age "when most girls are at school."6 Nicholas Turner's reasons for varying the usual order of things possibly included both his daughter's precocity and his own expectation that several London seasons would give Charlotte a polish that would help her attract a suitable husband at a suitable time.? Nicholas Turner would have wished to see his daughter settled to advantage--hers, of course, but his own as well. His refusal on her behalf of a marriage proposal she received at the age of thirteen or fourteen from a gentleman suggests that, at first, it was primarily Charlotte's happiness that Nicholas Turner pursued. As events played themselves out, however, his pressing needs ultimately prompted a hasty, ill-considered decision that Introduction I xt

instead of securing his daughter's happiness, purchased for her the trials and tribula­ tions for which she would become famous. By 1764 Nicholas Turner was in financial straits; four years earlier he had sold one property and mortgaged another (Hilbish, 37). Furthermore, in that year he mar­ ried again. These two facts are not unrelated, for biographers from Smith's time to ours have assumed that a twenty-thousand-pound fortune was the chief attraction of Turner's new bride. Whatever the case, this marriage spawned another one, for there was some agreement within the family that Charlotte and her new stepmother could not live together peacefully. So, despite her still extreme youth, her family set about finding her a mate, and they settled on Benjamin Smith, the son of Richard Smith, a West Indian merchant who was also a director of the East India Company. The couple were married in February of 1765. In a sense Charlotte Turner married beneath her, although Richard Smith was certainly wealthy, and his son, a partner in his business, was well positioned too. In terms of financial solvency, in fact, the Smiths outranked the Turners at this time. But of course, in eighteenth-century England, money alone did not determine rank; birth, property, and breeding were vastly more important. Benjamin Smith might have ac­ quired the habits of a gentleman through his father's ability to purchase the accoutre­ ments of such a lifestyle, but Benjamin Smith was not, in the sense the eighteenth century would have understood it, a gentleman. He was the son of a merchant, one of the new moneyed class that was buying its way into the upper ranks of English society, often through marriages of convenience. The eighteenth century is replete with cautionary tales of mismatched couples. The aristocratic Lovelace and the middle-class Clarissa are one such twosome, though, of course, that pairing is so disastrous that no actual marriage ever takes place. Another ill-paired couple is the Squanderfields of Hogarth's Marriage a-la-Mode. The problem, from Richardson's and Hogarth's points of view, is a matter of dissonant values, expec­ tations, and tastes. Charlotte Turner had been brought up to live a life of leisure, in pursuit of social diversion, refinement, beauty. Richard Smith, in contrast, knew the value of hard work and thrift. His son, the beneficiary of Smith's business acumen, had all too eagerly neglected to develop his own sense of middle-class responsibility, because his father's wealth made it possible for him to spend as though he had unlimited finan­ cial resources. Eventually, Benjamin's habits of expenditure-his careless squandering of his considerable fortune-would result in imprisonment and degradation. Benjamin and Charlotte Smith began their married life in an apartment over the office where Benjamin worked. It was here that Charlotte gave birth to her first two children, both boys. Sadly, the first child died a few days after the second was born, and so the young mother very early experienced the grief of burying a child. It was not the only grief she would know. Although this son was the only child Charlotte Smith lost in infancy, she did suffer the deaths of four more of her twelve children. Her second son, Benjamin Berney, died of a fever at the age of ten; another son, Braithwaite, died at the age of sixteen from a similar infection; a third son, Charles Dyer, died of yellow fever in the West Indies in 1801, after suffering a leg amputation eight years before. Most devastatingly, her favorite daughter, Anna Augusta, died in xu I Introduction

1795, probably of consumption. There would be lesser griefs as well: a rift with son William Towers that never mended; the ill health of daughter Charlotte Mary; the unhappy marriage of Lucy Elenore; and the medical expenses of Harriet Amelia, who contracted malaria in India. Although the sorrows associated with her children's sufferings and deaths af­ fected Charlotte Smith deeply, her children were also the meliorating factor in the chief burden of her life: her marriage to Benjamin Smith, which she herself apdy described as an "abyss into which I had unconsciously plunged" (quoted by Dorset, 256). After the death of their first child, the family lived for a while at Southgate just outside London, in a home provided them by Richard Smith. Four years later they moved to Tottenham. In 1774 they moved away from London entirely, to Lys Farm in the Hampshire South Downs, a residence again provided by Richard Smith. This last relocation had in fact been Charlotte's idea. Her father-in-law's acquiescence sug­ gests his recognition that his son was inept at and uninterested in the West Indian business the two of them had nominally comanaged since before Charlotte and Benjamin's marriage. Furthermore, Richard may have been persuaded by his daugh­ ter-in-law's argument that a country estate would be better than a London home for her, her children, and even Benjamin, who was all too prone to indulge in the various dissipations available in the city. Yet, if she had hoped to reform her husband's tastes and habits by a change of residence, Charlotte Smith was disappointed. For it was at Lys Farm that Benjamin's spending became notoriously extravagant and reckless. Although the farm included one hundred acres, Smith purchased more land. He built a mansion, though the dwell­ ing on the farm was both suitable and large enough for his still increasing family. He added to the gardens and outbuildings, increased the staff of servants, and indulged himself in agricultural projects that, because he knew nothing at all about farming, were ruinous. About her husband's expensive projects, Charlotte Smith is said to have quipped, "[F]or Heaven's sake, do not put it into his head to take to Religion, for if he does he'll instandy set about building a cathedral."8 Yet, in spite of her banter, Charlotte Smith no doubt realized that the situation was dire. It was soon to turn disastrous. In 1776 Richard Smith died. In his will he had hoped to provide for his grand­ children-his son Benjamin's numerous family and the considerably smaller families of two children who predeceased him. Unfortunately, the will was complicated by codicils the terms of which negated many intentions expressed in the original will; the trustees appointed to administer Richard Smith's property could not or would not interpret the will. 9 Lawyers were employed as advocates for one legatee or the other; the wrangling continued until after the deaths of Benjamin Smith, his wife, and all but six of their children.10 The effort to procure for her children the settlement in­ tended for them by their grandfather would occupy much of the remainder of Char­ lotte Smith's life. She came to know the legal profession of her time very well; she despised it, and she rarely let an occasion pass to say so in print. Criticized for her rancor, she responded:

a Novelist . . . makes his drawing to resemble the characters he has had Introduction I xm

occasion to meet with.-Thus, some have drawn alehouse-keepers and their wives-others, artists and professors-and oflate we have seen whole books full of dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies. /have "fallen among thieves," and I have occasionally made sketches of them, and I have made only sketches of them, because it is very probable that I may yet be under the necessity of giving the portraits at full length, and of writing under those portraits the names of the weazles, wolves, and vultures they are meant to describe. 11

Most galling to Smith was the effect on her children. Assured by the trustees that the terms of the will would be resolved, she brought up her family "as a gentleman's family." Had she known their inheritance would be delayed and depleted by endless legal actions, she says, "I should have been wiser to have descended at once into the inferior walks of life, and have humbled them and myself to our fortunes." 12 For several years following her father-in-law's death, however, the Smiths did not suffer deprivation. Benjamin continued to increase his debts, encouraged, no doubt, by the belief that he would soon enjoy his own share of his father's fortune. He was even appointed overseer of the poor and later High Sheriff for the county of Hamp­ shire, appointments that speak positively of his standing in the community. In 1783, however, the years of profligacy finally caught up with him. He was imprisoned in the King's Bench in London for debt. Leaving their children with her brother at the Turner estate at Bignor Park, Charlotte accompanied Benjamin to jail, dwelling there with him off and on for the length of his imprisonment, which lasted around seven months. Charlotte Smith describes her final night within and departure from the King's Bench in terms of a contrast between the horrors of confinement and the soothing pleasures of the natural world:

It was on the 2d day of July that we commenced our journey. For more than a month I had shared the restraint of my husband, in a prison, amidst scenes of misery, of vice, and even of terror. Two attempts had, since my last residence among them, been made by the prisoners to pro­ cure their liberation, by blowing up the walls of the house. Throughout the night appointed for this enterprize, I remained dressed, watching at the window, and expecting every moment to witness contention and blood­ shed, or perhaps, be overwhelmed by the projected explosion. After such scenes, and such apprehensions, how deliciously soothing to my wearied spirits was the soft, pure air of the summer's morning, breathing over the dewy grass, as (having slept one night on the road) we passed over the heaths of SurreyP3

But this sense of relief was not to last long. Within three months of the Smiths' return to Bignor Park, Benjamin Smith was in financial trouble again, and he fled to Normandy, where he was joined by his wife and eight children. 14 Here, in the winter of 1785, in what Hilbish describes as a "cold, dreary, dilapidated chateau, nine miles from the near- xtv I Introduction

est town and market, among turbulent peasants of the crudest manners, in the midst of an almost absolute prohibition of fuel, ... without proper attention or accommo­ dation," Charlotte Smith gave birth to her last child, a son, George Augustus (113). In the spring of 1785, Charlotte Smith returned to England with her children to look after her husband's business affairs and to escape the hardships oflife in exile. It was also the beginning of her escape from the ill-advised marriage that had been the source of so much mental anguish for her. After two years in England, in 1787, she obtained a legal separation from her husband, freeing herself from the daily exigencies attendant on his financial irresponsibility, his volatile and sometimes violent temper, and his infidelities. Benjamin Smith would remain a part of her life until 1806, the year that both husband and wife died; he would make repeated financial demands and continue to cause her grief and pain. 15 After 1787, however, Charlotte Smith began to define herself as an independent woman and a professional writer. She had to fight for this self-definition-to achieve it and maintain it-and, predictably, she made many enemies doing so. But her impetus-the care and support of her nine living children­ was compelling, and her talent, energy, and will were suited to the task. Determined to support her children through her own efforts, Smith was likely given the courage to take this step by the success she had already achieved by 1787 as a poet and translator. Her first literary achievement had come while her husband was imprisoned in King's Bench. At this time Charlotte decided to gather some of her poetry for a small edition that she hoped would produce some income to offset her husband's debts. She sent these poems to William Hayley, her neighbor (though she did not know him personally at the time), a successful poet and the friend and champion of other poets, including William Cowper and, later, William Blake. With a dedication that spoke of Hayley's "protection for these essays," Charlotte Smith's first publication consisted of fourteen sonnets in a quarto volume entitled Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Char­ lotte Smith ofBignor Park, Sussex, a title that, in the words of Stuart Curran, "testifies alike to her sorrows and her irreducible self-esteem." 16 The publication was a success; a second edition appeared within the year. In 1786 Charlotte Smith's publisher, Dodsley in Pall Mall, issued a third edition that included twenty sonnets not printed in the first and second editions. The fourth edi­ tion appeared later that year. In 1787 a fifth edition, again enlarged, was published by subscription. Following the fifth edition, a further, two-volume edition was published by subscription in 1797, with less success than the fifth had enjoyed. All together, nine editions of the sonnets were produced during Smith's lifetime. Two additional editions appeared after her death: a tenth edition in 1811 and an eleventh edition, the last, in 1851. In this initial publication Charlotte Smith presents herself to the reading public as a sufferer. She stakes her claim, in her first sonnet, to pensiveness, melancholy, and sorrow:

The partial Muse has from my earliest hours Smiled on the rugged path I'm doom'd to tread, And still with sportive hand has snatch'd wild flowers,