THE PICKERING MASTERS THE WORKS OF CHARLOTTE SMITH VOLUME 14 THE PICKERING MASTERS THE WORKS OF CHARLOTTE SMITH Volumes 11–14 General Editor: Stuart Curran Volume Editors: Elizabeth A. Dolan Jacqueline M. Labbe David Lorne Macdonald Judith Pascoe THE WORKS OF CHARLOTTE SMITH VOLUME 14 Elegiac Sonnets, Volumes I and II The Emigrants Beachy Head: With Other Poems Uncollected Poems Edited by Jacqueline M. Labbe First published 2007 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Taylor & Francis 2007 Copyright © Editorial Material Jacqueline M. Labbe All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks , and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Smith, Charlotte Turner, 1749–1806 The works of Charlotte Smith Vols 11–14 – (The Pickering masters) 1. Smith, Charlotte Turner, 1749–1806 – Criticism and interpretation I. Title II. Curran, Stuart 823.6 ISBN-13: 978-1-85196-795-7 (set) Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction vii References and Further Reading xxi Elegiac Sonnets, Volume I 5 Elegiac Sonnets, Volume II 63 The Emigrants 117 Beachy Head: With Other Poems 149 Uncollected Poems 211 Explanatory notes 217 Textual notes 261 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As ever, my deep gratitude to Stuart Curran for his guidance and example. My thanks to Michael Gamer, Roger Meyenberg, Judith Pascoe, and Judith Stanton for their generous assistance; to the University of Birmingham (UK) Special Collections for permission to use their copy of The Emigrants; and to the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California, for permission to reprint Smith’s ‘Prologue’ to William Godwin’s play Antonio. As ever, I am most grateful to my family – Rod Jones, and Indie and Nathan Labbe- Jones – for their support and ongoing interest. For Nathan Guy INTRODUCTION How do we read a poet like Charlotte Smith? In print from 1784 until after her death; in demand throughout the 1790s before any of the more famil- iar Romantic voices were audible; in decline just as those voices began to echo the sentiments she had initiated in their early youth; nearly forgotten, according to her most indebted reader, William Wordsworth, in 1833: the trajectory of her career reminds us that a combination of a fickle audience and an engrained gender bias can overcome the most compelling poetry. What do we make of a poet like Smith, who shows throughout her career a devotion to the artistry of her poetry, yet who also constantly assesses the market value of each composition: ‘I believe I could add three or more other Sonnets, Songs, etc. – but as I am compelled to deal, like any dealer in coin or cattle – I own I am willing to know how much my applica- tion may be paid for’.1 Regretting to the end of her life the necessity she was continually under ‘to appear in the mortifying character of a distrest Author’2, yet contextualizing almost all of her poetry as written under the duress of her financial and emotional needs, she creates a poetics of sorrow that chimed with the late eighteenth-century interest in public displays of sensibility. How do we read a poet like Smith, who, while appealing to a sympathetic public to perform their duty as consumers, explored the viability of solitude and the nature of her own identity; who wrote revolu- tionary politics into her contemplative poetry; who not only repopularized a genre but revitalized and reinvented its very structure; who, from first (Sonnet I) to last (‘To my Lyre’) wrote about her talents and her muse as the balm of suffering, and suffering as the enabler of the purest poetry? Charlotte Smith wrote some of the most significant and important poetry of Romanticism under some of the most trying and difficult circumstances: how do we read a poet for whom poetry is as much a job of hard physical labour as it is a reflection of powerful feeling, whose life contained virtu- 1 Letter to Thomas Cadell, Charles Thomas-Stanford archive, Royal Pavilion, Libraries and Museums, Brighton & Hove, on deposit in the East Sussex Record Office: ACC 8997 (letter L/AE/60, 25 March 1792). 2 See letter to Thomas Cadell, Jr, and William Davies, 10 February 1795, in The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 190. viii Works of Charlotte Smith – Volume 14 ally no tranquillity, who had no coterie of devoted amanuenses to ease the work of composition? It is hard to know exactly when Smith began writing. By 1782 she was publishing her poetry; earlier versions of six of her poems appear in the European Magazine for that year under the signature of S. C., an interesting inversion that is matched by Smith’s transformation of her gender, alluding to herself in a note as ‘he’ (p. 218). Smith herself refers in the Preface to the first and second editions of the Elegiac Sonnets to the ‘mutilated state’ of those of her ‘attempts’ that have ‘found their way into the prints of the day’ with her typical disarming misdirection (p. 11); ‘S. C.’ certainly seems as much in control of the publication of ‘his’ poems as ever Smith is. The circumstances surrounding the 1784 publication of Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays are well known, and from the outset associate Smith’s art with the financial need that dogged her for the rest of her life. And this raises one of the paradoxes of her authorship: if she ‘live[s] only to write and write[s] only to live’, why did she take such care with her poetry?1 Why did she exer- cise such originality? Why, if sonnets of sorrow met such readerly approval, did she continually experiment with and develop her approach? Why write The Emigrants, a poem almost certain not to make money? Why struggle, at the end of her life, with the ‘local poem’ that became Beachy Head? Why, in other words, work so hard to write poetry that would ‘tell [her] name to distant ages’ (‘To my Lyre’ (p. 215)) rather than simple popular verse that would put food on the table and clothes on the backs of children who never seemed to grow up? Instead of the simple route, Smith took the artist’s; she tested the waters with pseudonymous magazine publications and then plunged into fully named authorship, bypassing both feminine anonymity and genteel dependence. ‘Charlotte Smith’, originating in 1784 in Bignor Park, Sussex, hauled herself and her husband out of the King’s Bench Prison, and although it would be another three years before she secured a separation from him, her career as a professional writer was established. As the previous thirteen volumes of The Works of Charlotte Smith show, Smith wrote prolifically and across all genres. The financial imperative was always there, but so was the artistic one. Stuart Curran remarks that ‘though she soon saw that the means to financial independence lay in prose, Smith’s sense of her genteel heritage and her claims to artistry never allowed her to abandon a commitment to poetry’.2 Literary hierarchy generally placed poetry at the highest level; debates about the relative moral and stylis- tic merits of different forms of fiction implicitly allowed for the inherent social value of poetry. So to turn to the publication of a book of poetry as the route out of debtor’s prison was perhaps as much about recover- 1 See letter to Dr Thomas Shirley, 22 August 1789 (Collected Letters, p. 23). 2 The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. by Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. xxii–xxiii. Introduction ix ing reputation as restoring her husband’s freedom: poetry overwriting his improvidence. In her letters to her publishers, Smith approaches composi- tion, no matter the genre, as a business, however: she casts herself as an eminent author, and her publishers as in her debt; or she calculates the profit/loss equation of each additional poem, each additional page. Or she becomes anxious that she has lost her influence and attempts to flatter her publisher back into acquiescence. Even in letters to friends she dwells more on her troubles and afflictions than on her sense of herself as Poet. How, then, can we discern a dedication to poetry as an art form – how can we read her silences and interpret her postures? One clue lies in the title of the first and second editions of the son- nets: Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays. As Daniel Robinson has cogently argued, Smith uses the word ‘essays’ to denote ‘experiments’, and she embeds this at multiple levels.1 From the first, Smith regarded the son- nets as opportunities for innovation, seeing the possibilities that resided in their fourteen lines. This shows itself, for instance, in the frequency with which she departs from the regularity of the Shakespearean rhyme scheme. Although she notes in the Preface to the first and second editions ‘I am told, and I read it as the opinion of very good judges, that the legitimate Sonnet [Petrarchan] is ill calculated for our language’, she also hints at her flexible approach even to the illegitimate, or irregular (the Shakespearean): ‘the little Poems which are here called Sonnets, have, I believe, no very just claim to that title: but they consist of fourteen lines …’ (p.