Desmond

489 Pages·2001·24.083 MB·English

by  Charlotte Smith, Antje Blank, Janet Todd

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DESMOND
Charlotte Smith
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Portrait engraved by Ridley and published in 1799 by Vernor & Hood.
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DESMOND
Charlotte Smith
Edited by
Antje Blank
and Janet Todd
broadview literary texts
Review Copy
©2001 Antje Blank and Janet Todd
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored
in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of
photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Cancopy (Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5—is an in-
fringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Smith, Charlotte, 1749-1806
Desmond
(Broadview literary texts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55111-274-4
I. Blank, Antje, 1965- . II. Todd, Janet M., 1942- . III. Title. IV. Series.
PR3688.S4D42001 823'.6 COO-932877-7
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Contents
Acknowledgements 6
Introduction 7
Charlotte Smith: A Brief Chronology 34
Works by Charlotte Smith 36
Further Reading 37
A Note on the Text 39
DESMOND
Preface 45
Volume I 48
Volume II 159
Volume III 275
Notes 415
Appendix A. Extract from Edmund Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France 445
Appendix B. Extract from Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Men 449
Appendix C. Extract from Helen Maria Williams,
Letters from France 452
Appendix D. Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants 455
Appendix E. Charlotte Smith, Letters to
Joseph Cooper Walker and Joel Barlow 482
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Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank Judith Stanton for kindly making avail-
able her edition of The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2002). They are also grateful to the John
Rylands Library, Manchester, for a copy of the text of Desmond.
Review Copy
Introduction
"Compelled to live only to write & write only to live"1
On 23 February 1765 Charlotte Turner, not quite sixteen, was mar-
ried to Benjamin Smith, second son of Richard Smith, a wealthy Lon-
don merchant with stock in the East India Company and sugar cane
plantations on Barbados. Looking back nearly forty years later, Char-
lotte Smith would refer to the event as a moment when
... my father & my Aunt (peace to their ashes!) thought
it a prodigious stroke of domestic policy, to sell me like
a Southdown sheep, to the West India shambles, not
far from Smithfield (& they would have done me a
greater kindness if they had shot me at once) ...2
This ill-advised marriage, "worse than African bondage," would
determine the course of Charlotte Smiths future.3 Hastily contracted,
it had been the means to rid the household of a young girl who squab-
bled with her new stepmother, a 40-year-old woman whose large dowry
had been a vital addition to her father's dwindling fortune.
Charlotte was little prepared for life in a London merchant family.
She had spent an affluent childhood at Bignor Park, the family estate
on the picturesque Sussex Downs, and her early youth among fash-
ionable London society; now she had to accustom herself to living in
a gloomy second-storey flat in her father-in-law's house in Cheapside
with relatives who she thought wanted refinement and education,
frowned on her ignorance of housekeeping, and showed little under-
standing of her fondness for reading, writing, and drawing. Her hus-
1 Charlotte Smith to Dr. Shirly, 22 August 1789.
2 Charlotte Smith to Lord Egremont, 4 February 1803.
3 Ibid.
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band's character proved unstable; he was sometimes violent, frequently
promiscuous, and habitually extravagant. Her father-in-law Richard
Smith, however, took a great liking to Charlotte and recognized her
literary talent, although he thought it would be put to best use in his
counting-house. Charlotte declined becoming his paid clerk, but she
continued to assist him in keeping the accounts until his death in 1776.
Only too aware of his son's expensive habits, Richard Smith at-
tempted to provide for Charlotte and her family by bequeathing the
bulk of his estate to her children. By 1776 she had given birth to nine
children; one had died in his infancy, another—her eldest son—would
die the following year. Unfortunately, neither Charlotte nor her sur-
viving children would ever benefit much from their inheritance of
£36,000; Richard Smiths will, which tied up his property in a trust,
had been written without legal advice. Complications soon arose and
the trust became the subject of a prolonged legal dispute which was
settled only forty years later.4
Legal proceedings first came to a head in 1783 when it emerged
that Benjamin Smith, carelessly performing his duty as executor to the
will, had run up high debts and diminished the value of the trust by
more than a third. Other members of the family and beneficiaries of
the will sued; as a result, trustees were appointed and Benjamin Smith
found himself in King's Bench Prison. Charlotte chose to share much
of the seven months' term with her husband. Harassed with debts, she
decided to write for money, beginning with a series of sonnets. The
renowned publisher Dodsley to whom she turned doubted their mar-
ketability, but, encouraged by William Hayley, Smith published them
at her own expense. Although she compiled her poems in the humili-
ating environment of a debtors' prison, she ensured with her title that
the public was aware of her claim to a more genteel station in life:
Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park,
Sussex (1784).
The collection of sombre poems was immensely successful—in sev-
eral ways. One immediate effect was, of course, financial, their profits
contributing to Charlotte's and her husband s release from prison. In
4 For a detailed clarification of Richard Smiths will, see Florence Hilbish, Charlotte
Smith, Poet and Novelist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), 72-
81.
8 INTRODUCTION
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the long term they established her reputation as a gentlewoman and
author of serious verse and thus lent greater respectability to her later
productions in a less prestigious but more lucrative genre—the novel.
Within literary history, Smith's Elegiac Sonnets played a significant part
in the revival of the sonnet form in the Romantic period. As they went
through numerous subsequent editions, they swelled into a two-vol-
ume set, inspiring later poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats, and established the form as a proper
vehicle for the expression of plaintive sentiment. Although many of
the Elegiac Sonnets were explicitly autobiographical in their setting and
mood, the public was still left in the dark about the specific legal, eco-
nomic, and emotional causes of the poet's misfortunes—so much so
that the gallant reviewer of The Gentleman's Magazine could state his
preference for an imaginary distress, claiming he would have read her
"exquisite effusions" with "diminished pleasure," could he have "sup-
posed her sorrows to be real."5
Charlotte Smith's miseries, however, were only too real. Prison did
nothing towards reforming Benjamin Smith. Soon he was in debt again,
and his violent outbreaks escalated. On 15 April 1787, after 22 years
of marriage, Charlotte Smith finally left him. "Tho infidelity and with
the most despicable objects," she explained, "had renderd my continu-
ing to live with him extremely wretched long before his debts com-
pelled him to leave England, I could have been contented to reside in
the same house with him, had not his temper been so capricious and
often so cruel that my life was not safe." Her sister noted that Smith
made a futile appeal to one member of their family to make just terms
of separation.7 William, Smith's eldest son, had found employment in
the civil service in India, and her second son Nicholas was about to
follow him, but her remaining three sons and four daughters depended
solely on their mother for their support. And with none of her mar-
riage settlements providing for a separation and no legal arrangement
to secure her fortune or her future income Charlotte Smith was left at
the mercy of her husband Benjamin.
5 The Gentleman's Magazine (April 1786), 333.
6 Charlotte Smith to Joseph Cooper Walker, 9 October 1793.
7 Catherine Dorset's biographical sketch "Charlotte Smith" in Sir Walter Scott, The
Lives of the Novelists (London: Dent, 1810), 321.
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