A Bibliographic Analysis of Beachy Head

Among the many works of literature written by Charlotte Smith, the collection Beachy Head and Other Poems is unique among them in many ways. Though she managed to publish nearly 20 individual works while she was alive, Beachy Head stands out as the sole major work to be released after her death. Published in January 1807, three months after Smith died, Beachy Head is a fundamentally distinct piece in the manner of its style, composition, and printing. Because Smith’s ultimate intentions for the work cannot be assured, its unique qualities remain curious, and its printed form leaves the reader with unanswerable questions about the work’s intended shape. Though there are many more things worthy of discussion in Beachy Head than can be covered here, it is its posthumous nature, its use of annotation, the publisher’s voice, and its publication as an anthology that will command this paper’s focus, so that an understanding of what makes this publication particularly unique can be gleaned.

The last major work of Smith’s, Beachy Head was written over the course of three years until Smith’s death in 1806. It was published by Joseph Johnson, a well-known and influential publisher at the time in London, known for promoting the work of women writers of the period (Chard, 82). Though it can be read as a complete poem, it’s posthumous publication does invite questions as to its intended final form. Indeed, one interesting element of the original publication is the prefatory section titled the “Advertisement.” This section acts like a traditional preface, although one not written by the author. Though the section is not signed it was presumably written by Johnson. In it, he apologizes to the reader that there is in fact no preface available from Smith herself, and also notes that “the Poem entitled BEACHY HEAD is not completed according to the original design.” What is meant by this is not clear; certainly, the poem is not obviously unfinished, though whether it was meant to go on or not cannot be said for sure. All that the advertisement can say is that the poem is offered in an “imperfect state.” In a letter four months before her death, Smith says that the poem is “not yet ready for the press.” (Stanton, 705)

Unique among Smith’s work is Beachy Head’s extensive use of annotations. The 742-line poem contains sixty-four annotations. These annotations vary in length, but the largest are many paragraphs in their own right, and all of them possess a voice quite distinct from the poetic voice of the poem proper. Many of them add context to the many references the poem makes to animals, plants, historical events, geography; many also provide glimpses into Smith’s own personal experiences. Johnson’s original publication of the poem included the annotations as endnotes, making them unlikely to be read along with the text by first-time readers. However, it was Smith’s intention that they be printed as footnotes, a request that was followed in subsequent printings (Wieland, 4) Smith wanted the footnotes to be read as necessary asides to the text, and knowing this, the change to prose voice becomes as important as the poetry. In the original printing then, readers were not able to experience the finished poem as it was actually intended by the author—not because of Smith’s death, but arguably because of the publisher’s own mishandling of the material.

This interference with an author’s work by a publisher was not at all unheard of in the world of 18th century literature, but in this case, it doesn’t seem obvious that the interference was intentional. It could simply be that Smith’s intentions for her annotations were not well understood or documented prior to her death, and so they were carelessly handled. Wieland, speaking of the back-and-forth effect of reading the prose footnotes along with the poetic main texts, identifies that when the footnotes are read along with the main text, they offer a “competitive or questioning, or even supportive perspective to the positions taken by the speaker in the main text and thereby establish a dialogue between the main text and the annotations.” (4) Beachy Head is regarded as a classic piece of early Romantic poetry, but the footnotes provide an interesting counterbalance to the poetry’s Romantic sensibility. In them, Smith can be seeming to straddle the line between Romantic and Enlightenment thinking. Many of them simply provide scientific names for the plants and animals the poem makes mention of. Many others go into historical or scholarly asides at great length. For instance, where Smith writes of “a mass of ruins,” she adds a footnote that goes on for six pages, expounding on the history of the Normans leading up to the Battle of Hastings, and the footnote itself possesses annotations of its own. In some annotations, such as the one regarding a “huge unwieldy elephant,” Smith mixes scientific theory with first-person narrative. Here, she muses on the history and origin of elephant bones, and relates her own trip to the National Museum of Paris, and an excavation that occurred in 1740 at Sussex. Little in this footnote has much to do with the context of the elephant mentioned in the poem, but the contrast between the poetic writing on the natural world, and the explanatory annotation stripped of poetry and imagination, is perhaps critical to the composition of Beachy Head, and something compromised by Johnson’s original printing.

Although it has come to be known as a classic piece of Romantic writing,when read in a way that acknowledges the role of the footnotes as Smith intended, Beachy Head may have been reaching for something more. However, Beachy Head is a collection, and its other works clearly suggest Romantic themes. Of the eleven other poems, almost all of them evoke nature in their titles alone: “The Truant Dove,” “The Lark’s Nest,” “The Swallow,” “Flora,” “Studies by the Sea,” “The Horologe of the Fields,” “A Walk in the Shrubbery,” and “Evening.” Two of these poems, “Studies by the Sea,” and “Flora”, were previously published in Conversations: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History, and added at the request of “many of her friends.” Curiously, these friends of Smith’s felt that the poems were better placed in this new collection. This allusion to Smith’s circle of literary friends who remained so invested in her work that they made an attempt to curate her publication after her death, provides a fascinating glimpse at the influence Smith commanded even at the end of her life. Whatever Smith’s ultimate intent was with Beachy Head, the view of her publisher and of her literary allies was that this was a collection of nature poetry, and that certain older works fit even better when collected here. What can be certain is that Smith did intend for Beachy Head to appear in an anthology, although the original order of the works was much different than that eventually published. (Stanton, 705) All of the titles that are known today are also innovations of Johnson’s—Beachy Head itself was known to Smith simply as “the local poem,” and was intended to close the collection.

Even if it wasn’t published until after her death, Smith’s last work would have been noteworthy. It experiments with a confident subversion of style and predicts a literary movement on the cusp of emerging in full force. It’s use of Romantic imagery along with prose footnotes both conversational and adversarial with the main body of poetry is innovative, but the addition of the publisher Joseph Johnson’s voice throughout the finished work—and the voices of some of her contemporaries—when it comes to arrangement, presentation, and collection, make Beachy Head an even more fascinating and rich window into the world of the early nineteenth-century literary industry.