Biography of Charlotte Smith

By: Garin Fahlman

Charlotte Smith was an eighteenth-century poet and novelist, born to a wealthy father who owned two estates, and went on to marry into a wealthy family. While one might imagine her economic and social prospects to be good, Smith in fact struggled seriously with poverty throughout her life, and was completely destitute by the time of her death. Further, her status as an unmarried widow for most of her life, and a single mother of nine children (The Poetry Archive), makes her success as a published author of poetry and novels all the more unusual. Indeed, her experience is an interesting look at how status can be subverted, even within the rigid class structure of Enlightenment England.

Early Life

Born in 1749 in London, Charlotte was the eldest child to Nicholas and Anne Turner. A poet himself, Nicholas encouraged Charlotte to write, and she even felt confident enough to submit her early writings to Lady’s Magazine when she was six or seven, though they were not published (Zimmerman). When Charlotte was only a few years old, however, her mother died, and her father abandoned the family, leaving Charlotte and her two siblings to be raised by their maternal aunt, Lucy Towers (Zimmerman). Though she received a somewhat upper-class education for a lady despite this early turbulence, any hope that the family could recover its former stability was lost upon her father’s return and the discovery that he had squandered his fortune gambling. Now finding themselves poor and having to sell off their estates, Nicholas was determined to marry Charlotte off to a wealthy family (Blank).

It wasn’t long until Nicholas found Benjamin Smith, a man she never loved but was attached to a wealthy family of slave-owners. This was enough for Nicholas, who promptly married off the 15-year-old Charlotte to the 21-year-old suitor in 1764. Charlotte despised this arrangement, writing to a friend in 1804 that she considered it little more than “legal prostitution" (Blank). Benjamin failed to maintain his duties to the family business, leaving Charlotte to take on the bulk of the work, including once successfully writing a legal vindication of her father-in-law Richard against a libel suit that had been brought against him (Zimmerman). Charlotte and her husband produced a total of eleven children, of whom the first two died within their first few years, and only six managed to outlive her. Her constant familial tragedy coloured her work, and her writing was known to be remarkably sorrowful among her literary contemporaries. Eventually, Benjamin too found himself in debt, and he and Charlotte spent seven months in prison on account of it. This is when Charlotte’s first successful attempt at writing was realized, as she decided to publish her Elegiac Sonnets to raise funds for her husband’s release. She signed the work as “Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park,” announcing herself as a proper poet, suggesting her intention to start a career and not simply a one-off work meant solely to make quick cash. Elegiac Sonnets was published in 1784. By 1800 it had seen nine editions, and Charlotte Smith would go on to be a prolific author of ten novels, three volumes of poetry, children's novels, and other works.

Literary Career

This unexpected success must have given Smith some confidence over her future, for shortly after Benjamin was released and convinced the family to move with him to France, she left him and returned to England with their children in 1785. Her decision to continue writing at this point was probably both due to her previous success, and also her continuing financial troubles—Richard had recently passed away and left a complicated will that did not get resolved until after Charlotte had passed away, and she long held out for a sum that she felt was due to her. She had lofty ideas for her writing career; having been influenced by her father’s love of the form, she believed that poetry would be her most enduring literary contribution (Roberts, 152). However, of her many published works, only three the Elegiac Sonnets, The Emigrants, and incomplete collection, Beachy Head, are works of poetry. The rest were almost all novels, which proved much more lucrative. Beachy Head was her final work, published posthumously, and before her death she remarkedthat it was her hope that the collection would increase her recognition as a poet, for she still believed poetry to be the source of “the little reputation I may hereafter have.” (Letters, pp. 705-6)

She had little faith in the longevity of her work as a female writer, and believed that hers would be that "least likely among the works of modern Poets to reach another period" (Letters, pp. 705-6). For a time, she was right. Throughout the nineteenth century she was mostly forgotten as a serious author, but twentieth century scholars regard her as many of her contemporaries did—as a distinguished writer who influenced many of those who followed after her, revitalized the sonnet, and portrayed radical views on liberty, slavery, racism, and feminism at a time when honest portrayals of such themes were not common (Zimmerman).

A Progressive Pen

The years of Smith’s most prolific output were marked by an inability to stay settled in one place. Between 1785 and her death in 1806, she lived variously in Sussex, Chichester, Brighton, Storrington, Bath, Exmouth, Weymouth, Oxford, London, Frant, Elstead, and Tilford (Zimmerman). Her sister Catherine Ann, herself a successful children’s author, described Charlotte as “unsettled, moving from place to place in search of that tranquility she was never destined to enjoy.” (Dorset, 51) Indeed, Charlotte’s writing could be seen as similarly unsettled, as she worked in sonnets, translations, novels, and found herself going through passionate periods where she devoted her writing to personal loss, the French Revolution, the Americas, and social justice. While living in Brighton between 1791 and 1793, Smith was radicalized by the ideas of the French Revolution. She entered a period of pro-republican writings, which feature in several of her works such as Desmond, The Old Manor House, and the blank verse poem, The Emigrants. During this time she even assisted French refugees displaced by the Revolution. These views became more controversial as republican sentiment grew in England, but that did not stop Smith from exploring other radical ideas. The Old Manor House, released in the same year as The Emigrants, deals with slavery and colonial America, displaying a sympathy towards Indigenous Americans that mirrored that which she showed towards French revolutionaries.

She was able to produce so many works of such varied content because she managed to embed herself within a circle of supportive literary friends. She was able to keep friendships with esteemed contemporaries such as Jane Austen (Blank), even though the latter did not always celebrate her writing. Her relationship with the Irish poet Henrietta O’Neil allowed Smith access to a literary world that would have been otherwise closed off to her.

Conclusion

Despite a literary output that might today be considered empowering, she maintained a reputation as a writer unafraid to honestly portray her own struggles. Her friend William Hayley eventually tired of what he saw as her constant sorrows and woes. However, it may be that Smith had more sorrows and woes than happy times from which to write about. By the end of her career, she still had received nothing from Richard’s will, and was struggling to write. Her estranged husband finally died in 1806 (in debtor’s prison), and though she received some money from his passing, she too died only eight months later. Her last years were not happy ones. She was riddled with gout, arthritis, pleurisy and neuritis, unable to hold even a pen. She wrote to her friend Sarah Rose in 1804 to say that she was “literally vegetating, for I have very little locomotive powers beyond those that appertain to a cauliflower.” (Blank)

Smith was prolific in her lifetime, but her achievements overshadowed her own personal struggles with finances and family. In actuality, her radical place as a successful, progressive female writer won her the appreciation not only of her female contemporaries, but her male ones as well. Coleridge celebrated her as a poet, and it is speculated that she even lent some inspiration to elements of Jane Austen’s work (The Poetry Archive). Even outside of her writing, her life found continued influence; Charles Dickens likely took his inspiration for the legal battle featured in his 1853 novel Bleak House from her drawn-out legal affair concerning Richard’s will. But perhaps nobody understood Smith’s legacy better than William Wordsworth, who would become the most important figure in the Romantic era, when he remarked that Smith was “a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered.” (Wordsworth, Poetical Works).