Charlotte Smith (née Turner; (1749-05-04)4 May 1749 – (1806-10-28)28 October 1806) was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England. She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite eleven novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and expected to be remembered for that.
Smith left her husband and began writing to support their children. Her struggles for legal independence as a woman affect her poetry, novels and autobiographical prefaces. She is credited with turning the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment and her early novels show development in sentimentality. Later novels such as Desmond (1792) and The Old Manor House (1793) praised the ideals of the French Revolution. Waning interest left her destitute by 1803. Barely able to hold a pen, she sold her book collection to pay debts and died in 1806. Her poem Beachy Head (1807) was published posthumously. Largely forgotten by the mid-19th century, she has since been seen as a major Romantic precursor.
Charlotte Turner was born on 4 May 1749 in London and baptised on 12 June as the oldest child of well-to-do Nicholas Turner and Anna Towers. Her two siblings, Nicholas and Catherine Ann, were born over the next five years. Smith received a typical girl's education in a wealthy, late 18th-century family. Her childhood was marked by her mother's early death (probably giving birth to Catherine) and her father's reckless spending. After losing his wife, Nicholas Turner travelled and the children were raised by Lucy Towers, their maternal aunt; when exactly their father returned is unknown.
At the age of six, Charlotte went to school in Chichester and took drawing lessons from the painter George Smith. Two years later, she, her aunt and her sister moved to London, where she attended a girls' school in Kensington and learned dancing, drawing, music and acting. She loved to read and wrote poems, which her father encouraged. She even submitted a few to the Lady's Magazine for publication, but they were not accepted.
Marriage and first publication
Nicholas Turner met with financial difficulties on his return to England and had to sell some of the family's holdings. He married the wealthy Henrietta Meriton in 1765. His daughter entered society at the age of 12, leaving school and being tutored at home. His reckless spending then forced her to marry early. In a marriage on 23 February 1765 at the age of 15, she was given by her father to a violent, profligate man, Benjamin Smith, son of Richard Smith, a wealthy West Indian merchant and a director of the East India Company. The marriage proposal was accepted for her by her father. Condemning his action 40 years later, Smith said it had turned her into a "legal prostitute".
The Smiths had twelve children. Their first, in 1766, died the next year just days after the birth of their second, Benjamin Berney (1767–1777). Their ten more children between 1767 and 1785 were William Towers (born 1768), Charlotte Mary (born 1769), Braithwaite (born 1770), Nicholas Hankey (1771–1837), Charles Dyer (born 1773), Anna Augusta (1774–1794), Lucy Eleanor (born 1776), Lionel (1778–1842), Harriet (born c. 1782), and George (born c. 1785). Six of their children survived her.
The Smith marriage was unhappy. She detested living in commercial Cheapside (the family later moved to Southgate and Tottenham) and argued with her in-laws, whom she saw as unrefined and uneducated. They in turn mocked her for spending time reading, writing and drawing. Meanwhile Benjamin proved violent, unfaithful and profligate. Only her father-in-law, Richard, appreciated her writing abilities, although he wanted her to use them to further his business interests. Richard Smith owned plantations in Barbados, which provided the income of £2000 a year upon which Charlotte Smith and her family lived. Smith would later criticize slavery in works such as The Old Manor House (1793) and Beachy Head (1807).
She persuaded Richard to set Benjamin up as a gentleman farmer in Hampshire and lived with him from 1774 until 1783 at Lys Farm, Bramdean, about 10 miles east of Winchester. Worried about Charlotte's future and that of his grandchildren and concerned that his son would continue his irresponsible ways, Richard Smith willed most of his property to Charlotte's children. However, he drew up the will himself and it contained legal problems. The inheritance, originally worth nearly £36,000, was tied up in chancery after his death in 1776 for almost 40 years. Smith and her children saw little of it. (It has been proposed that this may have inspired the famous fictional case of interminable legal proceedings, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in Dickens's Bleak House.
In fact, Benjamin illegally spent at least a third of the legacy and ended up in King's Bench Prison, a debtor's prison, in December 1783. Smith moved in with him and it was there that she wrote and published her first work. Elegiac Sonnets (1784) achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels, as poetry was then considered the highest art. Smith revised Elegiac Poems several times over the years, eventually creating a two-volume work.
Smith's husband fled to France to escape his creditors. She joined him there until, thanks largely to her, he was able to return to England.
After Benjamin Smith was released from prison, the entire family moved to Dieppe, France to avoid further creditors. Charlotte returned to negotiate with them, but failed to come to an agreement. She went back to France and in 1784 began translating works from French into English. In 1787 she published The Romance of Real Life, consisting of translated selections on François Gayot de Pitaval's trials. She was forced to withdraw her other translation, Manon Lescaut, after it was argued that the work was immoral and plagiarised. In 1786, she published it anonymously.
In 1785, the family returned to England and moved to Woolbeding House near Midhurst, Sussex. Smith's relations with her husband did not improve and on 15 April 1787 she left him after 22 years of marriage, writing that she might "have been contented to reside in the same house with him" had not "his temper been so capricious and often so cruel," so that her "life was not safe". When Charlotte left Benjamin, she did not secure a legal agreement to protect her profits – he would have access to them under English primogeniture laws. Smith knew that her children's future rested on a successful settlement of the lawsuit over her father-in-law's will, and so made every effort to earn enough money to fund the suit and retain the family's genteel status.
Smith claimed the position of gentlewoman, signing herself "Charlotte Smith of Bignor Park" on the title page of Elegiac Sonnets. All her works were published under her own name, "a daring decision" for a woman at the time. Her success as a poet allowed her to make this choice and she identified herself as a poet throughout her career. Although she published far more prose than poetry and her novels brought her more money and fame, she believed poetry would bring her respectability. As Sarah Zimmerman claimed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "She prized her verse for the role it gave her as a private woman whose sorrows were submitted only reluctantly to the public."
After leaving her husband, Smith moved to a town near Chichester and decided to write novels, as they would make more money than poetry. Her first one, Emmeline (1788), was a success, selling 1500 copies within months. She wrote ten more in the next ten years: Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Wanderings of Warwick (1794), The Banished Man (1794), Montalbert (1795), Marchmont (1796), The Young Philosopher (1798), and Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800, 1802). Smith was beginning her novelist career at a time when women's fiction was expected to focus on romance and to focus on "a chaste and flawless heroine subjected to repeated melodramatic distresses until reinstated in society by the virtuous hero". Although Smith's novels employed this structure, they also included political commentary, notably support of the French Revolution through her male characters. At times, she challenged the typical romance plot by including "narratives of female desire" or "tales of females suffering despotism". Her novels contributed to the development of Gothic fiction and the novel of sensibility.