1 - An Unfinished Work: Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets

Summary

By the time Charlotte Smith's first publication, her Elegiac Sonnets, appeared in June 1784, she was the mother of nine surviving children and of two who had already died. She had spent much of the previous year negotiating her husband's release from King's Bench, a debtor's prison.1 When this was finally secured, Smith and the children followed Benjamin Smith to Normandy, where, in straitened circumstances, Charlotte Smith gave birth to another son in February 1785. By then the second edition of the Sonnets had been published and the collection was receiving positive reviews back in England. Although she had received no advance from her publisher Dodsley, Smith was set to make some profit from the collection, which eventually went into ten editions. In 1784, any profit would have helped to relieve the burden of debt she carried courtesy of her husband Benjamin.

Such biographical detail might seem extraneous to the critical understanding of Charlotte Smith's sonnets. To allude to her status as a mother might seem to offer not only a biographical but also a ‘biological’ context for her poetic production, as though the poems were peculiarly linked to her female body. Smith's sonnets do inhabit a self-consciously biographical domain, one that Smith insists we understand in the prefaces to the many editions of the Sonnets. But the poems provide us with mediated access to the poet – mediated by the generic history of the sonnet, by the eighteenth-century culture of melancholy and by the emerging conditions of authorship.

SONNET REVIVAL

Smith's contemporaries William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge credited her for the revival of popular and critical interest in the sonnet. Smith and William Lisle Bowles are cited as the inspirations for Coleridge's own experiments with the sonnet form, and for hundreds of less well-known poets who turned sonneteer at the end of the eighteenth century. The sonnet had been popular amongst English writers of the early modern period, who took inspiration from the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Petrarch, and his musings on the pains of love, which were neatly organized into eight and six line sections (the octave and the sestet) and regular rhyme schemes that seemed to impose order on the chaos of amorous attraction.