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Charlotte Smith, Pre-Romantic Novelist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2021

James R. Foster
James R. Foster*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Extract

Time and the critics have dealt but scurvily with Charlotte Smith, since she has been completely forgotten, being neither as bad as the Minerva Press nor as striking as Ann Radcliffe. The relative position these two novelists held in the years before the publication of Udolpho has been exactly reversed, and this is perhaps an injustice since no little of Ann Radcliffe's success was due to the help and example of her rival.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 1928 , pp. 463 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1928

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References

1 A typical contemporary evaluation is found in Literary Memoirs of Living Authors, London, 1798, vol. II, p. 268. “Considered as a novel writer only, though the powers of pleasing are very great, Mrs. Smith has a few superiors among her country women; considered as a poet only, the number of these will be found exceedingly small; but, if considered as to her union of both these characters, we know of no lady who has superior pretensions.”

2 Georges Meyer, Revue Germanique, V, 1909, p. 509 ff. voices the usually accepted opinion that The Monk was the only contemporary novel to influence Mrs. Radcliffe.

3 This seems to be the attitude of F. E. Pierce, Currents and Eddies in the English Romantic Generation, New Haven, 1918, p. 20. Ibid. p. 35, “What the late eighteenth century welcomed in her [Radclifle] and the mature nineteenth rejected, appear to have been chiefly her subterranean Gothic machinery and her half Ossianic, half Richardsonian sentimentality.” It would be more accurate perhaps to substitute “French” for “Ossianic.”

4 Michael Sadleir, The Northanger Novels, Edinburgh Review, July, 1927, finds himself compelled to look for a German source for the sentimental type. “Both hero and heroine [of Mrs. Roche's Clermont] are children of sorrow (this feature, inherited from Werter's Leiden, persists like the Hapsburgh nose through the family of Gothic romance) and their mutual sympathy had its origin in a common melancholy.”

5 The political features of Mrs. Smith's Desmond, 1792, The Banished Man, 1794, and The Young Philosopher, 1798, have been overs tressed. They are first of all adventure novels. They will not be described in this article, since this has been done by Allene Gregory, The French Revolution and the English Novel, New York, 1915; G. Adolph Frisch, Der Revolutionäre Roman in England: seine beeinflussung durch Rousseau, Pforzheim. 1914; Lilly Baacho, Englische Schriftstellerin in ihren besiehungen zur französischen Revolution, A nglia, XLI, 1917, p. 185. In the last one reads that in Desmond the author tried to combine the technique of Richardson and Fielding. There is nothing of Fielding here: the model of Desmond is that gloomy and tearful Sidney Bidulph, 1761, that made Dr. Johnson weep—an imitation of Clarissa Harlowe.

6 Preface to Old Manor House (British Novelists, 1810, vol. XXXVI).

7 Among the advocates of sensibility was Sir Egerton Brydges. In his Imaginary Biography, 1834, vol. II, p. 96, he defends Desmond. “Yet this Mrs. Smith is the writer whose works have been deemed immoral! Immoral? by whom? By people who read with pleasure of fashionable intrigues, and wade with pleasure through all the base and stupid ordure of a circulating library! Who delight with the filthy amours of Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle; who are enraptured with stories of ghosts and ruffians, and rapes and murders.”

8 The religious-sentimental convent in The Italian, vol. III, p. 118, is a curious late expression of this. The abbess's religion “was neither gloomy nor bigotted: it was the sentiment of a grateful heart offering itself up to a Deity who delights in church without supposing a faith in all of them to be necessary to salvation.” Here Ellena “worships” by yielding “alone and unobserved .... to the melancholy which she endeavored to suppress in society.”

9 See A. C. Bradley, Shakspearean Tragedy, 1922, p. 92. 'How significant is the fact that it was only when the slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder, beauty, and pathos of the most marvellous of Shakes-peare s creations began to be visible!“

10 The Women Novelists, London, 1918, p. 18.

11 Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, Chichester, 1784.

12 Her admirer, Egerton Brydges, Imaginary Biography, 1834, vol. II, p. 101. writes, “Sorrow was her constant companion; and she sang with a thom at her bosom, which forced out strains of melody expressive of the most affecting sensations, interwoven with the rich hues of an inspired fancy.”

13 See the obituary notice, Gentleman's, Magazine, LXXVI, p. 107J, which I have quoted for this. Mrs. Smith was at one time a contributor to this periodical. At the time of her death a daughter, probably the novelist Maria Lavinia, was said to have been collecting her correspondence with the idea of writing her mother's biography, but nothing seems to have come of this. In a footnote to one of Andrew Caldwell's letters to Bishop Percy (Nichol's Illustrations of Lit. vol VIII, p. 35) one reads that Mrs. Smith's “embarrassments arose from the wild and ruinous projects of her husband, and other absurdities. Upon her expressing a wish to a gentleman that he [her husband] could be engaged in some rational pursuit, he suggested that his enthusiasm might be most safely directed to Religion. ”Oh,“ said she, ”for Heaven's sake, do not put it into his head to take to Religion, for if he does, he'll instantly set about building a cathedral.“ J.M.”

14 Marchmont, 1796, deals principally with the difficulties a young man of family encounters in making his way owing to the thoughless extravagance of a father. The Banished Man, 1794, is partly founded upon her daughter's affair with Faville, in the novel, D'Alonville. The author pictures herself here as Mrs. Denzil. In Emmeline her husband is the extravagant Mr. Stafford, and she the long-suffering benevolent wife.

15 What it She?, 1799. In this the author satirizes the Minerva Press, the Schauerroman, and sham sensibility. As an example of the last she has Sir Caustic Oldstyle say, “There again, her feelings—her sensibility—what! I suppose she sighs over the distresses of a novel—wipes her eyes while a ghost in an opera comes out of his tomb to accompany the orchestra; but is shocked too much at real misery to suffer its approach.”

16 Desmond, vol. II, p. 214. This novel contains her most notable political caricatures: the lordling Newminister who idolizes his hound Bichey, the stingy hypocritical bishop, and the bragging General Wallingford.

17 Ethelinde.

18 Old Manor House.

19 Emmeline

20 Yet she knew the lawyers in Cecilia.

21 Translator of Mme. Riccoboni's Lady Catesby's Letters, 1760, and author of Julia Mandeville, 1763; Emily Montague; The History of Miss West; The Excursion; and Charles Mandeville.

22 Miss Lee's Recess with its Gothic ruin, the Abbey Saint-Vincent, hermit's grotto, underground passages and graveyard—a synthesis of romantic properties— an imitation of Cleveland, influenced both Mrs. Smith and Ann Radcliffe.

23 The landscapes in A dèle et Théodore and the settings of D'Arnaud's théâtrenoir were especially influential.

24 Monlalbert, vol. II, p.74.

25 Celestina, vol. III, p. 50.

26 Lives of the Novelists, ed., 1826, vol. I, p. 228.

27 Old Manor Bouse, vol. II, p. 150. The spring is described as coming with miraculous rapidity, savannahs are filled with cattle, and tropical vegetation abounds.

28 She called this The Romance of Real Life, 1787, and selected from Guyon de Piteval and Richter tales that “might lead us to form awful ideas of the force and danger of the human passions.”

29 This lover is more like Linch in the Dean of Killerine than like Floyer of Cecilia.

30 Analytical Review, July, 1788, p. 327. The writer bewails the influence of such a nóvel on young women, disapproves especially of Adeline and child, but praises the romantic landscapes.

31 Of course, the old castle, that necessary article, is found here.

32 Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, 1789. It ran several editions, was translated into French, and drew favorable comment from the press: e.g. Analytical Review, Dec., 1789, p. 484.

33 Fanny Burney was fond of this novel. See Early Diary, vol. I, p. 4. The situation of Monckton and wife (Cecilia), not unlike this in Ethelinde, is one among several that Burney took from Prevost.

34 Victorine, rescued from a convent in Spain where evil priests had caused her to be sent, turns out to be the rich uncle's natural daughter. She is a forestudy of Celestina.

35 Qui se spiega la notte il fosco velo

Nel mare emulo al cielo, etc., etc.

36 Ethelinde, vol. V, p. 38.

37 Edith Birkhead, Sentiment and Sensibility in Ike Eighteenth-Century Novel, (Essays and Studies by Members of the Eng. Assn.) Oxford, vol. XI, p. 92 ff. seems to make the mistake of regarding the tale of terror as distinctly different from the pathetic sentimental narrative. Nevertheless the article cited here is the best account of the English sentimental novel to date. The author appears to think that Prevost's best novel Manon Lescaut should have had the most imitators, and consequently underestimates Prevost's influence, since it was Cleveland and the Dean of Killerine that were imitated the most often. She has little to say about Charlotte Smith.

38 Celestina, a Novel, 1791, A second edition was issued the same year. Mme. de Rome translated it in 1795 at Celestina, ou la Victime des Préjugés. The Décade Philosophique in an article that put the novel over history and Richardson and Fielding over the French novelists, Celestina was praised highly. Cited by J. Merl-ant, Le Roman Personnel, Paris, 1905, p. 88.

39 A list of her later work follows: Desmond, 1792; Darcy, 1796 (or earlier); Old Manor House, 1793; Wanderings of Warwick, 1794; Banished Man, 1794; Montalbert, 1795; Marckmont, 1796; YoungPhilosopher, 1798; Letter, of a Solitary Wanderer, 1798-1801 (a series of tales like Sophia and Harriet Lee's Canterbury Tales, 1797-1801). Some of the titles are: Palsgrave Abbey. Corisande de Beauvillers, The Caledonian Bandit. There were nine editions of her sonnets by 1800; the Romance of Real Life was reprinted at Aberdeen in 1847. What is She ? is of 1799, and Beachy Head and Other Poems was published 1807. She also wrote occasional pieces, juvenile works like her Rural Walks in Dialogues, and translated Kotzebue's Zaida.

40 The model for Vivaldi's mother in the Italian.

41 Helen Maria Williams and Mary Robinson were among her imitators.

42 She probably attended Sophia Lee's school at Bath. See Jerome March, Mrs. Barbauld and her Contemporaries, London, 1877, p. 136. The Recess, 1783-6, and D'Arnaud's Comminge both influenced Radcliffe.

43 Celestina must have appeared early in 1791 since it was reviewed in the August Analytical Review the same year. The Romance of the Forest must have been later, for it was first mentioned in the April Critical Review of the following year (vol IV, p. 458). That Mrs. Radcliffe was almost unknown in 1792 is indicated by the footnote to this article: the writer thinks the novel is by “a certain Miss or Mrs. Ratcliff.”

44 Thorold is the servile lover in Celestina.

45 Roker is the vile lawyer in the Old Manor House. Bangy is the Villeroi chateau in Udolpho.