ABSTRACT
When in 1783 Smith’s husband Benjamin was finally sent to prison for debt, she had already been sounding the poetical waters with her sonnets, albeit in pseudonymous disguise. From at least 1782, perhaps even earlier, Smith had been sending her poems to magazines, but it was not until she gathered the first sixteen sonnets (along with ‘Song. From the French of Cardinal Bernis’ and ‘Origin of Flattery’) into a volume in May 1784 that she came out unambiguously on the title page as ‘Charlotte Smith, of Bignor Park, in Sussex’. Much has been made of her public self-naming, and certainly, given the notoriety achieved by Benjamin Smith, of King’s Bench Prison, in London, her relocation cloaked her in the gentility of her upbringing. Published by James Dodsley, whose publishing house had long been associated with respectable literature, the poems went immediately into a second edition. In February 1786 the third and fourth editions saw ‘Song’ and ‘Origin’ dropped, but twenty new sonnets added, including a fourth ‘from Petrarch’ and the final two ‘supposed to have been written by Werter’. The success of the venture can be measured by the more than 800 names listed as subscribers to the fifth edition, in 1789, when Thomas Cadell took over as publisher. For this edition, Smith supplied twelve new sonnets, reinserted the Bernis poem and ‘Origin’, added ‘Ode to Despair’ and ‘Elegy’, and arranged for the inclusion of plates. The sixth edition, in 1792, contained the first of her lengthy Prefaces, wherein she rehearsed, in quite an unfeminine manner, her trials at the hands of untrustworthy men: her husband, and especially the lawyers handling the lawsuit over her father-in-law’s will. For this edition she added eleven new sonnets, ‘The Peasant of the Alps’, ‘Thirty-Eight’ and ‘Verses … Prefixed to Emmeline’. This provided the final form of what was to become Volume I of the Sonnets. Volume II was being talked about as early as 1794, and probably earlier; in a letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, Smith notes that ‘[s]ome time since it was propos’d to me to publish a second Volume of Poems with Plates of the same size as the first …’1 This volume, however, was delayed until 1797, when it was published with a Preface so inflammatory and intense in its misery that it threatened to overtake the poetry altogether. 2For this volume, published by subscription but with many hundred fewer names than in 1789, Smith supplied twenty-four sonnets as well as all but the last four of the ‘other poems’ listed in the contents to the present edition. Finally, in 1800, Volume II reached a second edition and appeared, sans Preface, with eight new sonnets and the final four ‘other poems’. For this edition I have combined the ninth edition of Volume I with the second edition of Volume II, as they appeared together in 1800, but with the suppressed Preface in place.
