ABSTRACT
Charlotte Smith infused the literature she wrote during the last twelve years of her life with references to scientific botany. She portrayed this life-long interest as pleasurable, as intellectually engaging, and increasingly as therapeutic. The effect of Smith's literary botanizing on our understanding of Romanticism has been the topic of much scholarly conversation following the republication of her work in The Poems of Charlotte Smith. By the mid 1790s, Smith claims botany as the only reliable therapy for her melancholia and begins her excursion into literary botany in earnest. In the midst of her fifteen-month struggle with her daughter's and her own health in Bath and Bristol, Smith writes her first children's book, Rural Walks, which includes among moral lessons and social criticism an informal curriculum in natural history. Smith draws on the botanical handbooks' discourse of health in order to further her ideas about mental illness and healing.
