ABSTRACT
In The Young Philosopher the most striking feature among the devices occurs shortly after the praise Charlotte Smith lavishes on Mary Wollstonecraft in the preface, where a passage, again unidentified, from Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice greets the reader. The characteristic appears in a different form as Smith pauses from describing the labour of a French peasant in a vineyard he will never own to cite a Thomas Warton poem of some forty years earlier attesting to the same disparity. There are many ways in which intertextual models infiltrate and affect the course of others of Smith's fictional arguments. The presence of Smith's complete works in a modern and richly annotated edition is bound to foster a continuing discussion of such textual interplay. Frances Burney makes a second oblique appearance in Smith's fiction, and it would appear, though the effect is very different, that the intertextual signal is no less apparent.
