ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that Smith's labour on Conversations came to guide the conceptualization and production of her most ambitious poem, Beachy Head, a poem that was 'of magnitude to be printed singly in Quarto, but she prefer making it a member of the collection'. In contrast to the educational fictions of her contemporaries, Charlotte Smith's children's books incorporated poetic extracts into the narrative, a practice common in novels of the period. Smith's use of poetry to teach natural history follows a different lineage, one exemplified in Erasmus Darwin's long annotated poem, Loves of the Plants. In drawing the attention to how the botanical specimen enters the nosegay, Smith's note also reveals another form of poetic labour. By confounding the nosegay with the specimen cabinet, 'Flora' fuses the poet's 'dear delusive art' of weaving 'fantastic garlands' with the language and forms of empiricist science.
