Charlotte Smith’s Marchmont: “my very soul was sick of the wild assemblage of ideotism and phrensy”

Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night o’er the ocean settles, dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone,
Singing the hour, and bidding “strike the bell.”
All is black shadow, but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Mislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way.
— Smith, poem found in The Young Philosopher

Joseph Wright of Derby: Moonlight with a Lighthouse

Dear friends and readers,

This past month I read the only longer (4 full volumes) novel by Charlotte Smith not available except in the super-expensive Chatto and Pickering Complete Novels of Charlotte Smith: Marchmont. I cannot think of any rational explaining why this one has been left out. It is superior to those produced in various facsimile editions, as good or better those produced in good popular and academic style editions. I used my downloaded ECCO pdf texts supplemented by a xerox of all four volumes from the microfilms of these ECCO texts I made in the 1980s at the Library of Congress.

Unlike a number of Smith’s novels, it not only has a heroine’s subjective consciousness at the center, the heroine herself, Althea Dacres, is self-contained, pro-active on her own behalf, a persuasively mature intelligent presence. She is closest presence to Austen’s Elinor Dashwood in Smith’s oeuvre. Smith observes verisimilitude carefully, delineates (as she does in another later novel, The Young Philosopher), the actual money relationship of the frequently disparate relatives within an English kinship system at the time. There is a sophisticated analysis of the workings of law and custom dramatized.

Deep into this long novel there is a letter by Marchmont, the hero, to his friend Eversley (this is a novel partly told in letters) where he describes at length what he sees going on all around him, the conditions of prison existence where to get anything at all you must bribe someone; where the acceptance of living in prison for debt is so strong a whole set of industries and type jobs have grown around it, as well as families living “in the rules” (just outside the prison and some prisoners allowed to visit). It’s soberly devastating. She begins with how a person might feel who tells himself how he has long years ahead to live in this place and knows he shouldn’t be there, that it’s an outrageous and counterproductive injustice to put him there. (The creditors Johnson called vultures persisted in hoping rich relatives who were willing — both conditions rarely existed would pay to get the person out.) In her prison memoir Madame Roland has a section on what she saw as people expect to die: Roland brings out the rampant sexuality, prostitution and violence and raw coarse behavior that comes out (a bit of this is seen in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, but not enough). Smith has her hero reading Roland’s memoir which came out in 1796 so it’s possible Smith read Roland just before or during the time she was writing this novel. Smith does say the people are “profligate, daring and unprincipled,” “careless of consequences” for they have so little to lose.

First Marshalsea prison: an 18th century print

I find myself regretting Smith put this in a novel. It ought to have been published separately. OTOH, it is terrible to our hero and heroine (Althea is married to Marchmont by the fourth volume when he is incarcerated) to look around himself and see so much misery – what he sees happens to people who are led to see themselves as outcasts and everyone attached to them who stays living in sordid conditions of helplessness. Her experience is one of threats from sexual harassment which would bring upon her not only possible rape but the destruction of Marchmont who would insist on defending her honor.

Seige of Toulon, the attack: another 18th century print

Smith includes the horrifying siege of Toulon, and again most graphically, he desperate straits of the different people differently caught up in this story of “blood” and carnage over the course of the event. She emphasizes daily life, monthly life was like in the debtors’ sections and in various vantage points of a seige. The question is a woman’s one: how does one live, carry on regardless in such continuing conditions. We see famine from afar: smith remarks we are “creatures of accident” and refers to Leibnitz Pope, Optimism: she pictures someone asking, what use is this reasoning. She replies by reasoning, by showing these things happen, you may gradually remove abuses. If don’t do this, you are savage and nothing will change. She quotes Horace Walpole on the rightness of subordination at this point — ironically. It is a novel which tells of the failure of the French revolution but maintains its ideals are humanity’s hopes.

The story is many-faceted and tonight I want just to suggest a few of the themes and modes of writing which emerge and are reflective of Smith in her later years; what differentiates this book. When the novel opens, Althea is being brought up by a sympathetically portrayed unmarried aunt, Mrs Trevyllian. When she won’t accede to a forced marriage to a fop-like thug, she is sent to a ruined house, and we have a realistic gothic. The ghost turns out to be the outcast hero, Marchmont descended from a line of Cavaliers whose history of punitive treatment gives us insight into the civil war conflicts and their aftermaths. They are worse in debt than mere bankruptcy (Marchmont must struggle to keep his father’s body from creditors who would hold it unburied as ransom for payment). The novel is famous among those who read 18th century minor fiction for its predatory lawyers, especially one Vampyre (others have memorable names like Tygerface). She is explicit about the oppression to most of the legal criminal justice and legacy systems. She shows smuggling going on continually; small people get caught and the punishment is harsh, but the practice is in effect otherwise ignored. Smith is prescient about the results of the just beginning Napoleonic conquest of Europe. What worlds.

Like Mansfield Park, there is in effect an inset epistolary novel, narratives by the hero, Marchmont, sent to Eversley, his and Althea’s loyal friend, like so many characters in Smith suffering from the wretchedness of marriage to a partner morally stupid, deeply committed to hierarchy and loving senseless social dissipation, egoistically vain. A long embedded novella told in omniscient free indirect third person form is done as a flashback, backstory: our displaced heroine is a servant girl, Phoebe, whose immiseration, emigration, shattered state from what happens to her and her family, and final rescue gives the novel a powerful post-colonial perspective: people who know nothing of the places they are sent to end up killing the people there, with profit seeming to go to invisible further parties. It’s poignant tale of girl maimed — of immense pathos.

Smith reflects on the world of publishing in the 1790s: this is the first text beyond those Kenneth Johnstone udsd in his Pitt’s Reign of Alarm to describe how writers were frightened from writing by the harassment and trials, imprisonment, loss of places to live, jobs, community support. Marchmont’s own reflections about how he daren’t publish or no one will be interested because what he writes will be seen as seditious shows why someone might put this in a novel. She has in this novel had him think about Pitt’s repressive measures against writers. She talks of how somehow it disgraces a person to tell of such an experience (as it would have disgraced her and actually still does to tell of her husband’s abuses of her); how much the success of a book depends on how it’s ushered into the public, how that sort of recommendation influences half the world at least. This is the first book I’ve read that this early brings up the writing life from this political and social capital point of view.

Frontispiece chosen by Smith for her book of poetry (“To the Moon”)

It has the flaws of her other novels: it moves too slowly at times; she is too insistent on her heroine’s exemplary goodness. If this is a flaw, as in all her books, we see a version of her father, utterly blameable and yet forgiven; her aunt who meant well; her stepmother presented as vicious. I like her acid tone, the rants against “the calamities of this best of all possible worlds.” The way she alone tells how families are by the system they find themselves in, and the heterogenous nature of their ties become engines of alienation. But others will find her not allowing enough space for better social moments in life. And it’s too self-conscious, too repetitive, the language not original enough. Not cliched and plain and honest, serviceable, and can move to theoretical analysis back to demotic dramatized scenes, but not what is found in her The Old Manor House, much less the poetry.

It seems to me to reflect her life at this time. We hear of what she had learned to turn to for whatever enjoyment, companionship, new knowledge, as reasons to stay alive after the death of a favorite daughter, estrangement from her eldest son, and her experience of the others most frequently as financial burden and emotionally twisted sites she had not the resources to sustain or respect and compatibility to direct. Books. This is a novel where the heroine finds “the love of books as the greatest solace and company the world affords.”

The deep-musing beautiful landscapes are found in all Smith’s novels, but here she shows her taste for the sublime. She finds release in a tempest. Yet the book begins and ends quietly: Althea at home with her aunt, and a delineation of routine days spent together. Althea at the close with Marchmont and their children with its reference to fortitude learned and how Althea’s life spreads comfort all around while not as beautifully written anticipate Mansfield Park and Dorothea in Middlemarch.

A scene from Scott drawn by Turner

Ellen