Placing Charlotte Smith at Chawton House Library: Her Elegiac Sonnets

Charlotte Smith in 1792 by George Romney

Dear friends and readers,

In the second week of October a second Charlotte Smith conference was held for three days: the first two at mostly at the Chawton House Library (a musical recital was in St Nicholas’s church on the grounds); the third, a Sunday, a tour to Bignor Park, a place not far off where Charlotte Smith lived out for her formative years, and loved very much (she would visit her brother and then sister there as an adult); the nearby Petworth House, the seat of her erstwhile patron, George O’Brien Wyndham, Earl of Egremon;, and St John’s Church, in Guilford, where she was baptized, near which her mother’s home was, and where she was buried. I’ve already described the human dimensions (the social life, conversations, what Chawton House looks like) in a diary of trips blog. Valerie Derbyshire has provided a concise conference report: Placing Charlotte Smith, 14th – 16th October, Chawton House. Here I intend to give the gist of the richly informed insightful papers and then describe the places we saw, and the informal and formal lectures we had on Charlotte Smith’s relationship to them.

So, the three days were crowded with richly informed insightful papers. Beth Dolan began the conference by telling us how the statistics of studies and editions of Charlotte Smith show she is at last attracting the serious attention her work deserves. The first ever Charlotte Smith conference was held in 2006 and lasted for a day. The Plenary address was given by Judith Stanton who achieved the 800+ page edition of her letters (2003), chaired by Loraine Fletcher who wrote the indispensable literary biography (1998). There were panels on Smith’s poetry, The Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, political acts at the time, Desmond, her fellow women poets and friends, Desmond, The Old Manor House, and her one play, What is She? Lunch, tea, a dinner to launch the volumes of Smith’s works published by Pickering and Chatto. I have myself gone to two panels on Smith’s poetry and two on her novels in three different ASECS conferences since. Beth surveyed the history of scholarship. Since Walter Scott’s assessment of Smith’s life and work (1827), before the 1960s there was the one magisterial dissertation biography-study by Florence Hilbish (which I own in the forms of xeroxes and have read), and a few skant thin commentaries on Smith’s writing; then starting in 1969-75 five articles appeared, 13 more publications before 1990, and suddenly 54 articles in the next nine years. Stuart Curran’s Complete Poems appeared in 1993; Carroll Fry’s Twayne biography 1996. The first six years of the 21st century saw 45 publications, the last ten years there have been 82. Beth kindly named my edition of Ethelinde for Valancourt Press this year, and talked of the novel’s erotic sensibility, its presentation of debtor’s prison (connecting plot-point in it to Dickens’s Little Dorrit). The conference had begun. This blog will cover just the first morning.

The morning panel was on Smith’s seminal Elegiac Sonnets: it was these which put her on the literary map of her age, and arguably makes her a mother of romanticism more original than Wordsworth (the thesis of Jacqueline Labbe’s Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784-1807). Rich Ness gave a paper on “Lyric Afflictions: Apostrophes and Opiates in Smith’s poetry.” He explored her frequent use of the apostrophe, using Jonathan Culler’s explanatory work on how apostrophes function (manipulative, emotion performing, solipsistic, embarrassing in artificiality, a kind of ventriloquism). Smith seeks oblivion, cannot forget her suffering, takes over suicidal motifs from Shakespeare (sleep and death are cures). Rich saw a connection between her poetry and that of the Greeks. He emphasized other poets like Smith, using Freud’s ideas about melancholy. Modern witnesses included Hannah Arendt who saw a retreat from the social in the arts with a public invasion of the intimate. Poems gone over included her “To the Moon” and “To the South Downs.”

Samuel Rowe’s paper was called “The Negative Turn: Smith, the sonnet revival and dissociative form.” Sam’s basic thesis was that Smith refuses to establish communication. We find in her poetry a quiet denial of the horrors she has seen or known while maintaining a strong silence on the actual objects of her loss. Unexpectedly (he did not use this word), given the sentimentality of her heroines, Smith’s poetry is unsentimental when it comes to events or people. A real object she names is her daughter, Anna Augusta, who died so young of consumption after a hard childbirth. The light does not shine on Smith; when she opens her inner space it remains unilluminated. Her most famous sonnet (44, “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex”) offers an extreme scene of tempestuous flux; she affiliates herself with the dead who are excluded from the war of life. Sam thought it was a strange poem, where these bones are excluded from the earth’s movements on the shore where and in the waters while she is doomed to stay or live on. He compared these poems to Wordsworth’s “Composed after a Journey across the Hamilton Hills, Yorkshire,” “Ere we had reached the wished-for place, night fell,” and Keats’s famous “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” (As I read these Wordsworth finds peace by pushing disappointment from his mind; Keats wants to live on.)

John Thelwall (1764-1834)

Mary Ann Myers placed Smith’s sonnets in the context of John Thelwall’s writing. Kenneth Johnston has a sympathetic informative chapter on Thelwall in his Unusual Suspects. Thelwall is one of the many gifted reformists whom Pitt’s policies and gov’t destroyed: “against Thelwall the state acted directly by arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial, conviction, punishment and later also unusual suspect; he found how difficult it was to get out of political catchment, how the distinction between personal and political is non-existent … Thelwall was arrested, put on trial for treason. His speeches revealed (among other things) the absurdity of sending send peasantry to be annihilated in a crusade to restore the fallen despotism of France. Treason now means telling the truth to the shame and confusion of ministers. Thelwall presented himself as a target – let him be prosecuted; but after the acquittal, the way he was kept from any success was through means like a petty illegal smashing of a hall, frightening others who welcomed him, beating him up – all he could get was laughter at his plight.

Well Thelwall defended Smith from attacks inflicted on her for her radical politics, for revealing the truth about how she was abused by lawyers and her husband. She never mentioned him so what prompted the passionate defense? Mary Ann concentrated on Thelwall’s defense of patriotism — rightly understood. A patriot is someone willing to fight for liberty and devote himself to principles in spite of oppression. Mary Ann found an “uncanny intersection” between Thelwall’s principled patriotism, attitudes towards rebellion, and Smith’s sonnet 76 (not well known so I print it here):

Go now, ingenious youth! — The trying hour
Is come: The world demands that thou shouldst go
To active life: There titles, wealth, and power,
May all be purchased–Yet I joy to know
Thou wilt not pay their price. The base control
Of petty despots in their pedant reign
Already hast thou felt; — and high disdain
Of tyrants is imprinted on thy soul —
Not, where mistaken Glory, in the field
Rears her red banner, be thou ever found:
But, against proud Oppression raise the shield
Of patriot daring — So shalt thou renown’d
For the best virtues live ; or that denied
May’st die, as Hampden or as Sydney died!

Smith included a note to her sonnet telling the reader she did not intend to allude to her sons; we know that she was actively opposed to her sons seeking a military career as dangerous as well as amoral (the trade of blood she called it), but the context for this sonnet is the hero, Marchmont in the novel named after him, who comes from a long line of patriotic cavaliers, but himself inveighs against the European wars (the Siege of Toulon is included in the novel), and is politically pro-Revolutionary ideals (whence the citing of Hampden and Sidney). Mary Ann called it an “unusually manly sonnet” for Smith, with its central male presence, and patriot martyred again tyrants who destroy principled constitutions. She then discussed Thelwall’s “The Feelings of a Parent” who is willing to sacrifice a child and himself to “the cause of sacred Freedom.”

Ah ! who yet conscious of the social glow
Of Nature—or whose generous breast can feel
An offspring’s future woe or future weal,
The cause of sacred Freedom would forego,
For aught luxurious Grandeur can bestow,
Or Tyranny inflict? Who that can view
In Meditation’s glass the scenes of woe
The darling issue of his loins must know
Beneath the Despot’s rod, but would pursue
(To Nature, and to Patriot virtue true)
The glorious chace of Liberty, and scorn
Each fierce opposing danger—the fell steel
Of ruthless Janissaries—the stern Bastille—
Its bars, its iron doors, and caves forlorn,
Ere leave a trampled Realm in chains to mourn?

The poem comes from Thelwall’s volume Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate Under a Charge of High Treason (London, 1795). He saw Smith as sharing his values. He recognized a writer who shared his pain, who was not impressed by evil laws. Mary Ann quoted a number of philosophical critics (including Benedict Anderson’s famous book on imagined communities which are “not the less real for being imagined”): Mary Ann’s implication is that Thelwall took heart from Smith’s existence as part of a world he belonged to and had struggled in. To defend Smith was to explain and defend himself.

These extraordinary papers (and poems) elicited rich conversation from the audience. I could only get snatches down, and didn’t know everyone’s names (thus name no one). Sam Rowe had talked about William Lyles Bowles’s poetry, which Coleridge’s discussions linked to Smith, and someone suggested Bowles was a kind of mainstream alternative to Smith. The internet came up and it was asked if people on the internet are speaking into nothingness. (I hope not.) This was a comment sceptical about Smith’s retreat, not sympathetic to an emphasis on this as central to her poetry. I spoke my wish that Smith had named the concrete sources, or described the experiences that she refused to communicate; the lack of an objective correlative, and her obsessive repetition leads to adverse criticism of her poems. Readers retreat from the continual sadness without justification. One person suggested that Keats’s poem deconstructed itself, Shelley is ironic in his “Ode to the West Wind,” that the point of Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” was to imagine himself with his friends, to bring them in effect (especially the gentle Charles Lamb) into his bower, and that there is frequently much alienation in romantic poetry. We ought to deconstruct Smith’s retreat more. This was then another somewhat sceptical response to being so openly sympathetic to (bonding with) Smith’s dissociation. I liked how Sam Rowe defended Smith’s stance of non-communication by saying it was essential for mental health and a way she could be in public with others and remain authentically her. (She refused to cheer up, to snap out of it, to pretend to live in the same emotional world as her critics or non-readers.) Someone said she refused to be consoled; she will not let the reader or world off the hook. She does not want to be shut down and protests out of her true self which she holds on to.

From the grounds of Bignor Park

The morning concluded with a video and podcast of Ned Bigham, Viscount Mersey’s setting of Smith’s “Written in Bignor Park in Sussex, in August, 1799,” from a performance that had occurred some time ago

Low murmurs creep along the woody vale,
The tremulous Aspens shudder in the breeze,
Slow o’er the downs the leaden vapours sail,
While I, beneath these old paternal trees,
Mark the dark shadows of the threaten’d storm,
As gathering clouds o’erveil the morning sun;
They pass! — But oh! ye visions bright and warm
With which even here my sanguine youth begun,
Ye are obscured for ever! — And too late
The poor Slave shakes the unworthy bonds away
Which crush’d her! — Lo! the radiant star of day
Lights up this lovely scene anew — My fate
Nor hope nor joy illumines — Nor for me
Return those rosy hours which here I used to see!

The music was very beautiful (to match the imagined landscape), and very sad (for the mood), set to express the lines and words of the poem. Viscount Mersey (to give him his title) showed us the score and went over some of what he had done and then replayed the video, slowing down over specific lines. It made me pay close attention to images and words, see them differently. The image of the slave had especially discordant music. He mentioned his admiration for Mahler, an Orpheus poem by Rilke (where Eurydice has to look back) as influential in his choices.

It was Ned (he appeared to prefer this address) who invited the Smith conference people to Bignor Park on Sunday; he is a composer, musician, and the present owner of the estate and lives there; his family have lived in Bignor Park for about 100 years. So, anticipating our visit, he also gave us a brief sketch of the history of the estate and especially the gardens. Records go back to the medieval period; in 1632 a mansion house was built. At times the land was poorly managed and in 1750 when Charlotte’s father, Nicholas Turner inherited, his profligate ways further depleted the estate. The Viscount seemed to suggest that when John Hawkins, Cornish geologist and writer, bought the property and developed it as part of a larger estate, despite expense and setbacks over the century; the house was renovated, and landscape improved, supported, cared for. You can tour the gardens and landscape as a paying visitor, and there is a pamphlet describing all that you see and how it came to be there (wildlife, flora, small buildings like a temple and loggia, ancient trees). The pamphlet includes a lovely line drawing of the house, stables, zen pond, overlook, and a keyed map. (We were given copies.) When we walked there on Sunday I saw a ha-ha for the first time.

Another part of the gardens

It was then more than time for lunch. My next blog will be on the afternoon panels.

Ellen