By Elizabeth Wright
Charlotte Turner Smith is best known for her poems about Sussex; She also found literary success by weaving parts of her incredible life into her romantic novels. Born on the 4th May 1749 at Bignor, Sussex, the first child of wealthy parents, but tragedy struck, when, at the age of six she lost her beloved mother, Anna Towers, who died giving birth to her sister Catherine. Her father, Nicolas Turner, was a reckless spender, who abandoned Charlotte, Catherine and their brother Nicholas and disappeared abroad.
Brought up by their maternal aunt, Charlotte was sent to a school in Chichester, where her talent for drawing was encouraged by her teacher, painter George Smith. At the age of eight, she, her aunt and siblings, moved to London. Attending a school in Kensington, Charlotte had a natural flair for poetry, drawings and music.
‘I was so happy, when while yet a child,
I learnt to love their upland solitudes,
And, when elastic as the mountain air,
To my light spirit, care was yet unknown
And evil unforeseen – Early it came,
And childhood scarcely passed, I was condemned,
A guiltless exile silently to sigh,
While memory, with faithful pencil, drew
The contrast; and regretting. I compared
With the polluted, smoky atmosphere
And dark and stifling streets, the southern hills
That to the setting sun, their graceful heads
Rearing,o’erlook the frith, when vectra breaks
With her white rocks, the strong impetuous tide,
Where western winds the vast Atlantic urge
To thunder on the coast – Haunts of my youth!
Charlotte Turner Smith
‘Miscellaneous poems,’
‘Beachy Head.’
Her father returned to England, financially impoverished, and was forced to sell many of the family treasures. Having met wealthy Henrietta Meriton, he turned on the charm and she eventually agreed to marry him. Supported by Henrietta’s money, Charlotte left school and was tutored at home.
As she blossomed into a beautiful teenager, she caught the eye of Benjamin Smith, son of Richard Smith, a wealthy director of the East India Company. When she was fifteen, her father accepted Smith’s proposal to marry Charlotte, and in later life, she wrote, that by her father’s action, ‘I have become a legal prostitute.’
Charlotte discovered that Benjamin was not an ideal husband, he was violent and unfaithful. She was unhappy living in London’s Cheapside, and couldn’t get on with her in-laws, whom she felt were uneducated and had no manners. They, in turn, derided her for spending time writing and drawing. In spite of their rocky relationship, Charlotte and Benjamin had twelve children together. Sadly, they lost their firstborn at the age of one year, and their second child, Benjamin Berney, died in 1777, aged ten. In the following years ten more children were born.
Her father-in-law, Richard, began to see her in a different light. He asked her to assist in the family business by helping out with the correspondence. As a wealthy West Indian Merchant, he owned prosperous plantations in Barbados. In 1774 Charlotte eventually persuaded him to set Benjamin up as a gentleman farmer at Lys Farm, in Hampshire., not far from White’s Selborne, on the borders of Sussex. It proved to be an unfortunate speculation, as her husband, with his usual impudence, engaged in ‘injudicious and wild schemes in agriculture.’
Benjamin never accepted his role as a family man, and continued to behave irresponsibly, and run up big debts. Richard Smith became so concerned about the future of his grandchildren that he made a personal will, leaving them a legacy of some £36,000. But there were a number of legal problems concerning this self- made document, so that, even after his death in 1776, Charlotte saw little of the money. Benjamin had other ideas, and managed to steal and spend around £12,000 of his children’s inheritance. In December 1783 he ended up in King’s Bench Prison incarcerated for several months. Charlotte joined him and it was here that she wrote her first book of poetry, ‘Elegiac Sonnets.’ This was an instant success and she was able to buy their freedom. However, with creditors still pursuing them for money, the whole family fled to Dieppe, in France. Charlotte found employment translating works from French into English.
In 1785 the family returned to England, settling into Wollbeding House, near Midhurst, in Sussex. It was well known for its beautiful Saxon garden described by author Arthur Mee, ‘It is all yews and cedars here and a little walk lined with square clipped yews comes first to a grave of a poet’s father (Francis Bourdillon) and then to the walls the Saxons made, with the familiar pilaster strips.’
Next door there is a fine 17th century house .with the gorgeous cedar peeping over the wall and one of the most famous tulip trees in England, blooming when we called.. with a trunk over 20ft round. ‘ A true place for a poet. ‘
Charlotte was so happy to be back in her beloved Sussex that she wrote Sonnet to the South Downs:-
Ah! Hills belov’d – where once a happy child,
Your beechen shades, ‘your turf, your flowers among.’
I wove your blue bells into garlands wild,
And woke your echoes with my artless song………
A woman before her time, Charlotte decided, on the 15th April, 1787, after twenty-two years of marriage, to take the unusual step of leaving her husband, taking their nine surviving children with her. She wrote, ‘I might have been contented to reside in the same house with him…….had not his temper been so capricious and often so cruel…my life was not safe.’
She moved near to Chichester, in Sussex and was able to support herself and the children with her writing. Although she always saw herself as a poet first, believing they brought her respectability, she found that writing novels was more financially rewarding. ‘Emmeline’, written in 1788, sold 1,500 copies within months. Many of the stories she wrote were touching on the autobiographical, containing portraits of herself and her extraordinary life.
Sitting on a shingle beach, facing a healthy breeze, she wrote:-
‘The wild blast rising from the western cave
Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed,
Tears from their grassy tomb the village dead,
And breaks the silent Sabbath of the grave!
With shells and seaweed mingled on the shore,
i.e. their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
But vain to them the wind and waters rave,
They hear the warring elements no more.’
In further novels, prompted by her life’s experiences, she pushed for legal reforms giving women more rights, freed from the ‘legal, economic and sexual exploitation by marriage and property laws.’
During a period of ten years , Charlotte wrote ten more novels, including ‘Celestina’ (1791), ‘The Wanderings of Warwick,’ (1794) and ‘The Banished Man,’ (1794). Much of women’s fiction at that time was expected to be of a romantic nature, but, Charlotte also added some political commentary. Having lived in France, she was supportive of the French Revolution and its republican principles, and began to earn herself a reputation of being something of a radical writer. She continued to write poetry, and her work had a lasting impact on Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who said, ‘Charlotte Turner Smith was a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered.’
Novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote.’….she preserves in her landscapes the truth and precision of a paint….’ Charles Dickens was heavily influenced by her novels….’drawing some of his most resounding imagery of the vagaries of the law in Bleak House and the desperation of debtors’ prison in Little Dorrit.’
Charlotte wrote eleven novels, three collections of poetry and five children’s books, but, in time, there was declining interest in her work. Poet Anna Seward wrote that…..’Smith was….vain….indelicate…and exposing her husband to public contempt.’ Others felt that….there was a corresponding erosion of quality of her work after so many years of literary labour….as she published, on average, one work per year for twenty-two years, and a controversy that attached to her public profile…’
Thus Charlotte was forced to tone down her radical ideas as her income waned. She published a collection of tales, ‘Letters of a Solitary Wandered,’ a play, ‘What Is She?’ plus some children ‘s literature, ‘Rural walks’ and ‘Rambles Farther.’ Publishers did not pay much for these works, and eventually financial problems forced her to frequently move; she lived in a number of different towns, including Brighton, Storrington and Weymouth, eventually settling in Tilford, Surrey. Now poverty stricken, she was forced to sell her library of 500 books to pay for food and coal.
Her health became progressively worse, rheumatoid arthritis started to cripple her hands, making it painful for her to write. As the disease crept further into her body, she became partially paralysed . She likened it to….’literally vegetating, for I have very little locomotive powers beyond that appertaining to a cauliflower.’
Her spendthrift husband died in a debtor’s prison on the 23rd February, 1806, and a few months later Charlotte passed away on the 28th October. She is buried at Stoke Church, Stoke Park, near Guildford. Ironically, seven years later the lawsuit over her father-in-law’s estate was finally settled, thirty-six years after Richard Smith’s death.
In 2008, Charlotte Turner Smith’s entire prose collection was republished.
