Romantic Histories
Review by: THERESA M. KELLEY
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 59, No. 3 (December 2004), pp. 281-314
Published by: University of California Press
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Romantic Histories:
Charlotte Smith and
Beachy Head
THERESA M. KELLEY
¬
n recent decades the literary renaissance
of works by Romantic women authors
has altered scholarly understanding of which works and writers
might be said to constitute the center and periphery of Romantic literary culture. The writings and modern critical reception of the poet, novelist, and essayist Charlotte Smith is a
case in point. Smith’s virtual disappearance from print culture
after the mid nineteenth century derives in some measure from
the Victorian formation of a Romantic canon that largely omitted Romantic women authors.1 In the twentieth century Smith’s
work remained largely unread until the late 1980s, when scholars began to circulate unpublished typescripts of her poems. In
1993 Stuart Curran issued the first complete edition of Smith’s
poetry, having proposed eight years earlier that modern critical understanding of the Romantic “I” would have to shift
dramatically in order to reckon with the poetic voices of Smith
and other women authors.2 With the appearance of Loraine
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 281–314. ISSN: 0891-9356, online ISSN: 10678352. © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct
all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University
of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/
rights.htm.
1 See Harriet Kramer Linkin, “Taking Stock of the British Romantics Marketplace:
Teaching New Canons through New Editions?” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 19 (1995),
111–23.
2 See Stuart Curran, “Romantic Poetry: The ‘I’ Altered,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988),
281
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nineteenth-century liter ature
Fletcher’s 1998 critical biography of Smith, together with reprints of single volumes of her poetry and some of her novels,
as well as Judith Phillips Stanton’s 2003 edition of Smith’s complete letters, Charlotte Smith has made a remarkable literary
comeback.3 Yet even as modern readers have gained greater
access to Smith, they have had to confront a writer who makes
considerable demands on her audience.
Chief among those demands are Smith’s unrelenting bids
for sympathy, which uncomfortably flaunt the stickier, more
piteous side of Romantic subjectivity. It is difficult enough to
explain this Romantic tendency in, for example, Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s painful exclamation in Ode to the West Wind (1819): “I
fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” 4 Smith’s version of this
tendency is altogether more relentless and even more difficult
to explain or justify. She makes the biographical ground for
such appeals explicit in published prefaces for successive editions of her Elegiac Sonnets (1784 –97), her most popular volume
of poems, which purports to offer translations of Petrarchan
sonnets.5 In fact, they are more typically riffs on Petrarchan
themes, or sonnets written against that tradition, that introduce
voices, arguments, and formal interiors that serve an openly
biographical elegy.6 One might argue of course that this tactic
is consonant with the sonnet tradition, which asserts as autobiographical or fictional truth a close affiliation between the
pp. 200 –202. See also Charlotte Smith, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993). Subsequent references to Smith’s poetry are to
this edition and are included in the text. Matthew Bray circulated his transcribed text
of Smith’s Beachy Head (1807) prior to the poem’s modern republication.
3 See Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1998); and Charlotte Smith, The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith
Phillips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2003).
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative
Texts, Criticism, 2d ed., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 300, l. 54.
5 In her Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press,
1999), p. 70, Sarah M. Zimmerman assesses reviewers’ complaints about Smith’s
self-pity.
6 See Sarah Zimmerman, “Charlotte Smith’s Letters and the Practice of SelfPresentation,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 53 (1991–92), 50 –77; and Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, pp. 39 –72. See also Daniel Robinson, “Elegiac Sonnets: Charlotte Smith’s Formal Paradoxy,” Papers on Language and Literature, 39
(2003), 185–219.
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speaker and the subject of the sonnet. Yet Smith’s practice offers something different: although she claims that these sonnets work within and are disciplined by the Petrarchan tradition, they frequently exceed its terms. Indeed, Smith forces the
autobiographical persona of the Petrarchan sonnet to inhabit a
performance that borders on the unseemly. She introduces the
raw specifics of her personal circumstances so emphatically that
the fictional guise of the sonneteer cannot hold. In successive
prefaces that offer up a never-ending saga of legal battles for
money and property, Smith made her story the basso continuo
against which readers read her sonnets.
Briefly put, Smith spent most of her life hammering at legal
disputes and financial distresses that began with her marriage
at age fifteen to Benjamin Smith and ended with his death, and
then hers, years later. In the interim, litigants fought her case
(on both sides) in the Courts of Chancery. This long and sordid legal struggle became a model, Loraine Fletcher notes, for
Charles Dickens’s invention of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce suit in
Bleak House (1852–53).7 By her own account, Smith wrote to
live, in the double sense of not only earning a living but also
putting food on the table for herself, her twelve children, and,
for more time than she wished, her erring husband, from
whom she eventually separated.8 She wrangled in public and in
private to get access to the family wealth that was due her and
those of her children and grandchildren who survived into
7
See Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, p. 338.
For a sampling of the many letters that Smith wrote to plead her impoverished
circumstances, see Smith, letter to James Upton Tripp, [28 October 1794], in Collected
Letters, p. 173; letter to Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 2 November 1795, in
Collected Letters, pp. 211–12; letter to William Hayley, 16 April 1797, in Collected Letters,
pp. 260 – 62; letter to James Edward Smith, 15 March 1798, in Collected Letters, pp. 314 –
15; letter to the Earl of Egremont, 6 October 1801 and 1 October 1802, in Collected Letters, pp. 381– 83, 470 –73; letter to Michael Bowman, 5 January 1803, in Collected Letters,
pp. 505– 8; letter to Egremont, 26 February 1803, in Collected Letters, pp. 552–53; letter
to Egremont and Rev. Nicholas Turner, November 1804, in Collected Letters, p. 671; letter to Sarah Rose, August 1805, in Collected Letters, pp. 701–3; and letter to Egremont,
20 September 1806, in Collected Letters, pp. 757–59. See also Judith Phillips Stanton,
“Charlotte Smith’s ‘Literary Business,’” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 1
(1987), 375– 401. Jacqueline M. Labbé calls attention to a Smith letter not published
in Stanton’s edition in which Smith negotiates the double identity of lady and author in
financial distress (see Labbé, “Gentility in Distress: A New Letter by Charlotte Smith
(1749 –1806),” Wordsworth Circle, 35 [2004], 91–93).
8
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adulthood. Presented with this story in preface after preface,
readers are invited to conclude that it is little wonder her poetry is elegiac in tone and subject.
Among Smith’s early readers, this invitation soon became
internalized, like an embedded switch-plate or a default setting, in critical discussions of her writing, prose as well as poetry. In response to the 1786 third edition of Elegiac Sonnets,
an anonymous contributor from Chichester offers a sonnet
dedicated “To Mrs. SMITH, on reading her Sonnets lately published,” which declares: “Base were those groveling minds,
those breasts of stone, / Who taught thee grief nor time nor
hope can heal.” 9 A subsequent review in the same magazine of
her poem The Emigrants (1793) assures that it allows readers to
become “acquainted with the authoress . . . whom we can discover almost at the bottom of every page, as we may the portrait
of some of the most renowned painters in the corner of their
most favourite pictures.” A few paragraphs later the reviewer
makes this point more plainly still: “The whole Poem may be
considered as a soliloquy pronounced by the authoress.” 10 A
reviewer in the Critical Review is a good deal less sanguine about
Smith’s autobiographical presence: “Herself, and not the
French emigrant, fills the foreground; begins and ends the
piece; and the pity we should naturally feel for those overwhelming and uncommon distresses she describes, is lessened
by their being brought into parallel with the inconveniences of
a narrow income or a protracted law-suit.” 11 Anna Seward complained in a letter about the “everlasting lamentables, which
she [Smith] calls sonnets, made up of hackneyed scraps of dis9 [Anon.], “Sonnet,” European Magazine, 9 (1786), 366. See also Zimmerman’s
acute discussion of this and other responses to Smith’s poetry (Sarah M. Zimmerman,
“‘Dost thou not know my voice?’ Charlotte Smith and the Lyric’s Audience,” in Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and
Stephen C. Behrendt [Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999], pp. 101–24).
10 [Anon.], rev. of The Emigrants, by Charlotte Smith, European Magazine, 24 (1793),
42. See Zimmerman’s cogent discussion of this review as indicative of the impact of
Smith’s self-presentation in “Charlotte Smith’s Letters,” p. 58.
11 [Anon.], rev. of The Emigrants, a Poem, in Two Books, by Charlotte Smith, Critical
Review, 9 (1793), 299 –300. See also Florence May Anna Hilbish, Charlotte Smith, Poet
and Novelist (1749–1806) (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1941), p. 152.
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mality.” 12 Obituaries and biographical memoirs were kinder,
but here too the link that Smith herself had forged between the
circumstances of her life and the fictionalized situations and
speech of her poetry and novels remained in the foreground.
For Smith and her readers the travails of the autobiographical
poet-speaker are arguably even more insistent than those that
punctuate Byron’s later self-inscription in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812, 1816, and 1818).
Modern critics have been sharply attentive to the rhetorical craft with which Smith fashions the lyric personae of her
poems and letters. Sarah M. Zimmerman has argued persuasively that Smith and William Wordsworth share a poetics bent
toward rhetorical complexity in which the poet-speaker is an
autobiographical fiction; Adela Pinch specifies the poetic advantages that accrue to Smith’s lyrical demands for readerly
sympathy; and Jacqueline Labbé has tracked the adeptness with
which Smith manages her autobiographical persona along with
other voices and identities.13 The modern critical landscape of
Smith studies has moved, in short, rather quickly from the textual recovery of a Romantic woman poet who mourned her
marginal, inadequate relation to the male tradition (both poetic and juridical), to the recognition that Smith capably staged
a Romantic poetic persona for whom loss and recovery and diffusion are the rhetorical work at hand and the labor of poetic
speech. It is no wonder that Wordsworth later admitted that
poets of his generation had learned more from Smith than
would probably ever be acknowledged.14 Wordsworth’s compliment has often been understood to concern the formal
12 Anna Seward, letter to Theophilus Swift, 9 July 1789, in Letters of Anna Seward,
Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols. (London: Longman, Hunt, and Rees,
1807), II, 287.
13 See Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyric and, History, pp. 51–72; Pinch, Strange Fits of
Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996),
pp. 58 – 66; and Labbé, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender
(Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 3–9.
14 Paul Kelley comments on a note that Wordsworth appended to his “Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off St. Bee’s Head” in 1833, as well as the poet’s earlier, unacknowledged echo of a Smith sonnet in A Evening Walk (1793) (see Kelley, “Charlotte
Smith and An Evening Walk,” Notes and Queries, n.s. 29 [o.s. 227] [1982], 220). Bishop
C. Hunt, Jr., reviewed the fascinating record of Wordsworth’s verbal and metrical
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achievement of Smith’s sonnets from which he and other Romantics learned a great deal, but it may also subliminally acknowledge the poetics of loss and self-fashioning that Smith
forged and that Wordsworth soon took up in The Prelude (1805,
1850) and subsequent poems and essays.
So reconsidered, Smith’s writing invites readers to assent
to another twist in the Möbius strip that continues to unbind
and reconfigure how we assign authors to the center or periphery in Romantic literary culture. No longer hidden below the
radar screen of canonical Romantic poets, Smith has emerged
as a poet whose appropriations of genre and voice convey in
singular fashion the Romantic impulse to laminate biography
and poetic identity with public as well as personal ends in view.
That she does so in ways that also register her wariness of poetic
appropriation makes reading Smith critical to understanding
how gender and poetic ambition constitute a productive arena
of conflict within Romantic poetics.15
That conflict is especially marked in Beachy Head, which
appeared posthumously in 1807 as the first poem in a collection of Smith’s late poetry titled Beachy Head, Fables, and Other
Poems. Of Smith’s two long narrative poems (the other being
The Emigrants), Beachy Head is more historically ambitious and
more attentive to natural history. Smith annotated this poem
more heavily than she did any other poem in her career, and its
notes supply ample evidence to support its historical and scientific knowledge. Its subject is the human and geological history of Beachy Head, a long headland that rises up from the
South Downs of England to a coastline defined by its cliffs,
whose “chalky” limestone composition is subject to uneven erosion that produces small caves and ledges. The poem begins
with the speaker’s imagined re-creation of the geological preechoes of Smith in a 1970 essay, recently reprinted as “Wordsworth and Charlotte
Smith: 1970,” Wordsworth Circle, 35 (2004), 80 –91.
15 Hunt argues in his reprinted 1970 essay that Wordsworth is far the better poet
than Smith. I might agree, yet I would also turn the point differently. As Hunt amply
demonstrates, Smith’s poetry offered Wordsworth motifs, phrases, and even some metrical choices that we now identify as “Wordsworthian.” If one’s scholarly concern is to
recognize what poetic habits are typically Romantic or Wordsworthian and so on, who
generated those habits is a question that merits consideration.
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history of the site, marked by its concussive break with the coast
of France. It then weaves a chronicle of the human history of
conflict between inhabitants of the South Downs and France
with stories of how the inhabitants of the region now live on
land and on the sea. The speaker’s personal retrospective and
(for Smith) relatively brief lament intermingles with these
tales, then yields to narratives about the life and death of two
lonely men, the one a stranger, the other a hermit who saves
those about to drown at sea. The poem ends just before giving
a promised epitaph for the hermit’s own death.
As a poem that is fascinated with nationalist and natural
histories, Beachy Head dramatizes an impasse in Romantic historiography created by the presence of two historiographical
models. The first is the large, supervisory project often characterized as the grand march of history. The second emphasizes a
narrative description of minutiae roughly akin to the Annales
project in modern French historiography, which examines records for a single place or group over a few years, typically no
longer than a decade or two, such as the economy of silk
weavers in Lyons just before the French Revolution in 1789.
The first of these models, which derives from the classical
disposition to write histories in which a focus on politics and
statecraft yields a more or less linear narrative, retained enormous prestige into the eighteenth century, as the histories of
Edward Gibbon, William Robertson, and David Hume make
clear. During the same period, however, new historical genres
emerged to challenge the classical model. Reviewing the evidence for this shift, Mark Salber Phillips notes that personal
experience, eyewitness accounts, and even spectatorial sympathy disrupted the protocols of classical historiography.16 LateEnlightenment discourses, succeeded by revolutionary proclamations on individual rights beyond those sanctioned by feudal
codes, together indicate another symptom of what Karl Marx
16 See Phillips, “Adam Smith and the History of Private Life: Social and Sentimental Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Historiography,” in The Historical Imagination in
Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500 –1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and
David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1997), pp. 318 – 42.
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nineteenth-century liter ature
would later call history from below, with its attendant insistence
on the historiographical value of localities (the terrain of antiquarian histories throughout the eighteenth century) and ordinary lives. Siegfried Kracauer describes these competing
models as the “macro” and “micro” levels with which historiography continues to struggle.17
In Beachy Head Smith’s narrator attempts to write a history
that moves between these levels, with precisely the degree of
difficulty that Kracauer suggests is inevitable in modern historiography. The opening section of the poem is committed to a
grand historical narrative, but this commitment is undermined
by a parallel attention to human and natural particularities that
are insistently local. As other readers of the poem have observed, this split reiterates a difference that was typically gendered in the period, as though the inherent problematic of history writing might be resolved by foisting the new, competing
models onto women. Late-eighteenth-century and Romanticera critics insisted that the grand history modeled by Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 – 88) had been and
should remain the work of male historians. Given this assumption, the category of female historian is an oxymoron, inasmuch
as a woman’s perspective, so the argument goes (or went), is by
temperament and training inadequate or partial and thus unsuited to the task of writing a grandly conceived, objective history. The fact that women wrote histories anyway only sharp17 See Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1969), pp. 118 –19. James Chandler surveys the challenge presented by grand
historical narratives about Romanticism in his England in 1819: The Politics of Literary
Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1998),
pp. 36 –38. See also Chandler, “History,” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age:
British Culture, 1776 –1832, ed. Iain McCalman, et al. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1999), pp. 354 – 61. Other scholars of the era who advance or critique the possibility of
a grand historical narrative of Romanticism include M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the
Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953);
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970); Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); and
Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1988).
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ened the rhetorical knives in this debate.18 Because women,
again by training and temperament, were more disposed to notice people, events, and nature, they were well situated to write
novels and local natural histories, particularly when the subject
was flowers. Some recent critics have identified this narrative
focus as eco-feminist.
Although it is surely the case that gender is implicated in
the way the narrative threads of Smith’s poem unwind and recoil, I contend that the role of gender in Beachy Head is remarkably different from that conveyed by the highly feminized
rhetoric of Smith’s earlier poems and so many of her letters. By
this I mean that her last poem asks readers to think about gender not so much as the work of an autobiographical female
poet-speaker who uses an elegiac voice to dun her readers, insisting on their sympathy whether they will or no, but as work
concerned with the elegiac as a condition of history (human
and geological) that bites into the task of narrating stories of all
kinds. A tendency toward personal elegy remains in Beachy
Head, but it is largely directed toward others in ways that urge
a degree of readerly tact. That is to say, one could assimilate all
such persons and mourning to the figure of Charlotte Smith
(as readers of her earlier poems were certainly invited to do),
but in order to do so, one would also need to put aside what I
take to be the distinctive narrative gesture of this compelling
and baffling poetic experiment.
In this essay I argue, against the considerable undertow created by Smith’s early poems and critical reception, that the elegiac subject of Beachy Head is not centrally
the woman poet assailed by others, but rather the difficulty of
18 See Greg Kucich, “Romanticism and Feminist Historiography,” Wordsworth Circle,
24 (1993), 133– 40; Kucich, “Women’s Historiography and the (dis)Embodiment of
Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger,” Wordsworth Circle, 33 (2002), 3–7;
and Morri Safran, “‘Unsex’d’ Texts: History, Hypertext, and Romantic Women Writers
(Catharine Macaulay, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Sydney Owenson),”
Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas at Austin, 2001.
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writing history when its records and concerns work at so many
discordant levels. Unlike The Emigrants, which oscillates between conditional sympathy for French royalist émigrés who
had sought refuge in England and sympathy for Smith herself,19 Beachy Head is overall far less concerned with marking autobiographical parallels.
Even the passage in the poem that presents readers with
Smith’s trademark elegiac lament for a lost, happier self soon
gives way to a broader analysis of the economics of scarcity and
crime that underpins the loss of georgic sufficiency among
those “hinds” who at present work the land, feed their flocks,
and set out to sea at night to smuggle illegal and untaxed
goods, a night job made more hazardous in 1806 with the English decision to blockade the transport of goods to and from
Napoleonic France. Here the poem’s elegiac turn is more attentive to the fracturing of history, the erstwhile happiness of
agrarian and peasant life, and two characters introduced near
the end of the poem whose sorrows might seem to invoke
Smith’s own. Finally, as if to insist that fracture and incompletion are its elegiac subject, the poem ends without an ending by
claiming that it will offer words inscribed in a cave to memorialize a dead hermit, but then does not.
This description of Smith’s Beachy Head would have surprised readers of nineteenth-century reviews and Alexander
Dyce’s anthology Specimens of British Poetesses (1825). Taking his
cue from reviews of the poem in the British Critic and the New
Universal Magazine in 1807, Dyce primarily excerpts passages
from Beachy Head that would have reminded readers of the autobiographical voice of Elegiac Sonnets. The section of Beachy
Head that readers of the Elegiac Sonnets might have expected
begins, “Ah, who is happy?” and this refrain is echoed some
thirty lines later: “I once was happy.” 20 But for the first time in
19 See Susan J. Wolfson, “Charlotte Smith’s Emigrants: Forging Connections at the
Borders of a Female Tradition,” in Forging Connections: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance
to Romanticism, ed. Anne K. Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, and Jonathan F. S. Post (San
Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2002), pp. 81–118.
20 Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, in Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 228, ll. 255, 282 (further references to Beachy Head are to this edition and are included in the text). See also
Alexander Dyce, Specimens of British Poetesses (London: T. Rodd, 1825), pp. 260 – 63;
New Universal Magazine, 7 (March 1807), 228 –30; and [Anon.], rev. of Beachy Head,
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Smith’s poetic career, the lament is relatively brief: it emerges
from a meditation on the relative happiness of Sussex “hinds,”
but then it disappears. Yet it is hard to resist the temptation to
read the epitaphic gestures at the end of the poem as covert invitations to imagine Smith herself as the stranger who dies,
inasmuch as she was in fact dying as she wrote this poem.
Then there is the matter of the site and title that Smith
chose for her last “local poem.” Smith was born near Beachy
Head and lived in its vicinity most of her life. The coastal South
Downs are frequently the subject of her early and later poems,
where she presents them as the site of her lost and longmourned childhood happiness. It was also, as Smith indicates
in her notes to the poem, a topography that by the 1790s invited unease and watchfulness. As the first landfall on the English coast for those traveling from France,21 Beachy Head was
indeed, the English feared, a likely beachhead for the anticipated French invasion of England. The poem’s recollection of
the French defeat of the English Navy off Beachy Head in 1690
is a sharp, if implied, reminder that the French could do again
what they had done at least once before. Here too proximity to
France across the Channel made Sussex smuggling a viable cottage industry, and from here as well watchers could see ships
engaged in the colonial transport of goods procured by
slaves.22 Here too, as Loraine Fletcher remarks, suicide was unnervingly common, encouraged by the long, rising sweep of
land from the Downs to cliff edge. And here, sailors and passengers called out “Beachy, Beachy” to mark the end of their
journey, a detail that Smith incorporated into her 1795 novel
Montalbert. Fletcher notes too that “beachy” meant more generwith Other Poems, by Charlotte Smith, British Critic, 30 (1807), 170 –72 (quoting Smith,
Beachy Head, p. 228, ll. 255– 83; the review quotes Smith’s lament to l. 309). Smith alludes once more to this theme, in lines that John Keats echoes (together with George
Chapman’s 1611 and 1614 –15 translations of Homer) in his “On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer” (1816). In Beachy Head Smith writes: “Ah! hills so early loved! in
fancy still / I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold / Those widely spreading
views” (p. 232, ll. 368 – 69). Clearly Keats was neither the only nor the first Romantic
poet to make use of Chapman’s “pure serene.” The overtone series suggested by these
lines also includes Wordsworth’s use of “behold” in a position of strong enjambment
and deictic gesture in “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798).
21 See Smith, note to Beachy Head, p. 217n.
22 See Smith, notes to Beachy Head, pp. 222n, 224n, 225n.
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ally, and figuratively, “the end of a journey” (Charlotte Smith,
p. 330). Smith, who rightly supposed that Beachy Head would be
her last poem, repeatedly makes this point in letters to friends,
publishers, and the Earl of Egremont, her legal trustee.23 On all
these registers, then, Smith’s last poem finds itself most uncannily at home at Beachy Head, the end of a journey on a hill
where death and suicide were familiar events, even as they appear to have been psychic familiars to Smith.
Were all this not sufficient challenge to my claim that the
elegiac project of Beachy Head concerns history more than it
does the poet’s autobiographical self, there would remain the
posthumous record of obituaries and reviews, which begins
with the “Advertisement” for Beachy Head, where the publisher
alludes to Smith’s death, albeit decorously, to explain that the
poem was in some way not completed according to the author’s
design.24 Early reviews of the poem continued in the same vein.
The British Critic reviewer lamented Smith’s death and acknowledged her genius, fancy, and sensibility as “rarely . . . surpassed by any individual of her sex,” a formula for backhanded
compliment widely used to discuss women’s writing during the
era. As evidence, the review quotes the poem’s single long passage of personal lament.” 25 Meanwhile, in a sonnet published
in The Times in April 1807 titled “The Exile—A Sonnet Attempted in the Style of the Late Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” the
writer re-creates a double-exposed image of Smith as the poet
of Elegiac Sonnets and the poor Wanderer of Beachy Head (not a
sonnet at all, but a long narrative poem in unrhymed blank
verse with epic designs).26 Having airbrushed the formal difference between the two poems that bookend Smith’s career, the
23 See Smith, letter to Sarah Rose, 2 July 1805, in Collected Letters, p. 691; letter to
Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 6 July 1805, in Collected Letters, p. 694; letter
to Davies, 11 July 1806, in Collected Letters, p. 739; and letter to Joseph Johnson, 12 July
1806, in Collected Letters, p. 741.
24 See “Advertisement,” in Smith, Poems, p. 215.
25 See rev. of Beachy Head, British Critic, pp. 170 –72.
26 See G.H.F., “The Exile.—A Sonnet,” The Times, 7 April 1807, p. 2, col. F. See
also “Literary Notice of the Late Charlotte Smith,” European Magazine, 50 (1806), 339 –
41; [Obituary], Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 76 (1806), 991; and
Mrs. [Anne K.] Elwood, “Mrs. Charlotte Smith,” in Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), I, 284 –309.
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Times sonnet memorializes Smith as a dead speaker in her last
poem, precisely the kind of elegiac gesture that she had earlier
trained her readers to make.
Against the tide of so much insistence that the elegiac subject of Beachy Head is Smith herself, my argument for a different
assessment of the role of gender and elegiac sympathy in the
poem takes its cue from Smith’s writing practices as a poet, essayist, and novelist. Her last letters to those in charge of her legal situation register her frustration with legal restrictions that
prevented women from acting directly in financial and legal
disputes. In those letters her repeated pseudo-apologies to
men who were at different times authorized to represent her
financial claims repeat the same rhetorical gestures that women
authors frequently employed in presenting works as their
own—as indeed Smith herself often does in her published
writings. Difference and alterity, in short, were the preconditions that Romantic women authors had to negotiate as gendered others to the real history and real literature practiced by
real men. Writing as a woman, Smith inevitably experienced
gender as a figure for incompletion, for disrupted and partial
narrative.
In Beachy Head, I surmise, Smith spins or pivots this recognition in order to mark an otherness within narrative itself that
she approaches by working through how and why grand or sublime narrative and the miniaturizing, internally playful form of
natural description are each formally incompatible and insufficient. In theoretical terms, this formal incongruity suggests that
the task of writing a history of oneself or the nation is similarly
stymied in the crucial sense that it is formally unavailable or impossible. By moving between these levels of narrative, juxtaposing them, and then recoiling from them in distinct ways, Beachy
Head thus puts the problem of telling a history squarely before
its Romantic readers, and post-Romantic (a.k.a. modern) readers must confront these problems as well.
I certainly am not alone among readers of Beachy Head who
have found its narrative performance difficult to construe.
Feminist critics have emphasized its tilt toward an anti-sublime,
feminine preoccupation with localities and small, mostly botanical details served up by beautiful and picturesque land2
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scapes and theory. Judith Pascoe, Donelle Ruwe, and Donna K.
Landry all link the poem’s stunning botanical apparatus to
women’s writing on botany and pedagogy during the period.27
Noting the slippage within the poem between a local, particular diction and its opening invocation of a grandly sublime,
magisterial survey, Anne D. Wallace observes that this invocation looks like the authoritative gesture of the male historian—
objective, all-knowing.28 Briefly put, this reading, propped up
by Burkean aesthetics, supposes that a sublime viewpoint is
male and god-like in its capacities, whereas a picturesque or
beautiful perspective is lower, more involved, more shaped to
the look of the land and its particulars. The aesthetics of particularity, whether beautiful or picturesque, might seem to offer a
way for history or narrative to become less grand, more local,
and perhaps more true.29
Yet the opening lines of Beachy Head are uninterested in
such a compromise. Instead, they imagine the great geological
“concussion” that ruptured England from the west coast of
France as the first, prehistoric indication that others would follow, such as the French defeat of the English off Beachy Head
in 1690 as well as some future French invasion. Aided by these
27 See Pascoe, “Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith,” in Re-Visioning
Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776 –1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel
Haefner (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 193–209; Ruwe, “Charlotte Smith’s Sublime: Feminine Poetics, Botany, and Beachy Head,” Prism(s): Essays in
Romanticism, 7 (1999), 117–32; and Landry, “Green Languages? Women Poets as
Naturalists in 1653 and 1807,” in Forging Connections, pp. 51–53. Ruwe’s and Pascoe’s
readings extend Anne K. Mellor’s mapping of the Burkean sublime and beautiful as
gendered categories in Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 85–143.
28 See Anne D. Wallace, “Picturesque Fossils, Sublime Geology? The Crisis of Authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head,” European Romantic Review, 13 (2002), 77–93.
See also Kay K. Cook, “The Aesthetics of Loss: Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants and
Beachy Head,” in Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed.
Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (New York: Modern Language Association, 1997), pp. 97–100.
29 In his The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 111–59, David Simpson critiques particularism as a version of resisting theory and conceptual analysis. See also his corollary arguments in the following: David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against
Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 182– 88; and Simpson, Situatedness,
or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2002),
pp. 3, 192–200.
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historical registers—the first mentioned in Smith’s notes and
the second implied by the poem’s subsequent anti-French
rhetoric—Beachy Head stages its notice of political and geological conflicts and ruptures that are also “concussions,” as if the
breakup of the two land masses, or the breaking off of England
as an island, required collision and battering, or, in a Blakean
sense, that the rupture concussed the shared being of the
two nations. This last implication, however, would undermine
Smith’s apostrophe to England as “thou” who will never, unlike
Spain, abase itself to “modern Gallia” (Beachy Head, p. 223,
l. 143). Rather, Smith insists, England with its “integrity secure, /
Shalt now undaunted meet a world in arms” (ll. 152–53).
Smith’s patriotic riff may be designed in part to forestall renewed public hostility toward critics who had long been exercised about her Gallic and revolutionary sympathies.30 The
poem is also confounded by the uncertainties of the present, as
colonial and smuggling profits threaten English pastoral/
georgic existence on the South Downs. Against these larger elegiac gestures, the poem’s odd conclusion leaves hanging the
work of elegy.
John M. Anderson reads the formal insolvencies of the
poem as symptomatic of its generic relation to the Romantic
fragment poem, a category derived from other, more traditionally Romantic poems that Marjorie Levinson has described as
representatives of this curious genre.31 Yet the Romantic advantage of the poetic fragment—that as a form it paradoxically
signals a larger yet inaccessible wholeness or genius (a paradox
that Levinson has recognized)— does not appear to operate in
Smith’s poem, which lacks or seems to lack only the concluding
epitaph for the hermit who died trying to save those shipwrecked on Beachy Head.
30 See Toby Ruth Benis, “‘A Likely Story’: Charlotte Smith’s Revolutionary Narratives,” European Romantic Review, 14 (2003), 291–306; Antje Blank and Janet Todd, “Introduction,” in Charlotte Smith, Desmond, ed. Blank and Todd (Peterborough, Ont.:
Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 13–33; and Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s
Political Writing in England, 1780 –1830 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2002),
pp. 106 –21.
31 See Anderson, “Beachy Head: Romantic Fragment Poem as Mosaic,” in Forging
Connections, pp. 119 – 46; and Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 20 –25.
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Smith herself may have supposed that the poem was finished. As she wrote it, she apprised her publisher Joseph Johnson of her progress, beginning with her first description of the
poem as a “local” poem of four-hundred-plus lines. By the time
she sent it to Johnson for publication in May 1806, it comprised over seven hundred lines and a preface, with perhaps a
memoir and some letters to follow.32 When Smith died in October 1806, Johnson had already held up publication for five
months, waiting for the preface that neither Smith nor her family members ever sent. Published after her death in early February 1807 with poems reprinted from earlier publications, Beachy
Head had no preface, memoir, or letters. Instead, Johnson—
or perhaps Smith’s married sister, Catherine Dorset—supplied
the “Advertisement,” which lamented the poet’s death and
noted that publication had been delayed while others searched
for the missing preface. This, I take it, is the evidence for the
poem’s not being “completed according to the original design”
(“Advertisement,” p. 215). If the poem was not complete, as its
incomplete epitaphic ending encourages readers to suppose,
then Smith evidently chose to publish it as such, perhaps because she was literally dead-tired, or because her penchant for
self-fashioning and self-projection survived to the end. In this
view, the missing epitaph for the hermit might be what Smith
hopes her readers will supply for him and, soon enough, for
her, even as Wordsworth’s narrator in the Lyrical Ballad “Simon
Lee” (1798) invites or exhorts readers to make a moral or a
tale out of the abruptly concluded story of Simon Lee and the
narrator’s inconclusive notice of kindness and mourning.33
I want to pursue another possibility suggested by Anderson’s observation that Beachy Head is primarily allusive to her
earlier writing.34 Whereas in earlier poems Smith had alluded
widely to other poets, her notes for her last poem principally
32
See Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography, pp. 330, 334 –35.
The narrator of Wordsworth’s poem concludes: “—I’ve heard of hearts unkind,
kind deeds / With coldness still returning. / Alas! the gratitude of men / Has oftner
left me mourning” (William Wordsworth, “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman,” in his
“Lyrical Ballads” and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green
[Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992], p. 67, ll. 101– 4).
34 See Anderson, “Beachy Head: Romantic Fragment Poem as Mosaic,” p. 120.
33
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cite nonpoetic works and events, with the notable and riveting
exception of her echo of a Miltonic simile. This ethos of internal allusion may register Smith’s sense that this poem is hers
(as well as her last) and, as such, it is in her rhetoric and she is
responsible for her poetic choices. Here she appears to have
chosen to make her elegiac voice speak to the problem of writing history, especially as that problem confronted Romantic
authors in their time and place. Unlike the speaker or speakers
of Elegiac Sonnets, who typically project a version—however
ventriloquized— of Smith as the woman and poet whose financial travails and laments are so prominent in the assembled
prefaces to successive editions, the speaker of Beachy Head is
only by intervals close kin to the narrative voice identified with
Smith herself. Moreover, that voice competes with a grander
voice of the historian whose reach goes back in space and time
to the geological beginning of the site.
Readers have debated the aesthetic perspective and the
gender of this historian-speaker, who joins an array of other
speakers within the poem—among them some who write inscriptions on walls for the dead and a “wanderer of the hills”
who is identified as male by the syntax that children use to
speak to him. Arguing against the feminist claim that Smith’s
voices can be aligned along a gendered axis that opposes the
female beautiful and the male sublime (an axis inherited from
Edmund Burke), Jacqueline Labbé proposes that the multiple
voices and gendered perspectives of Beachy Head present a
“fluid” poetic self at ease with these competing registers and
thus able to constitute an interior Romantic self prior to later
Romantic poets’ efforts to do so. Labbé notes that Smith is one
Romantic ventriloquist not included in Edward Bostetter’s arresting 1963 discussion of how Romantic poets project their
identities onto other, often spectral, beings.35
35 See Labbé, Charlotte Smith, pp. 8 –9, 19; and Edward E. Bostetter, The Romantic
Ventriloquists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron (Seattle: Univ. of Washington
Press, 1963), pp. 4 –5. See also Isobel Armstrong, “The Gush of the Feminine: How
Can We Read Women’s Poetry of the Romantic Period?” in Romantic Women Writers:
Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, N.H.:
Univ. Press of New England, 1995), pp. 13–32.
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Labbé’s further claim—that Smith achieved thereby a
coherent poetic self—begs a larger question about poetic selfhood in Romanticism. For while it is surely true that other Romantic poets, among them Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, attempt to write poems in which speakers forge a coherent self, it
is their failure to do so that has been compelling to modern
readers. Such efforts are typically stalled, halted by the very
difficulty of the task or, more precisely, by some level of recognition that, as Lucy Newlyn has put it, “the integrity of the subject [is] placed disturbingly (but also excitingly) under question every time we write or read.” 36
The narrative voice or voices of Beachy Head are similarly
compromised by a narrative project that is remarkably unsettled, as if it were formally ill at ease with distinct, competing
tasks. It is this formal narrative discomfort that makes Beachy
Head so difficult to construe and yet so critically interesting.
As the poem ends, its architectonic frame is held up, left hanging: from the grand surmise to the lack of a closing epitaph is
a long narrative stretch toward an abyss, a cliff-hanger that resists or refuses or finds it impossible to execute what the poem
inaugurates.
Even so, Beachy Head entertains mimic forms and analogues drawn from its local and natural histories as if these
were figures capable of binding their finer optic to the wider
perspective of the poem and site. Yet these local analogies,
each of which sustains an interior development in which further variation occurs—like a quasi-organic exfoliation from a
single figure— cannot sustain the larger oscillations that rock
the poetic narrative. This narrative contestation, moreover, is
formally analogous to the geological concussion that rocks the
opening lines of the poem. It may be true that the problems of
narration and historicity that the poem presents are not sus36 Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. ix. See also Marc Redfield’s more philosophically skeptical discussion of the project of Bildung, the building of an identity or persona
(Redfield, “Romanticism, Bildung and the Literary Absolute,” in Lessons of Romanticism:
A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner [Durham, N.C.: Duke
Univ. Press, 1998], p. 46). Labbé finds Redfield’s analysis more supportive of a multivocal and coherent self than I argue it is (see Labbé, Charlotte Smith, p. 10).
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ceptible to poetic closure of the kind that Smith might have offered had she returned to the single-narrator persona of her
earlier poems, in particular The Emigrants.35 What, then, might
Beachy Head suggest about the status of historiography in the
time and place of this poem, and, further, how might this inquiry assist critical understanding of the interior rhetorical
spaces of Romantic narrative and modern critical practice? For
it is apparent that recent conference programs and sessions concerning Romanticism have displayed scholarly practices that
are similarly stretched between, on the one hand, local histories and material particularities and, on the other hand, the
maligned yet seductive call of grand historical narratives.
Perhaps the most obtrusive evidence of
narrative friction in Beachy Head is Smith’s remarkable, albeit
truncated, meditation on the significance of fossil shells found
on the summit of Beachy Head. As Anne Wallace and Noah
Heringman note, the poem’s speculations on this topic merely
repeat hypotheses that were widely known and debated at the
end of the eighteenth century.38 The first of them imagines
that the appearance of shells on the summit of Beachy Head
might be the work of a “wanton” mimicry whereby Nature produces “fantastic shapes / Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes”
in the Beachy Head limestone (Beachy Head, p. 232, ll. 379 –
80). The second speculation repeats the geological hypothesis
that was under discussion by the last decades of the eighteenth
century: “Or did this range of chalky mountains, once / Form
a vast bason, where the Ocean waves / Swell’d fathomless?”
37 See Penny S. Bradshaw, “Dystopian Futures: Time-Travel and Millenarian Visions
in the Poetry of Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith,” Romanticism on the Net (February 2001) <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n21/005959ar.html>; Maxwell
Wheeler, “Charlotte Smith’s Historical Narratives and the English Subject,” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 10 (2002), 7–18; and Matthew Bray, “Removing the Anglo-Saxon
Yoke: The Francocentric Vision of Charlotte Smith’s Later Works,” Wordsworth Circle, 24
(1993), 155–58. Bradshaw and Wheeler note Smith’s reservations about the value of
material histories and records.
38 See Wallace, “Picturesque Fossils or Sublime Geology?” pp. 78 –79; and Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 275–77.
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(Beachy Head, pp. 232–33, ll. 382– 84). Yet the poem and its
narrator immediately abandon both hypotheses, but more
pointedly the second, as if in moral and theological recoil
from thinking about what the poem describes as “strange and
foreign forms / Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil /
Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance” (Beachy Head,
p. 232, ll. 373–75). The formal repetition of “seeming /
resembling” marks in suffix and argument the onset of speculation and the terms of its eventual foreclosure.39
Smith’s note to these lines coyly suggests that the poem’s
swift recoil from speculative query is well grounded in her past.
Years ago, she notes, she found fossil shells embedded in the
chalk soils of this summit, but at that time she was ignorant of
natural history. Since then, as though to insure her continued
innocence on this point, Smith insists that she has not “read
any of the late theories of the earth” on the subject of geological events like this one, and has not been “satisfied with . . .
conjecture” on this subject (note to Beachy Head, p. 232n). Although one could speculate about why Smith swerves from
conjecture here (was she covering her theological tracks, was
she really that ignorant of speculations that were endemic in
the popular natural histories of the period?), it is perhaps more
instructive to examine this moment for its recoil from analogy
and mimic forms, a recoil that is out of step with the formal
grounds that the poem itself offers. That is to say, as a narrative
whose investment in analogy and mimic forms and shapes is at
work at different levels of its argument, this sudden recoil, formally speaking, is quite stunning.
I note here four distinct instances of the formal disposition in Smith’s Beachy Head. The first instance is a pattern
linked to the poem’s attempt to offer a grand historical narrative. The poem’s opening section is structured by what the
narrator can see from Beachy Head at sunrise and sunset. Its
39 See Kevis Bea Goodman’s important accounts of poetic labor in Romantic Georgic poetry (Goodman, “Making Time for History: Wordsworth, the New Historicism,
and the Apocalyptic Fallacy,” Studies in Romanticism, 35 [1996], 563–77; and Goodman, “‘Wasted Labor’? Milton’s Eve, the Poet’s Work, and the Challenge of Sympathy,”
ELH, 64 [1997], 415– 46). See also Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).
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history of invading powers, from ancient Scandinavia to Napoleonic France, is presented as formally successive events, although the temporal gaps between Scandinavian, Norman,
and, prospectively, future French invasions are quite large. Second, on the level of the poem’s flawed georgic (flawed at least
from the vantage point of James Thomson’s more confident
georgic in The Seasons [1726 –30]), in the youthful happiness
of shepherd’s boy and girl and in the narrator the presentation
recognizes for all three of them a pattern in which early joy
gives way to embittered, trapped adulthood. The third example
is suggested by the poem’s use of picturesque norms, whereby
variations in detail and shading are said to inhabit a single picture frame. Beginning with “woods of ash, and beech, / And
partial copses” on the heights (p. 230, ll. 320 –21), the narrator continues the survey to include domesticated flowers in
a cottage garden that seem “almost uncultured” (l. 334), and
then Nature’s “rudest scenes” and its “uncultur’d flowers”
(p. 231, ll. 347, 359). The contrastive strategy here suggests the
rule of an unpoliticized, reliably composed, picturesque scene.
Fourth and finally, in the section that follows the poem’s meditation on those “mimic” shells, the narrator insists that the “pirate Dane,” the “savage native,” and the Roman “centurion” are
all buried on Beachy Head, having “passed away, / Even as the
clouds, with dark and dragon shapes, / Or like vast promontories crown’d with towers, / Cast their broad shadows on the
downs: then sail / Far to the northward, and their transient
gloom / Is soon forgotten” (Beachy Head, p. 235, ll. 426 –39).
From pirate to native to centurion to clouds, the roll of similitude rolls on and over the disturbance caused by those shells.
Here and elsewhere in the poem, mimicry and formal
analogy trigger greater and prior disturbances, even, or especially, when the mimicry is playful. Once articulated, those “bivalves, and inwreathed volutes” (p. 232, l. 380) launch a meditation about form in which the poet’s narrator cannot stop
folding the chain of replicating shapes found at sea and encrusted with limestone or “chalk” on the headland high above.
Whether that chain concerns vessels seen at sea—from ordinary Sussex fishermen going out at night to nighttime smugglers and the “ship of commerce” (p. 218, l. 42) that echoes
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Milton’s epic simile for Satan’s earth landing, then forward
to colonial merchandise and slavery and flowers that mimic
insects—the poem’s mimic energies put different registers and
arguments in relation to each other, to which the poet responds with gestures of recoil or abandonment. This antagonism certainly leaves its mark on Beachy Head. It leaves its mark
too on Romantic natural history, where questions about species
and taxonomies made it at once possible to present facts about
specimens and habitat and impossible to keep up with questions about how to assemble and order facts into classifications
and histories. And it leaves its mark on Romantic historiography, where the effort to join Siegfried Kracauer’s macro- and
micro-levels of history is frustrated because these registers are
finally incommensurable.
In order to suggest why this should be so and what it implies about the Romantic desire to shape histories and taxonomies with local habitations and names, I wish to consider two
other passages in Beachy Head that invite conversation with several presentations of Linnean botany to Romantic readers. The
passages stand on either side of the “fossil shells” episode: the
first is the opening section of the poem, with its Miltonic image
of a “ship of commerce,” and the second concerns a flower
whose blossom mimics a bee. Although it is quite brief, this second passage is one of several in the poem in which details of
natural history anchor and multiply the poem’s rich sense of
topographical situation, as though to give the poem some ballast against its teetering historical and narrative situatedness.
From the poem’s opening vantage point high on Beachy
Head, where the narrator reclines to watch the day from dawn
to sunset, the sight of a fleet of fishing vessels, and beyond
them a “ship of commerce,” prompts Smith’s Miltonic simile:
Afar off,
And just emerging from the arch immense
Where seem to part the elements, a fleet
Of fishing vessels stretch their lesser sails;
While more remote, and like a dubious spot
Just hanging in the horizon, laden deep,
The ship of commerce richly freighted, makes
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Her slower progress, on her distant voyage,
Bound to the orient climates.
(Beachy Head, p. 218, ll. 36 – 44)
Even as she shifts their specific reference from Satan to ships,
Smith alludes here to the following lines from Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667):
As when farr off at Sea a Fleet descri’d
Hangs in the Clouds, by Æquinoctial Winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the Iles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring
Thir spicie Drugs: they on the Trading Flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seemd
Farr off the flying Fiend.40
Smith’s refiguration of Milton’s simile involves Beachy Head
in a chain of similitudes that suggests trouble both abroad and
at home. Whereas in Milton’s figure Satan is so large that in the
distance he looks like a fleet of ships that seems to hang in the
clouds at the horizon, Smith describes a fleet of fishing vessels
(of the kind that she mentions elsewhere in the poem) and
then compares a “ship of commerce” headed for Asia to “a dubious spot.” The ensuing account of that ship’s future progress
to collect gems gathered in Asia at the expense of those enslaved to dive for pearls suggests that the work of this “dubious spot” on the horizon is satanic. The allusive chain between
Smith’s “afar off” simile and Milton’s Satan would have been
easy for Smith’s readers to recognize in 1807, the year of Beachy
Head’s posthumous publication and the same year that the British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was finally stopped
by Parliament. As the “day” of the poem’s opening narrative
ends, the return of fisherman and the passage of a “dark vessel”
(p. 220, l. 105) on the night tide that lands along the shore
(not in port) hint at the smuggling off the Sussex coast, to
which the narrator explicitly refers later in the poem.
40 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I, 42; Book II, ll. 636 – 43.
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Although the scene is now set for the next grand narrative
reach, back through the recorded human history of various invasions of England and the nation’s ultimate independence
from invading peoples, the poem soon breaks off this history
on the grounds that the “reflecting mind” prefers “simple scenes
of peace and industry” (p. 224, ll. 168 – 69) in which sheepherding and subsistence farming are both the work at hand
and the work of hands. This recoil fails in two ways. First, it
stumbles with the narrator’s chagrined notice of the smuggling
trade that shepherds use to supplement what is presumably an
otherwise nonexistent cash flow, at the expense, inevitably, of
pastoral care for sheep. Second, it repeats the now-weighted
Miltonic phrase “afar off” in order to assert an uncomfortable
link between the poem’s rehearsal of England’s history of conquest and resistance and the rural work of hands.
This awkward moment yields to the narrator’s second,
equally determined swerve away from the figure of the smuggling shepherd to the struggling, industrious man and his mate
who barely manage to survive on the land but at least are not
involved with “illegal acts” (p. 226, l. 211). Among the activities
that this family conducts in order to live is burning thistles in
heaps as they clear land to plant crops. “Then flames the high
rais’d heap,” the narrator explains; “seen afar off / Like hostile
war-fires flashing to the sky” (Beachy Head, pp. 226 –27, ll. 227–
28)— except of course that these are not war-fires akin to those
that Smith mentions in her notes: “The Beacons formerly
lighted up on the hills to give notice of the approach of an enemy” (note to Beachy Head, p. 227n). The macro- and
micro-levels of the narrative—the first broadly historical, the
second a local history of a specific place in one narrative
time— do not mix easily, and neither does the Miltonic echo
perform a link that works particularly well, for it announces a
likeness that is not like.
In the second passage, the topic of mimicry follows hard
on the poem’s sharpest rejection of the history of war and ambition with which it has at times been concerned. Having chastised science for its pride, and having chastised war games
as the defeat of vain ambition, Smith turns “from thoughts
like these, / By human crimes suggested” (Beachy Head, p. 235,
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ll. 439 – 40) to the poem’s most extended notice of the particularities of the natural history of Beachy Head. This passage is
introduced by the figure of a male “wanderer of the hills” to
whom “shepherd girls” brings flowers; the narrator lingers with
the “mockery” suggested by the shapes of these flowers:
. . . Let us turn
To where a more attractive study courts
The wanderer of the hills; while shepherd girls
Will from among the fescue bring him flowers,
Of wonderous mockery; some resembling bees
In velvet vest, intent on their sweet toil,
While others mimic flies, that lightly sport
In the green shade, or float along the pool,
But here seen perch’d upon the slender stalk,
And gathering honey dew.
(Beachy Head, pp. 235–36, ll. 440 – 49)
Smith’s botanical notes identify the flowers as the Bee and Fly
Ophrys or orchis, native orchid species of a group whose blossoms were believed to mimic the insects they pollinated, just as
the fly does the fly orchis here. In the catalog of flowers that
follows, Smith includes two more whose names suggest another
kind of cross-pollination: “bird’s foot trefoil” and “hawkweed”
(p. 236, ll. 454 –55). Although these last two names do not
make claims about literal cross-pollination, their nominal resemblance to species that belong to other natural kingdoms
is doubled by their formal physical resemblance to those species. Such formal resemblances between flowers and insects or
birds, resemblances marked by common rather than Latinate
and Linnean nomenclature, look playful, and in some sense
they surely are. Yet in a poem where mimicry and formal resemblance have thus far created inassimilable moments of narrative difficulty, such resemblances invite a closer look.
As the author of a number of pedagogical works in which
natural history plays a key role, Smith respecifies her authority
as a writer on natural history in her notes to Beachy Head, where
she offers the Latin and mostly Linnean names for the plants
that she mentions by common name in the text of the poem.
Even so, it is the common names that caused trouble for tax3
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onomies, in part because they often varied from region to region or country to country, but also because common names
like those that Smith deploys here invite the mind to wander, in
quite unsystematic fashion, across systematics that were in fact
quite distinct.
John Aikin’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777) warns against the poetic use of inexact analogies
drawn from natural history.41 Aikin is silent on the power of
analogies authorized by common nomenclature; Smith, however, is not. Indeed, in the note in which she cites Aikin’s praise
for poets who have accurately noted which insects and animals
make night sounds, Smith launches a survey of the names variously given to the Fern Owl and specifies the local beliefs that
such names reflect:
I remember only one instance in which the more remarkable
though by no means uncommon noise, of the Fern Owl, or Goatsucker, is mentioned. It is called the Night Hawk, the Jar Bird,
the Churn Owl, and the Fern Owl, from its feeding on the Scaraboeus solstitialis, or Fern Chafer, which it catches while on the
wing with its claws, the middle toe of which is long and curiously
serrated, on purpose to hold them. It was this bird that was intended to be described in the Forty-second Sonnet [Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets]. I was mistaken in supposing it as visible in November; it is a migrant, and leaves this country in August. I had often
seen and heard it, but I did not then know its name or history.
It is called Goatsucker (Caprimulgus), from a strange prejudice
taken against it by the Italians, who assert that it sucks their goats;
and the peasants of England still believe that a disease in the
backs of their cattle, occasioned by a fly, which deposits its egg
under the skin, and raises a boil, sometimes fatal to calves, is the
work of this bird, which they call a Puckeridge.
(note to
Beachy Head, p. 239n)
Here the poem’s narrator-cum-editor suddenly cuts herself
adrift to follow wherever the word “Goatsucker” might lead,
spinning out analogous practices and beliefs in Italy and England in which names echo putative function, and in which
41 See Aikin, Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (Warrington: J. Johnson, 1777), pp. 24 –25.
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function registers unexpected relations across species and systematic barriers: birds suck goats or flies deposit larvae on
cattle.
This wide figurative swing from goats to cattle via birds—
or putative birds, as it were—is an inviting hazard in the Romantic discourse about natural history. In some measure it is
common plant nomenclature, which preserves so many of the
insect- or bird-to-plant crosses, that invites digression. Latin
names may suppress the earlier name, as with echium (a.k.a.
“Viper” in the large group of species called by this generic
name). But in others the Latin term, or a Latin transliteration
of Greek, is itself a translation of the English common name.
This widespread practice is, for example, at work in the nomenclature assigned to the group of orchids that carry the
name Paphiopedilium, or “Venus’s shoe or slipper,” or, less honorifically (but still as member of the gentry), “Ladies’ slipper.”
In scientific books and magazines on botany like the
Botanical Magazine, which the general reading public bought
and avidly read, plant descriptions are usually limited to discussions of shape, provenance, and gender. This sober practice evidently does not characterize Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1789 –91). Indeed, popular Romantic writing on botany
rarely let opportunities pass for making the lives of plants
highly figurative. Even Dr. Robert Thornton’s most sober popularizations of Linnean terms cannot resist making plants or
plant parts figurative. I refer here not to the extravagant visual
and verbal figures of Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1807), but to
his Philosophy of Botany (1799 –1806; also titled New Illustration
of the Sexual System of Linnaeus), as well as his Juvenile Botany
(1818), a series of pedagogical dialogues between father and
son about the Linnean system.
In The Philosophy of Botany Thornton takes polite issue with
the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus on the subject of
lobes “improperly called Cotyledons by Linnaeus.” Thornton argues that these lobes bear “a much stronger affinity with the
MAMMAE or breasts; indulging that freedom of inquiry for
which the present age is so remarkable.” Predictably, Thornton
does not stop there, but instead expands the analogy and then
makes it the occasion for a long note on mammalian breast3
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feeding: “The cotyledons in brutes are analogous to the placenta in us, being several small placentulae. . . .” 42 “It is thus
with the parent animal, who possesses two or more dugs*, these
however serve a still more important function in the vegetable
world” (Philosophy of Botany, p. 30). The note follows:
* the number of dugs is always proportioned by Nature to
the offspring to be produced. In a litter of pigs, it may be remarked, that each pig always goes to its own dug, and never
usurps that of another. Children went first born shew the same
partiality for one breast.
The breasts serve also the office of a warm and soft pillow to
cherish the babe. How strong and tender also is maternal affection! But fashion has, alas! Perverted this wise ordination, and
children now, as soon as they come into the word, are committed
to hirelings.
(Philosophy of Botany, p. 30n)
In the example from Juvenile Botany Thornton hews speculation
and figure closer to botanical matters, yet the human and patriarchal sexual economy is still at issue. Speaking of the parts
of plants, the father explains the stamen or stamina:
A Stamen presented as a Latin word, meaning foundation, from
which stare, to build upon. [also “to stand”] . . . Because as being
the male part of the flower, as the man is called the Lord or Head
of Creation, so this is the foundation, or principal part of the
flower.43
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft takes direct aim at several words that are cultural
markers of masculinity, including stamen. Contending that
there is no difference between the souls of women and those of
men, and that women should be permitted to learn how to reason, she declares: “The stamen of immortality, if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason.” 44 Here
42
Robert Thornton, Philosophy of Botany (London: R. Thornton, 1806), p. 28.
Thornton, Juvenile Botany [also titled An Easy Introduction to the Science of Botany
through the medium of familiar conversations between a father and his son] (London: Sherwood, Jones and Co., 1823), p. 3.
44 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (New York: New York Univ.
Press, 1989), V, 122. In her “Gendering the Soul,” in Romantic Women Writers, pp. 33–
43
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Wollstonecraft’s coy gesture of seeking permission to use the
word “stamen” to refer to a human and spiritual condition
rather than one specific to the male conveys the linguistic gerrymandering that Romantic botany makes available.
Finally, in his 1862 monograph On the Various Contrivances
by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, Charles
Darwin pursues a hypothesis that concerns the economy and
necessity of insect-fertilized vs. self-fertilizing orchids. The less
explicit corollary to this claim concerns whether certain species
in the orchis family, like the bee orchis whose formal mimicry
Charlotte Smith described, are fertilized by the insects they resemble—a proposition that Darwin finds suspect because it
ascribes evolutionary agency to plants or insects, or both. It is
also, as Smith’s verse shows, the kind of botanical claim that invites high-flying figurative analogy. Yet Darwin himself invokes
this figurative practice when he says of the Spiranthes autumnalis, or “Autumn Ladies-tresses,” that its rostellum is a “narrow
vertical brown object” that resembles a tiny boat or canoe, and
when he refers to this part of the orchid as a “boat, standing up
vertically on its stern,” or a “boat-formed disc.” 45 This specificity, which was essential for making distinctions required for
classifying orchids as their species and genera proliferated
throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, is
singularly dependent on similar figures. Even Darwin finds
himself enmeshed in this practice, despite his refusal to attribute agency, whether figurative or “real,” to flowers and insects. Clearly, Darwin meant his descriptions to be taken as
mere figures. Yet in the first edition and in a second, revised
edition of On the Curious Contrivances, where he critiques those
who attributed agency to plants and insects, his reliance on
such figures is rhetorically unadvisable, if also unavoidable.
The larger arena of Romantic discourse about natural history, which Smith knew exceedingly well, included the work of
Thornton and systematic botanists before him. In this arena,
questions about nomenclature and classification were not small
68, Susan Wolfson surveys the larger Romantic debate about sex and soul to which
Wollstonecraft here responds.
45 Charles Darwin, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are
Fertilised by Insects (London: John Murray, 1862), pp. 118, 130.
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matters, insofar as these organizing categories demonstrated
the era’s epistemological and cosmic desire to map all species,
to assign resemblances such that no detail of natural history
anywhere on the globe would lack a local habitation and a
name in a grand scheme, either Linnaeus’s or someone else’s.
At the time of his death in 1778 Linnaeus acknowledged what
the next several generations of natural historians struggled not
to notice: that the tasks of codifying and naming all species and
ordering them into indisputable categories and relationships
could never be complete or absolutely satisfactory.46 The sustained and often rancorous early-nineteenth-century debate
about proposed classifications and nomenclature in part registers this underlying epistemological anxiety.
The quasi-material, and thus apparently anchored, domain of Romantic natural history discloses a dilemma that is
also at work in the grand, abstract reaches of Romantic historiography as G.W.F. Hegel and others hoped to write it. There, as
Theodor Adorno suggests in his critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1807) and Philosophy of Right (1821), particulars
get folded into the work of spirit at a level of abstraction that
is intrinsically unable to take in particulars, except in this way.
Briefly put, Adorno objects to Hegel’s claim that negativity
offers a dialectical means for including the particular (which
includes nature’s particulars and species) in the abstraction
or universal named the World Spirit. Adorno charges that
this claim works to occlude and finally exclude particulars by
subsuming them through the Hegelian process of lifting up
or taking up that is usually accorded its German term, Aufhebung. (Undoubtedly, Hegel would have disagreed with this
characterization of what the World Spirit does to the Nature it
gathers up.)
I invoke Adorno’s objection here because it corresponds
to an allied desire in Romantic natural history: despite efforts
to name all species and thus find a local habitation and a home
for all flora and fauna, the “expanding” record of species (expanding, that is, from the perspective of European explorers
46 See Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 44 – 45.
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and taxonomists) continually undercut and waylaid this effort—as though, I speculate, they were the embodied form of
contingency or chance, terms that work in Hegel’s writing as
deep foils to freedom (which is the great Romantic work of the
World Spirit). Against Hegel, I suggest that the array of species
and the ongoing instability that they brought to the classification of natural history may offer to Romanticism another kind
of freedom.47
Elsewhere in Romanticism the complexity of events, and
even the capacity to conceive of an event like the French Revolution, may prompt the concern about levels of history that
Siegfried Kracauer would later identify, with the corollary that
these levels are by their very natures inassimilable to each
other. Within the framework of history and aesthetics in Beachy
Head, Smith’s invocation of the georgic surmise in the tradition
of Thomson’s Seasons is halted by its own chronicle of the particular historical pressures that bear on those who herd sheep
and plant crops on the uplands behind Beachy Head and engage in smuggling on the side. Given the economics of scarcity
that Smith records (an economics driven by the English wars
with France, and particularly by the Continental blockade in
effect by 1806), two narratives of English identity are compromised: in addition to that of Thomson’s georgic, the story
of English naval supremacy gets reread here on its dark side—
canny mariners and their compatriots on Beachy Head smuggling illegal goods. Like the “ship of commerce” that Smith’s
narrator spots early in the poem, this kind of seafaring has a
darker, satanic edge.
In this reading, Smith’s Beachy Head does not dwell exclusively or unproblematically on local particulars; rather, it seeks
to bind these, albeit unsuccessfully, into a grand history or, indeed, into several different grand historical narratives. Smith’s
efforts deserve our critical attention because they suggest the
ongoing, irresolvable struggle that is the historical. It is this
differential energy within the task of writing history—the difference between particulars and the general shape we try to
47 See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 300 –360, esp. pp. 342– 47.
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give them—that our critical practice needs to recognize; or to
put this point another way, to reject grand narratives on the
grounds that they falsify particulars is to miss the larger problem that will always be ours: particulars and abstractions need
each other and they need to be intrinsically in contest. To reject this problem and take refuge in the kind of local history
practiced by the Annales school is to miss the very task of
thought and of history writing as a highly potent version of
that task.
If, as Tilottama Rajan has argued, it is our task as critics to
recognize that the work of history in the present time is to reclaim “history as a site of something different from the present,” and in doing so to reclaim “our own unassimilable alterity” from the future and from the past,48 then several Romantic
models suggest how the problem of history’s differential alterity is also and differently on the table. In this essay I have focused on Smith’s Beachy Head in order to suggest that this problem exists in Romantic culture both at the level of its perplexed
engagement with narrative and natural history and at the level
of philosophical discourse. If such alterity inhabits even the
culturally vested material particulars of Romantic natural history, then we have something to learn from that history about
questions that haunt our critical practice. For if a material, cultural history like that which pertains to Romantic botany is itself riddled with questions about form and figural naming, and
about the reach of categories and the stubborn appeals that
particulars make on categories, then the work we do across
the cultures of Romanticism needs to reaffirm its disciplinary
ground in questions about form and rhetoric that are literary
and philosophical as well as cultural and material. This crosspollination has, in short, some old affiliations to re-recognize.
From the vantage point of these surmises, I turn again to
the end of Smith’s Beachy Head. Perhaps, as its first editor suggests, the poem only lacks the final epitaph that Smith intended to provide but could not because of her death. Yet I
wonder whose or what death is memorialized here. Is it that of
the hermit who helped those in danger at sea? or, proleptically,
48
2
Tilottama Rajan, “Introduction: Imagining History,” PMLA, 118 (2003), 428.
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is it Smith’s death before it occurred, at the time she sent the
poem to Johnson to be published? or, does it reveal the impossibility of writing an epitaph for only one person or particular
to close a poem whose narrative engages the writing of history
at so many discordant levels?
In this last reading, the incomplete epitaphic gesture at
the end of Beachy Head marks the kind of historiography that
this poem and Romantic culture at large cannot write, yet cannot but choose to write. If this reading is correct, then this
recognition is given shape and substance by Smith’s inversion
of the interdiction placed on women authors who try to write
history: yes, such narratives are incomplete, impossibly transfixed between personal and grand narratives, but this is so because the woman author carries this dilemma for Romantic
culture at large. By reading the dilemma back onto a narrative
form in which the voice of a grand historical vision keeps trying
to get a foothold, Smith shows that here the semblable is Romanticism’s sisters at least as much as it is Charles Baudelaire’s
reader-brother.49
I want to summarize briefly the kinds of history writing
that attract but do not fully satisfy Smith in Beachy Head: history
that is at once personal and collective, private and extensively
public; but also a personal history that is free of pressures from
outside the self; and, finally, a public history that purports to
control or to account fully for private lives. These alternatives
canvas the kinds of history writing that other Romantics tried
to create or to combine repeatedly, in fictional and nonfictional forms. I am thinking here of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, set in pre-Union Scotland; or of Sydney Owenson’s novels
set in Ireland during and after the Irish Revolt of 1798; or of
Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1819; published 1820); or,
most symptomatically, of Keats’s failure to complete either Hyperion poem (1819, 1820), when the poet stumbles over the
particular and paradoxical humanity both of the gods and then
of himself as poet-fanatic-dreamer. In historiographical terms,
49 See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard [bilingual
edition] (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982). pp. 184, 6. The last line of Baudelaire’s address to readers is: “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” (“hypocrite
reader,—my alias,—my twin”).
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we might understand these failures as a sign of the formal impossibility of trying to write a history from two directions: from
below, with particulars, and from above, with grand theories
and broad perspectives. If, as Kracauer insists, this is a problem
that historiography cannot solve, then it is a problem whose
Romantic lineage is everywhere marked by the sense of difference and contestability that Charlotte Smith as a woman poet
brings to Beachy Head.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
abstract
Theresa M. Kelley, “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy
Head” (pp. 281–314)
In this essay I argue that Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807) dramatizes a crucial impasse in Romantic historiography insofar as the poem rocks between two models of historical narrative: the large, supervisory project often characterized as the grand march
of history, exemplified by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 –
88), and a narrative of locality, specificity, and individuals that includes the several
kinds of human and natural history that Smith practices in her poem. This second
model is roughly akin to the Annales project of modern French historiography. Smith’s
poem in this sense registers the formal and conceptual unease that Romantic historiography is unable to put aside, an unease that G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of history and
aesthetics challenges but does not put to rest. Considered in these terms, Beachy Head
specifies the incommensurability of historical kinds to which Romanticism so often and
so productively returns.
4