A Letter from Charlotte Smith to the Publisher George Robinson

In the introduction to her comprehensive and meticulously annotated edition of the letters of the poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), Judith Phillips Stanton writes that "the present volume of letters supplies ... almost all of the almost 500 surviving letters that Smith wrote to publishers, patrons, solicitors, relatives and friends."¹ Among the letters not included in the collection is one to the publisher George Robinson, written while Smith's novel Desmond (1792) was in the final stages of preparation. This letter, located in the Dyce Collection of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,² provides a vignette of Smith at work during a crucial stage of her career, and offers additional insights into the motivations that accompany the preparation of what would become her most politically explicit novel, by which she earned her radical credentials.

Smith's letter to Robinson exhibits many of those features that characterize her correspondence with the publishers she worked with throughout her career—a concern with technical detail as to the eventual length of the completed publication as well as anxiety over printers' errors that could adversely affect her reputation as a novelist. Yet this letter also reveals a moment of indecision in which Smith hesitates over the eventual title she will give her novel, and in doing so, calls attention, however briefly, to the pressures of politics, patronage, and authorial self-consciousness that inform her literary work.

"The Wandering Lover," Smith's original choice of a title, seems incongruous with the strong political engagement of her narrative. Indeed, the novel is a conscious, polemical intervention in the Revolution debate. Smith's central protagonist argues against Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France , praises Paine's The Rights of Man , and sustains a defence of the French Revolution throughout the novel. Smith herself would, in her preface, willingly identify herself with this pro-Revolution position: "I have given to my imaginary characters the arguments I have heard on both sides; and if those in favour of one party have evidently the advantage, it is not owing to my partial representation but to the predominant power of truth and reason, which can neither be altered or concealed."³

The radicalism of Desmond was widely acknowledged by its original readers and reviewers. Thus, while Smith's views were commended by the liberal periodicals—for example, the reviewer for the European Magazine writes that "our Authoress has certainly vindicated the cause of French liberty with much acuteness"⁴ —her outspoken political stand was censured in other circles, generating, in one instance at least, a rumour that she "was bribed to [write the novel] by the democratic party."⁵ In an act that conspicuously confirms the political resonance of Desmond , Smith was recognized on 18 November 1792 by the British Club, a group of radical Britons living in France, who raised their glasses in toast to "the Women of Great Britain, particularly those who have distinguished themselves by their writings in favour of the French Revolution, Mrs [Charlotte] Smith, and Miss H.M. Williams."⁶

It is that energy of political conviction resonating throughout the manuscript which must have caused Smith's two "literary friends" (one she identifies as William Hayley, who was her close friend and literary patron at the time)⁷ to register their disapproval of the proposed title of her book. And, noting this energy, we may ask why she would want to call it "The Wandering Lover" in the first place. Was it due to the uncertainty that accompanied her entry into a forthright political discursive engagement, and the implications of that engagement for the economic success of her career as an author? Financial necessity is a ubiquitous feature of Smith's authorship and one that she repeatedly avows. On one level, then, the choice of "The Wandering Lover," in emphasizing the story of Desmond and Geraldine Verney, the unhappily married woman whom he loves, would appear to reflect hesitation on Smith's part, and a desire to cater to those "mere novel readers," whom she somewhat...