The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith

Sources of Charlotte Smith's Letters

Sources of Charlotte Smith’s Letters For the purpose of studying Smith’s literary career, the largest signi¤cant collections of her letters are the 140 letters at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the 50 letters at the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Most of the Yale letters are addressed to Thomas Cadell, Sr. and Jr., and to William Davies, who published a number of her works. The Huntington collection includes letters to friends, particularly the Reverend Joseph Cooper Walker and Sarah Rose. Most of the remaining letters are to be foundin groups of a dozen or fewer, and they help round out the picture of Smith’s life. In Great Britain, letters are located at the Bodleian, Oxford; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the British Library, London; the Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney, Buckinghamshire; the Liverpool Libraries andInformation Services; and the Westminster Diocesan Archives. The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, has one note. In Canada, Mills Memorial Library of McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., has three letters. In the United States there are letters at the Houghton Library, Harvard University ; Pennsylvania State University Libraries; Princeton University Library; the New York Public Library; Boston Public Library; J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; Magill Library, Haverford College Library, Haverford , Pa.; Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA; the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania; and the University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City, Iowa). Finally , there are letters in the private collections of the duke and duchess of Devonshire andthe Comyn Collection of Burney Family Papers in England, and of Lucy Magruder in California. For a more intimate look at Smith’s personal life and ¤nancial dif¤culties , there is an important body of letters in the Petworth House Archives, sources of charlotte smith’s letters administered by the West Sussex Record Of¤ce, Chichester, England. Originally , their collection was thought to consist of 250 letters Smith wrote from1799 to 1806to her onetime patron and trustee to Richard Smith’s estate , George O’Brien Wyndham, the third earl of Egremont. These shed new light on the maneuvering and litigation surrounding the Smith trust from its beginnings as well as Smith’s slow, humiliating slide into poverty at the end of her life. The present collection includes all of her letters to Egremont but only the most informative of many long, repetitious business letters to Tyler. In the spring of 2001, just as this edition was being readied for the press, two new groups of letters were discovered in an old tin muniments chest as the Petworth House Archives was moving into its new quarters. First are¤fty-six letters Smith wrote from 1790 to 1795 to James Upton Tripp, estate agent to Egremont. Along with several written to others, they add enormously to our picture of her early years of success. The second includes ¤fty remarkable lost letters by Smith’s reviled husband Benjamin, written from 1799 until his imprisonment for debt in 1805. The only two known letters he wrote to her are given in full in footnotes , as are passages he cites from her letters to him. Substantial passages from his remaining letters to Egremont and Tyler are also cited in footnotes to ¤ll in the picture of this dif¤cult man and his bitter relationship with his estranged wife. In the winter of 2003, four additional notes to Tripp were found concerning Egremont’s purchase of Benjamin’s horse. They show earlier dealings with Egremont than previously known and continued business with Benjamin after the separation. These letters are in the appendix. ...