The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place

Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith’s Bioregional Poetic Imaginary

181 Bioregional literary criticism is demonstrably productive for readings of modern and contemporary authors, but can it be fruitfully applied to authors from earlier periods? My essay explores the poetry of a major pre-Romantic author, Charlotte Turner Smith, whose collection of Elegiac Sonnets (first published in 1784 and revised in multiple editions to 1800) revived the sonnet form for the first generation of English Romantic poets. Together with her loco-descriptive and politically radical poems such as The Emigrants (1793) and the posthumously published blank verse topographical experiment Beachy Head (1807), her poetry is H e at h e r K e r r Melancholy Botany Charlotte Smith’s Bioregional Poetic Imaginary Charlotte Turner Smith (1749–1806) was one of England’s most popular writers in a period when literary tastes mirrored the revolutionary changes taking place in the political and economic spheres of life in the western world. Her four volumes of poetry, ten novels, translations, and moralistic children’s books made her one of the most prolific writers of the last years of the eighteenth century, and readers of the day were usually quite ready to support both critically and financially this woman who dared on the one hand to question the social structures under which she lived while on the other she challenged the already crumbling literary standards of a rationally prejudiced age. Paul and June Schlueter, An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers Heather Kerr 182 the subject of sustained critical attention.1 Many commentators remark on Charlotte Smith’s interest in concepts that are pertinent to a bioregionalist literary criticism: for example, the relations between local and global economics , geography, and biodiversity; tensions between arbitrary political and ecosystem boundaries; histories of place; natural right and questions of morality; imaginative and physical belongings; and territories of the mind. As yet, Smith’s work has not been read with explicit reference to bioregionalist thought. My focus is on Smith’s poetics of place, a sustained local attentiveness to the bioregion of the English southeast that contrasts strikingly with her novelistic cosmopolitanism. In considering the effects of this poetic localism, I propose to bring together two lively but apparently separate critical trends: the investigation of Smith’s investment in literary subjectivities, defined in part by a “melancholy poetics” (Pratt), and the investigation of her literary investments in natural history. I aim to sketch her bioregionalist poetic imaginary, first with reference to the Elegiac Sonnets , in which “picturesque” locations spatially formalize Smith’s sense of “biographical alienation,” social marginalization, and personal loss (Sodeman 135); and second, with reference to The Emigrants and Beachy Head, South-East Down and Weald, England Melancholy Botany 183 in which Smith lays out a “metaphorical map that offers an alternative to dominant geographical [social and political] configurations of England and France” in the eighteenth century (Wiley 55). To attend to particular local natural histories is to attend to the ways in which particular bioregions offer ethically preferable alternatives to generally institutionalized injustices, whether interpersonal or international. In Michael Wiley’s assessment, “the natural on this [metaphorical] map does not oppose the social; rather, the natural has . . . a socially radical, reformist purpose” (56). What is the relationship between Smith’s compassion for French émigrés of the 1790s and her poetic attention to the biota of the commons? As Donna Landry’s ecocritical analysis points out, Smith “demonstrated that poetry could also be natural history, and that natural history could lead to ethical statements and social comment” (489). My essay pursues some bioregionalist possibilities of this observation, using examples from Smith’s poetry. I conclude with an assessment of the “scalar” effects achieved by Smith’s deployment of Fancy, an eighteenth-century understanding of the sympathetic imagination (cf. Pappas). How does Smith’s poetry use Fancy to “scale up” from particular to general phenomena? And how do Charlotte Smith’s pervasive sense of exile and persistent demands for readers’ sympathy relate to her interest in local natural history? What, in other words, is the relationship between Fancy (or sensibility) and Linnaean botanical taxonomy (or science) in the eighteenth century? Throughout this essay I assume that the bioregional setting of Smith’s poetry is no mere background but the very condition of possibility for an unswerving attentiveness to the effects of systemic injustice in the period following the French Revolution. I argue that in her poetic exploration of multiple forms of interrelatedness , Smith represents...