Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

Financial Investments vs. Moral Principles: Charlotte Smith’s Children’s Books and Slavery

elizabeth a. dolan • Financial Investments vs. Moral Principles Charlotte Smith’s Children’s Books and Slavery Charlotte Smith’s remarkably productive twenty-three-year writing career coincided with the most intense decades of British Parliamentary debate about the slave trade.1 Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784) appeared the year after a Quaker group presented the first abolitionist petition to British Parliament (1783); her volume Beachy Head and Other Poems and her sixth children ’s book, A Natural History of Birds, were published posthumously in 1807, the same year Parliament abolished the slave trade. In her children’s literature, Smith addressed a wide range of contentious social issues such as poverty, women’s oppression, slavery, and war.2 In her depiction of poverty and women’s lack of rights, she clearly drew on her own financial, legal, and emotional suffering. Separated from her profligate husband in 1787, she struggled to support her large family—including two sons who went to war—by writing, all while battling severe rheumatoid arthritis and depression. By 1794, when she began writing children’s literature, Smith was sliding into real poverty. Thus, in her children’s books, she urges girls to learn self-supporting skills, decries the illogic of nationalism that leads to war, and explains the relationship between illness and poverty. Unlike Smith’s support for women’s rights and for pacifism, her antislavery stance in the children’s literature ran counter to her best interests. A major aspect of Smith’s struggle during the last decades of her life was to Financial Investments vs. Moral Principles 57 settle her father-in-law’s, Richard Smith’s, estate on her children. This estate included holdings in Barbados, including two sugar plantations from which she regularly received earnings. With the hopes for her children’s financial future dependent upon West Indian slave money, Smith might have been silent in her published works on the topic of slavery. And yet, instead, she spoke up repeatedly against slavery in her juvenile literature, a rare practice among children’s authors in the 1790s. Thus, this essay will investigate the strategies Smith employed to mediate between the antislavery principles she determined to inculcate in child readers and the financial interests of her children and grandchildren. Scholars of her novels disagree about Smith’s position on the slave trade and slavery in the colonies. For example, Eamon Wright and Moira Ferguson offer passages in Desmond (1792), the Old Manor House (1793), and The Wanderings of Warwick (1794) as evidence of Smith’s antislavery views (Wright 73–74; Ferguson 192–93). In contrast, M. O. Grenby characterizes Smith as an ameliorationist, at least in The Wanderings of Warwick (xiv–xvi). More subtly, in their scholarship about The Wanderings of Warwick and Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800), Charlotte Sussman investigates Smith’s representation of the relationship between colonial violence and “free labor” (183), while George Boulukos examines Smith’s depiction of the effect of local plantation politics on emancipation, and Smith’s apparent fear of racial hybridity (“Horror”). The conversation about Smith’s position on slavery is ongoing. Unlike the novels’ polyvocal representation of slavery, Smith’s children ’s literature depicts teachers who offer explicit advice to children about how to reason through this and other difficult social issues. Although no one has written about her depiction of slavery in children’s literature, Smith includes a lengthy discussion between a teacher and children about both slavery and race in the first dialogue of her second children’s book, Rambles Farther (1796). In addition, in Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804) and A Natural History of Birds (1807), Smith mentions slavery briefly, endorsing slave uprisings and protesting the treatment of slaves as animals. Although the teacher-centered structure of her children’s books allows for a more straightforward response to slavery than does the structure of her novels, Smith’s financial interest in the products of slave labor still complicates our ability to assess her position. Smith wrote Rambles Farther, the 58 Elizabeth A. Dolan primary focus of this essay, while negotiating the sale of a plantation and slaves in Barbados. I will argue that Smith teaches children a method of reasoning in Rambles Farther that serves as a strategy for managing the conflict between her antislavery principles and her family’s financial interest, and, more subtly, allows Smith to acknowledge her own moments of ambivalence about this issue. As with her innovations...