Abstract
Nightingales bookmark Charlotte Smith’s literary career. The first edition of her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) includes two sonnets on the bird and her posthumous work for children The Natural History of Birds (1807) includes a section on the nightingale. This chapter considers the significance of the nightingale for Smith, showing how Smith’s experience of the natural world was bound up with her sense of literary tradition. In turn, it clarifies Smith’s own place in both literary tradition and the history of nature writing, shedding new light on Smith as a poet who engages deeply with the literary past in her verse, yet is also celebrated with ‘making it new’. Through a focus on Smith, this chapter also illuminates the rich interrelations between literary and natural history, poetry, and science, in the long eighteenth century as manifested in the nightingale—the most versified and also the most mythologised bird in cultural history.
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Notes
- 1.
Smith’s relationship with literary tradition can thus appear contradictory. In Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Stuart Curran showed how poets of the period engaged with the forms of earlier poetry much more than had been understood. However, in celebrating Smith as a ‘Romantic’ poet, she became aligned with a literary-historical model prevalent since M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) whereby Romantic writers appear to break with the past. For other accounts of Smith as a ‘Romantic’ poet see Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003) and Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 2.
William Wordsworth, note to ‘Stanzas suggested in a Steamboat off St. Bees’ Head, on the coast of Cumberland’ (1833), in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 403.
- 3.
Charlotte Smith, A Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, 14 vols., Pickering Masters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 13: 244. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically within the text.
- 4.
Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry, 13: 179.
- 5.
Tony Pinkney, ‘Romantic Ecology’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 411–19: 414. See also John Rowlett, ‘Ornithological Knowledge and Literary Understanding’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 30 (1999): 625–47 and James C. McKusick, ‘The Return of the Nightingale’, The Wordsworth Circle, 38 (2007), 34–40.
- 6.
Thomas C. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2009), 79.
- 7.
Gannon, 83.
- 8.
Part of this section has appeared, in a longer form, in Bethan Roberts, Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Place, Tradition and Form (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).
- 9.
Smith, Poems, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, 13: 17, line 14. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically within the text.
- 10.
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, ‘Charlotte Smith and “The Swallow”: Migration and Romantic Authorship’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 72 (2009), 48–67: 61 and 66.
- 11.
Francesco Petrarca, ‘311’, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 490.
- 12.
Catherine Talbot, ‘Sonnet: In the Manner of Petrarch –’, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 861, lines 1–6.
- 13.
Anne Finch, ‘To the Nightingale’, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, 860, lines 4, 5, 8.
- 14.
Sarah Dixon, ‘The Nightingal’, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, 861, lines 8–9.
- 15.
James Thomson, ‘Spring’, Poetical Works, ed. by J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 25, lines 76–78.
- 16.
John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 33.
- 17.
John Milton, ‘Sonnet I’, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997), 92, lines 1–7.
- 18.
Milton, 93, lines 13–14.
- 19.
Thomas Pennant, British Zoology, 4 vols (London: Benjamin White, 1768), 2, 255–56.
- 20.
George Montagu, Ornithological Dictionary; Or, Alphabetical Synopsis of British Birds, 2 vols (London: J. White, 1802), 1, s.v. ‘Nightingale’.
- 21.
Daines Barrington, ‘XXXI. Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds’, Philosophical Transactions: Giving Some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours, of the Ingenious, in many Considerable Parts of the World, LXIII, part I (London: Locker Davies, 1773), 249–91: 281.
- 22.
Barrington, 282.
- 23.
Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles, 5 vols (London: J. S. Barr, 1793), 5, 81.
- 24.
Buffon, 84.
- 25.
Ralph Beilby and Thomas Bewick, History of British Birds. The Figures Engraved on Wood by T. Bewick. Vol. I. Containing the History and Description of Land Birds (Newcastle: 1797), 201.
- 26.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale; A Conversational Poem’, Written in April, 1798, in Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1991), 41, lines 12–15.
- 27.
Coleridge, 41, lines 16, 23.
- 28.
Coleridge, 42, lines 41, 43–45, 48.
- 29.
McKusick, 37 and 39.
- 30.
Nick Groom, ‘Plastic Daffodils: The Pastoral, the Picturesque, and Cultural Environmentalism’, Climate Change and the Humanities: Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Contemporary Environmental Crisis, ed. Alexander Elliott, James Cullis, Vinita Damodaran (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 120.
- 31.
Debbie Sly, ‘“With Skirmish and Capricious Passagings”: Ornithological and Poetic Discourse in the Nightingale Poems of Coleridge and Clare’, Worcester Papers in English and Cultural Studies, 3 (2005), 6–19: 10.
- 32.
Coleridge, quoted by Brett and Jones in Lyrical Ballads, 279.
- 33.
Elements of Natural History: Being an Introduction to the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1802), 2, 144; The Natural History of Birds: Containing a Variety of Facts Selected from Several Writers, and Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Children, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 3, 127.
- 34.
John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 34; Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (London: Penguin, 1987).
- 35.
Clare, 39.
- 36.
William Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, Lyrical Ballads, 104, lines 29–32.
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Roberts, B. (2020). Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale. In: Carey, B., Greenfield, S., Milne, A. (eds) Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_5
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