Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and the First Year of the War with France

Abstract

In April 1797 Charlotte Smith wrote to her publisher urging him to restrict the circulation of her engraved portrait, intended for the forthcoming edition of her Elegiac Sonnets.¹ She asked him to ‘take such precautions as are in your power to prevent its being exhibited in Magazines “with anecdotes of this admir’d Authoress” like M^rs Mary Robinson & other Mistresses whom I have no passion for being confounded with’.² Smith was not habitually generous about her contemporaries and competitors, but her eagerness to distance herself from Robinson may be accentuated by a tacit recognition that there were clear points of comparison between their careers, and by an implicit acknowledgement that her reputation might already be linked too closely for her comfort with that of her more scandalous contemporary; for Smith’s comment alludes to Robinson’s notoriety as the former mistress of the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox, and other prominent men. While no suggestion of sexual impropriety tinged Smith’s personal reputation, her liberal social and political connections and the politics of her work nevertheless associated her quite closely with Robinson, whose career as a poet and novelist at least in its broad outline shadowed her own.