The holograph letters I transcribed from the letters held by the East Sussex Record Office are largely clear and readable. When Smith’s usual clarity and elegance slipped, there is almost always internal evidence in the letter to suggest that she was writing under duress: acute economic stress, illness or physical limitation, or speedily trying to make the day’s post. Unfortunately, typed transcriptions cannot convey the kinds of immediacy and distress that her handwriting conveys.
All modern editors of early correspondence must choose whether to make a diplomatic edition, a normalized edition, or some combination of the two. A
diplomatic edition perfectly preserves every peculiarity of the author’s original text—from spelling, punctuation and capitalizations, to abbreviations, superscripts, cross-‐outs and outdated orthographic practices. Normalized editions render the text into a form easier for the modern reader to read, modernizing spelling and punctuation, among other edits. I chose a middle-‐ground, for several reasons. First, Smith had written her letters as ephemera: quick, regular updates, intended for a sole reader—Thomas Cadell, Sr.—and discarded. She was usually rushing to meet a post deadline and was limited by the size of the letter sheet. If she had foreseen that her letters would be published, she likely would have placed more care into her presentation. Secondly, I wanted to maintain the textual principles employed by Judith Philips Stanton in her Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, so that the letters published here for the first time would complement that collection.
In my edition, I silently added paragraph breaks where a change of subject justified one, even though the holograph letters often look like unbroken lines of text. And, although Smith rarely used indentions, I added them to the paragraphs to make them uniform and easier to read. I also modernized punctuation when quirks of eighteenth-‐century custom or Smith’s own usage impede the modern reader. Her use of semi-‐colons, for instance, can be maddening for us today, so I edited every one. Smith often ended sentences with a long dash, and, if the sentence ended at the end of a line, she often did not use end punctuation at all. In my edits, I converted some of these end-‐punctuation long dashes to periods if it aided understanding, except never in instances wherein the long dash conveyed something of her emotional stress. I retained Smith’s quirky spellings of “beleiving,” “proffit,” and “ballance,” for instance, and, unless her spelling rendered a word inscrutable, I retained her spellings and did not add the fussy and intrusive editor’s
acknowledgement that a word is misspelled: [sic]. My edition retains every crossed-‐ out word (e.g., “on my account behalf”) and every underscore (e.g., “what may be in your hands”); I did not transcribe carets, but, rather, have normalized the text she added.
In places where unclear handwriting or fuzzy copy obscured a word, I attempted an educated guess, which I placed inside angle brackets (e.g., “I own I <assumed> it would place you”). I retained all of Smith’s abbreviations and superscripts (e.g., “I am Sir your obt & oblig’d Sevt”), only supplying the missing
letters in square brackets when I thought some readers might pause (e.g., “the pay[men]t”), or when she left out the ‘e’ in the surname of William Davies, a frequent
reference in these letters. I deleted all periods that she placed under superscripts, because they are unnecessary, make the page messier, and because Stanton removed them for her edition. For instance, where Smith would write, “Jan.y 3.rd
1787,” I give “Jany 3rd 1787.”
2. Copies and Printed Sources
Of the 121 letters in this project, 28 were published previously. I included them here in order to have a comprehensive collection of all known correspondence between Smith and the firm of Thomas Cadell, Sr. Judith Stanton previously
published 23 of these letters in her Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (Letters 5, 9, 12, 25, 54, 55, 63, 64, 67, 72, 75, 89, 90, 104, 105, 111, 115-‐121). The other six have appeared in journals: in articles by Richard C. Taylor in Modern Philology (Letters 56, 90, 99); by Jacqueline M. Labbe in The Wordsworth Circle (Letter 68); and by Harriet Guest and Stanton in both The Keats-‐Shelley Journal (Letter 67) and Women’s Writing (Letter 50).
The Appendix contains four letters, none of which have been published previously. Among them are the two extant letters Cadell drafted to Smith that were tucked in among the stack of letters stored in the Petworth House Archives and later moved to the ESRO. Additionally, there is a short letter in the Appendix that Smith received from the proprietors of the European Magazine, which was likewise in the ESRO stash. Finally, there is a letter that William Hayley sent to Cadell,
commiserating about Smith’s abuse of his generosity. Since we lack many letters from Cadell, Hayley’s letter offers a backdoor glimpse into his perspective. Stanton
had discovered this 1793 letter during a research visit to the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney, U.K.
In order to incorporate these 28 previously-‐published letters into my project, I first copied them as transcribed by Stanton, Guest, Labbe and Taylor. Lacking access to the originals of all but two (scans of which Dunedin Library in New
Zealand supplied), I preserved the transcriptions as published and the editing rubric those authors already employed. To these letters, I applied the same normalizing practices that I did with the holograph letters.
3. Dates
For letters that Smith did not date herself, I tried to supply a date based on internal and external evidence. A former (volunteer) archivist for the Preston Manor Museum had previously assigned possible dates to the undated Smith letters in the collection that is now housed in the ESRO. In numerous instances, I was able to correct or fine-‐tune these suggested dates because of the greater body of material I had to work with. Dates not provided by Smith herself are placed in square brackets.
4. Headings and Postscripts to Letters
I have divided the letters into seven discrete sections, categorized by year. Ahead of each section I summarize and contextualize the letters as a group. Ahead of each letter I name the addressee (e.g., “To Thomas Cadell, Sr.” or “To William
on the envelope, then I place his name in square brackets (e.g., “[To Thomas Cadell, Sr.]”).
For each letter, before Smith’s greeting, I supply the location and the date of the letter, if she did not do so herself. When she did not date her letters I assigned one and placed that information within square brackets. Sometimes Smith identified her location above the greeting of the letter. Sometimes, as the image below
illustrates, a location is stamped on the envelope (here, PETWORTH). When a letter lacked both, I either used internal evidence to assign a location, or, if a location could not be determined, I left one out. I moved all of this information flush left and onto one line in order to make this collection uniform and clear.
The address and postal markings from a letter Smith sent Cadell on 9 Mar. 1794 (Letter 99)
After each letter, I identify that letter’s current location information (current as of Summer 2012). If I discovered the letter in an article or a book, I give due credit to the source. If I was able to track down the provenance of the letter, I gave that information as well. Finally, I transcribe the address and postal information
from the envelope (if there is one). Sometimes the postal markings include the post city name in all caps (e.g., “BRIGHTHELMSTONE”—which was Brighton), followed by the date stamped in a circle, with a two-‐letter abbreviation for the month. For example, the date “13 JA [17]91” represents “13 Jan. 1791.”
The majority of the letters come from the East Sussex Record Office (ESRO), which acquired them from the Preston Manor Museum. At Preston Manor, Thomas-‐ Stanford’s entire 3,000-‐piece collection had been organized and numbered by a previous curator, and the 98 Charlotte Smith letters were identified as “L/AE/1-‐98.” When the ESRO accepted them into its archives, it modified this numbering system to BH/P/L/AE/1-‐98, the identifications used in this dissertation. The “BH” reference derives from the ESRO’s system of identifying records that were allocated from the Brighton/Hove City Council, and the “P” signifies that they came from Preston Manor.1
5. Annotation
In my annotation, I attempted to identify every person, title, place, and obscure term Smith mentions, illuminate the personal, historical, and literary allusions Smith makes, and point to other letters within the collection pertinent to the letter at hand. Despite my best efforts, the identity of some people have been lost to history, especially various tradesmen to whom she owed money and some of the subscribers she lists. Those figures who loom large in her circle of family, friends,
and connections I have described in greater detail in the Biographical Notes, located in the Appendix.
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF LETTERS