Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale

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.