Slow in the Wintry Morn

This day in 1806 died Charlotte Smith, the poet and novelist whose Elegiac Sonnets established her as a leading voice of early Romanticism. One of her most famous works is The Emigrants, a long poem published in 1793 and set explicitly on the cliffs to the east of Brighton, then known as Brighthelmstone. Its combination of personal melancholy, political sympathy, and local coastal imagery made it one of the most striking poetic responses to the turbulence of the French Revolution and the transformation of the Sussex seashore.

Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London in 1749, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. Married at 15 to Benjamin Smith, she endured an unhappy union marked by financial ruin and repeated imprisonment for debt. To support her twelve children she turned to writing, publishing Elegiac Sonnets in 1784 while her husband was in the King’s Bench Prison. The book became a sensation, going through multiple editions and influencing Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the following two decades she produced both poetry and a string of innovative novels that engaged with contemporary politics, women’s rights, and the injustices of the legal system.

Despite chronic illness and poverty, Smith continued to write until her death at Tilford, Surrey, on 28 October 1806. Among her most enduring works is The Emigrants, written during the war with revolutionary France. It is addressed to her friend William Cowper, whose own Task had inspired her, and takes as its scene the Sussex coast overlooking Brighton. In the poem’s two ‘books’ (around 80 pages in total), she meditates on the plight of French exiles driven to England, weaving their suffering into her own reflections on war, tyranny, and compassion. 

Here are the first few lines of the first ‘book’. It opens with a note - ‘Scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex. Time, a Morning in November, 1792’ - and begins with a powerful evocation of the pebbled beach and troubled Channel.

The Emigrants

Slow in the Wintry Morn, the struggling light
Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves;
Their foaming tops, as they approach the shore
And the broad surf that never ceasing breaks
On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams
Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives
To this cold northern Isle, its shorten’d day.
Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy!
How many murmur at oblivious night
For leaving them so soon; for bearing thus
Their fancied bliss (the only bliss they taste!),
On her black wings away! - Changing the dreams
That sooth’d their sorrows, for calamities
(And every day brings its own sad proportion)
For doubts, diseases, abject dread of Death,
And faithless friends, and fame and fortune lost;
Fancied or real wants; and wounded pride,
That views the day star, but to curse his beams. . .