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Charlotte Smith is both a known radical sympathizer and an allusive writer. This thesis investigates the political meanings embedded through the selection and treatment of allusion in each of Charlotte Smith’s novels published between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the end of the Reign of Terror. Specifically, it investigates how Smith utilizes quotations from authors connected with political radicalism—John Milton, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—to work through the nuances of her own political thought. I argue that these specific authors feature significantly in her work because of their known republican sympathies. Yet, Smith frequently deploys these quotations in a context far from that which was originally intended by her source, capitalizing on their republican significations but making the actual polemical content all her own. Both the frequency and diversity of her allusive engagement increases during the period of the Revolution, which marks the Revolutionary period as one essential to the development of Smith as both a novelist and as a radical. Through tracking the presence of quotation in each novel, one published each year between 1791 and 1794, the thesis traces the evolution in Smith’s political thought and, specifically, her changing attitudes toward the French Revolution as it moves through its early utopian stages to the violence and excess of the Reign of Terror. Not only does this study contribute to recent scholarship on the use of quotation in eighteenth-century writing, but it also provides an in-depth study of Smith’s evolving radicalism. In this way, the project demands reassessment of critical studies of Smith’s work which have failed to recognize the extent of the polemical content within the first work in the sequence, Celestina, and the continuing commitment to republican sympathies despite burgeoning conservatism in the last, The Banished Man.

This thesis examines women’s mock-heroic verse on domesticity, focusing on four female poets of the eighteenth century. Despite critical work on women’s poetry, on the mock-heroic, and on the rise of a cult of domesticity during the period, there has been little sustained criticism of women’s verse about domesticity, and even less about women’s use of mock-heroics. This thesis closes a gap in the work of the past few decades by adding the work of women poets to the discussion of domesticity and mock-heroic verse. The mock-heroic has been identified as ‘the exemplary mode of the eighteenth century’ and ‘the dominant idiom of the age’: a form which late seventeenth and early eighteenth century poets developed to criticise the status quo. The fact that female poets wrote mock-heroic poems and sections of poems in the mock-heroic mode, as well as the range of poems by women which may be considered mock-heroic, demonstrates that women’s use of what might be called the domestic mock-heroic merits more and different critical attention than it has received until now. This dissertation traces the use of mock-heroic poetry by four different female poets of the eighteenth century: Mary Leapor, Mary Jones, Elizabeth Moody, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. It demonstrates that the mock-heroic poems written by women differed significantly from those written by Scriblerians such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay – both in form and in tone. Further, it argues that mock-heroics by women contributed significantly to the form’s development throughout the century and to the intellectual shifts that occurred throughout the century.