In “Tracing the Earth: Narratives of Personal and Geological History in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head” (hereafter “Tracing the Earth”) Alexandra Paterson examines the way in which the reading of personal history is linked in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807) to the reading of geological history. In Beachy Head the geological history of landscape reconfigures Smith’s representation of both self and landscape, a process complemented by Smith’s recasting of lines and themes from her earlier Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1800) such as Sonnet V, “To the South Downs”. “To the South Downs” charts an emotional estrangement from the landscape, with the octave of the poem working to emphasize the change in the speaker’s emotional state over time. The disjunction between the child and adult’s relationship with the landscape in the sonnet reappears in Beachy Head, where around twenty descriptive lines extend the sonnet’s quatrain. Yet, while the compression of both adult and childhood experiences into two quatrains in “To the South Downs” make the contrast between the two evident, Beachy Head blends the speaker’s past and present so that they overlap. Images of tracing and weaving emphasize connections between the two poems and between the child and the landscape, but also weave together past and present selves. In Beachy Head, however, the adult’s perspective is interwoven with the display of botanical knowledge, including endnotes indicating the Latin names of several of the flowers she mentions in the descriptive passage, emphasizing the coexistence of child and adult. In this way, the poet allows the speaker not only to view, but also to be part of, her own history.
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