Author: Smart, Christopher
Biography:
SMART, Christopher (1722-71: ODNB)
Christopher Smart is a “prior” author who is included in the database for his posthumous Hymns for the Amusement of Children and the 1791 collection of his works which prints some previously unpublished poems. He was born 11 Apr. 1722 in Shipbourne, Kent, to Peter Smart, a steward, and his wife Winifred Griffiths. After his father’s death in 1733 he was sent to live with an uncle in county Durham. In 1739 he entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (1744) and MA (1747), and was made a Fellow of the college (1745). However, his lively and erratic character did not take easily to the role of a college don and friends had to rescue him when he got into debt. In 1749 he left Cambridge and sought to make his name as a poet in London. He met John Newbery, the bookseller, who published his Horatian Canons of Friendship as by Ebenezer Pentweazle in 1750 and, by subscription, his Poems on Several Occasions in 1752. Also in about 1752 he married Newbery’s stepdaughter, Anna Maria Carnan; one of their two daughters was Elizabeth Le Noir (q.v.). Although he won Cambridge’s Seatonian poetry prize five times (1750-53, 1755), his London career as a serious poet never really took off and his mental health declined. He was admitted to St Luke’s Hospital in 1757 and to a private madhouse in 1760. Possibly his was a case of wrongful detention; friends—including Samuel Johnson (q.v.)—described him as eccentric but not mad. While the conditions of his confinement were not harsh—he was allowed to write, keep a cat (immortalised in Jubilate Agno), and work in the garden—he suffered from the loss of his family. He escaped in 1763 through the ingenuity of a friend but Anna Maria had left for Dublin to work as Newbery’s agent and he went to live in lodgings in Westminster. Despite an outpouring of work, success still proved elusive and he fell into debt and alcohol dependence. He wrote Hymns for the Amusement of Children while imprisoned for debt in 1770 and it was published by his brother-in-law, Thomas Carnan. He died in prison on 20 May 1771. The posthumous Poems, edited by Francis Newbery (John’s son), contains little of his verse from after 1756. The brilliance of his later work was not appreciated until the twentieth century, particularly with the discovery of Jubilate Agno in 1939. (ODNB 22 Nov. 2021; ESTC; ACAD 22 Nov. 2021)