Author: Smith, Charles
Biography:
SMITH, Charles (fl 1815)
Charles Smith published two volumes of poetry in London in 1815, The Mosiad and Poems. The fairly short subscription list in the former includes mainly London subscribers but also a number from Orkney and elsewhere in Scotland, and one Charles Smith in Rouen, France, who may be the author himself. The book is dedicated to “the great and respectable body of Dissenters in England.” The “scriptural notes” appended are all parallel passages from the Old Testament. Neither book appears to have been reviewed, but The Mosiad was announced as forthcoming by subscription in the Scots Magazine, which describes the author as an English artist who had been detained as a prisoner of war or hostage “during the late war.” The description only partly tallies with the known facts of the life of the multi-talented artist Charles Smith (1749-1824), who was in fact born and died in Scotland, but this is probably the correct identification. He had trained at the Royal Academy in London and earned his living as a painter, primarily of portraits, in London, Edinburgh, and India; it might have been assumed that he was English. ODNB does not mention any period of incarceration. He was baptised in 1749 at Firth and Stenness, Orkney, the son of Charlotte (Whitefoord) and William Smith. He died at the house of his brother in Coupar, Fife, on 19 Dec. 1824. One of the family trees on ancestry.com gives him a wife, Jane (d 1822), and four children, but reliable records are lacking and his name is so common that the claim is open to doubt. His other writings were plays not well received in London: one tragedy, The Count of Burgundy (1796), and two musical entertainments, A Day at Rome (1798) and A Trip to Bengal (1802). Watkins cites these but not the poems of 1815. (ODNB 31 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 31 Oct. 2024; ancestry.com 31 Oct. 2024; Watkins; Scots Magazine 1 June 1815, 454; Perthshire Courier 31 Dec. 1824)