Author: Smith, Elizabeth
Biography:
SMITH, Elizabeth (fl 1780-89)
Elizabeth Smith’s long poem Life Reviewed (1780) was very successful, with an enormous subscription list for the first edition—27 pages of names in long double columns, mostly of local residents—and four editions in the 1790s. It is in the eighteenth-century graveyard tradition, a survey of the graveyard at Truro, Cornwall, with general reflections on the vanity of human life, but it is unusual within that tradition in describing the dead individually and sometimes giving their names. One of the dead is her own father, buried there 21 years earlier, and another is her daughter, a small child. These details make it possible to identify the author tentatively as Elizabeth Teague, who married Henry Smith at St. Mary’s, Truro, on 7 Apr. 1765, baptised their daughter Elizabeth in the same church on 3 Apr. 1768, and buried her on 12 Dec. 1772. But there are several candidates for an Elizabeth Teague of Cornwall born about 1740-45 whose father might be buried at Truro, and it is not possible to name her parents precisely. The first two editions of Life Reviewed were published in Exeter, and it might be that her husband was Henry Smith of St. Sidwell’s, Exeter, whose name is on the subscribers’ list: St. Sidwell’s is either the church or the ancient school of that name but Smith is not in CCEd and it is more likely that he was a schoolmaster. Later editions and Smith’s two last poems were published elsewhere, at Ilminster, Gloucester, and Birmingham, again by subscription. (Anna Seward, q.v., subscribed in Birmingham.) Since Smith was an accomplished writer but has no later publications it seems likely that she died in Birmingham not long after, but no death notice has yet been found. (ancestry.com 31 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 31 Oct. 2024; Blain; ECCO)
Other Names:
- E. Smith
- Eliz. Smith