Nicholas Turner met with financial difficulties on his return to England and had to sell some of the family's holdings. He married the wealthy Henrietta Meriton in 1765. His daughter entered society at the age of 12, leaving school and being tutored at home. His reckless spending then forced her to marry early. In a marriage on 23 February 1765 at the age of 15, which she later described as prostitution, she was given by her father to a violent, profligate man, Benjamin Smith, son of Richard Smith, a wealthy West Indian merchant and a director of the East India Company. The marriage proposal was accepted for her by her father.[3] Condemning his action 40 years later, Smith said it had turned her into a "legal prostitute".[4]
The Smiths had twelve children. Their first, in 1766, died the next year just days after the birth of their second, Benjamin Berney (1767–1777).[A] Their ten more children between 1767 and 1785 were William Towers (born 1768), Charlotte Mary (born 1769), Braithwaite (born 1770), Nicholas Hankey (1771–1837), Charles Dyer (born 1773),[A] Anna Augusta (1774–1794), Lucy Eleanor (born 1776), Lionel (1778–1842), Harriet (born c. 1782), and George (born c. 1785). Six of their children survived her.[3]
The Smith marriage was unhappy. She detested living in commercial Cheapside (the family later moved to Southgate and Tottenham) and argued with her in-laws, whom she saw as unrefined and uneducated. They in turn mocked her for spending time reading, writing and drawing. Meanwhile Benjamin proved violent, unfaithful and profligate. Only her father-in-law, Richard, appreciated her writing abilities, although he wanted her to use them to further his business interests.[4] Richard Smith owned plantations in Barbados, which provided the income of £2000 a year upon which Charlotte Smith and her family lived.[3] Smith would later criticize slavery in works such as The Old Manor House (1793) and Beachy Head (1807).[3]
She persuaded Richard to set Benjamin up as a gentleman farmer in Hampshire and lived with him from 1774 until 1783 at Lys Farm,[5] Bramdean, about 10 miles east of Winchester.[3] Worried about Charlotte's future and that of his grandchildren and concerned that his son would continue his irresponsible ways, Richard Smith willed most of his property to Charlotte's children. However, he drew up the will himself and it contained legal problems. The inheritance, originally worth nearly £36,000, was tied up in chancery after his death in 1776 for almost 40 years. Smith and her children saw little of it.[3] (It has been proposed that this may have inspired the famous fictional case of interminable legal proceedings, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in Dickens's Bleak House.[6]
In fact, Benjamin illegally spent at least a third of the legacy and ended up in King's Bench Prison, a debtor's prison, in December 1783. Smith moved in with him and it was there that she wrote and published her first work.[4] Elegiac Sonnets (1784) achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels, as poetry was then considered the highest art. Smith revised Elegiac Poems several times over the years, eventually creating a two-volume work.[4]
