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Affect in the Margins

The marks left by readers in their personal copies of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets provide traces of how manuscript engages print, and readers materially engage writers, in the Romantic period. Surveying 152 copies of Elegiac Sonnets and other contemporary sonnet collections by Bowles, Robinson, and Seward, this essay considers how marginalia challenges us to reconsider how readers used books—and how books might use their readers—in soliciting and forging affective relationships through print. We chronicle Smith’s careful recollecting and reframing of her own poetry in printed editions, a practice which seems to have licensed readers in turn to change how they responded to her verse. Why did Smith’s readers mark, interleave, or otherwise thicken their copies more often and with greater urgency than the readers of other late eighteenth-century sonneteers, particularly as the Elegiac Sonnets grew? Tracing these various annotations, from the most conventional to the most transgressive, heightens our historical sense of the dynamism of Smith’s publishing practice and illuminates the sentimental and aesthetic bonds she formed with readers. It also, we argue, exposes something more radical: a blurring of lines between persona and poet, author and reader, and between book-writer and book-owner.