Manon L’Escaut: or The Fatal Attachment from the French by Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith (née Turner 1749–1806) completed her translation of Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles’s Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut (1731) in 1785, during a brief time of living in exile in France with her profligate and indebted husband Benjamin Smith. The tale first appeared as Volume VII of Abbé Prévost’s Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde (1728–31). For her translation, Smith used a number of sources, including the original text, which she claimed, in her “Translator’s Note to the text,” “fell into my hands” (Smith, “Manon L’Escaut: or, the fatal attachment.” In: Gamer M and Taylor KM (eds) The works of Charlotte Smith, volume 1: Manon L’Escaut: or, the fatal attachment (1786) and The romance of real life (1787). Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited, London, pp 5–123, 2005). As she further discloses, as “I had then with me some English friends who did not read French, and for their amusement, I translated as I read” (Smith, “Manon L’Escaut: or, the fatal attachment.” In: Gamer M and Taylor KM (eds) The works of Charlotte Smith, volume 1: Manon L’Escaut: or, the fatal attachment (1786) and The romance of real life (1787). Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited, London, pp 5–123, 2005, 5). She also accessed Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, whose depictions of the American landscape are identified as having been used in her descriptions of New Orleans in this text. There were problems with the publication of this work from the very outset for Smith, including negative comments upon the morality of the work and accusations of plagiarism, because Smith’s translation of Prévost closely followed another author’s translation of the same text being released upon the market. These comments were sufficient impetus for Smith’s publisher, Thomas Cadell the elder, to withdraw Smith’s translation from sale. However, an anonymous edition of Smith’s translation was later released, and in June 1787, Smith wrote to her publisher, commenting upon the disappointing sales of Manon L’Escaut and requesting that Cadell “do everything in his power to sell off the remaining copies” (Garner, Introduction. In: Gamer M, Taylor KM (eds) The Works of Charlotte Smith, volume 1: Manon L’Escaut: or, The Fatal Attachment (1786) and The Romance of Real Life (1787). Pickering & Chatto, London, pp xxviii–xli, 2005, xxxii).