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Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Elizabeth Oakes Smith (née Prince; August 12, 1806 – November 16, 1893) was an American poet, fiction writer, editor, lecturer, and women's rights activist whose career spanned six decades, from the 1830s to the 1880s. Most well-known at the start of her professional career for poems such as "A Corpse Going to a Ball", which appeared in The Neapolitan in 1841, and "The Sinless Child", which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1842, her reputation today rests on her feminist writings, including Woman and Her Needs, a series of essays published in the New-York Tribune between 1850 and 1851 that argued for women's spiritual and intellectual capacities as well as women's equal rights to political and economic opportunities, including the franchise and higher education.
Smith was born August 12, 1806, near North Yarmouth, Maine, to David Prince and Sophia née Blanchard. After her father died at sea in 1809, her family lived with her maternal and paternal grandparents until her mother remarried and moved with her stepfather to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, then Portland, Maine. In her autobiography (parts of which were published in the 1860s and 1880s), she recalls being a precocious student, and at age twelve taught in a Sunday School for black children. Despite her wishes to attend college like her male cousins, however, she was married in 1823 at the age of sixteen to a thirty-year-old magazine editor and later humorist, Seba Smith, best known for his “Jack Downing” series.
Between 1824 and 1834 she bore six sons: Benjamin (1824), Rolvin (1825–1832), Appleton (1828–1887), Sidney (1830–1869), Alvin (1832–1902), and Edward (1834–1865), all of whom were known by the portmanteau last name Oaksmith (from a combination of the phonetic pronunciation of their mother's middle name, "Oakes", and their father's surname, "Smith").
Thus, for the first decade of her marriage, Smith managed a growing household, which included not only her own sons but also, at times, apprentices and printers of her husband's newspaper ventures.
What she wrote for her husband's newspaper, The Eastern Argus, or later his Portland Daily Courier, is unclear, but in her husband's absence in 1833, Smith assumed editorial responsibilities for the Courier. By the late thirties, Smith had begun to contribute regularly to the newspapers her husband edited, as well as other magazines, anonymously or over the signature "E".
Caught up in the fever of land speculation during the 1830s, Smith's husband invested in a tract of land near Monson, Maine, known in correspondence between Smith and her husband as “Number 8.” When land values plummeted in the Panic of 1837, Smith lost much of his fortune and attempted to recover his losses by backing an invention designed to clean Sea Grass Cotton in South Carolina.
After briefly removing to Charleston, South Carolina, Smith and her husband moved their family to New York City in 1838 and began to pursue tandem literary careers. Upon their arrival, Smith and her family boarded with cousins of the Princes, Dr. Cyrus and Maria Child Weeks, but they soon moved to Brooklyn, where Smith emerged as a recognized name in the New York literary world. In their new home, both Smith and her husband contributed to literary magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book, the Snowden's Ladies' Companion, among other journals and gift books, and soon Smith published her first novel, Riches Without Wings, a children's story that appealed to victims of the Panic of 1837 with a moral message favoring spiritual over material wealth. She also penned the poem "A Corpse Going to a Ball", which became the American folk ballad "Young Charlotte" and led to the proliferation of Frozen Charlotte dolls and figurines; this poem is sometimes misattributed to her husband due to the byline "Mrs. Seba Smith" that accompanied it.
Smith received her first wide literary notice with narrative poem entitled "The Sinless Child," published serially in the Southern Literary Messenger January and February 1842, and a first edition of her collected poems, The Sinless Child and Other Poems, was published by John Keese later that year, with introductions by Keese, John Neal and Henry Theodore Tuckerman. Neal had helped launch Smith's career by publishing and reviewing her early work in The Yankee magazine (1828–1829).
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Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Elizabeth Oakes Smith (née Prince; August 12, 1806 – November 16, 1893) was an American poet, fiction writer, editor, lecturer, and women's rights activist whose career spanned six decades, from the 1830s to the 1880s. Most well-known at the start of her professional career for poems such as "A Corpse Going to a Ball", which appeared in The Neapolitan in 1841, and "The Sinless Child", which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1842, her reputation today rests on her feminist writings, including Woman and Her Needs, a series of essays published in the New-York Tribune between 1850 and 1851 that argued for women's spiritual and intellectual capacities as well as women's equal rights to political and economic opportunities, including the franchise and higher education.
Smith was born August 12, 1806, near North Yarmouth, Maine, to David Prince and Sophia née Blanchard. After her father died at sea in 1809, her family lived with her maternal and paternal grandparents until her mother remarried and moved with her stepfather to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, then Portland, Maine. In her autobiography (parts of which were published in the 1860s and 1880s), she recalls being a precocious student, and at age twelve taught in a Sunday School for black children. Despite her wishes to attend college like her male cousins, however, she was married in 1823 at the age of sixteen to a thirty-year-old magazine editor and later humorist, Seba Smith, best known for his “Jack Downing” series.
Between 1824 and 1834 she bore six sons: Benjamin (1824), Rolvin (1825–1832), Appleton (1828–1887), Sidney (1830–1869), Alvin (1832–1902), and Edward (1834–1865), all of whom were known by the portmanteau last name Oaksmith (from a combination of the phonetic pronunciation of their mother's middle name, "Oakes", and their father's surname, "Smith").
Thus, for the first decade of her marriage, Smith managed a growing household, which included not only her own sons but also, at times, apprentices and printers of her husband's newspaper ventures.
What she wrote for her husband's newspaper, The Eastern Argus, or later his Portland Daily Courier, is unclear, but in her husband's absence in 1833, Smith assumed editorial responsibilities for the Courier. By the late thirties, Smith had begun to contribute regularly to the newspapers her husband edited, as well as other magazines, anonymously or over the signature "E".
Caught up in the fever of land speculation during the 1830s, Smith's husband invested in a tract of land near Monson, Maine, known in correspondence between Smith and her husband as “Number 8.” When land values plummeted in the Panic of 1837, Smith lost much of his fortune and attempted to recover his losses by backing an invention designed to clean Sea Grass Cotton in South Carolina.
After briefly removing to Charleston, South Carolina, Smith and her husband moved their family to New York City in 1838 and began to pursue tandem literary careers. Upon their arrival, Smith and her family boarded with cousins of the Princes, Dr. Cyrus and Maria Child Weeks, but they soon moved to Brooklyn, where Smith emerged as a recognized name in the New York literary world. In their new home, both Smith and her husband contributed to literary magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book, the Snowden's Ladies' Companion, among other journals and gift books, and soon Smith published her first novel, Riches Without Wings, a children's story that appealed to victims of the Panic of 1837 with a moral message favoring spiritual over material wealth. She also penned the poem "A Corpse Going to a Ball", which became the American folk ballad "Young Charlotte" and led to the proliferation of Frozen Charlotte dolls and figurines; this poem is sometimes misattributed to her husband due to the byline "Mrs. Seba Smith" that accompanied it.
Smith received her first wide literary notice with narrative poem entitled "The Sinless Child," published serially in the Southern Literary Messenger January and February 1842, and a first edition of her collected poems, The Sinless Child and Other Poems, was published by John Keese later that year, with introductions by Keese, John Neal and Henry Theodore Tuckerman. Neal had helped launch Smith's career by publishing and reviewing her early work in The Yankee magazine (1828–1829).
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