Young Girls on the Move in Charlotte Smith’s Didactic Miscellany Collections

Abstract

This paper analyses the didactic miscellany collections for young female readers by the English writer Charlotte Smith. In these texts, through dialogues and conversations, the young protagonists are seen to learn from their daily experiences of walking in the natural world. Smith’s texts also offer remarkable examples of girls on the move in another sense, in that some of the young female protagonists appear to be escaping from distressing family and financial circumstances, in search of better life opportunities.