Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head (1807) moves quite spectacularly from a sweeping and panoramic cosmological, geographical and historical vision, to a regional portrait of the Sussex downs, to a series of village vignettes, before concluding with the single and isolated figure of ‘the lone Hermit ’ in the final lines of the poem. This inward telescoping movement is accompanied and countered by the climbing of the poetic speaker who starts out reclined in contemplation on that ‘stupendous summit, rock sublime’ of Beachy Head and then proceeds upward ‘[a]dvancing higher still’ as ‘the prospect widens’ until the view is so elevated that only the limitations of the human eye prevent the sight of London while ‘in the distant north it melts away / And mingles indiscriminate with clouds’.

The opening lines of Beachy Head, indeed, offer the reader a prospect view in miniature composed precisely according to the aesthetic principles that John Barrell has suggested were widely adopted in eighteenth-century Britain from the seventeenth-century Roman landscape painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The eye of the stationary and elevated speaker/viewer is drawn immediately to the horizon highlighted by the rising sun before moving out again to take in the surrounding view.

Barrell makes clear that in works such as James Thomson's Seasons, the prospect view allows or at least strives for a sense of distance from and control over nature. This aesthetic is furthermore the property of the landed gentry and the aristocracy who have the means to move about the country, take in and compare landscapes.

The political, moral and historical lessons learned from Smith's prospect are, however, far different from those taught by the traditional, reassuring eighteenth-century prospect poem. As Jacqueline Labbe has shown, in addition to its association with class privilege, the commanding prospect view is also a marker of the social privilege of the male writer.