Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Smith, Charles John
SMITH, CHARLES JOHN (1803–1838), engraver, was born in 1803 at Chelsea, where his father, James Smith, practised as a surgeon. He was a pupil of Charles Pye [q. v.], and became a good engraver of book illustrations of a topographical and antiquarian character. He executed a few of the later plates in Charles Stothard's ‘Monumental Effigies,’ the views of houses and monuments in E. Cartwright's ‘Rape of Bramber,’ 1830, and several of the plates from illuminated manuscripts for Dibdin's ‘Tour in the Northern Counties of England,’ 1838. In 1829 Smith published a series of ‘Autographs of Royal, Noble, and Illustrious Persons,’ with memoirs by John Gough Nichols [q. v.], and later undertook another serial work, ‘Historical and Literary Curiosities,’ which he did not live to complete. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1837, and died of paralysis in Albany Street, London, on 23 Nov. 1838.
[Gent. Mag. 1839, i. 101; Redgrave's Dict. of Artists.]