Everything seemed to be going well for Smith, but only the week before he had been fired from his job with the Somerset Coal Canal Company. Although he was able to make a fair living afterwards as a freelance surveyor, he would never be employed full time again. He would also face the theft and publication of his work without credit; both his Table of Strata and his map of Bath would be plagiarized soon after their publication by Smith.
After the success of his map of the area around Bath, Smith set out to produce a geologic map of the entire country of England, plus Wales and Scotland. (Winchester provides a full-color copy of the map, which one can compare with a modern geological map, also provided.) Smith also planned to write a book about his geological ideas. (In 1816 he published Strata Identified by Organized Fossils.) The map was printed as sixteen separate sheets and sold for between five and twelve pounds, depending on the quality opted for. Smith was to be paid twenty-five shillings for each map sold. Smith also received a prize of fifty guineas from the Society of Arts for completing the first mineralogical map of the nation, a prize they had first offered thirteen years earlier. These amounts were very important to Smith; even though he made a fair living with his freelance work, he always managed to overspend his income.
Smith suffered a series of financial setbacks, and in 1818 he sold 2,657 of his collection of fossils to the British Museum for five hundred pounds. He received an additional one hundred pounds for his display shelves, and in 1819 he sold a small cache of specimens to the Museum for an additional one hundred pounds. Unfortunately, this was not enough, and in June 1819 Smith was imprisoned in King's Bench Prison in Southwark, London, for a debt of three hundred pounds. Smith spent eleven weeks in debtor's prison before his debt was discharged. Once he was released, he left the city of London -- all of his possessions and property had been sold to satisfy his creditors -- for Yorkshire, two hundred miles to the north.
