Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple

Susanna Rowson

Tonight we'll discuss Charlotte Temple, or Charlotte, a Tale of Truth as it was known to British and American readers before publisher Mathew Carey retitled it in 1797.  Charlotte was the first best-selling novel in America.  Tonight we'll think about why, especially in the context of Rowson's career.  Of special interest are any connections we might make between Charlotte  and Amelia, as well as the two texts' treatment of New York and London.

 

In his 1828 introduction to Charlotte's Daughter; or, The Three Orphans (A Sequel to Charlotte Temple), Samuel L. Knapp wrote,  

 

No writer of fiction has enjoyed a greater popularity in this country than Mrs. Rowson. Of "Charlotte Temple" upwards of twenty-five thousand copies were sold in a short time after its appearance, and three sets of stereotype plates are at present sending forth their interminable series of editions, in different parts of the country. . . .

 

As Elias Nason put it in his 1870 Memoir of Mrs. Rowson:

It has stolen its way alike into the study of the divine and the workshop of the mechanic; into the parlor of the accomplished lady and into the bed-chamber of her waiting maid; into the log-hut on the extreme border of modern civilization and into the forecastle of the whale ship on the lonely ocean. It has been read by the grey-bearded professor after his "divine Plato"; by the beardless clerk after balancing his accounts at night; by the traveler waiting for the next conveyance at the village inn; by the school girl stealthfully in her seat at school. It has beguiled the woodman in his hut at night in the deep solitudes of the silent forest; it has cheated the farmer's son of many an hour while poring over its fascinating pages, seated on [p. 51] broken spinning wheel in the attic; it has drawn tears from the miner's eye in the dim twilight of his subterranean dwelling; it has unlocked the secret sympathies of the veteran soldier in his tent before the day of battle.

an older Susanna Rowson

Resources for Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791, England; 1794, U.S.), the nation's first best-selling novel.

Full text of Charlotte Temple:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/171/171.txt

Four Critics on Charlotte Temple:
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/enam854/ctemple.html

Historical and Biographical Information from Francis W. Halsey's 1905 Edition