to avoid further persecution and to begin a new publishing operation (with a loan from the Marquis de Lafayette, who aided the cause of U.S. nationalism by fighting alongside Washington in the Revolutionary War). Carey’s publishing house, founded in Philadelphia, went on to become one of the most successful in early U.S. history.
In 1794, Carey published a stateside edition of Charlotte. It was relatively cheap and easy for him to do, since there was no international copyright law. Indeed, an excited Carey reported the book’s steady sale to the Rowsons apparently without any thought of sharing the profits. Yet such a casual attitude toward what we now call intellectual property was a factor in the novel’s phenomenal success. Domestic publishers soon did unto Carey what he had done unto Rowson’s British publisher and the novel spread like wildfire, until there were over two hundred editions, ranging from expensive leatherbound volumes to the most ephemeral chapbooks. Gradually it became known by the title Charlotte Temple.
The plot of the novel can be easily summarized. When a British nobleman named Temple aids a heavily indebted army officer, he is gratefully offered the hand of the soldier’s daughter. This turns out to be a match of love, not money (which Temple essentially renounces by refusing to marry the woman his father had chosen for him) and the happy couple are soon blessed with a daughter named Charlotte. They send her off to a boarding school, where she befriends an unscrupulous schoolteacher named Mademoiselle La Rue. An army lieutenant named Montraville bribes La Rue to introduce him to Charlotte, with whom he has become sexually infatuated. Montraville and his friend Belcour are bound for the colonies to fight the Americans in the Revolutionary War, but they convince La Rue—and manipulate a reluctant Charlotte—to join them. Once in New York, Montraville sets the fifteen-year-old girl up as his mistress in a house outside of Manhattan, and the two live happily until he meets an aristocratic woman whom he wants to marry. La Rue fails to be a friend to Charlotte, and the evil Belcour steals the money Montraville intends to give her. Pregnant, impoverished, and alone, Charlotte finds her way to New York City as her distraught father searches for her, hoping to reunite her with her anxious family. But despite the efforts of a poor servant of La Rue’s, it is too late to save her life.
“For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of Truth is designed; and I could wish my fair readers to consider it not as merely the effusion of Fancy, but as a reality,” Susanna Rowson wrote in the introduction. The factual accuracy of the story (supposedly, only the names were changed to protect the innocent) seems to have been an important motive to Rowson, but it has never been independently verified. Perhaps this emphasis on reality was designed to justify writing fiction to disapproving elites; more likely, Rowson believed that underlining the authenticity of the story would give it more impact (much in the same way docudramas appeal to television viewers today).
On the face of it, Rowson’s message to her readers is deeply conservative. “Oh my dear girls—for to such only I am writing—listen not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbration,” she counseled. Yet her advice that young women be wary of men, even relatively well-intentioned men like the thoughtless Montraville, was sound in the context of late-eighteenth-century America, where female sexual expression resulted in severe social censure—and, more importantly, where unplanned pregnancy could have deadly consequences, as the fate of both Charlotte and the mother of Rowson herself powerfully testifies. But if Charlotte Temple does not strike us as a feminist role model (though some of the characters in Rowson’s other novels do), her novel nonetheless suggests the defeat of, and ongoing need for, gender solidarity.
The astounding success of Charlotte Temple is one indication of such solidarity. By the time of Rowson’s death in 1824, it had become the most famous and beloved novel in the United States, and it remained so for another generation—until it was replaced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The varied editions, prints, and versions of the story (unauthorized sequels surfaced, and Rowson’s own Charlotte’s Daughter was published posthumously) suggest the deep emotional attachment many Americans, especially the women for whom Rowson explictly wrote, and who were largely assumed to be her readers, felt for the story.
There is another striking measure of the novel’s impact. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, a gravestone to the fictional Charlotte Temple was erected in lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church cemetery, which housed the remains of luminaries like Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton. For the next hundred years, Charlotte received more visitors than anyone else in the cemetery, as tens of thousands of people left behind flowers, books, and other mementoes in her honor. “In that churchyard are the graves of heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, whose names are familiar to the youngest scholar, and whose memory is dear to the wisest and best,” a lawyer who had worked in an office overlooking the cemetery for forty-seven years wrote in 1903. “Their graves, tho’ marked by imposing monuments, win but a glance of curiosity, while the turf over Charlotte Temple is kept fresh by falling tears.”
Most of the so-called “best and wisest” had little interest in a seduced and abandoned character from a novel about and for some of the least valued members of U.S. society. But a great number of “little people” obviously felt that Charlotte Temple revealed fundamental truths about life in the early United States.
One novel genre was the picaresque. Of Spanish origin (Don Quixote was the prototype), these books featured faraway locations, unusual characters, and deceptive appearances. In part, such stories—which had titles like Adventures of Alonso (1775), The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794), and The Algerine Captive (1797)—catered to a taste for the exotic and for escapism. As noted in the introduction, however, escapism is never an adequate explanation for the appeal of any work of popular culture. It always occurs within a particular context, and the different ways people choose to escape, and the places they escape from and to reveal a good deal about them.
In the case of the picaresque, setting a tale on the geographic, social, or political margins offered an opportunity for an oblique critique that might not have been countenanced if stated forthrightly. In The Algerine Captive, for example, a naive doctor who agrees to work on a slave ship is himself enslaved in Africa when the ship is captured. His six years as a hostage impress upon him the evils of slavery (a position of more than casual significance for a country that had a constitutionally sanctioned slave trade until 1808) and a new appreciation for a vigorous (if also vulgar) democracy that he had considered full of avarice and cupidity before he left. The novel was written by Royall Tyler, a well-to-do lawyer and judge of Jeffersonian sympathies. As we shall see in the next chapter, he had many of the class prejudices of the ruling elite in early-nineteenth-century America. Yet the abolitionist and mass-democratic elements that suffused his narrative and helped make it popular had explosive tendencies that hit raw nerves. This was especially true in the new United States of the 1790s, when Shays’ Rebellion (which, ironically, Tyler helped suppress), the Whiskey Rebellion, increasing party polarization, elite anxiety over the French Revolution, and growing demands for political equality triggered the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, one of the most repressive censorship and law-and-order measures ever passed in U.S. history. In the contemporary popular imagination, the early United States was a country of idyllic equality and calm rural landscapes. But close readings of its fiction and history suggest otherwise.
Gothic novels reveal similar conflicts. These stories were often set in decaying aristocratic mansions and focused on the unprivileged men (and occasionally women) who had to overcome dangers. Threats were as much internal as external: as Davidson has suggested, gothic novels posed troubling questions about the corrupting effect of power on those previously denied it. They also expressed, as modern gothic stories do, skepticism about any serene confidence in the efficacy of Progress. The early popularity of native gothics novels like Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Arthur Mervyn (two parts, 1799-1800) is especially interesting in this regard, as is the persistence of a gothic sensibility that runs through the work of Brown’s heir, Edgar Allan Poe, and even through to Stephen King. It is ironically appropriate that horror stories took
