[In the following excerpt, Halsey accounts for the popularity of Rowson's Charlotte Temple in America, explaining that the realism of the novel contributed to its success. Halsey then traces the parallels between scenes and characters in the book and actual places and people.]

The Book

Charlotte Temple['s] early success in England merely foreshadowed the success it was destined to have in America, with scarcely an interruption down to the present day—a period of one hundred and fifteen years. As a survival among books of that generation it is probably matched in this country only by Franklin's Autobiography, if indeed that book has matched it. Among novels it had no rival in its own day—not even Evelina or The Children of the Abby. None of Scott's novels, which came a generation later, could have had so wide a reading here. Not until Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared did an American work of fiction dispute its preeminence in point of circulation.

Perhaps even now, in the number of copies actually printed and read, Charlotte Temple has not been exceeded by Mrs. Stowe's work, because, being not protected by copyright, it has been constantly issued by many publishers in the cheapest possible forms of paper as well as cloth. The editions are innumerable. It has been published in London, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and several of the smaller American towns, including Ithaca, N. Y., Windsor, Vt., and Concord, N. H. Some of the early editions were in two volumes, but all later reprints seem to have been in one, tho some have appeared in the form of two volumes bound as one. Several have had a frontispiece, some a vignette, and a few have had illustrations in the text, but recent editions have commonly had no illustrations save now and then a frontispiece. In size the editions have been 18mos, 16mos, 12mos, and 8vos. A translation has been made into German, and a play based on the story long enjoyed much popularity.

Duyckinck, writing in 1855, said the story was still "a popular classic at the cheap bookstalls and with traveling chapmen."¹ Reprints of it to this day are offered in department stores, on sidewalk bookstalls, and by pushcart dealers. In the little stationery stores of tenement districts it can usually be found on shelves where are kept some hundreds of secondhand or shop-worn paper covered novels. The shopkeeper will probably say he keeps Charlotte Temple constantly in stock, and that it is one of his best-selling books. A collector in New York many years ago had secured a large shelfful of various editions, said to number about one hundred. Mr. Nason did not exaggerate the actual facts when he offered up the following tribute to the popularity of this book:

It has stolen its way alike into the study of the divine and into the workshop of the mechanic; into the parlor of the accomplished lady and the bedchamber of her waiting-maid; into the log hut on the extreme borders of modern civilization and into the forecastle of the whale ship on the lonely ocean. It has been read by the gray-bearded professor after his divine Plato; by the beardless clerk after balancing his accounts by night; by the traveler waiting for his next conveyance at the village inn; by the schoolgirl stealthily in her seat. It has beguiled the workman in his hut at night in the deep solitudes of the forest; it has cheated the farmer's son of many an hour, while poring over its fascinating pages, seated around the broken spinning-wheel in the old attic; it has drawn tears from the miner's eyes in the dim twilight of his subterranean galley; it has unlocked the secret sympathies of the veteran soldier in his tent before the day of battle.

In the best modern editions the integrity of the text has been better preserved perhaps than the circumstances, carefully considered, would have led one to expect, but, as already stated, the text to-day is extremely corrupt. Most errors in these editions were due to the carelessness of printers, since they seldom suggest the hand of an indiscreet editor or publisher. The original Preface I have not found in any available edition issued since 1803. The poetical quotations given on the title-pages are also missing from editions printed since the very early one, and changes have been made in the chapter-headings, one heading having been dropped altogether.

Once errors had crept into the text, it can be understood how they were almost inevitably repeated at the next setting of the type. With each resetting further errors would be made, so that an edition now current might show accumulations from three, or possibly four, generations of compositors. So formidable a total of errors (1265, large and small, by actual count) gives further evidence of the extraordinary popularity of Mrs. Rowson's little book.

In one edition among those I have seen, systematic condensation of the text has occurred, and other condensed editions are known to have been published. The one referred to was issued in Philadelphia in 1865, with the author's name omitted from the title-page. At least one-fourth of the matter has been eliminated, some of the chapters have been entirely rewritten, and their number reduced from thirty-five to twenty-eight. The publishers announced on the title-page that this was "the only correct and authentic edition" of the book; declared, in an introduction, that it was "the only correct one ever issued," and that it had been "printed from a copy of the original publication," which of course was impossible.

It was a thin, paper-covered octavo, with illustrations showing styles of dress worn in 1865—that is, ninety years later than the period of the story. Besides these sensational woodcuts in the text, it pretended to have a likeness of Charlotte, "taken from an original portrait," but looking like a fashion-plate, Charlotte being arrayed in an evening dress supported by a hoopskirt. This stupid misrepresentation of Charlotte is reproduced elsewhere in the present volume, with the sensational cover-title which the portrait was supposed to adorn. As an appendix, an article on the tombstone in Trinity churchyard was printed with an outline of "Lucy Temple." It was written by John Barnitz Bacon.² Owing to these pictorial and editorial features, newly introduced, the publishers were able to copyright this edition.

Other liberties, much more reprehensible, have been taken with the book. In the slums of large cities, many years ago, perverted editions were common, the text having been altered in a way to secure large sales. With sensational titles printed in type that suggests the "scare-heads" of newspapers, and representing Charlotte as a noted courtesan, copies were unscrupulously paraded on the streets and sold in large numbers. About 1870 a sensational story-paper, then just started in New York, printed, with one of its advertising posters, a large so-called portrait of Charlotte, which is reproduced in the present volume, but reduced to less than one-fourth the original size. One of the features of the paper to which particular attention was called in the advertisement was a serial story entitled, "The Fastest Girl in New York."

By means of these publications, now forgotten, Charlotte's character became much perverted in the minds of ill-informed people, among whom doubtless were persons of respectability and intelligence. Something of that influence has survived to this day in the impressions which many retain of the real character of Charlotte Temple.

The text of the rare first American edition, which appeared in Philadelphia while Mrs. Rowson was living there, has been carefully followed in this reprint. A copy was obligingly lent for the purpose by its owner, Mabel Osgood Wright. The original owner, as shown by an autograph on the title-page of the first volume, was Susanna Rodgers, the inscription being dated September 25, 1794. Except for the stains of time and twenty-one pages which in the bottom margin have been invaded by a bookworm, the copy is perfect. The two volumes are bound as one in half morocco, the number of pages for the two volumes being 87 and 83 respectively.

Charlotte

Mrs. Rowson's stories are pervaded by old-fashioned sentiment, which it has been the custom nowadays to mention as if it were a reproach. Sentimental they unquestionably are; but whether this be a reproach, may be left an open question. Our own period is distinctly not a sentimental age—at least in so far as concerns the expression of sentiment, about which we have grown somewhat squeamish. Human nature, however, has not changed. The average man and woman remain very much what their forbears for many generations have been in their susceptibility to emotion.

The situations Mrs. Rowson describes, the sympathies she evokes, appeal to what is elemental in our nature and what is also eternal. Rudimentary as to right thinking and right acting they may be, but they are wholesome, sane, and true all the same. As old as the hills, we may call this sentiment, but it will last with the hills themselves, immovable and fundamental in all our acts and thoughts, if not in our actual speech.

Mrs. Rowson was not gifted so much with creative imagination as with the power to delineate every-day human emotions. The situations which could move her were not those which she herself might have created, but those which she knew to have existed in the life she had seen. She wished always to draw some potent moral from them, holding up for emulation the staple virtues which keep the world strong and make it possible for men and women to be happy in one another's society. She was born to be a teacher, and a notable teacher she became in Boston. In her books she aimed also to teach, and in doing so adopted what we may call the "direct process" style in fiction, taking her scenes and characters from real life. She began in this way with Victoria; she made Rebecca autobiographical, and one or two other books partly autobiographical; and she wrote plays that were photographic pictures of things she had seen. When she wrote Charlotte she founded a novelette on a tragedy that had occurred in her own day, the incidents in which she knew to be true, and the characters persons who once had been of flesh and blood, and at least two of whom she herself had personally known.

"A tale of truth" Mrs. Rowson declared Charlotte Temple to be, and Mr. Nason describes it as "a simple record of events as they happened, and as truthful as Macaulay's sketch of Charles I." Writing of the motive of the story, Mr. Nason says Mrs. Rowson had seen so much of the scandalous lives of land and naval officers in that period that she "determined to warn her countrywomen against their seductive arts."³ Charlotte is described by Mr. Nason as "a young lady of great personal beauty, and daughter of a clergyman who, it is affirmed, was the younger son of the family of the Earl of Derby"—that is, of the Stanley family. Mrs. Rowson, in the story, seems to refer to this family in such expressions as "the Earl of D ," and "the Countess of D ."

Mr. Nason then explains that it was by a lieutenant in the British Army, who was afterward a colonel, and was then in service, that Charlotte, in 1774, was induced "to leave her home and embark with him and his regiment for New York, where he most cruelly abandoned her, as Mrs. Rowson faithfully and tragically relates." Mrs. Rowson, in the Preface to Charlotte Temple, printed two years after the death of the officer who is accepted as the original of Montraville, said:

The circumstances on which I have founded this novel were related who had to me since some little personally an lady⁴ known time by old Charlotte, tho she concealed the real names of the characters, and likewise the places where the unfortunate scenes were acted. I have thrown over the whole a slight veil of fiction, and substituted names and places according to my own fancy. The principal characters are now consigned to the silent tomb: it can therefore hurt the feelings of no one.

Mrs. Rowson had ascertained who the original characters were, and where the events took place. When Cobbett assailed her for expressing sentiments foreign to her heart, she said in the course of her reply:

I was myself personally acquainted with Montraville, and from the most authentic sources could now trace his history from the period of his marriage to within a very few late years of his death—a history which would tend to prove that retribution treads upon the heels of vice, and that, tho not always apparent, yet even in the midst of splendor and prosperity, conscience stings the guilty and 'puts rankles in the vessels of their peace.'

The year of Charlotte's arrival in New York was the immediate eve of the Revolutionary War. The Boston Tea Party had taken place the year before (December 1773), and in the same month New York had sent back to England a ship laden with tea, the captain of the ship being escorted out of town with much enthusiasm. In May, 1774, General Gage had been sent from New York to Boston as Governor of Massachusetts; on June 1 the port of Boston had been closed by decree of Parliament, and in September the First Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia. In the following year actual war began (at Lexington in April, at Bunker Hill in June), and eight days after the battle of Bunker Hill, George Washington, the new commander of the American Army, passed through New York to enter upon his duties in Cambridge.

Here, in New York, English sentiment at that time was extremely potent, officials owing their places to direct appointment from London, and the tone of society in the upper ranks being distinctly royal. But the people as a mass were notably patriotic—quite as much so as the people of any other part of the Colonies. They had amply proved their loyalty in the Stamp Act controversy, and in the conflict which, under the name of the Sons of Liberty, they had had with British soldiers. Here, in fact, in 1770, had been shed the first blood of the Revolution. The town, when Charlotte arrived, was in a state of political and military turmoil such as it had not known since the Stamp Act Congress met in Federal Hall or the Battle of Golden Hill was fought in John Street.

New York at that time was only third in population among cities in the Colonies, Philadelphia and Boston both being larger. Save for a few houses around Chatham Square, the built-up parts did not extend north of the present City Hall Park, then an unnamed piece of vacant land, described in the Montrésor map of 1775 as "the intended square or common." The only highway that led northward from the city first followed the line of the Bowery, and then, near the present Twenty-third Street, divided into Bloomingdale and Boston Post roads. Along this highway—in reality a great, and now an historic, thoroughfare—passed each day a varied procession of carriages, stage coaches, farm wagons, men on horseback, soldiers in red coats, and work-a-day pedestrians. Near the south end of the road—that is, near the beginning of the Bowery as it exists today, and forming one of the houses in the Chatham Square neighborhood—stood the cottage to which Charlotte was taken by her betrayer, the "small house a few miles from New York"⁵ described in the story. The exact place has been identified by Henry B. Dawson, as follows:

Below Bull's Head,⁶ on the same side of the Bowery Lane, at a distance from the street, but near the corner of the Pell Street of our day (not then open), in 1767 stood a small two-story frame building, which was the scene of the tragedy of Charlotte Temple. A portion of the old building, removed to the corner of Pell Street, still remains, being occupied as a drinking-shop, under the sign of the Old Tree House.'s"⁷

The house Mr. Dawson describes is plainly shown on the "Plan of the City of New York," surveyed by Lieutenant Bernard Ratzen, of the British Army, in 1767, and published with a dedication to the governor, Sir Henry Moore.⁸ A part of this map, embracing the Chatham Square neighborhood, is here reproduced. Pell Street was subsequently laid out through land on which stood Charlotte's home. It is the next street below Bayard, runs west to Mott, and is now chiefly inhabited by Chinamen.

Mr. Dawson wrote in 1861. Since his time that remnant of Charlotte's home has been supplanted by a modern building, in which a drinking-shop is still maintained, the upper floors being used as a lodging-house of the better class for that neighborhood. Over the doorway one still reads the sign, "The Old Tree House." This corner of the Bowery and Pell Street is the northwest corner. Next door to Charlotte, so that "their gardens joined," as stated in the story, lived Charlotte's friend, Mrs. Beauchamp. It will be observed that the Ratzen map shows two buildings at that point in the Bowery.

Notes

¹Cyclopedia of American Literature.

² Mr. Bacon wrote under the penname of "John Tripod," and in 1870 published A Legendary History of New York.

³ One of Mrs. Rowson's poems, written with the same moral purpose as Charlotte Temple, is as follows:

The primrose gay, the snowdrop pale,
The lily blossoming in the vale
Too fragile or too fair to last,
Withers beneath the untimely blast
Or rudely falling shower.
No more a sweet perfume they shed,
Their fragrance lost, their beauty fled,
They can revive no more.

So hapless woman's wounded name
If Malice seize the trump of fame
Or Envy should her poison shed
Upon the unprotected head
Of some forsaken maid;
Tho pity may her fate deplore,
Her virtue sinks to rise no more
From dark oblivion's shade.

⁴ The Mrs. Beauchamp of the story, whose husband was an officer in the English Army and served in America. Mrs. Rowson heard the story from Mrs. Beauchamp after the Revolution, when the army had returned and they first met in England, where the book was written, and in 1790 first published.

⁵ From this point to the Battery the distance is about two and a half miles.

⁶ The Bull's Head Tavern occupied the site of the present Thalia (formerly the Old Bowery) Theater.

⁷ Introduction to "New York City During the American Revolution; being a Collection of Original Papers Belonging to the Mercantile Library Association," published in 1861.

⁸ This map, as showing streets and houses, is the most important one we have for that period. Colonel John Montrésor, in 1775, published a map, reproduced elsewhere, which is more important in a military and topographical sense, but not so satisfactory in its details of streets and houses.