Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth.

ROWSON [SUSANNA HASWELL],.

$1,750.00

Item Number: 142082

Hartford: Published by Silas Andrus, 1827.

Early American printing of the first American bestseller, first published in 1794. 16mo, half calf over wooden boards, gilt-lettered spine, woodcut frontispiece. In good condition, assuming boards were once paper-covered, the paper has since entirely perished; shallow loss along top edge of both covers, lacking rear endpaper, 20th century rubberstamp to front pastedown. Rare.

Susana Rowson's best-selling novel, Charlotte, relates the tale of 15-year-old English schoolgirl Charlotte Temple, who is lured away from her prestigious boarding school by British army officer, John Montraville. While en route to New York, Montraville seduces Charlotte, who he swiftly abandons upon arrival to his post, and after a downward spiral into remorse, illness, poverty, and the birth of a child, she dies. Seduction novels were popular in the 18th century, and the widely read Charlotte Temple went through more than 200 editions and was the most popular best-seller in American literature until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published serially in 1851-1852. Rowson, a committed republican, used the success of the novel to protest the sexual double standard that ruined the lives of women like Charlotte. Later in life, she wrote a sequel that was published posthumously.