Charlotte Temple Study Guide

Susanna Rowson was born in Portsmouth, England in 1762. She lived in Boston beginning when she was five years old and eventually returned to England in 1778. She married a merchant named William Rowson in 1786—the same year that she published her first novel, Victoria. Over the next five years, she wrote four novels, including the one she’s best known for: Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, which was published in London in 1791 and later republished as Charlotte Temple in America. The novel became the nation’s best-selling novel. In fact, it remained the best-selling novel in America until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe some 61 years later. In addition to writing, Rowson took up acting in the early 1790s. After moving back to America with William and their new adopted daughter (William’s half-sister), Rowson appeared on stage in multiple productions, becoming a prominent actor. In 1797, she founded an “Academy for Young Ladies” with the goal of educating young women living in America at the time. She was a prominent voice advocating for female education, and she also published the first educational book in America about geography—a book that touched on the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. She died in Boston in 1824, two years after retiring from her career in education.

Charlotte Temple takes place in the late 1700s, when it was quite common for people to marry for money and status instead of love. Dowries and inheritances were big motivators for some people to get married—for instance, a man from a poor family had every reason to marry a woman from a rich family, since a bride’s family was generally expected to give the couple (but mainly the husband) a dowry in the form of land ownership or money. This is why Montraville doesn’t want to marry Charlotte in the novel; he doesn’t have much money and knows his only hope of becoming wealthy is by marrying a rich woman. On another note, the novel features a scene in a debtors’ prison, an institution that was common in England until the mid-19th century. Debtors’ prisons were places where people who were unable to repay their debts would be kept until they could finally furnish the necessary money. Unlike standard prisons, debtors’ prisons often allowed the debtors to have certain liberties. For instance, London’s infamous Fleet Prison—where Captain Eldridge is held in Charlotte Temple—allowed debtors to live in locked apartments outside the actual prison, and some debtors even got married in what came to be called “Fleet Marriages.” In general, the idea of debtors’ prison was to keep people locked up until they repaid their debts, either by doing hard labor while imprisoned or by somehow convincing someone else to give them the money.

Lucy Temple, Susanna Rowson’s follow-up to Charlotte Temple, was published in 1828. Like its predecessor, the novel concerns itself with marriage and wealth, following Charlotte’s daughter, Lucy, as she navigates young adulthood and tries (somewhat unsuccessfully) to find happiness and security through marriage. Charlotte Temple can also be read alongside The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster, which was published in 1797 and examines how a widely respected young woman living in Connecticut falls into dishonor and shame. William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy is also similar to Charlotte Temple, since it serves as a warning to its readers about the dangers of succumbing to passion and desire. On a broader level, society’s harsh judgment of women living with men out of wedlock in Charlotte Temple resembles the intense ostracization of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, though it’s worth noting that The Scarlet Letter—published nearly 60 years after Charlotte Temple—is set in the 1600s and is a critique of the narrowminded cruelty of American Puritanism. Charlotte Temple, on the other hand, doesn’t overtly criticize societal customs, though both novels focus on how unkind people are to young women who lead supposedly dishonorable lives.