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Cultural Impact
Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple is often described as America’s first bestseller, and even the nation’s first popular novel, selling more copies than any other novel in American history up until the middle of the 20th century. Published in 1794, Charlotte Temple emerged during the rise of America as a new nation, which saw the population boom after the Revolutionary War and an increased focus on the education of children in the late 18th century. Thus, the didactic novel reached the largely young and literate white youth and was met with enormous popularity due to its fast and entertaining plot. It was also intended as a sort of survival manual for “the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex”, educating young women on the moral disparity between genders and the male-oriented cultural institutions that fostered such divisiveness. Rowson’s characterisation of Charlotte as a young woman whose plight was a product of circumstance was relatable to women who also struggled to be independent agents in this post-revolutionary culture.

Despite its authorial intent, Rowson’s novel was not only culturally significant and meaningful to young women. Many archival copies contain inscriptions reveal the novel was exchanged between men and women, their sons and daughters, and even grandchildren. The volatility of the new nation spawned a general attitude of distrust, a lack of community, and a struggle to adapt to the rapidly changing country. High rates of urbanisation as well as the immigration of lower-class Europeans in the 18th century resulted in an extensive cultural transformation of America, with large proportions of the diverse society coming from rural lifestyles. Many new American readers undeniably related to Charlotte’s plight in the new world as they too felt abandoned and alienated while coping with worldly change.

200 subsequent editions were published in the 50 years after its release, all of which were tailored to different audiences and as Davidson writes, all “perform[ing] different kinds of cultural work”. Cheaper tabloid editions reached the lower classes and educational children’s editions used Charlotte’s tragic story of seduction, abandonment, and eventual death as a parable of caution. Rowson’s sequel Lucy Temple was released posthumously in 1828, but an illegitimate sequel by J. Barnitz Bacon, titled The History of Lucy Temple, released in 1877 truly indicates the cultural phenomenon that was Charlotte Temple. Davidson proclaims that the consensus in the 19th century was that “Charlotte Temple had managed to displace the Bible from the bedtables of America”. The cultural impact of Rowson’s novel materialised as a grave was built for Charlotte in Trinity Churchyard, New York City. A 1900 New York Daily Tribune entry says it “has been the Mecca of sentimental visitors”, revealing the grave received frequent visitors, a “rate of about fifty a day” , even a century after the publishing of the novel.