by Betsy Klima, MHS-NEH Long-Term Research Fellow, Spring 2025
I’ve spent the last few months in residence at the MHS as a long-term research fellow. I’m working on a book on author Susanna Rowson and the story of her novel Charlotte Temple. Charlotte Temple tells the story of an English teenager who falls in love with a British soldier. They sail to New York, where he marries another woman and leaves the pregnant, unmarried Charlotte to a tragic death. My book, Guilty Pleasure: The Story of America’s First Romance Novel, explores Charlotte Temple’s unique popularity with American readers—and shows how it paved the way for today’s romance novels.
Charlotte got good reviews when it was first published in London in 1791. After it debuted in Philadelphia in 1794, Charlotte became a sensation. America’s first best seller, Charlotte Temple would remain in the public consciousness for over a century. Charlotte Temple’s name was inscribed onto an actual gravestone, given to children, and bestowed on a race horse. Her wax body captivated curious throngs. Her image circulated in pocket-sized books with tiny type.
Charlotte Temple was so popular for so long that it’s easy to find copies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in libraries, often inscribed with their owners’ names. But I am looking for more than names. I want to understand how the novel found its early readers.
One day over lunch at MHS, a fellow researcher suggested that the Cary family papers might help me paint a picture of Boston in the 1790s and early 1800s when Susanna Rowson lived in town. So one June day, I sat in the Reading Room, a gray box full of manila folders on the table before me.
The Carys were Bostonians whose sugar plantation on the island of Grenada made them a small fortune. In 1791, patriarch Samuel Cary moved his growing family to a farm in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where they hoped to live out their days in comfort funded by the labor of enslaved people on an island far away. But slave rebellions in 1795 and 1796 destroyed their plantation. By 1797, their finances faltering, the Carys pulled their son Lucius out of school and sent him to work with his brother Sam in Philadelphia.

Lucius was not happy. His beautiful penmanship makes his feelings clear, even centuries later. On January 23, 1797, Lucius wrote to his mother, Sarah Cary, “Now I call this a very lonesome life. I have not a single acquaintance…. You know I said in my last letter that I was going to the play. I did and was much pleased. I have found no circulating library yet. I have been quite wretched since I left you for want of society but I have exerted all my philosophy and have almost conquered it.”
The letter stops me in my tracks—the unmistakable voice of a 14-year-old boy negotiating an unfamiliar and challenging situation. He has been wretched and homesick, but, he reassures his mother, he has “almost conquered it.” He misses his ten younger siblings and sends his love to each of them by name.

Lucius wrote often to his mother about everyday life in 1797 Philadelphia. On March 10, he wrote, “I have been to Rickett’s once and twice to see the Play. I have also had the pleasure of seeing General Washington, Mrs. W, and family, I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw this long wished for sight.” Ricketts’ was a popular equestrian circus. Lucius saw the Washingtons at the New Theatre, where Susanna Rowson performed from 1794-1796.
I could feel myself getting closer. And then I found Charlotte.
Lucius must have joined a circulating library. On July 1, he informed his mother, “The books that I have read are principally Lives, Voyages, Magazines, Travels, Histories, Letters, and some Novels…Novels Montalbert, Charles Townley or Bastile, Charlotte or tale of Truth, and a few others.”

Charlotte is there, part of a lonely 14-year-old boy’s reading list. Did the story of teenaged Charlotte, friendless and alone in New York resonate with Lucius? Did it keep him company? Make him laugh? Make him cry? We’ll never know. But the evidence that he read Charlotte keeps me going on my quest to understand why it resonated with so many Americans—and why it’s been forgotten.