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.

 Alaina Scapicchio, Ph.D. Candidate, University of South Florida

In 1992, a significant anniversary loomed large over the city of Salem, Massachusetts. Three hundred years prior, the infamous months-long witch trials had turned the lives of residents in Salem Village, Salem Town, and the surrounding areas upside down. The commemoration of those events in the late 20th century, for some Salemites, seemed no different.

While on fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I came across a tantalizing folder tucked in a massive collection of records from the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This folder was simply titled “Salem Witches, 1992.” As a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation that examines commemoration and memory of witch trials in the US, I could imagine what the file might contain but thought it best to dampen my excitement until it was in my hands.

If you’ve worked in a reading room before, you’ll know that there is a certain level of decorum expected from researchers. So, I’m sure you can imagine the difficulty of stifling a shout of joy and the urge to jump up-and-down at my table upon opening the folder. Those emotions were brought on by the letterhead and the signature on the first page inside.

Laurie Cabot is a significant figure in Salem history for several reasons, primarily because she was a harbinger of a shift in the city’s population and economic landscape. Cabot moved to Salem in the late 1960s as a practicing Witch and in 1970 opened up The Witch Shoppe, the first occult store in the city. As a spiritual leader, Cabot attracted many Witches, Wiccans, and New Age religious practitioners to the area over the next few decades. Amidst the backdrop of a collapsing industrial economy, many of these new residents followed in Cabot’s footsteps and opened up metaphysical shops in Salem’s historic downtown–a tourist boon. Governor Michael Dukakis even named Cabot the city’s “Official Witch.”

While I was familiar with Cabot’s influence on the city, this was my first time encountering the organization Witches’ League for Public Awareness. Luckily, a brochure in the back of the folder provided their vision statement.

It quickly became clear from the contents of this folder that the Witches’ League was needed more than ever in 1992. Apparently, as the tercentenary anniversary of the witch trials descended upon the city, so too did numerous groups of Christian Fundamentalists to protest any recognition or celebration of Witchcraft. This ACLU file contains a letter from a concerned Salem resident who was surrounded by one of these groups while on a walk with her children and asked about her religious beliefs. In another letter from Cabot to the Civil Rights Division of the Attorney General’s office, she claimed that one specific Methodist organization had “targeted local businesses for coercive treatment aimed at their immediate closure, or to cause the removal of certain items from their business fare.” Letters from the aforementioned office and from the Mayor of Salem confirm Cabot’s claims to be true, as they informed her that they would be prepared to take “immediate action” against the perpetrators should they return.

However, it was not simply these rogue religious agents that the Witches’ League had a problem with. In fact, they often took greater issue with a more legitimate body. The Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee was created by the city’s municipal government to develop educational and commemorative events for 1992 in remembrance of the 300th anniversary of the trials. They estimated that this milestone anniversary could attract nearly one million visitors to the ‘Witch City’ and the committee sought to provide tourists with opportunities to spend their money there all year long. All of these events were to culminate in the dedication of a memorial to the twenty victims killed during the panic.

Prior to discovering this folder, I had seen references in newspaper articles about local Witches in Salem who were unhappy with some of the language included in the Salem Witch Trials Memorial and who felt the city was purposefully leaving them out of events during the tercentennial year. These sentiments are made crystal clear by Cabot in a few of the letters she copied the ACLU in on. She even blamed the city outright for some of the incidents mentioned above, arguing “Because of the misuse of the term “Witch” and “Witchcraft” by this City, it’s [sic] agencies, and these out-of-state organizations, a substantial number of Salem’s citizenry, businesses, and tourists are being placed at risk.” Cabot had chastised the city just two months prior for their linking of Puritanical understandings of witchcraft with the Devil. She was not the only one either. In a printed copy of the “North Shore Sunday Feedback” included in the folder, another Salem Witch accused the committee of adopting “the Puritans’ superstitious and half-demented definition of Witchdom as its own…”

In 1992, Salem’s modern-day Witches were not going to let the delirium that had overtaken hundreds in 1692 repeat itself. They organized and wrote to their local government officials and the ACLU to ensure that their religious rights were protected. Since Witchcraft had been recognized by the federal government as a valid religion, officials had to respond to their statements of distress. The Salem Tercentenary Committee, however, did not. The Witches’ League may have been able to protect their practitioners, but they could not salvage their image in the eyes of many Salemites— a struggle that continues today.

Materials Referenced:

Emerson Baker, “Witch City?” in A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 256-286.

Alaina Scapicchio, ““Memories Rescued from the Mire of Oblivion”: The 1885 Rebecca Nurse Monument and Salem Witch Trials Commemoration,” USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations, 2022. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10354

Lynn Smith, “Official Witch is Haunting Dukakis– By Accident,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 8, 1988. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-08-me-97-story.html.

Mary B. W. Tabor, “‘The Witch City’ Dusts Off Its Past,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 1991.

Christopher White, “Salem as Religious Proving Ground,” in Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory, eds. Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 43-61.