Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824). Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth. 1905.
Historical and Biographical IntroductionVII. A Contribution to a Bibliography
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Copies of the book are not plentiful anywhere, mainly because it has been issued in small and perishable forms. In the Astor and Lenox branches of the New York Public Library may be found eleven old editions. Several of these came to the library as a gift in recent years, and some are curious, but none is earlier than 1811. In the British Museum, altho the book has often been reprinted in England, only five editions are preserved. None of these is the first, and four have American imprints. The first American edition (1794) may turn up at auction once in several years, but not oftener; while the first English edition, published four years earlier, seems to be quite unknown in this country.
A search for copies of the book has been made in libraries other than the New York Public and the British Museum. After consulting some twoscore printed catalogs, English as well as American, five libraries out of the forty were found which had one edition each, and two others which had two editions. These copies, added to the eleven in the New York Public, and the five in the British Museum, give a total of only twenty-six copies of the book. With two exceptions the editions found were fifty or more years old, a circumstance which is to be accounted for by the almost general absence in later times of new editions bound in something better than cheap paper.
On going to the sales catalogs of important private libraries, no better results were accomplished. At the Astor nearly two hundred catalogs, embracing the most notable sales of thirty years, were consulted, but the number of copies found in them was only eight. This of course merely shows that “Charlotte Temple” has not been a collectors’ book. But who shall say it might not have been, had collectors known the excessive and increasing rarity of early editions.
Nor does one fare better when he makes a tour of the little second-hand shops. Here in the outdoor stalls may be found cheap, and often well-worn, paper editions, but rarely can one discover in the stalls or inside the door an edition, new or old, in leather, boards, or cloth—forms once so common, but now rapidly disappearing off the face of the earth. Some fifty of these shops exist in the Manhattan Borough of New York. The proprietor of each was asked if he had the book. Exclusive of cheap paper editions, nine copies were thus discovered.
What is true of New York is also true of other cities. A large house in Cincinnati, in reply to an inquiry, wrote: “We have not, nor can we find in any of the second-hand shops of this city, an old edition of ‘Charlotte Temple,’ either in cloth or paper.” No copy could be obtained from a Washington dealer, and none from Albany, while from a large second-hand Philadelphia house only one was secured, and from Boston only two.
Roorbach’s “Bibliotheca Americana,” covering the period 1820 to 1855, names only two editions, and Sabin’s list, altho the longest heretofore printed, enumerates only sixteen. In the Publishers’ Weekly, the trade organ of American publishers and booksellers, an advertisement has brought to light three copies. In the Saturday Review of Books, published by the New York Times, readers who had copies of the book were asked to send descriptions of them, the result being the discovery of nineteen copies in private hands.
Such, then, are the fruits of a systematic search for a book which Sabin describes as “the most popular romance of its generation.” Mrs. Rowson’s first biographer, Mr. Knapp, writing in 1828, said: “Three sets of stereotype plates are at present sending forth their innumerable series of editions in different parts of the country,” while Joseph T. Buckingham, in his “Personal Memoirs,” published in 1852, describes it as having had “the most extensive sale of any work of the kind published in this country.” Trübner, in his “Bibliographical Guide to American Literature,” published in 1859, describes the popularity of the book in this country and England as being quite as remarkable as that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and attributes it to a similar cause—“its appeal to the softer feelings of our nature.” He adds that “many of the scenes are quite as ably described.”
Considering all the circumstances, the subjoined list, incomplete tho it be in the number of editions named, and often very inadequate in the descriptions, may have interest, as I have already said, as a beginning for a bibliography.
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* The date of this edition, October 9, 1794, shows that it was called for soon after the publication of the first, which had probably come out in April, some advertisements by Mr. Carey in the end pages of that edition being dated April 17, 1794.
* It is to be noted that in this, the third American edition, the title had been changed from “Charlotte” to “Charlotte Temple,” and that in 1797 Mrs. Rowson had ceased to be connected with the New Theater of Philadelphia.
* Apparently an unauthorized edition, since the title is changed in a way not afterward followed except in a few isolated instances.
* Has frontispiece showing a woman leaning against a tombstone.
* Possibly this edition and the preceding are the same. The inference, however, does not necessarily follow. In one or two other instances at least “Charlotte Temple” was issued without a publisher’s name on the title-page.
* It will be observed here that Mr. Burtus issued two editions of the book in one year—each having a different title.
* From the above items it appears that in 1814 at least three publishers in New York were issuing the book. The type of the Duyckinck edition is very small and the paper flimsy.
* Mr. Merrifield appears to have issued three editions in 1815, as indicated by the variations in the size and number of the pages, and in the forms in which his name is given. Of all the early editions, his are now the most common.
* Apparently a very early edition, of which a copy is in the Astor Library, but it has no title-page.
* Apparently early.
* An early edition. A copy is in the Society Library, with no title-page. Has a woodcut frontispiece showing Charlotte and Montraville returning to the school at night.
* Apparently early.
* Has the frontispiece showing the arrival at Portsmouth and an engraved title, vignetted. In type, paper, and binding the best of all the early editions here described.
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* Has a frontispiece showing the arrival at Portsmouth, reproduced elsewhere in this edition, and a decorative title-page with vignette.
* A reissue of the preceding.
* Has a frontispiece showing Montraville and Julia Franklin entering a church to be married, the picture being repeated on the cover.
* Possibly the same edition as the preceding. A copy, bound by William Matthews in calf gilt, was sold with the library of Theodore Irwin, in 1897.
* From being a printer, Mr. Swain appears to have become a publisher on his own account.
* Has a frontispiece showing Charlotte’s grave in Trinity Churchyard, the stone standing upright, and inscribed “C. T.,” with a willow tree drooping over it, and a vignette on the title-page.
* Has two illustrations on steel—“The Interview of Charlotte with Montraville” and “Charlotte in the Garden.” A frontispiece has apparently been torn out. “Charlotte in the Garden” was intended to illustrate the discovery by Mrs. Beauchamp of Charlotte at her Chatham Square home while she was singing the lines beginning
* Has the same frontispiece and vignette as the Nafis edition of 1840.
* From the same plates as the preceding.
* Besides the frontispiece portrait, the cover has another portrait, showing a different face and costume, and printed in colors.
* This and the three preceding editions appear to have been printed from the same plates, or from duplicate sets, as the custom apparently then was with publishers, and as it had been twenty-five years earlier.
* Already described.
* Mentioned by Caroline H. Dall as having a large sale, but “wretchedly printed.”
* Though printed from small type, this is the best edition of those issued since 1855. It contains the Preface signed S. R., but the signature and the title, “Love and Romance,” were never used by the author.
* Printed from the same text plates as the preceding, but on larger paper, with a two-line border.
* Printed from small type, with a portrait on the cover.
* The binding of the copy examined is recent, but the text plates and illustration seem to have been made about thirty years ago.
* Same plates as preceding, the text extremely corrupt.
* Of the cheap paper editions here named as published during the period 1875–1905, all but two seem now to be out of print. The others, in well-worn condition, may from time to time be picked up in the little shops of tenement districts.
* Reprinted from the First American Edition of 1794. Over 1200 errors corrected, and the author’s Preface restored.
While the popularity of the book down to the present day cannot be questioned, and gives no evidence of declining, it is a popularity which has not brought its name into the lists, either of best selling books or of books most called for in libraries. During the period covered by these researches, many well-read men and women were asked if they had ever read “Charlotte Temple.” Nearly all knew about the tombstone in Trinity churchyard, and in general they had some notion of Charlotte’s story, but that was all. On a Sixth Avenue surface car, however, and on a railway train bound for Chicago, during the same period were observed two young women reading paper editions with close attention.
Again and again have small dealers, with stalls in front areas and on sidewalks, assured me that “Charlotte Temple” was one of their most active books. “Ten sales a week,” said a man in Harlem. “My order is always for a hundred copies,” said another in lower Sixth Avenue. “I am always selling that book,” said a third on the East Side, “and it’s a shame there has never been decent edition of it.”
Obviously the readers who have been patronizing these small dealers are not responsible for those questions-and-answers which regularly and at frequent intervals for many years have appeared in the newspapers and periodicals in regard to “Charlotte Temple.” These questions have rather come from the ill-informed among people really bookish, to whom, at least in the present generation, has been denied all knowledge of a book which, if it has not shared in the greatest literary fame, has at least participated in the greatest literary notoriety, of the past one hundred and fifteen years.