Romance of the Association, The; or, One last Glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton.
Inscribed
Dall, Mrs. C[aroline].H. The Romance of the Association; Or, one last glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton. A curiosity of literature and life. Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1875.
8vo.; dark brown endpapers; green cloth; stamped in gilt; light wear to extremities.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper. Water damage to the inscription—as if the owner attempted to wash the ink from the page—has rendered it illegible except for: [name] with the [ ] of Caroline H. Dall. Dall examines the heroines of two immensely popular novels: The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster (Boston: Samuel Etheridge for E. Larkin, 1797) and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (London: n.p., 1791). The protagonists of Foster’s and Rowson’s novels, Eliza Wharton and Charlotte Temple, are “fallen women” who ruin their reputations, bring shame upon their families, and ultimately are abandoned by the male seducers who initially led them morally astray. Based on the lives of Elizabeth Whitman and Charlotte Stanley, the novels served to warn young women of the consequences of sacrificing virtue for transient passion.
Dall, however, finds the portrayals of Temple and Wharton to be overly simplistic and not as true to fact as Foster and Rowson would have their readers believe. In an attempt to present a more realistic depiction, she offers a more historical, less sensational account of their lives, as told through letters and personal accounts. “I have long thought,” Dall writes, “that there is no form of human injustice so bitter and so enduring as that perpetrated by the author of a historical novel” (p. 68). She attempts to undo some of the damage.
Though Dall admits that Foster and Rowson have written entertaining novels, the skewed details do more harm than good for the general populace, and it is dangerous to mistake The Coquette, which she describes as “a work of imagination” and as “a veritable history” (p. vii). The character of Eliza Wharton, for example, swore even on her deathbed that her child was not illegitimate and that she was a married woman. Dall offers evidence ignored by Foster that supports this claim.
Rowson sticks more closely to fact in her account of the life of Stanley, and Dall takes less issue with her depiction of the events of her brief lifetime. But the majority of the book is dedicated to correcting Foster’s errors:
After this issue, the novel plunges Eliza into dejection and despair; but my letters are about to show her, at that very moment, cheerful, industrious and useful. When her fatal departure draws near, the novel represents her as confessing her guilt, confiding in her friend, and writing to her mother; but no confession passed her lips, no confidence was ever given, no letter was ever written by her … the novel represents her carried away at night by her seducer, unknown to those who loved her. In simple fact, she went away in a regular stage-coach, at high noon, with everybody’s warm approval. (pp. 67-68)
After presenting a sampling of excerpts from the letters of the real-life Wharton, Dall concludes that they were written “by a light-hearted and fanciful, as well as cultivated, woman, but neither by a wanton nor a ‘coquette’” (p. 102). By setting the record straight, Dall does a service to the readers of The Coquette and Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, but also to the memories of Elizabeth Whitman and Charlotte Stanley, whose prosperity has been threatened by “a world that has misjudged [them]” (p. 102).
(#6219)
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