An important book that I never heard of---the back cover says: "First published in 1794, Charlotte Temple was the biggest bestseller in American literary history (more than 200 editions have been published in the U.S.) until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, half a century later.
Sweet, innocent Charlotte Temple is led astray by a friend, seduced by a young man who takes her from her country home in England to New York City and then abandons her after she becomes pregnant. The second work concerns itself with Charlotte's daughter and her two friends; alas, the sin of the father is visited upon his children.
Miss Blakeney at one point explains that she has her clothes made by local women so that they can provide for those who need help in their families; she disapproves of doing something yourself if you can afford to pay someone else to do it. [p.220]
Lucy does good works: For "ameliorating the condition of the poor [she founds] a little seminary for the education of female children. . . . She ... placed an intelligent and deserving young woman ... to superintend the different parts of education . . . . the most useful kinds of needlework, ... the common branches of instruction in schools, and ... the principles of morality, and the plainest truths and precepts of religion; while over these, there was a sort of High School, to which a few only were promoted who gave evidence of that degree of talent and probity which would fit them for extended usefulness. ( )

Ugh. This was a book I had to read in college for my history of publishing class. It a two-in-one situation that has the stories of Charlotte Temple and another one of Lucy. The time period the story is set in is not one of my favorites, and Rowson's writing is similar (in my mind) to Edith Wharton's (who I also don't enjoy much). I read through it and finished it, hence the two stars, but I was most relieved to have gotten to the end and be done with it. ( )

Possibly the first novel set in New York City, and one of the earliest American novels, it tells of a girl seduced and how her life goes to hell in a handbasket thereafter. The second novel tells the hard-knock-life story of her offspring. ( )

Short, easy to read, and amusing for its heavy-handed inclusion of advice for "innocent and naive" young women. Novels like Charlotte Temple, often termed a "seduction novel" were basically advice books with a story line, which accounts for the "preachy" narrator. I thought Charlotte and her constant "what will become of me" type comments were hysterical, even though you're suppose to seriously sympathize with her plight.
P.S. Charlotte Temple was so popular in its time that the protagonist has an actual tombstone somewhere in New York City. ( )