In the historic Trinity Churchyard in lower Manhattan, just off Wall Street, lies the grave of a woman who never existed. But two centuries ago, any American in the habit of reading novels would have known the name engraved on the slab: Charlotte Temple.
The sight of the tomb might have evoked sighs or even tears in the tender-hearted readers of Susanna Rowson’s 1791 novel Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, who would have recalled how Miss Temple, a naive 16-year-old British girl, had been seduced by the villainous rake Lord Montraville, brought to America, and then abandoned as he went off to marry another woman and fight in the Revolutionary War.
The book was hugely popular—it was the bestselling novel in America for half a century, right up until the release of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Heartstrings across the new nation were pulled by the ending of the tale, in which Charlotte dies penniless in wintry New York City after giving birth, her father arriving too late to save her.
Professor Ivy Linton Stabell, who teaches the book to her literature students at Iona University, says that the melodramatic tale appealed to all different kinds of Americans, because the story about a young, vulnerable woman being faced with difficult circumstances in New York, after betrayal by a powerful Englishman, paralleled the story of their nation.
“The book resonated with people on the explicit character level, but also the implicit big-picture idea about America as a new country,” Stabell says. In Charlotte, Americans saw not only their own personal heartbreaks and miseries, but the United States’ struggle for independence and recognition in the post-Revolutionary era.
At the time of the book’s initial release in America, the novel was a genre viewed with suspicion by Enlightenment-era moral critics. The reaction to Charlotte’s death was the perfect example of why, explains the scholar Cathy Davidson, who has written extensively about Charlotte Temple and its author Susanna Rowson. Novels had the power to bring forth a deep emotional identification between reader and subject, one which “subverts moral censure.” Charlotte broke the rules by eloping and becoming pregnant out of wedlock—but instead of seeing her death as fitting punishment for immorality, readers pitied her, wept for her, and made her into something of a folk hero.
Pilgrims to Charlotte’s gravestone—men, women, even newly married couples on their honeymoons—left flowers, cards, and their tears at the “shrine of the girl who died for love.” Many of the visitors believed she was a real person, a belief supported by churchyard caretakers who would answer in the affirmative if asked by visitors if Charlotte was really buried there. The grave was so popular that gardeners marked it with flowers—the only location in the churchyard so decorated—so that they could easily point it out when asked.
Susanna Rowson always insisted that Temple was based on a real person. Although there was no evidence for this, it was taken as gospel by readers as well as reporters, who observed the continuing popularity of Temple’s tomb throughout the latter half of the 19th century. It became a popular topic for newspaper articles, often ones purporting to know the true story of the woman in the grave and her sad end.
At the time, the grave bore a rectangular depression (often filled with water and visited by birds) that many assumed had once been filled by a marble or silver plaque with more details about the deceased. This apparent absence was cause for great speculation, and added to the mystique of the grave. Had someone stolen the plaque? If so, why?
In an 1888 interview, William Kelby, at the time the librarian of the New York Historical Society, told a reporter that decades earlier, “[people] were not so quick to discern between facts and fiction as they are now in this novel-writing and novel-reading age,” and thus were likely to believe that there really was a Charlotte Temple, and she really was buried beneath the slab at Trinity.
The origin of the grave was much more mundane, Kelby asserted. It was most likely a stonecutter involved with the 1840s rebuilding of the church (after structural problems had condemned the 1790 edifice) who laid the stone and cut Charlotte’s name into it. This is the story still told by churchyard tour guides today, as Trinity archivist Kathryn Hurwitz explained. The timeline fits: There are no references to the tomb existing before the 1850s, and the current Trinity church building was built in the mid-1840s. The tombstone is made of the same New Jersey brownstone as the building, and so was probably laid around the same time, underneath one of the many temporary work tents that occupied the churchyard during construction.
“There’s nobody down there,” she clarified. “If there was at some point, they weren’t Charlotte, because Charlotte [was] not a real person.” After over a century of curiosity, the Trinity archives team received the go-ahead to investigate the grave in 2008. This involved lifting the slab to check if there was a burial vault underneath it—there wasn’t—and then inserting a scope into the packed earth to see if any remains could be detected—none were found. So it probably wasn’t the noblewoman Charlotte Stanley, who many pointed to as potential inspiration for Charlotte Temple’s story, nor any actual New York woman coincidentally named Charlotte Temple.
Ivy Stabell points out that the grave might have been a kind of get-rich-quick scheme. Whoever created it might have been “someone who had kind of a savvy business sense about them,” she said. “[It was] the era where tourism was beginning, regular middle-class people are starting to [tour] around, and guide books to places like New York are being published.”
Stabell’s connection of the grave to commerce makes sense in light of the fact that beginning in the 1820s, popular stage adaptations of Charlotte Temple were being performed at theaters across New York, including in the 1840s at P.T. Barnum’s incredibly popular American Museum. The play version re-popularized the story for new generations of New Yorkers, and whether it was Barnum himself who paid a Trinity workman to illegally carve the slab, perhaps in order to earn a penny or two on giving sentimental audience members tours of the spot (much as an unscrupulous villager did for the reputed grave of Charles Dickens’s Little Nell), or a workman who had seen the play and was moved enough by it to want to create a monument to the lost maiden, the grave ensured Charlotte’s legend would live on—for a while longer, at least.
Professors from local schools will often bring their students to Trinity to explain the phenomenon of Charlotte Temple and what she represents about American literature and novel-reading culture, but these days, “other than academics, people are not coming specifically to see Charlotte,” said Hurwitz.
Once upon a time, Charlotte was the most popular grave at Trinity, but today famous neighbors like Alexander Hamilton get more attention. But you don’t need to have been falsely convinced that someone like Charlotte Temple was a real person to want to pay your respects at an important site. Fan pilgrimage for fictional characters is popular worldwide, especially at places related to their deaths—from the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, the famous spot of Sherlock Holmes’s “death,” to the shrine to Ianto Jones of Torchwood, which visitors have flocked to in Cardiff since 2009. As Charlotte’s visitors in the 1850s knew, the emotional experience of feeling connected to a character in a story, as if they were real, can be a powerful one.