Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

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CET was a prolific writer of poems, novels, children's books and religious tracts during the early nineteenth century, as well as a periodical editor. She was extremely popular in her day as a didactic author of texts for children, but is now mostly remembered for her writing on the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. She is forthright and passionate in her denunciation of the effects on women of waged industrial employment, the monstrous abuse of forcing the female to forsake her proper sphere.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. The Wrongs of Woman. John S. Taylor, 1844.
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Photograph of a print of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna by Francis Croll. She is seen from the shoulders up, wearing a simple dark dress with a grey shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and a light cap which is smooth on top, ruffled around the sides, and tied in a bow under her chin. A pendant on a long chain hangs round her neck. Her signature is reproduced below.

Milestones

1 October 1790
Elizabeth Browne (later CET ) was born in Norwich.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
1819
Under a pseudonymous description, the future CET published at Hythe in KentPoems Founded on the Events of the War in the Peninsula, describing herself on the title-page as the Wife of an Officer..
Burmester, James, Rosamund Burmester, and Emma Pound. English Books. James Burmester Rare Books, 1985.
list 33 (2014)
1841
CET 's innovative industrial novel Helen Fleetwood was published in volume form by R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside .
Khorana, Meena, and Judith Gero John, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 163. Gale Research, 1996.
309
1843
CET 's final substantial work of fiction, Judah's Lion, was published in the same year that she treated one of its topics, the conversion of the Jews, in her pamphlet Israel's Ordinances.
Khorana, Meena, and Judith Gero John, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 163. Gale Research, 1996.
314
12 July 1846
CET died of breast cancer at Ramsgate in Kent, where she is buried.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge, 1989.

Biography

Childhood

1 October 1790
Elizabeth Browne (later CET ) was born in Norwich.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

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