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.
132
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.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

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 et al. English Books. James Burmester Rare Books.
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.
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.
314

12 July 1846

CET died of breast cancer at Ramsgate in Kent, where she is buried.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Todd, Janet, editor. Dictionary of British Women Writers. Routledge.

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.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

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