Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

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Standard Name: Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth
Birth Name: Charlotte Elizabeth Browne
Married Name: Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan
Married Name: Charlotte ELizabeth Tonna
Pseudonym: Charlotte Elizabeth
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.
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Martineau
Critic Linda H. Peterson places the Autobiography as a response to the domestic memoir generally and to the domestication of the religious and intellectual in the memoirs of various women including Charlotte Tonna . Instead...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Gaskell
EG wrote Mary Barton following the death of her ten-month-old son in 1845. Johann Ludwig Uhland 's Auf der Überfahrt, from which she takes one of her epigraphs, refers to two from the spirit-land...
Literary responses Mary Wollstonecraft
MW 's posthumous vilification was followed by a long period during which her name was considered barely fit to be mentioned. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna borrowed her title The Wrongs of Woman in 1843; Maria Jane Jewsbury
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
Mary Russell Mitford wrote disapprovingly of HM 's claims: I see no good in these experiments.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
2: 281
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna 's pamphlet Mesmerism: A Letter to Miss Martineau, argued that if the account...
Reception Harriet Beecher Stowe
HBS 's early writing was recognized with a prize from the Western Monthly Magazine in 1834. A collection of her previously published stories entitled The Mayflower appeared in 1843.
Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford University Press, 1994.
141
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, 1990.
She introduced the collected works...
Textual Production Florence Dixie
The Agnostic Journal ran in weekly serial form FD 's final autobiographical novel, Izra, A Child of Solitude, which appeared posthumously in volume form by early January 1906.
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna had used the...
Textual Production Jane Taylor
JT published, anonymously, the highly original Rachel. A Tale, with an ugly heroine, an anti-romantically named male protagonist, Tomkins, and a courtship story still unconcluded by the end of the book.
This title was...
Textual Production Mrs F. C. Patrick
Poems Founded on the Events of the War in the Peninsula, 1819, by Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan (later Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna ) has been and sometimes still is wrongly ascribed to Mrs Fitzpatrick because it...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Clara Balfour
CB included in her collection the well-known writers Hannah More , Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna , Anna Letitia Barbauld , and Sarah Trimmer . Subjects of other sketches which also appeared separately included many of evangelical...

Timeline

6 June 1844: A new Factory Act was implemented, limiting...

National or international item

6 June 1844

A new Factory Act was implemented, limiting female factory workers of eighteen years and over to the same hours as young persons aged thirteen to seventeen.
The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Printed by J. Bentham, 1762–2024.
161-181
Chapman, Annie Beatrice Wallis, and Mary Wallis Chapman. The Status of Women Under the English Law. George Routledge and Sons, 1909.
49

March 1848: Chartist uprisings took place in London,...

National or international item

March 1848

Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.
Royle, Edward. Chartism. Longman, 1980.
40-3

31 August 1848: The Public Health Act was passed, establishing...

Building item

31 August 1848

The Public Health Act was passed, establishing the new General Board of Health as a first step towards a strong national health authority in Britain.
Kearns, Gerry. “Cholera, Nuisances and Environmental Management in Islington 1830-1855”. Living and Dying in London, edited by William F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1991, pp. 94-125.
95
Woods, Robert, and John Woodward. “Mortality, Poverty and the Environment”. Urban Disease and Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by Robert Woods and John Woodward, St Martin’s Press, 1984, pp. 19-36.
78
Smith, Francis Barrymore. The People’s Health, 1830-1910. Croom Helm, 1979.
198-200
Wohl, Anthony S. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. Harvard University Press, 1983.
90

1849: Following the death of Charlotte Elizabeth...

Writing climate item

1849

Following the death of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna , the monthly Christian Lady's Magazine ceased publication.
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914. Routledge, 1996.
216
Palmegiano, Eugenia M. Women and British Periodicals, 1832-1867: A Bibliography. Garland, 1976.
3

June 1857: The Christian Lady's Magazine (not the journal...

Writing climate item

June 1857

The Christian Lady's Magazine (not the journal of this title formerly edited by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna ) ceased publication.
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914. Routledge, 1996.
216
Palmegiano, Eugenia M. Women and British Periodicals, 1832-1867: A Bibliography. Garland, 1976.
3

Texts

Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. A Few Words on the Eightieth Psalm. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1835.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. A Friendly Address to Converts from the Roman Catholic Church. T. I. White, 1828.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Allen M’Leod, the Highland Soldier. F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1827.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Anne Bell. Bentham and Hardy, 1826.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Combination. M. W. Dodd, 1844.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Derry. J. Nisbet, 1833.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Helen Fleetwood. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1841.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Dodd, 1845, p. v - vii.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Ireland’s Crisis. 1832.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Judah’s Lion. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1843.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Kindness to Animals. Religious Tract Society, 1844.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Letters from Ireland, MDCCCXXXVII. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1838.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Mesmerism. Seeley, Burnside, and Seeley, 1844.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Mesmerism. W. S. Martien, 1847.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Osric. W. Curry, Jun., 1825.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Personal Recollections. American Tract Society, 1840.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Personal Recollections. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1841.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Poems Founded on the Events of the War in the Peninsula. 1819.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and Other English Martyrs. John S. Taylor, 1844.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, editor. The Christian Lady’s Magazine. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, and Edward Bickersteth. The English Martyrology. R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837, 2 vols.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. The Female Martyrs of the English Reformation. John S. Taylor, 1844.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. The Glory of Israel. American Sunday-School Union, 1843.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. The Happy Mute. L. B. Seeley, 1833.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth. The Minor Poems of Charlotte Elizabeth. P. D.Hardy, 1848.