11 August 2015

NYC #11: 'Charlotte Temple', Trinity Church, Lower Manhattan

This is a mystery literary grave, which may not even be a grave at all as there are doubts about anyone having been buried here. The name inscribed is Charlotte Temple, the protagonist of novelist Susanna Haswell Rowson's Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1790). An imaginary grave of an imaginary person? Perhaps, although Rowson sowed the seeds of doubt in suggesting that this was a real person: or did she do that to sell even more copies of her highly successful novel?

 (The above image looks so squat because – this part of the churchyard being temporarily fenced off from the public – I was forced to take it from a considerable distance away.)

No comments: