Tucker, Charlotte Maria (1821–1893)

English children's writer and missionary. Name variations: (pseudonyms) A.L.O.E., A Lady of England. Born on May 8, 1821, in Barnet, England; died on December 2, 1893, in Amritsar, India; daughter of Henry St. George Tucker (a civil servant and financier) and Jane (Boswell) Tucker; educated privately in England; never married; no children.

Published first book (1852); published some 140 books for the young, and donated proceeds to charity; served as a Church of England missionary in India (1875–93).

Selected writings (under pseudonym A.L.O.E.):

Claremont Tales; or Illustrations of the Beatitudes (1852); The Rambles of a Rat (1854); Wings and Stings (1855); Old Friends with New Faces (1858); The Story of a Needle; The Giant Killer (1868); Cyril Ashley (1870).

Born in Barnet, England, on May 8, 1821, Charlotte Maria Tucker was the sixth and last child of Jane Boswell Tucker , the Scottish-born daughter of an Edinburgh attorney who was related to James Boswell, biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Henry St. George Tucker, an expert on Indian finance who served as chair of the East India Company. Several generations of the Tucker family had been civil servants in the British colonies, including Bermuda and India.

When Tucker was only a year old, the family moved from Barnet to London, where she was educated privately in the family home. Her family's involvement in English politics made the Tucker house a popular gathering place for prominent political figures, including the duke of Wellington, and Tucker met many of these notables as they came and went while she did her lessons.

From the time she was young, Tucker spent much of her free time writing poetry and plays, although as she grew older she also became involved in charity work. Her father's opposition, however, kept her from pursuing her dream of publishing her writing until his death in 1851. Her first book, Claremont Tales; or Illustrations of the Beatitudes, published the following year, was a collection of morality tales aimed at children. It was well received, and she would go on to produce one to three books every year for the rest of her life. In all, Tucker wrote and published some 140 books; all were produced under the pseudonym A.L.O.E., short for "A Lady of England," and all the proceeds were donated to charity. She used her writings to convey moral lessons to young readers, employing allegory, homilies, adventure tales, and Bible stories to get her point across. Among the best known of her books are The Rambles of a Rat, Wings and Stings, Old Friends with New Faces, The Story of a Needle, and The Giant Killer.

Tucker lived with her mother until her mother's death in 1869, after which she made her home with a brother. A lifelong member of the Church of England, in 1875 she decided to travel to India as a missionary in service of the church's Zenana Society. To prepare for this new challenge, she taught herself Hindi. Once in India, Tucker made her headquarters in Batala, north of Lahore. As part of her duties there, she visited high-caste Indian women who were kept in enforced seclusion and also focused on the education and conversion of Indian boys. To help spread the faith, she wrote a number of pamphlets that were later translated into local dialects.

In 1885, Tucker was laid low by a serious illness and never recovered her strength, although she continued to write. She died eight years later in the Indian city of Amritsar and was buried without a coffin, in accordance with her wishes that her funeral cost no more than five rupees, in her adopted city of Batala.

sources:

Blain, Virginia, Pat Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

The Concise Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1936.

Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Don Amerman , freelance writer, Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania