Charlotte Maria Tucker/A.L.O.E. (A Lady of England)

Charlotte Maria Tucker or A.L.O.E. (“A Lady of England”) (b. 1821–d. 1893) was a popular author of didactic children’s literature, a prolific evangelical reformer writing religious stories and tracts, and an indefatigable missionary who spent the last eighteen years of her life in India. Tucker is widely credited with having written around 150 books, though the exact number is unclear because her works were so frequently collected and reedited as articles in magazines, as Sunday school prizes, and as small-format publications. Tucker grew up in London, the third daughter and eighth child of Henry St. George Tucker. Henry Tucker spent much of his life working in India, beginning at age fourteen as midshipman on a merchant vessel and finally becoming a Director of the East India Company and twice Chairman of its Court of Directors. Charlotte Tucker was known for her vivacity as a child, but a turn toward evangelical beliefs in the 1840s caused her to retreat from society. In 1847, Tucker’s domestic responsibilities increased, as she became the primary caretaker for three of her brother’s children after his departure to India. Her father’s death and the marriage of her beloved younger sister Dorothea Laura in 1851 marked the beginning of a new epoch in which Tucker dedicated her life to social and literary labor. Tucker began regular visits to the Marylebone Workhouse and, following the publication of The Claremont Tales in 1852, became a prolific and well-known author under the pen name A.L.O.E. (A Lady of England). In 1875, at the age of fifty-four, Tucker traveled alone as a self-financed missionary to India as part of the Indian Female Normal School Society (which split in 1880, after which Tucker belonged to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society). After a brief period in Amritsar, Tucker moved to Batala, where she spent most of her remaining life, sometimes as the only European missionary in the city. While Tucker’s charge was explicitly to work for the conversion of women, she particularly enjoyed the company of the boys at Batala’s Christian school and became the chief supporter of a Mission School created for boys who had not yet converted to Christianity. Tucker continued to be highly productive in her writing until the last few years of her life, writing inexpensive tracts for Indian audiences that were translated and distributed across the country. In the late nineteenth century, Tucker received considerable public attention for her career as an author and missionary. Her works passed into obscurity in the twentieth century and only a few critical accounts made mention of her literary or personal accomplishments. More recent critics have returned to Tucker from a range of literary and cultural perspectives, finding in her life and writings material for scholars of British colonialism, female biography, narrative allegory, animal studies, biblical interpretation, and scientific literature for children. Both as an author and missionary, Tucker astutely used her works to challenge gender hierarchies and to claim cultural and religious authority.