Charlotte Caroline Richardson

Charlotte Caroline Richardson (15 May 1795 – 29 March 1854) was a minor British poet and writer. Her life was shaped in part by the publication The Ladies' Diary.

Her parents and the magazine Betty Smales and R. Richardson in the Ladies Diary Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord 1786 Charlotte's father was Robert Richardson, a regular writer for the magazine The Ladies' Diary. He admired a fellow contributor to the magazine called Elizabeth Smales, who wrote enigmas in verse. Richardson had been so intrigued by "Betty Smales" that he wrote letters of admiration, and from these and a short correspondence, they were later married.

I took the book, within it gaz'd, The more I read, the more amaz'd; I saw the name of Betty Smales, Prefix'd to entertaining tales, Of Richardson, her rhyming beau... to Elizabeth and Robert Richardson. She was the youngest of three daughters. After her father's death in 1804, her mother decided to open a boarding school in Vauxhall for the dual purpose of earning an income as well as ensuring her two oldest children could be educated. She decided to temporarily send her youngest, Charlotte, to live with an aunt who, for unknown reasons, failed to return her for a decade. It was neither Charlotte or her mother's idea that she should spend her childhood in Hinderwell, Yorkshire.

In an attempt to reconnect with her family, Richardson wrote a poem in The Ladies' Diary in 1815, explicitly referring to her mother. Her mother replied in verse a year later, and Richardson reunited with her immediate family in London. All of Richardson's family (her mother and her two older sisters) regularly wrote contributions for the Ladies' Diary. In 1841, her mother died, and five years later, Richardson and her sister Elizabeth made a memoir of her life titled Poems, which was derived from her mother's contributions to The Ladies' Diary. The more modern version of this biography (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and this article differ substantially from the DNB version. The ODNB notes however that confusion is still possible.