Charlotte Champe Stearns

Charlotte Champe Eliot (née Stearns; October 22, 1843 – September 10, 1929) was an American school teacher, poet, biographer, and social worker. She was the mother of T. S. Eliot, a famous poet, editor and literary critic, wife of Henry Ware Eliot, who ran the Hydraulic Press Brick Company in St. Louis, Missouri, and daughter-in-law of William Greenleaf Eliot, a leading minister in St. Louis and a founder of Washington University in St. Louis.

Early life and education Charlotte Champe Stearns was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the second daughter of nine children from her parents Charlotte Stearns (née Blood) and Thomas Stearns Jr. Her father, Thomas, was a merchant who lived in several cities, before he settled down as a partner in the trading firm of Stearns & Bailey in Boston, Massachusetts. Charlotte attended private school and graduated from the State Normal School of Framingham, Massachusetts in 1862. T. S. attended Smith Academy and then furthered his education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When T. S. was at Harvard, Charlotte sent him a letter that stated: "I hope in your literary work you will receive early the recognition I strove for and failed. I should so have loved a college course, but was obliged to teach before I was nineteen. I graduated with high rank, 'a young lady of unusual brilliancy as a scholar' my old yellow testimonial says, but when I was set to teaching young children, my Trigonometry and Astronomy counted for nought, and I made a dead failure."

After her years as a teacher, she participated in social reforms including providing a house of detention for juveniles.