Red cloth binding with gilt title on the front board. Gilt title and floral decoration on the spine.

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Charlotte Maria Tucker (8 May 1821 – 2 December 1893) was a prolific English writer and poet for children and adults, who wrote under the pseudonym A.L.O.E. (a Lady of England). Late in life she spent a period as a volunteer missionary in India, where she died.

The work of Charlotte Tucker as a children’s writer was imbued with her Evangelical religious beliefs. Most of her stories were allegories with a clear moral, but she leavened her didacticism with a degree of realism and naturalism.  As she explained in an 1851 letter to a publisher, “My position in life renders me independent of any exertions of my own; I pray but for God’s blessing upon my attempts to instruct His lambs in the things which concern their everlasting welfare.”

Many of her 150 or more titles appeared in magazines before being collected into books. Among her titles were The Rambles of a Rat (1857), Parliament in the Play-Room (1861), Triumph over Midian (1866), A Wreath of Smoke (1871) and Pomegranates from the Punjab (1878). A biography by a fellow children’s writer, Agnes Giberne, appeared in 1895.

The proceeds from her writings she often devoted to missionary or charity work. Tucker’s contemporaries criticized the strong didacticism in her writing, but her creed was concerned not with original sin but with the chance of improvement for all people and races. Her realistic portrayals of the poor may have drawn on her experience as a workhouse visitor in Marylebone. Titles of hers are still occasionally reissued by publishers specializing in Christian books, including Lamplighter Ministries, an American nonprofit organization headquartered in Mount Morris, New York, best known for its Lamplighter Family Collection series.