Fair Charlotte

The story is a cautionary tale concerning a young girl called Charlotte who refused to wrap up warmly to go on a sleigh ride to a New Year's ball. Upon arriving at the ball, her fiancé discovers that she has frozen to death during the journey.

The ballad of "Fair Charlotte" is based on a poem by Seba Smith that was first published in The Rover, a Maine newspaper, on December 28, 1843, under the title A Corpse Going To A Ball.[2] According to folklorist Phillips Barry, Smith's composition was based on an incident recounted in an 1840 New York Observer article of the same name.[3] The story from the "New York Observer" [4] was entitled "A Corpse Going To a Ball" and was reprinted in an Ohio Newspaper: "Ohio Democrat and Dover Advertiser" February 28, 1840 p. 1[5] the article claimed that the incident in question had happened on January 1, 1840; it also claimed that this report was true [yet gave no location of the accident]; likewise it also mentioned at the very beginning a tale called "Death at the Toilet" which in turn came from an 1838 work called "Passages from the Diary of a London Physician".[6] The "Death at the Toilet" told of a vain young woman who was determined to go a ball despite the fact that she suffers from heart problems; because of Cold weather in her room she is found dead at her toilet while primping herself for the ball; the morale of the story is a diatribe against vanity-"...I have seen many hundreds of corpses, as well in the calm composure of natural death, as mangled and distorted by violence;but never have I seen so startling a satire upon human vanity, so repulsive, unsightly, and loathsome a spectacle as a corpse dressed for a ball!." [7] Other Newspapers which reprinted the story were the "Vermont Telegraph" {February 19, 1840[8] and a follow up article April 1, 1840[9]} and "Southern Argus" March 3, 1840 of Columbus Mississippi.[10] A version of Smith's poem was subsequently set to music, leading to the creation of the ballad. During the 20th century, a version of the ballad was sung by Almeda Riddle under the title "Young Carlotta".[2]

• Springfield Mountain, another cautionary folk ballad situated in New England, about a boy who is bitten by a rattlesnake. The two ballads are often cited together as examples of narrative verse representative of obituary tradition.
• Frozen Charlotte, a doll created after the ballad.

• Text of the Seba Smith poem
• One version of the Fair Charlotte ballad
• Another version of Fair Charlotte collected and originally published in 1924.