Charlotte Maria Tucker belongs to the tradition of women reformers writing Sunday-school and missionary literature in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Such literature focused on various social and religious causes and disseminated much useful knowledge. She was influenced by predecessors such as Mary Martha Sherwood and Hannah More and can be compared to contemporaries such as Maria Louisa Charlesworth and Hesba Stretton.

Born into a large, middle-class Victorian family with strong ties to the British Empire in India, Tucker was the sixth child and third daughter of Henry St. George Tucker and Jane Boswell. Her father was born on the Isle of St. George in Bermuda, was educated in England, and at the age of fourteen was sent to India, where he entered the Bengal Civil Service in 1792 and eventually became a chairman in the East India Company. After twenty-five years in India he returned to England and, in...