Dor'othy, charwoman of Old Trapbois the miser and his daughter Martha.—Sir W. Scott, Fortunes of Nigel (time, James I.).
Dorothy Pearson. The childless wife of a Puritan settler in New England. Her husband brings her home a boy whom he found crouching under the gallows of his Quaker father, and she adopts him at once, despite the opposition of "the congregation." A fortnight after he entered the family, his own mother invades the pulpit of the Orthodox meeting house, and delivers an anathema against her sect. Her boy presses forward to meet her, but, after a conflict of emotions she returns him to Dorothy. He submits, but pines for his mother through the months that pass before her return with the news of religious toleration. Dorothy's loving offices have smoothed the child's pathway to the grave, and she hangs above him with tears of maternal grief as he breathes his last in his mother's arms.—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Gentle Boy (1851.)
Dorothy Q. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "grandmother's mother." Her portrait taken at the age of "thirteen summers, or less," is the subject of his lines, "Dorothy Q. A Family Portrait."
"O, Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,—
All my tenure of heart and hand
All my title to house and land,
Mother and sister and child and wife