CHARLESTOWN, formerly a separate city of Middlesex county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., but since 1874 a part of the city of Boston, with which it had long before been in many respects practically one. It is situated on a small peninsula on Boston harbour, between the mouths of the Mystic and Charles rivers; the first bridge across the Charles, built in 1786, connected Charlestown and Boston. A United States navy yard (1800), occupying about 87 acres, and the Massachusetts state prison (1805) are here; the old burying-ground contains the grave of John Harvard and that of Thomas Beecher, the first American member of the famous Beecher family; and there is a soldiers’ and sailors’ monument (1872), designed by Martin Milmore. Charlestown was founded in 1628 or 1629, being the oldest part of Boston, and soon rose into importance; it was organized as a township in 1630, and was chartered as a city in 1847. Within its limits was fought, on the 17th of June 1775, the battle of Bunker Hill (q.v.), when Charlestown was almost completely destroyed by the British. The Bunker Hill Monument commemorates the battle; and the navy yard at Moulton’s Point was the landing-place of the attacking British troops. Little was done toward the rebuilding of Charlestown until 1783. The original territory of the township was very large, and from parts of it were formed Woburn (1642), Malden (1649), Stoneham (1725), and Somerville (1842); other parts were annexed to Cambridge, to Medford and to Arlington. S.F.B. Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, was born here; and Charlestown was the birthplace and home of Nathaniel Gorham (1738-1796), a member of the Continental Congress in 1782-1783 and 1785-1787, and its president in 1786; and was the home of Loammi Baldwin (1780-1838), a well-known civil engineer; of Samuel Dexter (1761-1816), an eminent lawyer, secretary of war and for a short time secretary of the treasury in the cabinet of President John Adams; and of Oliver Holden (1765-1831), a composer of hymn-tunes, including “Coronation.”
See R. Frothingham, History of Charlestown (Boston, 1845), covering 1629-1775; J.F. Hunnewell, A Century of Town Life ... 1775-1887 (Boston, 1888); and Timothy T. Sawyer, Old Charlestown (1902).
CHARLET, NICOLAS TOUSSAINT (1792-1845), French designer and painter, more especially of military subjects, was born in Paris on the 20th of December 1792. He was the son of a dragoon in the Republican army, whose death in the ranks left the widow and orphan in very poor circumstances. Madame Charlet, however, a woman of determined spirit and an extreme Napoleonist, managed to give her boy a moderate education at the Lycée Napoléon, and was repaid by his lifelong affection. His first employment was in a Parisian mairie, where he had to register recruits: he served in the National Guard in 1814, fought bravely at the Barrière de Clichy, and, being thus unacceptable to the Bourbon party, was dismissed from the mairie in 1816. He then, having from a very early age had a propensity for drawing, entered the atelier of the distinguished painter Baron Gros, and soon began issuing the first of those lithographed designs which eventually brought him renown. His “Grenadier de Waterloo,” 1817, with the motto “La Garde meurt et ne se rend pas” (a famous phrase frequently attributed to Cambronne, but which he never uttered, and which cannot, perhaps, be traced farther than to this lithograph by Charlet), was particularly popular. It was only towards 1822, however, that he began to be successful in a professional sense. Lithographs (about 2000 altogether), water-colours, sepia-drawings, numerous oil sketches, and a few etchings followed one another rapidly; there were also three exhibited oil pictures, the first of which was especially admired—“Episode in the Campaign of Russia” (1836), the “Passage of the Rhine by Moreau” (1837), “Wounded Soldiers Halting in a Ravine” (1843). Besides the military subjects in which he peculiarly delighted, and which found an energetic response in the popular heart, and kept alive a feeling of regret for the recent past of the French nation and discontent with the present,—a feeling which increased upon the artist himself towards the close of his career,—Charlet designed many subjects of town life and peasant life, the ways of children, &c., with much wit and whim in the descriptive mottoes. One of the most famous sets is the “Vie civile, politique, et militaire du Caporal Valentin,” 50 lithographs, dating from 1838 to 1842. In 1838 his health began to fail owing to an affection of the chest. He died in Paris on the 30th of October 1845. Charlet was an uncommonly tall man, with an expressive face, bantering and good natured; his character corresponded, full of boyish fun and high spirits, with manly independence, and a vein of religious feeling, and he was a hearty favourite among his intimates, one of whom was the painter Géricault. Charlet married in 1824, and two sons survived him.
A life of Charlet was published in 1856 by a military friend, De la Combe.
(W. M. R.)
CHARLEVILLE, a town of north-eastern France, in the department of Ardennes, 151 m. N.E. of Paris on the Eastern railway. Pop. (1906) 19,693. Charleville is situated within a bend of the Meuse on its left bank, opposite Mézières, with which it is united by a suspension bridge. The town was founded in 1606 by Charles III. (Gonzaga), duke of Nevers, afterwards duke of Mantua, and is laid out on a uniform plan. Its central and most interesting portion is the Place Ducale, a large square surrounded by old houses with high-pitched roofs, the porches being arranged so as to form a continuous arcade; in the centre there is a fountain surmounted by a statue of the duke Charles. A handsome church in the Romanesque style and the other public buildings date from the 19th century. An old mill, standing on the bank of the river, dates from the early years of the town’s existence. On the right bank of the Meuse is Mont Olympe, with the ruins of a fortress dismantled under Louis XIV. Charleville, which shares with Mézières the administrative institutions of the department of Ardennes, has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a chamber of commerce, a board of trade-arbitrators and lycées and training colleges for both sexes. Its chief industries are metal-founding and the manufacture of nails, anvils, tools and other iron goods, and brush-making; leather-working and sugar-refining, and the making of bricks and clay pipes are also carried on.