Charlotte Isabel Dick was a Tasmanian novelist and author known for her fictional romance stories involving the history and landscape of Tasmania, and in particular her bestselling 1945 novel Wild Orchard, and her 1930 novel Huon Belle.
Dick was born Charlotte Isabel Atkins (nicknamed ‘Daisy’ in her youth) to Charles J. Atkins and Kate Elizabeth Shoobridge in 1881. Her father, Charles, was an English immigrant who ran a successful share brokerage and accounting company. He was later elected Mayor of Hobart in 1910. Her mother, Kate, was a member of the affluent Shoobridge family of Derwent Valley. The Shoobridges were major hopgrowers in the region and owned extensive property.
In 1887 a typhoid fever epidemic struck Hobart. Multiple family members fell ill as a result, and Dick, aged six, was left ‘deaf, blind and speechless’ for some time. The illness had a lasting impact on her, and she wore glasses for the rest of her life as a result.
To help recover from her illness, the Shoobridge family offered Dick lodging at their large estate at Macquarie Plains. She spent much of her childhood and teenage years in and around the Shoobridge orchards, and it is on one of these properties where she met her husband, an Englishman named Ronald Dick. They married in 1908, moving into Ronald’s orchard property at Lymington in the Huon Valley area. They had two children, George and Una Margaret. Despite their best efforts, the pair failed to find success in the orchard business, ultimately deciding to move to Sussex, England, in 1913.
It is here where Dick first began publishing short stories, hoping to assist with the family finances. She contributed a few pieces for Blackwood’s Magazine, and met the owner, Mr. Blackwood, during a trip to Edinburgh. He praised her efforts and encouraged her to write a full-length novel. The family’s time in England was cut short, however, when in 1915 her husband died suddenly as the result of complications from surgery for appendicitis.
Thus, the newly widowed Isabel Dick, aged thirty-four, was forced to return to Hobart, Tasmania, with her two children. Taking the advice of Mr. Blackwood, she began writing more seriously to support her children financially. In 1920, she published her first novel The Veil of Discretion, a romance set in her home city of Hobart. The protagonist is Anne Lassiter, a governess who falls in love with a man named Maurice West, who has two children. Contemporary reviews were largely positive. One reviewer described it as ‘an attractive little story’ that ‘is wholesome and unaffected,’ and another thought it was ‘a very pleasing little Tasmanian tale,’ making special mention that ‘the writer has a lot of charm.’
Between writing her novels, Dick continued to publish short stories in newspapers and magazines, primarily Christmas themed. In 1927, a selection of these short stories were published as a single work titled Garden Peace and Christmas Tales. In both this work and The Veil of Discretion, Dick chose to abbreviate her first two names, Charlotte and Isabel, to publish as ‘C. I. Dick.’ However, from then on, she would mainly publish as ‘Charlotte I. Dick’ and ‘Isabel Dick.’
In 1930, Dick published her next novel, a romance titled Huon Belle. The novel is set in the Huon Valley, where she spent many years of her youth. The protagonist, Virginia ‘Ginny’ Lee, becomes obsessed with the natural beauty of the mountain, taking work on an orchard farm nearby just to remain in sight of it. Eventually, Virginia falls in love with one of the farmhands, Simon, with them buying the orchard together just to bask in the beauty of the valley. Reviews of the book were positive, which praised the well written characters, the ‘wholesome and original plot’ as well as the ‘highly colorful descriptions’ of the Tasmanian landscape. The novel received some modern scholarly attention in 2009 when C. A. Cranston published an essay analyzing Huon Belle from an ecofeminist perspective.
Dick’s next novel, another romance titled Wild Orchard: A Story of Early Tasmania, found much wider success than Huon Belle. The story is set in 1840s Tasmania and sees the heroine, Harriat [sic] Bracken, marrying the ambitious Jan Halifax. The pair purchase a plot of land in the Derwent Valley, a familiar scene from Dick’s youth, and try their hand at growing hops. The book was completed in 1945, and Dick attempted to have it published by a group of publishers based out of Sydney, but it was rejected for unknown reasons. She was able to have her novel published in New York by the Thomas Y. Crowell Company. There, Wild Orchard was a smash hit, quickly becoming a best seller. After doing the rounds in the US, it finally was published to a wider Australian audience in 1946 to generally positive reviews.
Many reviews praised Dick’s use of original documents and ‘authentic stories and anecdotes’ to supplement the material of her story. However, some reviewers found the characters to be rather cliché and overdone, with one writing ‘Miss Dick might have made a better story even of this sort of copper-plate commonplace romance if she had put more thought and care into her writing.’ In a 2019 journal article, Ellen Turner analyses the way Dick reconstructs Tasmania’s past in Wild Orchard. Turner notes how Dick continuously switches between a more dark, sinister portrayal of ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ and one of idyllic European beauty and civilization, emulating the British homeland of the protagonist. Turner also discusses Dick’s portrayal of Aboriginal people, noting that they are almost exclusively portrayed as ‘primitive and savage,’ reflecting ‘the settler/invader ideology of terra nullius.’
Quick to capitalise on the success of Wild Orchard, in 1947, Dick published her fourth and final novel, Country Heart. The protagonist, Charlotte Acton who grew up in the Derwent Valley, travels to South Africa following the conclusion of the Boer War to marry a man she once knew. After his death, she uses his inheritance to return to Tasmania and the landscape she loves. Reviews found the story satisfactory, but many felt disappointed that it didn’t live up to the expectations set by Wild Orchard. One reviewer wrote about how they felt ‘that the best qualities apparent in the earlier work have not been preserved,’ and another wrote that ‘it was not quite so good as its predecessor.’ Regardless, it did not find the same commercial success as Wild Orchard.
Charlotte Isabel Dick died on the 12th of September, 1959, at age seventy-eight. There is a small memorial on the side of the former All Saints Anglican Church in Melton Mowbray, Tasmania, to Dick, her husband, and her children. In their short biography on Dick, Margaret Giordano and Don Norman reflect ‘although not a major novelist, she brought Tasmania and its history to the attention of readers in the rest of the English-speaking world.’
This biography was researched and written by Brandon Mount.
Sources:
“All Saints Anglican Church – Former.” Churches Australia. https://www.churchesaustralia.org/list-of-churches/locations/tasmania/directory/1155-all-saints-anglican-church-former.
“All Saints Church of England Melton Mowbray.” Graves of Tasmania. http://www.gravesoftas.com.au/municipalities/green%20ponds/All%20Saints%20Church%20of%20England%20Melton%20Mowbray.htm.
Cranston, C. A. “Literary Eco-consciousness: Tasmanian Nature Writing and Ecofeminism.” In Australian Literary Studies Reader – Reading Down Under, edited by Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal, 362-70. New Delhi, India: SSS Publications, 2009.
Giordano, Margaret and Norman, Don. Tasmanian Literary Landmarks. Hobart, Tasmania: Shearwater Press, 1984.
Turner, Ellen. “’The whole Island is a jail and we the warders’: States of exception in Tasmanian historical fiction.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 42 (2019): 113-127. https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.1076.
