Catherine Ann Turner Dorset

Catherine Ann Turner Dorset created children's verse that linked literary satire with natural-history observation. Born Catherine Ann Turner, she was the younger sister of novelist and poet Charlotte Smith, and some of her earliest poems appeared anonymously in Smith's Conversations Introducing Poetry. Her best-known work, The Peacock at Home, first appeared anonymously in 1807 as a sequel to William Roscoe's The Butterfly's Ball. John Harris issued it in his Cabinet series with illustrations by William Mulready, and Dorset's authorship was disclosed in an expanded 1809 collection. The poem imagines a gathering of birds while gently exposing fashionable manners, making its ornithological cast useful as both entertainment and instruction. Dorset also wrote The Lion's Masquerade and adapted Madame de Beaumont's tale Think Before You Speak. Records from the Hockliffe Project and the Dictionary of National Biography place her within a family of writers and the market for early nineteenth-century children's literature.