Charlotte Sharman (1832–1929) was a Christian woman who ran orphanages for girls in West Square Southwark, Gravesend, Hampton, and Tunbridge Wells.
Her father was a general labourer, and in the 1841 census he and his family were recorded as living at Union Place, Newington, in the borough of Lambeth.
This was highlighted by Charles Dickens who vividly portrayed the horrors of the workhouse, the lot of poor children, and the evil of child slavery.
Sharman began to take girls from off the streets and those bound for the workhouses and put them with families of friends that she knew.
The idea of a home to care for her girls came from the Reverend Samuel Martin, minister of Westminster Chapel where Sharman was a member.
There were other homes around but entrance was competitive, and a great deal of influence, votes, and money was often needed to gain admittance to them.
In response to the pamphlet finance came in, and on 6 May 1867 she rented the house next to her mother in West Square and opened her first home for 13 girls.
Kate was seven and her young brother only two years nine months when their mother died shortly after their father, leaving the family orphaned and destitute.
The mansion was in very poor condition, and the order to pull it down led to Sharman deciding to build her own orphanage.
When the North Wing was opened, some of these Hampton residents were moved back, but others were sent to Gravesend where she had acquired an old building called 'the castle'.
Like her mentor George Müller, Charlotte Sharman was dependent on donations for the support of her orphans, or as she liked to call them 'her little people'.
John C Carlile, a close friend, paid Sharman the tribute of being a woman of faith, an apostle of practical religion, kind, intelligent, sharp witted and humorous.
"[6] Among her other friends were the famous evangelical preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon and the social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.