Guest established the Mabinogion as a source literary text of Europe, claiming this recognition among literati in the context of contemporary passions for the chivalric romance of King Arthur and the Gothic movement.

The name Guest used for the book was derived from a mediaeval copyist's error, already established in the 18th century by William Owen Pughe and the London Welsh societies.

With her second husband, Charles Schreiber, she became a well known Victorian collector of porcelain; their collection is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

She taught herself Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian as well as studying Latin, Greek, French and Italian with her brothers' tutor.

[5] The first national working-class movement in the world, Chartism, helped Lady Charlotte understand that there was a need for "closer involvement in practical work for the people of Dowlais".

With the backing of her cousin, Henry Layard, Lady Charlotte eventually focused her efforts on providing education in Dowlais.

Despite her sex, a great disadvantage in that day in public affairs, Lady Charlotte managed to propagate her ideas and implement many of her educational developments.

[5] The Dowlais school is described as "probably the most important and most progressive not only in the industrial history of South Wales, but of the whole of Britain during the nineteenth century.

As a result of this Guest would be sole trustee while a widow but she remarried in 1855 to Charles Schreiber and de facto control fell to Clark although there are reports that she gave up running the iron works, and instead travelled and assembled an impressive ceramics collection.

The meaning Mabinogi is obscure, but it clearly roots in the word 'mab' for son, child, young person: this is to be seen in the naming convention 'son of' in genealogies.

In 2007 the leading modern scholar of the field, John Bollard, challenged the validity of the Mabinogion collection, saying that apart from the Four Branches of the Mabinogi which are coherent, the stories have little in common with each other except that they are prose fictions surviving in the same mediaeval manuscripts.

She made friends with the learned men of the time and almost married the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), who was attracted to her intelligence.

[citation needed] Her first love is believed to have been Augustus O’Brien whom she had met at the age of fourteen, something which was later described as the best day of her life.

[citation needed] After the brief flirtation with Disraeli, she escaped her unhappy home life through marriage in 1833, at the age of twenty-one.

Her husband, John Josiah Guest, was a prominent industrialist and ironmaster (owner of the Dowlais Iron Company, the largest of its day) and the first member of parliament from the town of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales.

Though Guest was member of parliament for Merthyr, extremely wealthy, and of good family, he was much lower in status than his aristocratic wife, which caused her significant social strain.

She bore ten children:[11] She took an enthusiastic interest in her husband's philanthropic activities on behalf of the local community, and they built pioneering schools for their workers, as well as piping in clean water for their cottages when this was still a very new technology.

The decline of Josiah's health meant that Charlotte spent more time administering the business and took it over completely following his death in 1852.

In 1855, Charlotte married Charles Schreiber (10 May 1826 – 31 March 1884) a classical scholar who had recently been her sons' tutor,[10] and who was 14 years her junior.

The difference in status and age created a major social scandal and set her apart from many of her former close friends such as Augusta Hall.

[10] Despite the death of her first husband, Charlotte maintained an active role in implementing his philanthropic aims for the estate at Canford Manor.