No . 136
The Trusty Servant
Charlotte Mary Yonge , 1823-1901
This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Yonge , the best-selling Victorian novelist . Christopher Tolley ( Co Ro , 79-17 ) looks at her work and her connection with Winchester College .
Charlotte Yonge was born and lived in Otterbourne , just outside Winchester , where she taught daily in the village school , and worshipped ( also daily ) in the parish church which her father built . After her father died in 1854 she was a dutiful and loving companion to her widowed mother . She never married , did not care for the ‘ whirl ’ of London and hardly ever went abroad . Her life was described in her Times obituary as ‘ not outwardly different from the lives of thousands of homekeeping Englishwomen ’.
But she was different . Because she wrote . And wrote , and wrote , with an extraordinary and prodigious Victorian energy . Novels , stories for children , histories , biographies , translations , educational and religious books , magazine articles , plays , works on natural and local history : in a career lasting fifty-odd years she produced nearly two hundred publications as well as editing for most of that time her magazine for girls , The Monthly Packet . Her facility was legendary . She would work simultaneously on three literary tasks , ‘ writing a page of each , leaving it to dry , and going on with another ’. Her output diminished only during Lent when she denied herself the pleasure of writing fiction . And if her productivity rivalled Dickens , so in her own day did her fame . The book which made her reputation , The Heir of Redclyffe ( 1853 ) was a ‘ blazing success ’, as popular with officers serving in the Crimea as with their sisters at home . It was idolised by the undergraduate William Morris and cried over by Jo March in Little Women .
To read Charlotte Yonge is to experience Victorianism from the inside . Not for her the reforming zeal or the drive for self-fulfilment which make Dickens or George Eliot seem like our contemporaries . Her contented governesses turn Jane Eyre on its head . She wholeheartedly accepts the world to which she belongs . Her values are duty and self-denial : time and again her characters come up against ‘ the great unanswerable obstacle , the three words , “ It is wrong !”’ Her heroes are earnest clergymen , army officers , men who lead pure and strenuous lives at sea or in the colonies , missionaries in the South Seas . Her girls ( she likes to call them ‘ maidens ’) are passionate about Sir Walter Scott and chivalry : Guy Morville in The Heir of Redclyffe combines medieval knight with Victorian gentleman , and just a dash of the Byronic .
Charlotte would have agreed with her fellow Hampshire novelist Jane Austen , that families in the country were ‘ the very thing to work on ’. Her core subject is family life , on which in her own upper-middle-class Anglican milieu she is a mine of information . Her families are larger than Jane Austen ’ s , more outwardly devout and as likely to suffer from inadequate or absent parents . They are close-knit , anxious about their children ’ s education and indifferent to material wealth though not to class . On women ’ s issues Charlotte Yonge is conservative , often embarrassingly so , and mocks the progressives . In one of her stories the threat of a women ’ s lecture vanishes when the ladies are diverted by a children ’ s party . But feminist critics are interested by her relative lack of focus on marriage , certainly the story-book , happilyever-after kind . Brothers and sisters , parents and children , often have far stronger relationships in her work than husbands and wives , and girls are given space to fulfil themselves outside the exclusive sphere of wedded bliss , albeit within the limits of convention . Not strong on plot , she has a wonderful ear for conversation , honed by writing down talk that she overheard . And she is a gifted creator of ‘ relatable ’ characters , with whom the reader becomes instant friends : such are Dr May and his goldenhearted daughter Ethel in The Daisy Chain , the invalid Charlie Edmonstone ( The Heir of Redclyffe ), impetuous Kate Umfraville ( Countess Kate ) and Jane Mohun , the busybody maiden aunt who enlivens several books . It is common for individuals and families , once established , to reappear , often on the margin of subsequent stories . The novels link together to make ‘ a single created world ’ which is her own comédie humaine .
Charlotte Yonge was given a very good , if strict , home education , and her parents ’ local circle of friends included several ‘ people of light and leading ’. Among these were Sir William Heathcote , the Tory squire of Hursley ; John Keble , the man Heathcote had appointed to be his parish priest ; and in Winchester the Revd Dr George Moberly , headmaster of the College , with his numerous family .
As the author of The Christian Year and one of the instigators of the Oxford ( Tractarian ) movement , Keble was a national figure in the church , whose decision to retire to a life of quiet usefulness in a Hampshire village invested him with the sanctity of a latter-day George Herbert . Higher achieving , cleverer men were overawed by Keble . He influenced Charlotte
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