No . 136 The Trusty Servant
She shared in the outpourings of sorrow which greeted the early deaths of Arthur and Selwyn Moberly ( schoolboys at the College ) and Mary , the young wife of George Ridding . From Otterbourne Charlotte could walk to Field House , the farm at Ladwell which the Moberlys rented from Sir William Heathcote : their summer retreat , a sacred and enchanted place for the Moberly children . The house still stands , though the ‘ delicious silent wooded lanes where nightingales sang in abundance ’ are sadly reduced by the sprawl of Chandler ’ s Ford .
Charlotte was godmother to Margaret Helen Moberly , whose birth in May 1852 inspired her most loved book , The Daisy Chain . This story of Dr May and his family ( which includes two Margarets , his wife and eldest daughter ), seems to have been uncannily prophetic of the Moberlys ’ own doings . They acquired the collective nickname ‘ the daisy chain ’; and when Margaret Moberly married the Wykehamist Charles Awdry in 1876 there was a ‘ daisy wedding ’ at which ‘ everyone wore bunches of daisies ’ and ‘ daisies were scattered in front of Maggie ’ as she stepped out of church into the sunshine .
All this is recorded in Annie Moberly ’ s family memoir Dulce Domum ( 1911 ), a moving tribute to the Moberlys , their friends , and Winchester . Annie ( Charlotte Anne Elizabeth ) was Dr Moberly ’ s tenth child and the first principal of St Hugh ’ s College , Oxford . She became famous ( with her friend Miss Jourdain ) for running into Marie Antoinette at Versailles in 1901 , an adventure which taxed the best minds of the Society for Psychical Research and in her case probably derived from an inherited fascination with ghosts and visions . In Dulce Domum Annie described her father , John Keble and Charlotte Yonge as ‘ wonderful examples of the self-controlled vivacity of high spiritual existence ’, whom it had been her special privilege to know as a child . For Charlotte , who was shown an early draft of the book , reading it was ‘ a living over again of the dear golden age of our lives ’.
Winchester and its College make regular appearances in Charlotte Yonge ’ s fiction . The school is seen in soft focus , rather as it might seem to a sympathetic parent or sister , not to the boys or dons themselves : this despite Charlotte having seen much of young Wykehamist cousins who spent ‘ saints ’ day holidays ’ at Otterbourne . There is a wealth of detail in her novels about Victorian home education as well as the Sunday and village schools where her young heroines dutifully teach , but this does not accompany their brothers when they are sent away to board . Several of her clever boys have their cleverness rewarded by election to College , and at least one of her highminded clergymen , Robert Fulmort in Hopes and Fears , is made more moral at Winchester : ‘ an infinite help the influence there has been to him . I never saw anyone more anxious to do right , often under great disadvantage .’ An engaging and less stereotypical Wykehamist is Fred Langford in the early novel Henrietta ’ s Wish , a spirited , affectionate , weak-willed young man . Prevented by a serious accident ( for which he is largely to blame ) from returning to Winchester for his final half , Fred regrets
all the scenes where he would be missing , but not missed ; the old cathedral town , with its nests of trees , and the chalky hills ; the quiet river creeping through the meadows ; the “ beech-crowned steep ,” girdled in with the “ hollow trench that the Danish pirate made ;” 1 the old collegiate courts , the painted windows of the chapel , the surpliced scholars ,— even the very shops in the street had their part in his description : and then falling into silence he sighed at the thought that there he would be known no more ,— all would go on as usual , and after a few passing enquiries and expressions of compassion , he would be forgotten ; his rivals would pass him in the race of distinction ; his school-boy career be at an end .
In the historical tale The Wardship of Steepcoombe , set at the time of the peasants ’ revolt , we meet William of Wykeham himself . Charlotte pictures our founder as a mild , benevolent man , much loved by his people of Winchester , who lives for church building and education and would rather keep out of politics . In the story Wykeham takes the destitute young Allan-a- Coombe into his retinue as a chorister , later sending Allan to New College , Oxford where he will flourish as a clerk .
As the high Victorian age slowly declined , so did Charlotte Yonge ’ s standing . By the 1880s it was said , not kindly , that her keenest readers were ‘ ladies with silver in their hair ’. When she died in 1901 she left her ‘ cabinet of shells ’, with associated books , to the Natural History section of Museum ( newly opened in 1897 for the fifth centenary of the College ). Like other women of her age and class she was a lifelong and expert conchologist , and the bequest , as The Wykehamist noted , was a valuable one . The cabinet has long since been moved and its contents broken up ; no discernible trace remains . The shells will not return , nor will the glory days of the 1850s . Charlotte ’ s reputation is now in the keeping of academics and the members , devoted but few , of her supporters ’ club the Charlotte M . Yonge Fellowship . Is it possible in this bicentenary year that she might win back some readers from the wider public ?
1 Fred ( or Charlotte ) quotes from Lord Selborne ’ s poem on the 450th anniversary of the College . There is a tradition that earthworks on St Catherine ’ s Hill were made by the Danes .
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