Taming the Tropics: Charlotte Yonge Takes on Melanesia

It is hard to read Charlotte Yonge critically, but it is impossible to read her uncritically. Her novels are curiously addictive yet distinguished by a problematically pious didacticism. Yonge seems to demand that we embrace her dogma, spurring many modern readers to reject the whole Yongian corpus. Another way of posing the problem is to ask just how we can read a Victorian novelist whose "greatest enthusiasm was for the spread of the Christian church in heathen lands" (Coleridge 265)? How can we approach work whose explicit function is to co-opt us and whose narratives enthusiastically depict the conversion of people who are often like us?¹ Perhaps there is an alternative model for reading Yonge's fiction, one derived from an implicit paradigm in the novel of hers I examine here.

Yonge had a long, informed, and intimate connection with missionary work in the Loyalty Islands that extended over two decades. The Yonge family deeply admired George Augustus Selwyn, the bishop of New Zealand, whose pioneering efforts to train local converts as teachers of Christianity constituted the earliest and most enduring missionary work in the Loyalty Islands. Yonge donated much of the proceeds of her enormously successful novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) to building a mission ship for Selwyn. Called The Southern Cross, the ship was outfitted just in time for Selwyn's newest recruit, Yonge's relation John Coleridge Patteson, to use as he and Selwyn traveled throughout the Loyalty Islands starting in the summer of 1855 (Yonge, Life). During his missionary work, Patteson maintained a close correspondence with Yonge, and when he died in 1871 his sisters asked her to write his biography, which she published in 1875 as The Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands.

Thus, when the Loyalty Islands crop up in a Yonge novel from the mid-1850s such as The Daisy Chain, most of which was written in 1853 and 1854, it is not surprising.² Like all of her novels, it shows evidence of accurate research into contemporary issues, with descriptions and plot events clearly based on Selwyn's and Patteson's accounts. Indeed, one of the main characters in The Daisy Chain appears to be based on Patteson. Like all of her novels, moreover, The Daisy Chain is carefully structured to organize the plot around parallel situations and significant repetitions meant for readers to notice even though the characters themselves might not. In this case, the Loyalty Islands are repeatedly and explicitly connected to a fictional impoverished hamlet in England called Cocksmoor; the two dangerous spaces are reformed simultaneously and by the same set of characters, using the same techniques.

Yonge's interest in contemporary missionary work and her tacit invitation to compare the impoverished village with the Loyalty Islands can be approached from a highly unlikely perspective—that of horticultural handicraft. In so claiming, I am not simply being perverse (although I think it behooves every reader of Yonge to be perverse on principle): I believe that the actual ideological structure that undergirds Yonge's construction of missionary and colonial projects is based on a model of domestic manufacture, and that this is all the more significant because Yonge herself may not have been aware of it. In other words, while Yonge's meticulously drawn comparisons consciously structure her narrative, handicraft is a paradigm that works in The Daisy Chain's textual unconscious.

The domestic handicraft movement was wildly popular from about 1840 to 1870, and it included objects like woolwork cushions, wax flowers, stuffed birds, seaweed collages, and boxes encrusted with shells. Victorian handicraft instructions assumed their readers were sophisticated urbanites with access to specialized commodities and contemporary magazines, and the handicrafts themselves were supposed to be modern, ephemeral, and fashionable. More specifically, handicraft involved making facsimiles of factory wares by reusing household debris and cheap ready-made ingredients, including fish scales, bones, scraps of fabric, old wax candles, dried flowers, glue, ink, and shells. One of handicraft's strongest motives was a preservationist one. The earliest domestic handicrafts, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, worked...