Charlotte M. Yonge's The Daisy Chain: Victorian Artifact or Classic?

CHARLOTTE M. YONGE 'S THE DAISY CHAIN: VICTORIAN ARTIFACT OR CLASSIC? Anita C. Wilson During a long and tranquil life which spanned the years of Queen Victoria's reign, Charlotte Mary Yonge wrote approximately two hundred books, including domestic novels, historical stories, and works for use in Sunday schools. She was tremendously popular among both children and adults and became a Victorian institution in her own right. Today, however, very few of her books could find an audience among readers of any age. The qualities which endeared her to the Victorians: devotion to a traditional and insular family life, rigid religious beliefs and moral principles, and dedication to a socially stratified society, do not attract modern readers. Yonge' s popularity was already declining by the late nineteenth century; shortly after her death in 1901, a commemorative essay stated: "We cannot be surprised that the rising generation for the most part refuse to read Charlotte Yonge .... The smallness of her experience, or rather (for that might apply ..to Miss Austen) of the results of her experience, put them off her track." It is worth asking, therefore, why Yonge' s books appealed to many Victorian children and why their popularity waned after the "High-Victorian" age ended . Yonge' s life and work are intimately linked, and it is impossible to understand her books without knowing something of the conservative and deeply religious background from which they developed. Yonge lived all of her seventy-seven years in the small English village of Otterbourne, where she was born in 1823. After receiving an excellent education at home, she continued to live with her parents until they died. She never married, and her circumscribed life revolved around parish concerns, Sunday-school teaching, and her writing. Throughout her life, Yonge held tenaciously to the beliefs inculcated by her parents. One of the most conspicuous of these principles was a rigid concept of filial piety. Yonge never outgrew her childhood feelings of mingled adoration and fear regarding her father, as indicated by a comment made in middle age: "Even now, [1877] when for twenty-three years they [her father's eyes] have been closed, to think of their beaming smile seems to me to recall my greatest happiness, of their warning glance my chief dread and shame." Even in old age, Yonge never entered any of the villagers' cottages, although this hindered her parish work, because her mother had forbidden her such visiting in childhood. Such misguided and fanatical devotion reflected Yonge' s conviction that duty to parents must remain the paramount concern even of mature adults . When Yonge began writing for publication, in her early twenties, her father warned her of three possible-motives for writing: "love of vanity, or of gain, or the wish to do good." She ensured herself against avarice by donating the proceeds of her work to charity, and she was determined, above all, that "the wish to do good" would be her inspiration. Near the end of her life, she commented: "I have always viewed myself as a sort of instrument for popularising Church views." Yonge was a devoted member of the Church of England and adhered throughout her life to the ideals which had inspired her from youth, especially a strong belief in the necessity and spiritual value of self-denial and obedience — obedience to the Church and to parents, whom Yonge regarded as having almost divine rights over their children. As Richard May, who is no longer a boy, savs in The Daisy Chain: "It is our duty not to question our father's judgments." A major source of Yonge' s considerable influence was a magazine for girls and young women, The Monthly Packet, which she edited from 1851 to 1893 and introduced as "a companion in times of recreation ... to make [its readers] more steadfast and dutiful daughters of our own beloved ... Church of England ___ " It was in The Monthly Packet that The Daisy Chain first appeared; Part I was serialized between 1853 and 1855, and the complete book was published in 1856. Although the novel was written for young girls, both children and adults enjoyed its story of the Mays, a large, happy, and devout family...