Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge's Models of Manliness (review)

Susan Walton's Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era provides fascinating insight into a prolific yet still neglected author, Charlotte Yonge, while also exploring the mid-century construction of the ideal of "manliness." Walton examines Victorian models of masculinity through Yonge's life and work, arguing that women played an important role in constructing manliness as embodied by soldiers, missionaries, and father figures. Yonge's work gave substance to the ideal of "valour without violence" in her belief that "all good Christians are soldiers" (21), ideas that infused her representations of missionary work at home and abroad.

Walton begins by explaining her choice of "manliness" rather than "masculinities," pointing to the gentlemanly characteristics encompassed by the first, including "courage, determination, readiness to work at useful tasks and to take familial and political responsibilities" (6), and to the mid-century shift that turned soldiering from a lower-to a middle-class profession. Tractarian clergy in particular were considered "unmanly," and Yonge's novels challenged this perception through a revival of the "mediaevalized discourse of sanctified violence executed by upright moral men," constructing spiritual men as Christian knights (24). As Walton points out in her comprehensive introduction, masculinity studies has bloomed in recent years, and the author builds on this work in order to demonstrate the significance of Yonge's "prototypes of male behaviour," which offered "guidance on the formation of manly character." But these models were unstable, and Yonge's novels provided a space in which these "contested versions of masculinities" were "weighed up, debated and rehearsed" (2).

Yonge was surrounded by military men—including her father, uncle, and brother—and her novels are populated with soldiers. Yet the importance of the military in Yonge's work is often overlooked. Considering Yonge's fiction alongside mid-century attitudes toward the military (including ideas about men's fashion and facial hair), Walton demonstrates that Yonge combined "a narrative of knightly warfare" with an "evolving domestic ethos," producing a model of "happy warriors" grounded by the values of domesticity (24). Central to the construction of "happy warriors" were the mothers and sisters who shaped their sons and brothers into soldiers. Their role in the construction of manliness was important in part because "the ideal heroic personality [was] fuelled by an amalgam of feminine sensitivity combined with masculine physical courage and practical adventuring" (173). Walton's careful reading of Yonge's letters reveals the significance of this military context, and her examination of how the Crimean War influenced Yonge's novel Heartsease (1854) is particularly enlightening.

Equally important is Yonge's construction of the home as a flexible, communal space in which men play an active role. Her novels often reveal an interdependence of family relationships rather than a "gendered polarity assigning activity to men and passivity to women" (128). Thus, successful fathers are proactive, engaged in the lives of their children and their community, guides rather than authoritarian figures. Unsuccessful fathers are domineering and lack such relationships, often withdrawing emotionally or physically into the library and study. Novels such as Henrietta's Wish (1850) and Hopes and Fears (1860) explore "proactive fathering" and expose the damaging consequences of paternal absence (21).

Turning her attention from soldiers and fathers to missionaries, Walton demonstrates that Yonge did much more than simply donate her profits to the Melanesian Mission and the Bishops George Augustus Selwyn and John Coleridge Patteson (Yonge's cousin). Yonge's charitable contributions are often mentioned by critics, but Walton moves this discussion forward by exploring her "promotion of a vigorous attractive manly model of missionary," an ideal that she "wanted her readers to emulate, support and construct within strong family networks" (141). Yonge's editorship was important to this process, for she used her Tractarian magazine The Monthly Packet to promote reader support for the Society for the Propagation of Gospel...