FOSSIL FIELD
| VICTORIAN BEST SELLER. The World of
Chariotte M. Yonge. By
Margaret
Mare
| and Alicia C. Percival, farrap.
HE name of Charlotte M. Yonge is not one that occupies a prominent place in any history of English literature, in spite of her enormous literary output, and a quiz entrant under 30, if asked to name the author of The Daisy Chain, would probably plump for Aunt Daisy. So evanescent is fame that she who in her heyday was riotously acclaimed by Oxford (graduates and undergraduates) and thick heaped with honours from admirers in all parts of the world has as little immediacy today as last week’s programmes or the wallpaper two layers under the present one. Yet probably most aged, middleaged and still-quite-young females
(especially those who subscribed to Sun-day-school libraries) remember her, much as they remember birthday dolls, the clothes they wore as children, and the knobs on the brass bedstead at home. But the works of Charlotte M. Yonge, though remembered, are dead, and their failure to make the grade from the ephemeral to the universal is the very thing that makes Victorian Best Seller possible. For here is a rich fossil field for the social historian. Writing from 1850 to 1900 Miss Yonge produced over 50 major books and as many minor ones, and in these she faithfully mirrors (in microcosm) the whole pattern of Victorian England as seen from the hearth outwards. The Victorian Age has vanished, and (fortunately, think most of us) we shali not look upon its like again. There were of course other women novelists writing at this time (George Eliot, Ouida, Mrs. Humphrey Ward), but they were not Victorians in the sense that Miss Yonge is a Victorian. She was not only of the age, she was in it. Well in,,as he Dormouse would say. Miss Yonge would therefore seem to provide the perfect subject for this combined biography and social history, and the two authors to have outstanding qualifications for the job (Miss Mare is an historian and a childhood devotee of Miss Yonge, Miss Percival the author of The English Miss, To-day and Yesterday, and Vice-President of a teachers’ training college). It is not surprising therefore that Victorian Best Seller is a sound, a scholarly and a sympathetic study. At first it appeared to this reader to suffer from a lack of unity, a duality both of purpose and style amounting almost to schizophrenia. (There would be a section of biography, then the reader would be jerked back to more general consideration of topics. such as The Rich, The Poor, The Church, after which, Alicia having been given her turn, Margaret resumed.) Moreover, (continued on next page)
(continued from previous page) these early chapters on social background were profusely illustrated with extracts from the novels, and one finds one’s mental energies continually dissipated on the effort of remembering whether Uncle Edmund was the curate ot the retired tea-planter. Towards the end of the book, however, the social and individual threads intermingle in harmonious pattern. Misses Mare and Percival do not, of course, deny themselves the pleasure of a little. quiet irony at the expense of Victorianism. Yet though entertainment is the inevitable by-product of any attempt to describe Victorian attitudes to the sceptical modern it is not permitted to distract the reader’s sympathy from Charlotte herself, the unconscious victim of an anti-feminist environment. Rather does it help one to realise the enormous disadvantages under which Charlotte worked, and to appreciate the mental and physical stamina necessary to complete so great a body of writing.
M.
B.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 12
Word count
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597FOSSIL FIELD New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 12
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