Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
- Messages
- 9,229
Has anyone else read her?
I wrote an article for the New York C. S. Lewis Society some years ago, on some "little-known books" in Lewis's reading life. Here's what I wrote about Yonge's novel The Daisy Chain:
Yonge, Charlotte M. The Daisy Chain. I read it in a curious old Tauchnitz two-volume paperback edition from the late 1890s.
In “Membership,” an address he read to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius (1945; available in The Weight of Glory), Lewis said, “If a really good home, such as the home of Alcinous and Arete in the Odyssey or the Rostovs in War and Peace or any of Charlotte M. Yonge’s families, existed today, it would be denounced as bourgeois and every engine of destruction would be levelled against it.”
A Lutheran pastor and his wife whom I know have twelve children; that “apostolic dozen” surpasses by one the children of the May family: Richard (who, at the beginning of the novel, has failed his exams at Oxford), Margaret (18), Flora (about 17), Norman (about 16), Etheldred (15), Harry (12), Mary (10), Tom (8), Blanche (5), Aubrey (3), and infant Gertrude Margaret, also called Daisy. The “Daisy Chain” is the May children. Daisy will never know her mother, who is killed in a carriage accident soon after the book begins. We might expect excesses of “Victorian sentimentality” on this occasion, but find ourselves, instead, impressed by the realism of Yonge’s depiction: how Norman feels an awkward fear of entering the room where his injured father lies, or how Harry and Mary eat “from a weary craving feeling, and from want of employment.” [“If you find (some do) that mental anguish produces an inclination to eat more – paradoxical but it can – I should jolly well do so,” Lewis wrote to Fr. Peter Bide, whose wife was dying, on 29 April 1959.] Ethel – awkward, intellectually keen, energetic -- is the book’s heroine.
Halfway through the novel, the author moves ahead three years. Ethel’s project on behalf of the ragged children of Cocksmoor is moving ahead; Harry is missing at sea, having “gone for a sailor”; Flora’s intention of marrying an unimpressive young man who has prospects of wealth gives concern. By the end of the book, seven years have passed since it began. Yonge manages her various plots with unobtrusive skill, and orchestrates a satisfactory conclusion this volume of her “family chronicle.”
In Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (1965 edition), Lewis’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green says that Yonge (1823-1901) provides pictures representative of Victorian manor houses and parsonages, particularly those influenced by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England. John Keble, whose sermon “National Apostasy” is conventionally cited as starting the Movement, was a family friend, who stirred Charlotte’s father to a zeal for building churches. Charlotte’s only sibling was too young to be a childhood companion for her; though her childhood was austere, she remembered herself as being very happy. She was educated by her parents. Dedicated to a writing and editing career as an adult, her “amazing number of books” includes The Heir of Redclyffe, which was once on everyone’s lips.
The Daisy Chain comes first in a list of Yonge titles – “all good books” -- sent by Lewis to Arthur Greeves in 1953. Earlier, on 27 Dec.1940, he told Arthur, regarding The Heir of Redclyffe, that it was a “good old fashioned novel about large families in nice houses in the good old settled, pious, comfortable days,” and had then cried, “Oh Arthur, why didn’t we live a century earlier? Still, we must console ourselves by being glad that we didn’t live any later, that we had at least acquired our habits of mind before everything went bust.” We should remember, before venturing to censure “self-pity” in this remark, that Britain had been at war since September 1939, food rationing had begun in January 1940, the United States’ entry into the conflict was a year away, and Russia and Germany were still allies. Night bombing of England was under way and would continue for months. In 1940, British civilian casualties numbered 23,767. Such facts as these provide some of the context for Lewis’s words.
I wrote an article for the New York C. S. Lewis Society some years ago, on some "little-known books" in Lewis's reading life. Here's what I wrote about Yonge's novel The Daisy Chain:
Yonge, Charlotte M. The Daisy Chain. I read it in a curious old Tauchnitz two-volume paperback edition from the late 1890s.
In “Membership,” an address he read to the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius (1945; available in The Weight of Glory), Lewis said, “If a really good home, such as the home of Alcinous and Arete in the Odyssey or the Rostovs in War and Peace or any of Charlotte M. Yonge’s families, existed today, it would be denounced as bourgeois and every engine of destruction would be levelled against it.”
A Lutheran pastor and his wife whom I know have twelve children; that “apostolic dozen” surpasses by one the children of the May family: Richard (who, at the beginning of the novel, has failed his exams at Oxford), Margaret (18), Flora (about 17), Norman (about 16), Etheldred (15), Harry (12), Mary (10), Tom (8), Blanche (5), Aubrey (3), and infant Gertrude Margaret, also called Daisy. The “Daisy Chain” is the May children. Daisy will never know her mother, who is killed in a carriage accident soon after the book begins. We might expect excesses of “Victorian sentimentality” on this occasion, but find ourselves, instead, impressed by the realism of Yonge’s depiction: how Norman feels an awkward fear of entering the room where his injured father lies, or how Harry and Mary eat “from a weary craving feeling, and from want of employment.” [“If you find (some do) that mental anguish produces an inclination to eat more – paradoxical but it can – I should jolly well do so,” Lewis wrote to Fr. Peter Bide, whose wife was dying, on 29 April 1959.] Ethel – awkward, intellectually keen, energetic -- is the book’s heroine.
Halfway through the novel, the author moves ahead three years. Ethel’s project on behalf of the ragged children of Cocksmoor is moving ahead; Harry is missing at sea, having “gone for a sailor”; Flora’s intention of marrying an unimpressive young man who has prospects of wealth gives concern. By the end of the book, seven years have passed since it began. Yonge manages her various plots with unobtrusive skill, and orchestrates a satisfactory conclusion this volume of her “family chronicle.”
In Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (1965 edition), Lewis’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green says that Yonge (1823-1901) provides pictures representative of Victorian manor houses and parsonages, particularly those influenced by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England. John Keble, whose sermon “National Apostasy” is conventionally cited as starting the Movement, was a family friend, who stirred Charlotte’s father to a zeal for building churches. Charlotte’s only sibling was too young to be a childhood companion for her; though her childhood was austere, she remembered herself as being very happy. She was educated by her parents. Dedicated to a writing and editing career as an adult, her “amazing number of books” includes The Heir of Redclyffe, which was once on everyone’s lips.
The Daisy Chain comes first in a list of Yonge titles – “all good books” -- sent by Lewis to Arthur Greeves in 1953. Earlier, on 27 Dec.1940, he told Arthur, regarding The Heir of Redclyffe, that it was a “good old fashioned novel about large families in nice houses in the good old settled, pious, comfortable days,” and had then cried, “Oh Arthur, why didn’t we live a century earlier? Still, we must console ourselves by being glad that we didn’t live any later, that we had at least acquired our habits of mind before everything went bust.” We should remember, before venturing to censure “self-pity” in this remark, that Britain had been at war since September 1939, food rationing had begun in January 1940, the United States’ entry into the conflict was a year away, and Russia and Germany were still allies. Night bombing of England was under way and would continue for months. In 1940, British civilian casualties numbered 23,767. Such facts as these provide some of the context for Lewis’s words.
