Charlotte Mary Yonge

Template:Short description Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox writer Charlotte Mary Yonge (11 August 1823 – 24 March 1901) was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and showed her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.

Life

Charlotte Mary Yonge was born in Otterbourne, Hampshire, England, on 11 August 1823 to William Yonge and Fanny Yonge, née Bargus.Template:Sfn She was educated at home by her father, studying Latin, Greek, French, Euclid, and algebra.Template:Sfn Her father's lessons could be harsh: Template:Blockquote

Yonge's devotion to her father was lifelong and her relations with him seem to have set the standard for all other relations, including marriage.Template:Sfn His "approbation was throughout life my bliss; his anger my misery for the time."<ref>Quoted in Template:Harvnb.</ref>

Yonge was born into a religious family. Devoted to the High church, she was much influenced by John Keble, Vicar of Hursley from 1835, a near neighbour and one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Yonge was herself sometimes referred to as "the novelist of the Oxford Movement",Template:Sfn as her work frequently reflects values and concerns of Anglo-Catholicism. She remained in Otterbourne all her life and taught for 71 years in the village Sunday school.Template:Sfn Her house, 'Elderfield', became a Grade II listed building in 1984.<ref>Template:National Heritage List for England</ref>

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Yonge, Template:Circa

In 1858 she paid for the construction of a combined school and chapel of ease to Hursley parish church in the village of Pitt. It was designed by William Butterfield and, like Elderfield, has been a Grade II listed building since 1984.<ref name="NHLE-1095781">Template:NHLE</ref> In 1868 a new parish was formed to the south of Yonge's home village of Otterbourne. This was to contain the villages of Eastley and Barton. Yonge donated £500 towards the Church of the Resurrection, the Church of England parish church, and was asked to choose which of the two villages the parish should be named after. She chose Eastley but decided that it should be spelt Eastleigh as she perceived this as being more modern.<ref name="lambert">Template:Cite web</ref>

Yonge died in her home village of Otterbourne on 24 March 1901. Her obituary in The Times stated,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Template:Blockquote

Literary career

Yonge began writing in 1848 and published in her long life about 160 works, chiefly novels.Template:Sfn Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to put the schooner Southern Cross into service on behalf of George Selwyn. Similar charitable works were done with the profits from later novels. Yonge was also a founder and editor for 40 years of The Monthly Packet, a magazine founded in 1851, with a varied readership, but targeted at British Anglican girls, though in later years it turned to a somewhat wider readership).<ref name=gos/>

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Charlotte Mary Yonge later in life

Among her other well-known works are Heartsease, and The Daisy Chain. A Book of Golden Deeds is a collection of true stories of courage and self-sacrifice. Other titles were Cameos from English History, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, and Hannah More. Her History of Christian Names was described as "the first serious attempt at tackling the subject" and as the standard work on names in the preface to the first edition of Betty Withycombe's The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1944).

Around 1859 Yonge created a literary group of younger girl cousins, to write essays and gain advice from Yonge on their writing. Together they created a private magazine, The Barnacle, which continued until about 1871. This was valuable as they may have belonged to the last generation of girls educated at home.<ref name="NelsonVallone2010">Template:Cite book</ref> Her goddaughter, Alice Mary Coleridge, contributed as "Gurgoyle" to the first issue, drawing the covers and contributing translations, articles and verses.<ref name=gos/>

Yonge's personal example and influence on her goddaughter Alice Mary Coleridge were formative in her zeal for women's education, leading indirectly to the foundation of Abbots Bromley School for Girls.<ref name=gos>Template:Cite ODNB</ref>

After Yonge's death, her friend, assistant and collaborator, Christabel Coleridge, published the biographical Charlotte Mary Yonge: her Life and Letters (1903).

Reputation

Yonge's work was widely read and respected in the 19th century. Among her admirers were Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, William Ewart Gladstone, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Anthony Trollope.Template:Sfn William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones read The Heir of Redclyffe aloud to each other while undergraduates at Oxford University and "took [the hero, Guy Morville's] medieval tastes and chivalric ideals as presiding elements in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."Template:Sfn Yonge's work was compared favourably with that of Trollope, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola.Template:Sfn

Sir John Arthur Ransome Marriott called her: Template:Blockquote

So popular were her works that Template:Blockquote

C. S. Lewis thought highly of her, at one point bracketing her evocations of domestic life with those of Homer and Leo Tolstoy.Template:Sfn Abraham Kuyper, who read The Heir of Redclyffe on the recommendation of his fiancé, Johanna Schaay, found it a moving experience. The novel was "next to the Bible in its meaning for my life."Template:Sfn Yonge was one of the favourite writers of Barbara Pym, who mentions Yonge's novels favourably in several of her own novels.<ref>Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym, Macmillan, London, 1990, pp. 114, 152, 181, 229.</ref>

However, according to the critic Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström, Yonge's work has been "constantly be-devilled" by a "tendency to confuse the moral quality of [her] view of life with the quality of her literary expression".Template:Sfn

Her novels such as The Daisy Chain, The Young Stepmother, The Trial, and The Three Brides encompass Victorian problems of urban pollution, sanitary reform, and epidemics of cholera and typhoid. She urged social, economic and medical reform of dirt-ridden Victorian cities. The dualism found in her writings, writes Alethea Hayter, "serves to illustrate the triumphs and mistakes of reforming zeal, to contrast selfish irresponsibility with courageous philanthropy, to balance tradition against progress."<ref>Alethea Hayter, "The Sanitary Idea and a Victorian Novelist", History Today (1969) 19 12, pp. 840–847.</ref>

Yonge's work has been sparely studied, with the possible exception of The Heir of Redclyffe.Template:Sfn

Graham Greene used epigraphs from The Little Duke for each chapter of his 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear. In Chapter 1, the protagonist Arthur Rowe buys a copy of the book at a fête for sixpence.

File:Long shot of the bench (OpenBenches 1923-1).jpg

Sculpture of Yonge by Vivien Mallock outside Eastleigh railway station

In 2015 a sculpture by Vivien Mallock was installed outside Eastleigh railway station,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> as a tribute to Yonge for having effectively named the town. It shows her at the age of about 45 when she named Eastleigh parish. It shows her sitting on a bench with a book on her lap, with space for members of the public to sit alongside her.

Works

Abbeychurch; or, Self Control and Self Conceit (1844)
Scenes and Characters, or, Eighteen Months at Beechcroft (1847)
Kings of England: a History for Young Children (1848)
The Railroad Children (1849)
Langley School (1850)
The Two Guardians, or, Home in this World (1852)
The Heir of Redclyffe (1853)
Heartsease or The Brother's Wife (1854)<ref>Template:Cite book Volume I and volume II.</ref>
The Little Duke: Richard the Fearless (1854)
The Lances of Lynwood (1855)
The History of Sir Thomas Thumb (1855)
The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations (1856)
Marie Thérèse de Lamourous: Foundress of the House of la Misércorde, at Bourdeaux (1858)
Countess Kate (1860)
Friarswood Post-Office (1860)
The Young Step-Mother; or a Chronicle of Mistakes (1861)
History of Christian Names (1863)
A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands (1864)
The Trial; or, More Links of the Daisy Chain (1864)
The Clever Woman of the Family (1865)
The Prince and the Page: A Story of the Last Crusade (1866)
The Dove in the Eagle's Nest (1866)
The Chaplet of Pearls; or, The White and Black Ribaumont (1868)
Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II (1868)
Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe and Other Stories (1871)
Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History (1873)
The Pillars of the House: or, Under Wode, Under Rode (1873)
Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands (1874)
The Three Brides (1876)
Aunt Charlotte's Stories of French History for the Little Ones (1877)
Young Folks' History of Rome (1878)
Young Folks' History of England (1879)
Young Folks' History of France (1879)
Magnum Bonum; or, Mother Carey's Brood (1879)
Unknown to History: A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland (1881)
History of France (1882)
' 'The Armourer's Prentices (1884) Historical novel set in the time of Henry VIII.<ref>Nield, Jonathan (1925), A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales. G. P. Putnam's Sons, (p. 41 )</ref>
The Two Sides of the Shield (1885) – sequel to Scenes and Characters, Template:OCLC
Hannah More (1888)
A Reputed Changeling (1889)
Two Penniless Princesses (1891)
The Long Vacation (1895)
Modern Broods (1900)

References

Citations

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Works cited

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External links

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Works by Charlotte Mary Yonge at Project Canterbury
Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship – Links to all known online works; articles about Yonge's works; extensive bibliography; biography etc.
Works by Charlotte Mary Yonge in the University of Florida Digital Collections
John Keble 's Parishes John Keble's Parishes – A History of Hursley and Otterbourne. (1898) Edited by Charlotte M. Yonge
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Charlotte Yonge letters, 1823-1901, held by the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

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