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INTRODUCTIONTamara S. Wagner aa Nanyang Technological University , SingaporePublished online: 04 Aug 2010.

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INTRODUCTION

NOVELIST WITH A RESERVED

MISSION: THE DIFFERENT FORMS

OF CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE

Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823�1901) was a committed religious, domesticnovelist with a mission to promote Tractarian doctrine in popular fiction. Sheproduced more than 200 novels and short stories, a memoir of Hannah More,a biography of her cousin John Coleridge Patteson, the first Bishop ofMelanesia, and numerous non-fictional pieces on a variety of issues. From1851 to 1894, she edited the Monthly Packet (its full title was the Monthly Packetof Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church), a magazine aimedchiefly at ‘‘young girls, or maidens, or young ladies’’ between the ages of 15and 25. Intended as their ‘‘companion in times of recreation’’, it meant*likeYonge’s writing generally*to entertain as well as instruct.1 Although it needsto be remembered that Yonge’s main target readership ‘‘corresponded withthe demographic aimed at by any mid-Victorian novelist’’, and her best-sellingThe Heir of Redclyffe (1853) became famous for being the popular choice ofyoung officers in hospital during the Crimean War, her conceptualization ofher ‘‘girl readers’’ also compelled an alternative take on ongoing controversiesabout vulnerable young women readers.2 Providing alternative readingmaterial in a volatile book market swamped by blatantly sensational railwayreading, Yonge adapted fashionable formulas that would best appeal to thisreadership. Her fiction was to function as ‘‘a sort of instrument forpopularising Church views that might not otherwise have been taken in’’.3

This adaptation of different narrative paradigms importantly registered genrecrossings and thereby contributed to the formation of domestic realism as acentral factor in the development of Victorian popular fiction, yet Yonge’sfocus on the domestic has caused her to be branded as antifeminist,conservative, and didactic. In his 1934 Victorian Wallflowers, Malcolm Elwinalready maintained that her name had become ‘‘a standard synonym for smugpiety and mawkish sentimentality’’.4 In this view, seemingly incongruouselements may well be considered a welcome lapse in an otherwise stringent

Women’s Writing Vol. 17, No. 2 August 2010, pp. 213�220ISSN 0969-9082 print/ISSN 1747-5848 online – 2010 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09699081003754964

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didacticism. The ambiguity created by a combination of realist detail and aspecific ideological agenda (religious doctrine), however, is significantly morethan an inadvertent incongruity, which allowed her characters to get ‘‘beyondtheir creator’s conscious control, and, impelled by some inner necessity, [todevelop] as they would’’, as Margaret Mare and Alicia Percival asserted in their1947 study of this neglected ‘‘Victorian best-seller’’.5

Despite the fact that her novels have never completely gone out of printand have always retained a dedicated readership, Yonge has long served asemblematic of domestic Victorian women writers who resist easy appropria-tion by traditional feminist agendas in the recovery of non-canonical popularfiction. Bessie Rayner Belloc could be said to have written propheticallywhen she asserted in A Passing World (1897) that ‘‘justice has never been done[Yonge] by the literary critics’’ and that her books have been ‘‘injured inliterary circles, by her loyal devotion to her convictions in regard to theAnglican Church’’.6 More than 100 years later, it has hardly become any easierto ‘‘approach work whose explicit function is to co-opt us and whosenarratives enthusiastically depict the conversion of people who are often likeus’’, as Talia Schaffer has pointedly put it.7 A little over ten years ago, NicolaDiane Thompson still summed up a prevailing problem in the ‘‘recuperation’’of non-canonical best-sellers of the past by evoking Yonge as a prime example:‘‘what, for example, do you say about a conservative woman novelistlike Charlotte Yonge once you’ve discovered her?’’8 Recent interest in Yongerevolves precisely around the need to do away with any easy typecastingof nineteenth-century domestic women novelists. Instead, she has become acentral figure in a reconsideration of simplistic dichotomies of feminist versusantifeminist writers. Such reductive categories only hamper the appreciation ofthe sheer versatility, richness, and even contradictory complexities of Victorianliterary culture. Yonge’s new visibility on the radar of Victorianists has madeher alternative communities of interdependence noted in the intersecting fieldof disability studies, for example, while research on women’s periodicals andfamily magazines has highlighted her work as an editor. Most importantly,growing awareness of the diverse range of nineteenth-century popular fictionhas revealed her as a perhaps surprisingly experimental, even ‘‘epistemolo-gically self-reflexive’’ novelist.9

But if attention from such divergent approaches has ensured that Yonge hasbecome one of the most effectively rediscovered authors of the last decades, thishas only made it more prominent that critics have largely ‘‘sidestepped the issueof her work’s commitment to a religious perspective’’.10 Until recently,discussions of different gender roles in Victorian religion have tended toreference Yonge simply ‘‘as an exemplar of the orthodox attitude’’ as opposedto other women ‘‘critiquing or rebelling against the ‘crushing limitations ofVictorian society’’’.11 She might have something interesting to say about

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working women and, specifically, writing women, about unduly stereotypedVictorian invalids, or about the culture clashes within a proliferating range ofdivergent denominations of Christianity at the time, but discussion of theseseparate issues is therein neatly set apart from her self-positioning in her world:in her belief system and in her understanding of the literary marketplace. Thishardly does justice to her immensely versatile as well as prolific oeuvre or to herself-conscious endeavour to combine the narrative opportunities created byseemingly irreconcilable literary trends. Nor does it solve the issue of what hasbeen termed her confusingly ‘‘coded’’ or ‘‘oblique’’ referencing of spiritualsubjects, which may well create difficulties for the present-day reader.12

This encoding forms the key to her mission as a popular religious anddomestic novelist. Although Yonge certainly was ‘‘not afraid of symbols’’, asRaymond Chapman has stressed in his excellent overview of the OxfordMovement’s literary influence13, she followed the advice given her by JohnKeble, one of the movement’s main founders and her literary as well asreligious mentor, never to descend into direct preaching.14 In this, she waspractising a reserve that was essential to Tractarian aesthetics. Yet, earlyattempts to assess Yonge as a writer of the Oxford Movement haveunderscored first and foremost her ability to create good stories, despite heroccasional bowing to doctrine. Robert Lee Wolff speaks of ‘‘the novels*genuine novels*of Charlotte Yonge’’ to suggest their superiority to oftenthinly fictionalized tracts as the movement’s main venue of publication, whichearned them the, at first, disparaging denomination ‘‘Tractarianism’’.15 VinetaColby similarly acknowledges that Yonge ‘‘was the novelist who mostgracefully converted the tractarian [sic] impulse into novels of family life’’,and adds that this had much to do with the fact that Yonge’s idealism waspractically oriented, concerned with ‘‘her characters’ problems of daily livingfar more than with their problems of dogma and ritual’’.16 The fusion of suchan emphatically practical vision and domestic concerns, however, hasfrequently been read as evidence both of Yonge’s antifeminism and of heranti-intellectualism. Few critics have taken Yonge’s theological positionseriously at all, although Maria Poggi Johnson has recently remarked thatthe admitted ‘‘limitations and errors of Yonge’s worldview’’ should not‘‘disqualify her from consideration as a serious moralist’’.17 As Susan E. Colonargues in the first contribution to this issue, Yonge was a leading practitionerof Tractarian aesthetics whose self-conscious engagement with narrativedevices can be seen as part of the synthesis of aesthetics with theology thatformed a fundamental aspect of the movement’s doctrine.

What is more, the self-reflexivity of a popular novelist contending withcompeting demands and agendas prompts not merely an encompassingreappraisal of an easily stereotyped domestic woman writer. It simultaneouslycompels a new understanding of the ways in which we tackle such a reappraisal

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in the first place. We do not need to subscribe to a specific doctrine toappreciate a writer’s intricate working out of the narrative potential orproblems of synthesizing divergent narrative modes or paradigms. Not simplyto be dismissed as confusingly coded, Yonge’s genre crossings bring out thedifferent forms her mission as a religious and domestic writer could take. Asshe translated her belief system into compelling fictions of everyday lifethat have been called ‘‘curiously addictive’’18, she did so in a self-consciousdevelopment, even deliberate recuperation, of a growing mass readership. Tocapture the voracious Victorian reader by remaking popular paradigms waspart of this project. Her ‘‘girl readers’’ were necessarily top of the list. In hercontribution to this issue, Kristine Moruzi explores in detail the specificstrategies Yonge employed in promoting and supporting girls as readers andwriters. Increasingly, however, her ‘‘outreach’’ programme was to cast awider net. As Susan Walton shows, Yonge ‘‘marketed’’ the genre of themissionary story in order to percolate underpinning values into homes thatsubscribed neither to missionary periodicals nor to the missionary interest ingeneral. Comparative readings that firmly situate Yonge’s fiction both in acompetitive marketplace and within literary history clearly reveal how Yongecapitalized on seemingly divergent literary trends as well as on topicalcontroversies within the domestic novel’s confines*confines that therebybecame extended and redefined.

Yonge’s engagement with literary and cultural influences was clearly asversatile as it was complex and, at times, contradictory. This special issue seeksto provide a critical forum for a reassessment that leaves behind the strictures ofmere apologia or rehearsals of background material. The individual contribu-tions highlight specific aspects of Yonge’s aesthetics as well as of her agenda as awriter with a mission, of her influence, her intertextual interchanges, and herchanging negotiation of competing genres and cultural discourses. Highlightingthe significance of Yonge’s aesthetics, Susan E. Colon’s discussion of realismand reserve therefore starts out by stressing that paying more detailed attentionto the ways in which Yonge adopts the concept of Tractarian reserve inher fiction is essential for an appreciation of her development of novelistictechniques. Realism is not simply incommensurate with reserve, nor canreserve simply be reduced to a psychological dimension. In a close reading ofone of Yonge’s most popular family chronicles, The Pillars of the House (1873),Colon explores the power of Yonge’s realism to instruct readers in the doctrineof reserve without violating reserve in doing so.

Similarly combining close reading with an assessment of Yonge’sthematization of the Tractarian belief system, both Susan Walton and TeresaHuffman Traver take a new look at Yonge’s involvement in missionarypropaganda. Walton shows how in The Daisy Chain (1856) and its sequel, TheTrial (1864), Yonge successfully marketed the missionary story for a more

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middle-class, educated audience. It was not just that familiarity with BishopPatteson’s correspondence singled her out as a likely channel for filtering newsof the Melanesian Mission to a wider audience; she shaped his narrative tobroadcast it in subtle ways. Traver then moves on to discuss how thetraditional metaphor of the Christian Church as a ship riding the storms of lifeoffered Yonge a ready-made imagery to explore the relationship betweenmissionary outreach and British colonization. Neither straightforward nor one-way, when thematized in fiction like Yonge’s, this relationship ensured thatcolonial missionary endeavours reached back and shaped English Christianity*and English national identity*as well. Conversely, Leslee Thorne-Murphy’sdiscussion of altruism and self-deceit addresses the ambiguities of the ways inwhich Yonge represented local charity work. Why is it that Yonge rarelydepicts positive examples of charities at home or abroad in her fiction, even asshe devoted a significant portion of her money and time to them herself?Examining the charitable efforts of the Merrifield children in The StokesleySecret; or, How the Pig Paid the Rent (1861), Thorne-Murphy considers Yonge’sreasoning for portraying complex and problematic philanthropy in the contextof mid Victorian literature advocating children’s charity work.

While these analyses carefully dissect Yonge’s ambiguous realization of herpractical vision within the shifting confines of domestic realism, the followingarticles are grouped together in a sustained analysis of her increasingly criticalengagement with issues of reading and writing. Kristine Moruzi has doneextensive research on the Monthly Packet, analysing the discussion andrepresentation of ideal reading habits and recommended ways of writing forthe magazine within its own pages. Yonge, Moruzi shows, carefully guidedher main target group*her ‘‘girl readers’’*towards topics and styles thatwere considered consistent with High Anglican beliefs. In this, she offered animportantly different format for the young woman reader and writer. TamaraS. Wagner, June Sturrock, and Elizabeth Hale then approach aspects ofYonge’s most self-reflexive integration of different literary trends andtraditions. Juxtaposing the complex function of an embedded epistolarynarrative in The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) with the rewriting of theearlier novel’s most sensational plot in the collaborative letter novel Astray: ATale of a Country Town (1886), Wagner explores how Yonge translates concernswith mass-market literature into plots involving financial fraud.

June Sturrock then proceeds to situate Yonge’s fiction more centrally inliterary history. Shedding new light on Yonge’s contribution to the changingnarrativization of ongoing debates over women and work in the course ofthe nineteenth century, Sturrock reads Yonge’s novels in the tradition of JaneAusten’s Emma (1816) and side by side with similar reworkings of the sametopos, including George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871�72) and MargaretOliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866). While this reassessment allows us also

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to see Yonge as part of an interconnected canon of nineteenth-centurywomen’s writing, Elizabeth Hale’s article offers a comparative approach thatfocuses on transatlantic parallels. Hale’s comparison of The Pillars of the Housewith Susan Coolidge’s 1872 What Katy Did reveals how both novels use thesymbolic language of ‘‘affliction’’ to thematize the coming of age of talentedadolescents. This approach combines a critical redeployment of the paradigmsof disability studies with an analysis of authorial anxieties as a major topos.In a similar vein, Mia Chen pushes further a reassessment of domesticfiction’s frequently intricate referencing of scientific discourse. Examining thesymbolism of the fossil record in The Trial, Chen suggests that this new way ofencoding nature allows Yonge to translate the convergence of geological ‘‘deeptime’’ with theistic faith into the structures of the domestic novel.

Providing a different perspective on the making of Yonge’s vast and vastlyversatile output, the final article reminds us of the vital importance of archivalresearch for a new appreciation of non-canonical fiction. In an insightfulreading of Yonge’s bank accounts, Charlotte Mitchell shows how they give aclearer picture of Yonge’s journalistic activities and expenditure, allowing alsothe identification of anonymous contributions to the Monthly Packet. Inaddition, they disclose new information on the financial crisis suffered byYonge’s brother in the 1870s and its implications for her work. Supplementingclose textual analysis and the new insights offered by different, importantlycomplementary critical paradigms, this archival work constitutes an essentialpart of the necessary mapping of Yonge’s prolific output. As the contributionsto this special issue bring together different approaches that help to illuminatethe surprisingly versatile aspects of her writing, in fact, they simultaneouslyindicate a shift in reconsiderations of the various forms Yonge has taken in thepublic imagination and in critical discourses over the years. It hopes to make itpossible that we draw on Yonge’s vast oeuvre in close and comparativereadings without having first to reiterate her still contested significance for anexpanding canon of Victorian popular fiction.

Tamara S. WagnerNanyang Technological University, Singapore

Notes

1 Charlotte M. Yonge, ‘‘Introductory Letter,’’ Monthly Packet 1 (1851): i.2 Gavin Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian

Novel (Oxford: Lang, 2007) 9; Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Yonge (Plymouth:Northcote, 1996) 1. Kristine Moruzi has recently shown that decades ofeditorial work and a prolific output of fiction reveal ‘‘Yonge’s perspectivetowards girls was complex and sometimes contradictory but that she was

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sensitive to the needs and expectations of her girl readers’’. See KristineMoruzi, ‘‘‘The Inferiority of Women’: Complicating Charlotte Yonge’sPerception of Girlhood in The Monthly Packet,’’ Antifeminism and the VictorianNovel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Tamara S. Wagner(Amherst: Cambria, 2009) 57�76 (58).

3 Ethel Romanes, Charlotte Mary Yonge: An Appreciation (London: Mowbray,1908) 190.

4 Malcolm Elwin, Victorian Wallflowers (London: Cape, 1934) 232.5 Margaret Mare and Alicia C. Percival, Victorian Best-Seller: The World of

Charlotte M. Yonge (London: Harrap, 1947) 5.6 Bessie Rayner Belloc, A Passing World (London: Ward and Downey, 1897)

30.7 Talia Schaffer, ‘‘Taming the Tropics: Charlotte Yonge Takes on Melanesia,’’

Victorian Studies 47.2 (2005): 204�14 (204).8 Nicola Diane Thompson, ‘‘Responding to the Woman Questions: Rereading

Noncanonical Victorian Women Novelists,’’ Victorian Women Writers and theWoman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1999) 1�23 (2). This question, Thompson stresses, highlights the limitationsof the ‘‘ideological basis’’ of feminist criticism.

9 Gavin Budge, ‘‘Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir ofRedclyffe,’’ Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 193�223 (193). JuneSturrock has already stressed that the ‘‘foregrounding of the domestic is, ofcourse, a commonplace of the period, and some of the most outspokenfeminist leaders can sound curiously close to Yonge here’’ (‘‘Heaven andHome’’: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women[Victoria: U of Victoria, 1995] 25). More recently, contributions toAntifeminism and the Victorian Novel explore in detail the limitations of suchsimplistic categories. In ‘‘Maiden Pairs: The Sororal Romance in The CleverWoman of the Family’’, for example, Talia Schaffer shows in detail howYonge’s family chronicles offer alternative ‘‘extending family units in a kindof plot dynamic not usual in more traditional fiction’’ (Wagner 97�116[99]). The pioneering work in applying a disability studies approach toYonge was undertaken in Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Fictions of Affliction:Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004).

10 Budge, ‘‘Realism’’ 193.11 Melissa Schaub, ‘‘‘Worthy Ambition’: Religion and Domesticity in The Daisy

Chain,’’ Studies in the Novel 39.1 (2007): 65�83 (81).12 Barbara Dennis, Charlotte Yonge (1823�1901): Novelist of the Oxford Movement:

A Literature of Victorian Culture and Society (Lewiston: Mellen, 1992) 2, 56.13 Raymond Chapman, Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the

Oxford Movement (London: Weidenfeld, 1970) 74.14 Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London:

Macmillan, 1903) 119.

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15 Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in VictorianEngland (New York: Garland, 1977) 197�98.

16 Vineta Colby, Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974) 186�87.

17 Maria Poggi Johnson, ‘‘The Reason for What Is Right: Practical Wisdom inJohn Keble and Charlotte Yonge,’’ Literature and Theology 20.4 (2006): 379�93 (390).

18 Schaffer, ‘‘Taming’’ 204.

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