Abstract
Reflecting on the paucity of women writers in the Victorian medievalist craze, Florence Boos writes, “It may also be revealing that no Victorian woman novelist of greater stature than Charlotte Yonge was prepared to grant the dignity of idealization to ‘medieval’ fiction.”1 Male nineteenth-century writers certainly glorified the Middle Ages. As early as 1819, Sir Walter Scott popularized (and romanticized) the Middle Ages in Ivanhoe, and Tennyson’s reflections on Malory and Arthurian lore, Idylls of the King, influenced generations of poets. In contrast to these looming literati, Charlotte Mary Yonge indeed is a minor writer, best known today, if at all, for The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).
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Notes
Florence S. Boos, “Alternative Victorian Futures,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence Boos (New York: Garland Publishers, 1992), 12.
For example, June Sturrock, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1995) focuses on Yonge’s domestic novels (The Daisy Chain, The Clever Woman of the Family, and The Three Brides). Joseph Ellis Baker openly states in his introduction to a section on Yonge in The Novel and the Oxford Movement (New York: Russell and Russell Inc., 1965), 103, “We shall try not to include purely juvenile fiction.”
Catherine Wells-Cole, “Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge,” in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 78.
Georgina Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1943), 85.
Harold Orel, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 13.
Charlotte Yonge, The Chaplet of Pearls, Project Gutenberg, June 23, 2002, http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04/chplt10h.htm> (accessed May 24, 2003).
Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, ed., Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.
Alethea Hayter, Charlotte Yonge (Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1996), 43.
Charlotte Yonge, The Lances of Lynwood (London: John W Parker, 1855) describes the fourteenth-century exploits of the Lynwood brothers in the court of Edward III, and the first paragraph of Yonge’s preface reads in full as follows: “For an explanation of the allusions in the present Tale, scarcely any Notes are necessary, save a reference to the bewitching Chronicle of Froissart; and we cannot but hope that our sketch may serve as an inducement to some young readers to make acquaintance with the delectable old Canon for themselves, undeterred by the size of his tomes.”
Chris Waters, “Marxism, Medievalism, and Popular Culture,” in History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence Boos (New York: Garland Publishers, 1992), 145.
Asa Briggs, Saxons, Normans and Victorians (Bexhill-on-Sea and London: Historical Association, 1966), 6.
R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed. (Dover, NH: Boydell Press, 1985), 1.
D. J. A. Matthew, “The English Cultivation of Norman History,” England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. David Bates and Anne Curry (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press, 1994), 13–14.
Francis Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,” Speculum 69, no. 3 (July 1994): 687.
Thomas Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James the Second, 6th ed., vol. I (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850), 11–12.
The percentages come from figures 1.2 and 1.3 in David Vincent’s The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), as does the comment about children’s literacy versus their parents (14). The numbers accord with The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 60, and Richard Altick’s 1841 literacy rates of 67% male and 51% female, based on the ability to sign one’s name on a marriage license. Although not a perfect measure of literacy (perhaps some individuals could read but not write), the statistics point to a continuing need for education.
Quoted in Margaret Mare and Alicia C. Percival, Victorian Best-Seller: The World of Charlotte M. Yonge (London: Harrap, 1949), 40.
Some might wonder why Charlotte Yonge did not rework Arthurian lore, especially since the Sangreal quest might have fit her religious intentions. See David Staines, “King Arthur in Victorian Fiction,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Buckley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 274. From him we learn that The Monthly Packet ran two King Arthur features, one a six-article series on Galahad (1852–1853) and the other an extensive twenty-one article (1859–1864) by Ellen J. Millingston on the Grail quest. Yonge mentions Arthur in The History of Tom Thumb, and she refers to hero Guy as Galahad in The Heir of Redclyffe. Otherwise she does seem to have avoided the more fantastic Camelot legend, with its pagan and incestuous overtones, and kept to the path of “purer” history. The King Arthur myth enjoyed popularity in children’s literature later in the Victorian period, with
Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur (1880) and
Margaret Vere Farrington’s Tales of King Arthur (1888).
The information about Keble comes from Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 119.
Michael H. Bright, “English Literary Romanticism and the Oxford Movement,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 3 (1979): 386.
Laura Peters, Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (Manchester, NY: Manchester University Press, 2000), 64–65.
J. S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 113–114.
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Story of the Normans (New York and London: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 126.
All information about Old Norse mothering comes from Jenny Jochens, “Old Norse Motherhood,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 204–208.
Natalie J. McKnight, Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1–5.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed., Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 112–113.
Laurence Lerner, Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 160.
Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only?: Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 36.
Jackie Wullschläger, Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne (London: Methuen, 1995), 18–19.
Another critic suggests Yonge took her material from Palgrave’s History of Normandy and England. See Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 110. The relevant first volume of the four-volume tome was published in 1851, so it is probable that Yonge knew of this historian’s version of events.
Elisabeth van Houts, “Historical Writing,” in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003), 104.
Cassandra Potts, “Normandy, 911–1144,” in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bell and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003), 24.
Edward Augustus Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England trans. Abridged J. W Burrow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 125.
John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1952), 72.
Peter Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 74.
Debra Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995), 8.
Julia Briggs, “Women Writers and Writing for Children: From Sarah Fielding to E. Nesbit,” in Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 237.
See Catherine Wells-Cole, “Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge,” in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 78.
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© 2005 Lorretta M. Holloway and Jennifer A. Palmgren
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Wakefield, S.R. (2005). Charlotte Yonge’s Victorian Normans in The Little Duke . In: Holloway, L.M., Palmgren, J.A. (eds) Beyond Arthurian Romances. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981165_4
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