Edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske

5The story described here was published as The Castle-Builders, or, The Deferred Confirmation, in serial form in the Monthly Packet April 1851-May 1853, and in volume form in 1854.

1CRC identifies the “fellow-slave” as Anne Mozley, editor of the Magazine for the Young. The aunt could be a mistake for Anne Mozley’s sister-in-law, Harriett Mozley who was certainly known to the Dysons.

2 ‘At midnight, December 2, 1340, the queen [and] king found that three nurses and the rest of the royal children were the sole occupants of the royal fortress of the Tower; the careless Constable, Nicholas de la Beche, had decamped that evening to visit a lady-love in the city, and his warden and soldiers, following so good an example, had actually left the Tower to take care of itself.’ Elizabeth Strickland, ‘Philippa of Hainault’ in Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, 7 vols (London: Colburn 1840-3) II, 353.

3 Marianne Small (b. 1839/40) and Elizabeth Small (b. 1837/8), daughters of John Small (b. 1797/8), of Allbrook, agricultural labourer. The poem was John Milton, ‘L’Allegro’ (1645).

4Keble’s bestselling volume of poetry, that is, and not The Child’s Christian Year (1841), an anthology of poems by various hands compiled for Sunday Schools by CMY’s mother. Jane Martin (b.1836/7) was daughter of James Martin, agricultural labourer, of Otterbourne; by the time of the 1861 census she was kitchenmaid to Countess Nelson at Landford House.

5 Alethea (Coleridge) Mackarness.

6 This play, written by CMY for the Moberly children to act at Christmas, was published as The Mice at Play (1860).

1 Jane Cowing (b. 1807/8), the Moberlys’ governess.

2 This was evidently an edition of Jean Froissart, Chroniques de France, d’Angleterre et des pais voisins (c. 1400).

1 To this list one could add her younger brother Julian’s service with the Army in the Crimean War, which seems to have permanently injured his health, his marriage to Frances Walter and the birth and death of his first child. Charlotte and Julian Yonge spent their entire lives in close proximity, but their relationship is ill-documented; the family’s characteristic reticence was compounded by the fact that his later financial disasters gave his descendants a positive interest in obscuring its details, but it appears all the same to have been of great importance to her.

2 Letter 0.105, Anne Yonge to the Rev. John Yonge (March 1854).

1 It is a striking fact that the letters to Anne Yonge surviving among the Puslinch papers do not include any of those published by Christabel Coleridge. This is no doubt because the Anne Yonge correspondence which Coleridge saw belonged to Yonge’s niece Helen Yonge, whose papers are missing. The fact that two of the surviving manuscript letters of the 1840s refer to the abortive engagements of Mary Coleridge and Jane Colborne suggests the possibility that those which remained at Puslinch were censored, perhaps after Anne Yonge’s death in 1869, as unsuitable for publication, and were therefore not returned to CMY. All CMY’s papers (which included the correspondences with Mary Anne Dyson and Anne Yonge returned to her on their deaths) were inherited by Helen Yonge, lent by her to Christabel Coleridge, and returned by the latter to her. After that they disappear. The theory advanced by Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge, 7, that Coleridge destroyed the papers, since often repeated, is disproved by a letter from Coleridge to Mary Yonge in the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office.

2 Moor, Guide to Hursley, 9.

3 This was Dr. John Francis Yonge, M. D. (1814-1879), see above, Letter 0.29, William Crawley Yonge to John Yonge (14 March 1849). Barbara Dennis, Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) Novelist of the Oxford Movement (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen 1992) 48, 51n, states, on the authority of Yonge family tradition, that his elder brother the Rev. Duke John Yonge (1809-1846) also converted to Roman Catholicism. But it is hard to reconcile what CMY wrote in 1850 with the conversion of two of the Antony cousins, one since dead, and it seems more likely that Dennis’s story relates to John Francis Yonge.

1 Awdry, Heathcote, 93. The event described here forcibly recalls the opening scene of CMY’s novel Heartsease, or, The Brother’s Wife (1854), which charts the reactions of an aristocratic family to the news of the clandestine marriage of the second son.

2 MS Plymouth and West Devon Area Record Office Acc No 308: 7-8-76, To Mary Yonge. (7 August 1876).

3 Geoffrey Holt, ‘Coleridge, Henry James (1822–1893)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; Moberly, Dulce Domum, 94; Jordan, ‘Charlotte Yonge’s First Publishers’ 5.

4 Letter 0.171, To Anna Butler (15 June 1857).

5 A. J. Butler, Life and Letters of William John Butler, late Dean of Lincoln (1897); George Herring, ‘Butler, William John (1818–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; information from the Community of St. Mary the Virgin.

1 The letters to Barnett were inherited by her niece, Emma (Butler) Knight, who lent them both to Coleridge and Romanes for their biographies, but we have not traced the originals.

2‘All the little Sunday books in those days were Mrs. Sherwood’s, Mrs Cameron’s, and Charlotte Elizabeth’s, and little did my mother guess how much Calvinism one could suck out of them, even while diligently reading the story and avoiding the lesson.’ Coleridge, Life, 97.

3 ‘Lifelong Friends’ (1894), reprinted in Chaplet, 183.

4 Coleridge, Life, 164.

1 Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 26, 138.

2 Gavin Budge, ‘Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe’ Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003), 193-223, and Elisabeth Jay, ‘Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics’ Victorian Poetry 44 (2006) 43-59, analyse CMY’s work in the context of Tractarian literary theory and reading practice.

1 This idea was not original, nor exclusively the property of High Church Anglicans: a similar idea is expressed in what was still in the mid-Victorian period one of the most popular textbooks for teaching children to read, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children (London: Johnson 1781), vi-vii: ‘by deep strong and permanent associations, to lay the best foundation for practical devotion in future life.’

2 Coleridge, Life, 191. Letter 0.76, To Mary Anne Dyson (23 February 1853).

3 Friedrich, Freiherr von la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843), German novelist, was the author of numerous allegorical romances. Newman and Keble both valued them highly, and they are frequently referred to in CMY’s fiction and correspondence.

1 Moberly, Dulce Domum, 11.

2MS British Library Add MSS 54921: 80- 81, To Alexander Macmillan (29 January 1879).

3 The Heir of Redclyffe, like The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1754) , is the story of a baronet who overcomes his inherited bad temper; it is an experiment in the fictional portrayal of a good man; Sir Guy Morville explicitly mentions his devotion to the earlier novel, and we are meant to understand a dialogue between the two books.

4 This point is of interest, in the light of recent critical interpretations of Mansfield Park, as evidence that at least some early Victorian readers of the novel may have been capable of interrogating it from the anti-slavery point of view.

5 ‘Probably it is this element of feeling which marks the vague distinction between the old-fashioned high churchmen and the Oxford men, the desire to use poetry as a vehicle of religious language, the sense of awe and mystery in religion, the profundity of reverence . . a concern for the evocative and the reverent, a sense of the whispering beauty and truth of divinity as its presence surrounded the soul.’ Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 19.

1Letter 0.38, To Mary Anne Dyson ( 1850). Jay, ‘Tractarian Aesthetics’, 50, cites the parallel comment of Laura Edmonstone in The Heir of Redclyffe.

2 Kate Caergwent, in The Pillars of the House (1873) Chapter 39.

1 Hopes and Fears (1860), Chapter 26.

2 Many of CMY’s subsequent works, including The Trial (1864) and The Two Sides of the Shield (1885) explicitly address this kind of generational conflict. Budge, ‘Realism and Typology’, 203 ff, discusses the conflicts between realism and typology in her work.

3 MS Mrs Clare Roels. To Christabel Rose Coleridge, (19 September 1899).

1L.A. De Gruchy ‘ “The Monthly Packet” : a study of C.M. Yonge's Editorial Aims and Practice’. University of London MPhil thesis (1986); Amy de Gruchy. ‘The Monthly Packet.’ Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society Fellowship. (1995); 1–4. June Sturrock, ‘Establishing Identity: Editorial Correspondence from the Early Years of The Monthly Packet ‘ Victorian Periodicals Review 39.3 (2006) 266-279.

2 We are extremely grateful to Messrs Hoare and Co. for permission to transcribe and to quote from the ledgers recording transactions in CMY’s bank account.

3 Her statement to Elizabeth Roberts in Letter 0.54 (31 January 1852) that ‘the publisher only promises me £30 for the year’, suggests that he may literally have paid her the sum which she then distributed among contributors including herself. The account, however, does not definitely prove this.

4 ‘for a long time it seemed a point of honour, and perhaps of duty, with me to spend none of it on myself.’ ‘Lifelong Friends’ (1894), reprinted in Chaplet, 183.

1 On Lydia Sellon and her coadjutor Catherine Chambers see Peter G. Cobb, ‘Sellon, (Priscilla) Lydia (1821–1876)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

2Letter 0.124, To Anne Yonge (1 December 1854).

3 Coleridge, Life, 184, 265-6.

4 This may also partly represent money collected by her from MP readers, see Letter 0.167.

1 Letter 0.117, To Mary Anne Dyson (9 June 1854).

2 Letter 0.213, From the Rev. John Coleridge Patteson to Charlotte Mary Yonge (21 December 1859).

1 The sense is that the idea of The Heir of Redclyffe is filling her mind and preventing her getting on with the composition of The Castle-Builders, or, The Deferred Confirmation (1854), which was serialized in MP April 1851-May 1853.

2The Rev. Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836), through his friendship with Keble and Newman and their posthumous publication of Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M.A., 2 vols (London, 1838, 1839), exerted huge influence on the Oxford Movement despite his early death. It is possible that CMY met him as a child, because his family lived at Dartington in Devon and he visited Keble at Hursley.

1 Henry IV Part II, IV, 5.

2 Whit Sunday was 19 May 1850.

1 Keble, ‘Sixth Sunday after Trinity’ in The Christian Year.

1John Duke Coleridge (1820-1894), created (1874) 1st Baron Coleridge, elder brother of Mary, Henry and Alethea Coleridge.

2 The word is often used in CMY’s letters to Dyson to refer to the object of hero-worship.

3 ‘Composing a story is like reading one for the second time. No one can feel much interest in the termination of events over which he himself has an absolute control.’ From the essay ‘Is a rude or refined age more favourable to the production of works of fiction?’ in R. H. Froude, Remains, I, 145-63.

1This probably refers to a dispute among the Dysons and Yonges as to the relative merits of the two writers. The cult of Scott’s novels and poetry was very important to the Tractarians; Southey’s poetry was also much admired in Hursley and Dogmersfield. Mary Anne Dyson’s brother was known playfully in their circle as the Simorg and their house as the Simorg’s Nest or the Nest in allusion to Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), VIII, 17: ‘In Kaf the Simorg hath his dwelling place, /The all-knowing Bird of Ages . . .’

1The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey ed. Cuthbert Southey 6 vols (London: Longman 1849-50). CMY refers to the last letter in the third volume (1850), p. 351, addressed to the Rev. John Martyn Longmire (4 November 1812): 'My aim has been to diffuse through my poems a sense of the beautiful and good . . . rather than to aim at the exemplification of any particular moral precept.' CMY is surprised by Southey's indifference to the allegorical interpretation of his poems because the Tractarians, especially Keble, laid emphasis on the power of poetry to teach by indirection and mystery. As this part of the correspondence makes clear, her own fiction was written to be moralized by attentive readers.

2 CMY seems to refer here to the idea that classical literature, despite being pre-Christian, might be interpreted as shadowing Christian truths. Jay, ‘Tractarian Aesthetics’, 51, cites Keble’s Lectures on Poetry 1832-1841 tr. E. K. Francis (2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1912), 2, 314 , on this point.

3 CRC dates the letter 'about 1850'.

1 Keble, ‘First Sunday after Trinity’ in The Christian Year. 23 June 1850 was the first Sunday after Trinity. The whole poem is relevant to the anxieties of the period, especially ll. 13-16 ‘We in the midst of ruins live,/ Which every hour dread warning give,/ Nor may our household vine or fig-tree hide/ The broken arches of old Canaan’s pride.’

2 Keble, ‘Eighth Sunday after Trinity’ 44-8: ‘The grey-hair’d saint may fail at last,/ The surest guide a wanderer prove;/ Death only binds us fast/ To the bright shore of love.’

3 Elizabeth Crawford Lockhart (b.1811/12) was the superior of the Sisterhood of St. Mary's Wantage, which had been founded by the Rev. William Butler. She was under Manning's influence. Her conversion to Rome in 1850, which followed that in 1843 of her brother William Lockhart (1819-1892), caused great consternation among the Butlers and their connections.

4Dr. John Francis Duke Yonge (1814-1879), a physician, the son of WCY's eldest brother the Rev. Duke Yonge. See the letter above from William Yonge to John Yonge (14 March 1849). Dr. Yonge’s wife was Elizabeth Alice Holmes, and his mother Cordelia Anne (Colborne) Yonge (1775-1856), stepsister of FMY.

5 The Rev. Henry Wilberforce (1807-1873), youngest son of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the campaigner against the slave trade. He and his wife Mary (Sargent) Wilberforce (1811-1878) were received into the Roman Catholic Church on 15 September 1850. In the 1851 census Elizabeth Lockhart was staying with them. The Rev. Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892), archdeacon of Chichester and later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, was the widower of Mary Wilberforce's sister. He became a Roman Catholic on 6 April 1851. See David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (1966).

6 CRC’s note: ‘This extract shows the feeling caused by the numerous secessions to the Church of Rome about this time.’

1Shiverydown was the family name for the story published as Kenneth, or, The Rearguard of the Grand Army. The 1850 edition by John Parker was printed in Winchester.

2Anne Mozley (1809-1891), the editor of the Magazine for the Young, was the sister of the Tractarians J. B. Mozley (1813-1878) and Thomas Mozley (1806 - 1893). CMY had been contributing a series of 'Chapters on Flowers' , subsequently published as The Herb of the Field (Derby: Mozley 1853). The article, ‘Compound Flowers’ (September 1850) 305-15, looks forward to The Daisy Chain: ‘When you make a daisy chain you thrust the needle and thread through the receptacle or disk, and the center florets. . . Daisy chains are country children’s strings of pearls, the pearls of the meadow, as we may call them, for the very same word, Margarita, signifies at once a daisy and a pearl.' [308-9]

3 Perhaps one of Dyson’s pupils, though the name does not appear among those listed on the 1851 census.

4John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1850).

5The seventh commandment is: 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' The sense of this is, although CMY does not usually write letters on Sunday evenings, but performs some sort of religious exercise ('my task), she is doing so because she is so interested in the question Dyson has raised, which seems to be whether the girls in her school should be permitted to read books which refer to adultery. Dyson has evidently also asked for recommendations for books suitable to be read aloud on Sundays.

1Review of William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) in The Christian Remembrancer XX (October 1850) 332-73, 347: 'And children left to themselves may in their innocence get no harm from what may taint an older imagination. But as a rule, it must be the duty of parents to guard their minds from contamination as much as their manners.'

2Perhaps Mary Ann Serrett Barber, Missionary Tales for Little Listeners (1840).

3One of the translations of [Tommaso Grossi], Marco Visconti, storia del trecento cavata dalle cronache di quel secolo 4 vols (Milan 1834), probably that by Caroline Ward, published as Marco Visconti: A Romance of the Fourteenth Century 2 vols (London 1836).

4The Voyages and Travels of Captains Parry, Franklin, Ross, and Mr. Belzoni (1826).

5Sir Francis Palgrave, Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Friar (London 1837).

6Probably Edmund Rodney Pollexfen Bastard (1825-1856) of Kitley, near Yealmpton, a neighbour of the Puslinch Yonges, mentioned in George Moberly's diary as having converted to Rome by January 1851 (Dulce Domum, 94),who married a Roman Catholic in 1853. The context makes clear that Mr B is a patient of CMY’s uncle Dr. James Yonge, a Plymouth physician.

7The Rev. William Maskell (1814?-1890), ecclesiastical historian, was deeply involved in the Gorham controversy over baptismal regeneration, and converted to Rome in about 1850.

8The Warden of Winchester College, the Rev. Robert Speckott Barter (1790-1861), a close friend of Keble and the Moberlys.

9The Rev. Leveson Vernon Harcourt (1788-1860), chancellor of York, and his wife, née the Hon. Caroline Peachey (d.1871), CMY's godmother. They lived at West Dean, in Sussex, and were neighbours of Manning, who was Rector of Lavington.

1The Rev. Edward Monro, The Combatants: An Allegory (London 1848). In this story about withstanding the temptations of worldliness Eustace is the noblest but suffers most.

2Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), Deerbrook (1839). Martineau had been brought up as a Unitarian. Socinians deny the divinity of Christ.

3Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), Mary Barton (1848), another novel by a Unitarian.

4The Rev. Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), one of the founders of the Tractarian movement. Its followers were often called Puseyites. CMY met him only once, at Keble's funeral. He wrote a large number of letters of spiritual advice, some of which were published (but not at this date), and the Coleridge’s letters were presumably in MS.

5Anne Mozley was the editor of the Magazine for the Young, which was aimed at a readership among working-class children. CMY had contributed her novel The Two Guardians to another organ of the Tractarian movement, The Churchman's Companion, published by Masters. The Dysons and the Yonges felt, however, that the latter was too controversial in its theology to be good for the young, and wished to start a magazine aimed at children and young people of the middle and upper classes. The magazine was eventually begun on 1 January 1851 as the Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church.

6Romeo and Juliet V, 1, 75:'My poverty, but not my will, consents.'

7Anne Mozley.

8Her cousin Duke Yonge.

1Perhaps The Reign of Terror: A Collection of Authentic Narratives . . written by Eyewitnesses 2 vols (London, Simpkin and Marshall 1826).

2Arabella Sullivan, Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry 3 vols (London 1835).

3Mary Ross is a character in The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).

4 i.e. to provide material for the new magazine, the first issue of which appeared on 1 January 1851 under the title The Monthly Packet of Evening Reading for Younger Members of the English Church.

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