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(Many thanks to Sandra Laythorpe and others)
Virago edition of The
Daisy Chain
Virago published an edition of The
Daisy Chain in 1988 in their Virago modern classics series.
This edition had a new introduction by Barbara Dennis and a new afterword
by Georgina Battiscombe.
The Virago edition ISBN 0860688798
is no longer in print.
Charlotte
Yonge, one of the most prolific and popular
of Victorian novelists, wrote a number of
"slice of life" novels. The most
famous of these is The Daisy Chain
– a novel about the large, motherless
May family.
form part of his growing collection of texts
on the theme of the relationship between the
middle-class and the respectable and unrespectable
poor in the nineteenth century. His Daisy
Chain extracts describe the attempts of
the May children, in particular Ethel May,
to help, educate and christianise a community
of quarry workers a few miles outside town.
For a commentary on death in childhood, including comments on The Daisy
Chain, see the second page of on The Victorian Web.
(This material is excerpted with permission of the publisher from Chapter
4 of Through the Northern Gate: Childhood and Growing Up in British
Fiction, 1719-1901, by Jacqueline Banerjee [New York: Peter Lang,
1996].
No
one can be more sensible than is the Author
that the present is an overgrown book of a
nondescript class, neither the "tale"
for the young, nor the novel for their elders,
but a mixture of both. Begun
as a series of conversational sketches, the
story outran both the original intention and
the limits of the periodical in which it was
commenced; and, such as it has become, it
is here presented to those who have already
made acquaintance with the May family, and
may be willing to see more of them. It would
beg to be considered merely as what it calls
itself, a Family Chronicle - a domestic record
of home events, large and small, dining those
years of early life when the character is
chiefly formed, and as an endeavour to trace
the effects of those aspirations which are
a part of every youthful nature. That the
young should take one hint, to think whether
their hopes and upward-breathings are truly
upwards, and founded in lowliness, may be
called the moral of the tale. For
those who may deem the story too long, and
the characters too numerous, the Author can
only beg their pardon for any tedium that
they may have undergone before giving it up. Feb.
22nd, 1856
Given
at
Text & Architecture – An
international Word & Image Conference, Paris, 26-28 June 2003
Victoria Coulson joined the in autumn
2003
This paper 'reads' Victorian Gothic domestic architecture
alongside the English nineteenth-century domestic novel in order to articulate
common themes and structures in these contemporaneous representational forms.
Using photographs, plans, and other visual materials as well as literary texts,
the paper focuses on the mid-Victorian commitment to purifying domestic representational
forms (novels and houses) through a sacralization of both verbal and non-verbal
structures of meaning.
The paper takes as the first of its two central 'texts'
Tyntesfield House, near Bristol in England. The self-made millionaire, and
Oxford Movement Christian, William Gibbs bought a Georgian manor house which
he commissioned a local architect, Norton, to redesign, enlarge, and glorify
(1863–6). After Gibbs's death, his son commissioned further alterations
(Woodyer, 1885–9) which consolidated the building's whole-hearted Gothicism.
The result was Tyntesfield House, a spectacular 43-bedroom Victorian Gothic
mansion, which remained in the ownership of the Gibbs family until 2002.
In relation to ecclesiastic architecture, George L.
Hersey has analyzed High Victorian Gothic as an eloquent medium of missionary
Christianity whose roots lie in nineteenth-century associationism, a theory
of design which held that buildings should 'express' their function through
contrasting volumes, masses, and distribution of detail; the central 'message'
of Victorian Gothic churches, Hersey argues, is one of didactic torment, 'offer[ing]
to the observer the prospect of his own suffering for Christ'.
This paper uses a comparable semiotic approach to propose
that the expressive function of domestic Gothic may be understood as a religious
purification of family life. The most extraordinary – yet archetypal
– feature of Tyntesfield is the enormous private chapel (by Arthur Blomfield),
fully integrated into the main body of the house and thus expressing at the
level of architectural structure the cultural project of sacralizing the domestic
sphere. Blomfield later completed a consonant commission in the design of
Selwyn College, Cambridge, whose Master's Lodge (1883) similarly effects domestic
comfort within an ecclesiastic architectural idiom. Tyntesfield House may
thus be analyzed as an architectural text whose physical structures narrate
an authoritative Victorian story about the relations between material, domestic
experience and the redemptive realm of Oxford Movement Christianity.
In the sphere of literary production, the most prolific
and popular exponent of this mid-Victorian missionary Christianity was Charlotte
Mary Yonge (1823–1901), a close friend of the Gibbs family, and frequent
visitor to Tyntesfield. Yonge's bestselling novel The
Daisy Chain (1856) forms the second major focus of the paper.
The paper argues that The
Daisy Chain may be seen as the literary counterpart to Tyntesfield
House, in that its expressive and didactic project is a cognate purification
of domestic narrative through the sacralizing cadences of religious discourse.
The novel begins with a happy family of eleven children, and proceeds
to dismantle this extravagantly procreative nucleus by a series of disasters
and sacrifices whose effect is to break up domestic and sexual relations
and replace them with missionary work at home and abroad; the plot culminates
in the consecration of a new church, and the almost total imposition of
celibacy on its protagonists. Like a Gothic church, The
Daisy Chain functions as a purifying medium, a machine
à souffrir for characters and readers alike, participating
in a Victorian literary tradition of the house as torture appliance that
stretches from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) to Henry James's
The Spoils of Poynton (1897). Yonge's characters shift at moments of high
drama into fluent biblicalese, an effect which echoes at sentence-level
the novel's symbolic and structural commitments to a sacralization of
secular discourse clearly akin to the semiotic project of Victorian Gothic
domestic architecture.
Website note:
Tyntesfield House was
recently bought by the National Trust and is open to limited public access.
For current details see the .
For another article on Tyntesfield
see by Lyle Eveillé of CMYF.
The Charity
Bazaar and Women's Professionalization in Charlotte Mary Yonge's The
Daisy Chain (2007)
Thorne-Murphy, Leslee
"The Charity Bazaar and Women's Professionalization in Charlotte
Mary Yonge's The Daisy Chain"
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 47, Number 4, Autumn
2007, pp. 881-899
Extract from
abstract: As an established author musing on the changes in women?s
professionalization that had occurred during her lifetime, Charlotte
Mary Yonge remarked that women's involvement in bazaars had changed
the way her society thought about women earning money. By examining
the depiction of a charity bazaar in The Daisy Chain, we see how she
used the methods and logic of the charity bazaar to represent her own
participation in the publishing marketplace. In 1877, as an established
novelist, Charlotte Mary Yonge reflected on a change that had happened
during the course of her career. As a child, she had understood that
a lady did not accept payment for her work, yet just thirty years later,
she observed, "everybody does want to make money." She mused,
"I suppose the bazaar system first led to the change of tone."
In typical understated fashion, Yonge pinpointed a seemingly minor element
of Victorian life that, according to her observations, had fundamentally
changed society's attitude toward women earning money: "the bazaar
system."
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