in fact far more lifelike than the two children in Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House
(1839), a book expressly written to show ‘that species of noisy, frolicsome, mischievous
children, now almost extinct’. Harry and Laura Graham are boisterous tearaways, but
they are more like engines of destruction than children. Besides, this is no normal
family; their parents are dead and they live with their grandmother but are brought up
by a ferocious nurse, with a houseful of servants to clear up after them.
There were several capable early and mid-Victorian writers of domestic fiction, among
them Harriet Mozley, sister of John Henry Newman, who wrote The Fairy Bower (1841)
in reaction to the stereotype characterisation of the moral tales prevalent in the early
decades of the century. She was, she says in the preface, trying to show families as they
really were. Elizabeth Sewell (1815–1906) used fiction with some skill to convey religious
instruction in a family setting, as in Amy Herbert (1844) and Laneton Parsonage (1846).
Annie Keary (1825–1879), less solemn than either Mozley or Sewell, wrote a handful of
vigorous stories about families, including The Rival Kings (1857) which powerfully
describes the implacable hatred that children can feel for each other—a theme which few
juvenile authors have cared to investigate.
But it was Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901) who was regarded as the doyenne of the
domestic writers at the time. Family chronicles such as The Daisy Chain (1856) and The
Pillars of the House (1873) were intended for the schoolroom girl. She loved to create
vast families, often with a complicated cousinhood, from a background such as her own
—upper class, devoutly Anglican, high principled, bookish. Her characterisation is
nearly always convincing, unexpectedly so when she describes unruly boys, or boisterous
girls, such as the turbulent young Merrifields of The Stokesley Secret (1861) or the
rebellious Kate Caergwent in Countess Kate (1862). But for all her concern for the
sanctity of the family, Miss Yonge did not often choose to show a complete one. In The
Daisy Chain the mother is killed early in the story in a carriage accident; in Magnum
Bonum (1879) it is the father who has been removed, and the mother, too young and
immature for the role, has to bring up her brood alone. In The Pillars of the House the
thirteen Underwood children are orphaned. The dying father lives long enough to bless
the new-born twins; “‘My full twelve, and one over, and on Twelfth-day”’. The mother,
her mind gone, dies a year later, and the eldest brother takes on the role of father. The
immensely high standards of behaviour that Yonge expected of her young characters,
the lofty idealism, the crises of conscience, are to be found in much mid-Victorian
fiction.
Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841–1885) was one of the best of the later Victorian writers of
family stories, though her style was too subtle and leisurely to be generally popular.
(Like Charlotte Yonge, she delineated characters better than she constructed plots.)
Brought up in a well-born, well-read but penurious clerical family, she wrote for readers
who understood that sort of background. G.M. Young, in Victorian England (1936)
recommended Six to Sixteen (1875) as containing one of the best accounts of a Victorian
girlhood. A Flat Iron for a Farthing (1872) and We and the World (1880) describe equally
well the early years of very different boys, in the first a rather ‘precious’ only child is
depicted with affectionate humour; in the second two rumbustious Yorkshire brothers.
In shorter stories such as A Great Emergency, Mary’s Meadow and A Very Ill-Tempered
Family, all written in the 1870s, she anticipates E.Nesbit’s style.
336 THE FAMILY STORY