Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge's

RECENT ATTEMPTS at a critical recuperation of the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge have largely sidestepped the issue of her work’s commitment to a religious perspective. June Sturrock’s brief 1995 monograph, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women, is focused on the way in which Yonge’s Tractarian beliefs provided a framework within which a conservative feminist account of an independent social role for women could be articulated, but takes those beliefs themselves as givens. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström’s more substantial 1984 study, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form, whilst noting a relationship between apparent changes in Yonge’s religious beliefs and differences in the form of her novels, is characterized by a formalist mode of interpretation which tends to bracket off the question of how Yonge presents religious belief in her novels from any wider context in Victorian religious thought. In this paper, I would like to examine the relationship between Yonge’s novelistic presentation of religious belief and prevailing critical characterizations of realism in the novel. Historians of the novel such as Ian Watt, following Lukács’s pronouncement that “the novel . . . is the epic of a world forsaken by God” (Watt 1957, 84) have tended to portray the novel form as inescapably committed to a secular view of the world. Charlotte Yonge’s novels present something of a problem for this characterization of the novel form, since they possess all the features Watt identifies with what he calls “formal realism” (Watt 1957, 83–85) – to an extent that led Victorian critics to complain about her excessive and undiscriminating realism (Hutton 214) – but combined with a religious perspective that extends far beyond superficial pieties, informing minute details of plot and characterization. Of course, it is possible for a modern critic to find tensions and contradictions between Yonge’s religious views and her realist literary method, a tactic which was already being pursued by her contemporary R. H. Hutton in his impressively serious 1861 review of her work. As is noted by Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström (18–20), who follows Hutton’s line of interpretation, however, the extent to which a reader finds Yonge’s realism and her Tractarianism in conflict largely depends on the differences between that reader’s perspective and Yonge’s own – it is not the product of incoherence in Yonge’s work itself. No less a