The Daisy Chain by Charlotte M. Yonge
By Dale Nelson
Well – so now we know: Machen disliked The Daisy Chain: “noxious and detestable”! *
“Why? Because it causes the Christian Religion to appear as the unhappy, cross-grained invention of an excessively pernickety nursery-governess, temp. 1850.” (Temp. means tempore, Latin for “in the time of.”)
For a different opinion, we may turn to C. S. Lewis.
In 1945, Lewis addressed the Society of St. Alban and St. Sergius, an Anglican-Orthodox group, speaking on the topic of “Membership.” A family is, or ought to be, a little society. Lewis said, “If a really good home, such as the home of Alcinous and Arete in the Odyssey or the Rostovs in War and Peace or any of Charlotte M. Yonge’s families, existed today, it would be denounced as bourgeois** and every engine of destruction would be levelled against it.”
A Lutheran pastor and his wife whom I know have twelve children. Their “apostolic dozen” exceeds by one the children of Yonge’s May family. The children are: Richard (who, at the beginning of the novel, has failed his exams at Oxford), Margaret (age 18), Flora (about 17), Norman (about 16), Etheldred (15; awkward, intellectually keen, energetic, she is the novel’s heroine), Harry (12), Mary (10), Tom (8), Blanche (5), Aubrey (3), and infant Gertrude Margaret, also called Daisy. The Daisy Chain is the May children. Daisy will never know her mother, who is killed in a carriage accident soon after the novel begins.
We might expect excesses of “Victorian sentimentality” on this occasion, but find ourselves, instead, impressed by the realism of Yonge’s depiction: how Norman feels an awkward fear of entering the room where his injured father lies, or how Harry and Mary eat “from a weary craving feeling,” and from lack of anything to do. When the wife of Lewis’s pastor friend Peter Bide was dying, Lewis wrote to him. “If you find (some do) that mental anguish produces an inclination to eat more – paradoxical but it can – I should jolly well do so” (from a letter of 29 April 1959).
Halfway through the book, the author moves ahead three years. Ethel’s project on behalf of the ragged children of Cocksmoor is moving ahead; Harry is missing at sea; Flora’s intention of marrying an unimpressive young man who has prospects of wealth is causing anxiety. By the end of the book, seven years have passed since it began. Yonge manages her various plots with unobtrusive skill, and orchestrates a satisfactory conclusion to this volume of the family chronicle. The sequel is The Trial, and a copy awaits my attention.
In Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964 (1965 edition), Lewis’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green says that Yonge (1823-1901) provides pictures representative of Victorian manor houses and parsonages, particularly those influenced by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England. John Keble, whose sermon “National Apostasy” is conventionally cited as starting the Oxford Movement, was a family friend of the Yonges. He stirred Charlotte’s father to a zeal for building churches. Charlotte’s only sibling was too young to be a childhood companion for her, but she remembered her young years as being very happy. She was educated by her parents. Dedicated to a writing and editing career as an adult, her “amazing number of books” includes The Heir of Redclyffe, a Victorian bestseller and a book whose chivalric idealism was an inspiration to the Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris – Morris, of course, being the author of one of Lewis’s favorite romances, The Well at the World’s End.
But it was The Daisy Chain that came first in a list of Yonge titles – “all good books” – sent by Lewis to Arthur Greeves in 1953. I’ve read it, and I’m with Lewis and not with Machen on this one.
Note: This installment of Books Around Machen is based on material included in “Little-Known Books in Lewis’s Background: Part II,” published in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 32:9&10, Sept.-Oct. 2001.
*“Odd Volumes: A Pecksniff Picture and a Puzzling Inscription,” The Evening News 5 April 1911; reprinted here in the Weekly Machen series on 14 December 2023.
**As demonstrated by the forthright manifesto of Black Lives Matter: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” When donations were put in peril by adverse publicity, BLM removed the statement (Sept. 2020) without changing its objective.
BLM removes website language blasting ‘nuclear family structure’ (nypost.com)
darklybrightpress.com 
I wonder why — given Machen’s dislike expressed thus in 1911 — he hadn’t forgotten the book by the time 15 years later when he wrote his Queer Things column for 8 August 1926. See the Darkly Bright book What Do We Know? (2023), page 69. Machen’s bound to be joshing when he calls it an “Immortal Work” and a “masterpiece.” Yet it came to mind when he needed a citation for the meaning of “britzska.” Had he simply remembered the book, all these years, as a useful source for details about the way well-off families lived in the mid-Victorian period — or had he read it again, perhaps not so long ago? It seems he expected his readers to understand that he was referring to it ironically — had he mentioned the book elsewhere more recently than 15 years ago in unambiguously contemptuous terms? At any rate The Daisy Chain is demonstrably a Book Around Machen; and, I think, a tolerably good one.
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Many thanks! Her Wikipedia article gave me a vivid sense of her “amazing number of books” – and amazing variety, richly reinforced by listening to audiobooks of her later History of France, Young Folks’ History of Germany, and The Lances of Lynwood, which historical novel apparently immediately preceded The Daisy Chain. These have thoroughly complicated my sense of her – and left me wondering how much of her Machen read, and what he might have simply enjoyed and admired of her other works in their variety.
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