A Power to Bite upon the Imagination' : ecclesiastical, ideological, and cultural controversies in the domestic novels of Charlotte Mary Yonge

Abstract

This dissertation investigates and interprets the ways in which Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901), one of the most popular and prolific authors of the nineteenth century, was read, represented, reviewed, and remembered. It scrutinises the ambition and reception of her domestic novels in order to develop a deeper and more detailed sense of the rivalries and reciprocities that existed between her ideals and dominant contemporary ideologies. The narratives were devised to be deployed in incendiary ecclesiastical, ideological, and cultural crises that erupted in confrontations over "Papal Aggression," Catholic "perversion," the Crystal Palace, the Great Census, "surplus" women, school commissions, Indian insurrection, Irish immigration, ecclesiastical innovation, sanitary reform, cholera prevention, purity preoccupations, and contamination panics, all conspicuous participants in the unruly processes of secularisation, industrialisation, urbanisation, and modernisation that complicated and contested previous constructions of the British identity at midcentury. This dissertation places her novels within broader disciplinary and interdisciplinary concerns, and aims to be especially attentive to the anxieties and antagonisms that surround contingent categories of gender, class, and race.