1st Edition

Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era Charlotte Yonge's Models of Manliness

By Susan Walton Copyright 2010
    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    Beginning with the premise that women's perceptions of manliness are crucial to its construction, The author focuses on the life and writings of Charlotte Yonge as a prism for understanding the formulation of masculinities in the Victorian period. Yonge was a prolific writer whose bestselling fiction and extensive journalism enjoyed a wide readership. The author situates Yonge's work in the context of her family connections with the army, showing that an interlocking of worldly and spiritual warfare was fundamental to Yonge's outlook. For Yonge, all good Christians are soldiers, and Walton argues persuasively that the medievalised discourse of sanctified violence executed by upright moral men that is often connected with late nineteenth-century Imperialism began earlier in the century, and that Yonge's work was one major strand that gave it substance. Of significance, Yonge also endorsed missionary work, which she viewed as an extension of a father's duties in the neighborhood and which was closely allied to a vigorous promotion of refashioned Tory paternalism. The author's study is rich in historical context, including Yonge's connections with the Tractarians, the effects of industrialization, and Britain's Imperial enterprises. Informed by extensive archival scholarship, Walton offers important insights into the contradictory messages about manhood current in the mid-nineteenth century through the works of a major but undervalued Victorian author.

    Contents: Introduction: 'Make us thine own soldiers true'; Happy warriors? Military matters in the 1850s; Shaping brothers and sons into soldiers I; Shaping brothers and sons into soldiers II; The fatherland of parish and community; The fatherlands of Henrietta's Wish and Hopes and Fears; Missionary men as Christian knights; The heirs of The Heir of Redclyffe in the South Pacific; Charlotte Yonge's historical heroes; Bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Susan Walton