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Charlotte
Yonge's two Prefaces to Scenes and Characters:
Online
text of Scenes and Characters
(Many thanks to Sandra Laythorpe and others)
Preface
1847 editionOF those who are invited
to pay a visit to Beechcroft, there are some
who, honestly acknowledging that amusement
is their object, will he content to feel with
Lilias, conjecture with Jane, and get into
scrapes with Phyllis, without troubling themselves
to extract any moral from their proceedings;
and to these the Mohun family would only apologise
for having led a very humdrum life during
the eighteen months spent in their company. There
may, however, be more unreasonable visitors,
who, professing only to come as parents and
guardians, expect entertainment for themselves,
as well as instruction for those who had rather
it was out of sight,look for antiques
in carved cherry-stones,and require
plot, incident, and catastrophe in a chronicle
of small beer. To these the Mohuns beg
respectfully to observe, that they hope their
examples may not be altogether devoid of indirect
instruction; and lest it should be supposed
that they lived without object, aim, or principle,
they would observe that the maxim which has
influenced the delineation of the different
Scenes and Characters is, that feeling,
unguided and unrestrained, soon becomes mere
selfishness; while the simple endeavour to
fulfil each immediate claim of duty may lead
to the highest acts of self-devotion.
NEW COURT,
BEECHCROFT, 13th
January.
Preface
1886 editionPERHAPS this
book is an instance to be adduced in support
of the advice I have often given to young
authors-not to print before they themselves
are old enough to do justice to their freshest
ideas. Not that I can lay claim to its
being a production of tender and interesting
youth. It was my second actual publication,
and I believe I was of age before it appeared-but
I see now the failures that more experience
might have enabled me to avoid; and I would
not again have given it to the world if the
same characters recurring in another story
had not excited a certain desire to see their
first start. In fact they have been
more or less my life-long companions. An almost
solitary child, with periodical visits to
the Elysium of a large family, it was natural
to dream of other children and their ways
and sports till they became almost realities.
They took shape when my French master set
me to write letters for him. The letters gradually
became conversation and narrative and the
adventures of the family sweetened the toils
of French composition. In the exigencies of
village school building in those days gone
by, before in every place "It there
behoved him to set up the standard of her
Grace," the tale was actually printed
for private sale, as a link between translations
of short stories. This process only
stifled the family in my imagination for a
time. They awoke once more with new names,
but substantially the same, and were my companions
in many a solitary walk, the results of which
were scribbled down in leisure moments to
be poured into my mother's ever patient and
sympathetic ears. And then came the
impulse to literature for young people given
by the example of that memorable book the
Fairy Bower, and followed up by Amy Herbert.
It was felt that elder children needed something
of a deeper tone than the Edgeworthian style,
yet less directly religious than the Sherwood
class of books; and on that wave of opinion,
my little craft floated out into the great
sea of the public. Friends, whose kindness
astonished me, and fills me with gratitude
when I look back on it, gave me seasonable
criticism and pruning, and finally launched
me. My heroes and heroines had arranged themselves
so as to work out a definite principle, and
this was enough for us all. Children's
hooks had not been supposed to require a plot.
Miss Edgeworth's, which I still continue to
think gems in their own line, are made chronicles,
or, more truly, illustrations of various truths
worked out upon the same personages. Moreover,
the skill of a Jane Austen or a Mrs. Gaskell
is required to produce a perfect plot without
doing violence to the ordinary events of an
every-day life. It is all a matter of arrangement.
Mrs. Gaskell can make a perfect little plot
out of a sick lad and a canary bird; and another
can do nothing with half a dozen murders and
an explosion; and of arranging my materials
so as to build up a story, I was quite incapable.
It is still my great deficiency; but in those
days I did not even understand that the attempt
was desirable. Criticism was a more thorough
thing in those times than it has since become
through the multiplicity of books to be hurried
over, and it was often very useful, as when
it taught that such arrangement of incident
was the means of developing the leading idea. Yet,
with all its faults, the children, who had
been real to me, caught, chiefly by the youthful
sense of fun and enjoyment, the attention
of other children; and the curious semi-belief
one has in the phantoms of one's brain made
me dwell on their after life and share my
discoveries with my friends, not, however,
writing them down till after the lapse of
all these years the tenderness inspired by
associations of early days led to taking up
once more the old characters in The Two
Sides of the Shield; and the kind welcome
this has met with has led to the resuscitation
of the crude and inexperienced tale which
never pretended to be more than a mere family
chronicle. C. M. YONGE. 6th
October 1886.
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