Charles Kingsley's and Charlotte Yonge's Christian Chivalry

Perhaps few authors have enjoyed such differing posthumous reputations as Charlotte Yonge and Charles Kingsley. Kingsley is known today as the author of swashbuckling stories for boys, Yonge as the author of pious family dramas for girls. Although Kingsley did in fact read and enjoy Yonge's work (Hayter 1), we can imagine the high church hero of The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Guy Morville, as the type of highly strung, effeminate man that spurred Kingsley to denounce John Henry Newman's theology. Yet there are also few Victorian novels that give a higher place to self-denial, chivalry, and the importance of suffering for others than The Heir of Redclyffe. G. A. Lawrence's rather odd assertion in his novel Guy Livingstone (1857), whose hero is an Oxford blood, that "men ... are most moved by the quiet and simple sorrows. ... [W]e yawn over the wailings of Werter and Raphael, but we ponder gravely over the last chapters of The Heir of Redclyffe" (276) gives an idea of the power of Yonge's depiction of masculine suffering. In this chapter, I read Kingsley's novels of the Crimea, Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857), alongside Charlotte Yonge's popular domestic drama The Heir of Redclyffe. In doing so, I make a claim for the centrality of spectacles of masculine suffering in developing the hero's sense of Christian duty. This theory of Christian chivalry is refined through sickroom scenes and the care of an invalid friend or brother, which teaches the hero the importance of protecting those who are weaker than himself. Finally, in both Yonge and Kingsley, masculine suffering is seen as enabling self-expression, so that each novelist develops a connection between invalidism and authorship. Disability comes to be seen as an enabling condition for the writer, as the immobility caused by invalidism gives him a chance to refine his powers of observation and his wit.

This connection between invalidism and authorship is viewed more positively in Yonge than it is Kingsley, who sees volubility as in greater tension with a self-assured masculinity. Yonge uses the spectacle of male suffering and invalidism to train the reader emotionally. In the Heir of Redclyffe, Charles, the Edmonstone family's disabled brother, conjoins an effusive sentimentality with a demand for self-discipline in a sometimes unstable equilibrium. The boredom of the sickroom causes him to long for action; there is a restless energy in his ennui that resembles the narrative energy necessary to set the plot in motion. But as the novel draws to a close, Charles, like the other characters in the novel, must learn to restrain his feelings. The novel's emotional trajectory, from the opening's ennui to the climax's angry intensity and the ending's calm, thus follows Charles's affective development, developing a connection among narrative form, authorship, and disability.

By contrast, Kingsley critiques his intelle