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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "More Bywords," Charlotte M. Yonge offers a compelling exploration of themes such as friendship, virtue, and the moral landscape of Victorian society. This collection of essays and narratives reveals Yonge's particular literary style, characterized by its rich moral undercurrents and vivid characterization. Her meticulous attention to detail and a profound understanding of human nature elevate her prose, making each page resonate with deeper meaning allied to urgent social concerns of her time. The work operates as both a reflective mirror on society and an intimate journey into the moral complexities faced by individuals. Charlotte M. Yonge was an influential Victorian author whose deep commitment to moral instruction and societal reform often flavored her literary endeavors. Growing up in a religious household, Yonge's writing was heavily informed by her devout Anglican faith and her advocacy for women's education. Her extensive works, including novels and historical writings, reflect an acute awareness of the changing social dynamics of her era and a desire to inspire positive change through her narratives. "More Bywords" is an essential read for those interested in Victorian literature, moral philosophy, or women's contributions to literary history. It not only showcases Yonge's literary prowess but also invites readers to engage with profound ethical dilemmas still relevant today. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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More Bywords
Table of Contents
Introduction
In More Bywords, ordinary lives are weighed against the claims of conscience and community, exploring how everyday choices become moral touchstones. Charlotte M. Yonge, a major voice of the Victorian era, uses this volume to consider the quiet dramas that shape character. Rather than spectacular events, she attends to the hinges of decision—moments when a word kept, a duty fulfilled, or a promise broken redirects a life. The result is fiction that prizes steadiness over sensation, inviting readers to look closely at motives and consequences. Its abiding interest is ethical clarity: not simple answers, but careful attention to what makes conduct trustworthy.
The book belongs to the landscape of nineteenth-century British fiction, appearing in the later decades of the Victorian period, when questions of faith, duty, and social responsibility were vigorously debated. Its settings evoke familiar domestic and communal spaces, where private loyalties meet public expectations. The prose is measured and lucid, attentive to manners without losing sight of inward struggles. Readers will recognize the historical texture of the age—its rhythms of family life, education, and parish presence—without needing specialist knowledge. Within that frame, Yonge crafts narratives whose stakes are intimate yet abiding, offering an experience shaped by reflection, careful observation, and a humane moral imagination.
More Bywords presents a sequence of self-contained narratives and character studies that together examine how values are tested in practice. Each piece turns on a situation that could plausibly arise in ordinary life: a contested obligation, a clash of temperaments, a promise that proves costly. The voice is calm and fair-minded, resisting melodrama in favor of gradual revelation. While conflicts emerge, the mood remains contemplative rather than sensational, and the style privileges clarity over ornament. Readers can expect a steady pace, a strong sense of causality, and a narrator who treats every figure—even the erring ones—with seriousness and restraint.
Central themes include integrity, patience, and the reconciliation of personal desire with the claims of others. Yonge probes how principles are learned, transmitted, and occasionally unlearned, asking what it takes to live by convictions when circumstances press against them. The book also reflects on speech itself—advice, counsel, and reputation—and the ways communal judgments become guides or snares. Without forcing conclusions, the narratives draw attention to formative influences: family bonds, mentorship, habit, and the quiet authority of example. The moral vision is demanding yet compassionate, interested less in faultfinding than in the possibility of growth through honest self-scrutiny and steady, practical charity.
Stylistically, the collection favors precise incidents over grand panoramas. Characters are defined by choices as much as by backgrounds, and dialogue often carries the weight of ethical inquiry. The tone is decorous but never bloodless; humor appears in gentle strokes, tempering earnestness with warmth. Yonge’s craft lies in the arrangement of pressures: competing duties are set side by side until their implications become clear, and resolution comes from clarity about ends rather than clever contrivance. The result is fiction that rewards attentive reading, offering the satisfactions of coherence, proportion, and a moral through-line that feels discovered rather than imposed.
For contemporary readers, More Bywords offers more than a glimpse of Victorian sensibility; it opens questions that remain urgent. How do we weigh competing loyalties? What does it mean to keep faith when doing so costs comfort or status? Where is the line between rightful independence and careless self-assertion? The book’s emphasis on consistency of character speaks to current debates about integrity in public and private life. Its interest in how communities shape conscience—through custom, instruction, and shared language—invites reflection on our own networks of influence, from family to profession. In this way, historical distance becomes a mirror rather than a barrier.
Approached as a volume of thoughtful Victorian tales, More Bywords offers a disciplined, humane reading experience: narratives that neither hurry nor harangue, but patiently unfold the stakes of ordinary choices. Yonge’s confidence in the formative power of small acts, and in the dignity of measured judgment, gives the book its distinctive gravity. Readers who enjoy fiction grounded in ethical inquiry and attentiveness to social texture will find its pages quietly bracing. Without spoiling specific turns, one can say that the collection consistently affirms the possibility of steadier vision—of living by words tested, not merely spoken—and invites us to consider how such steadiness is learned.
Synopsis (Selection)
More Bywords is a late-Victorian collection of short tales by Charlotte M. Yonge, issued as a companion to an earlier set of Bywords. Each narrative takes its cue from a familiar saying or maxim, placing the phrase within a concrete situation and watching its counsel meet events. The book ranges across ages and settings, yet remains focused on clear, ordinary choices and their consequences. The sequence is independent piece by piece, with no single hero, but the arrangement progresses from simpler scenes to broader responsibilities. The opening stories introduce the pattern: a proverb is stated, a predicament arises, and a measured resolution clarifies what the byword requires.
The first cluster of tales emphasizes home life, schoolroom scruples, and the early testing of character. Misunderstandings begin in trifling slights or hasty words and grow into problems that require patience to repair. A recurring turning point is the moment when a young person sees the cost of concealment and chooses candor instead. Parents, guardians, and teachers provide steady expectations rather than dramatic interventions. The bywords attached to these stories stress truthfulness, diligence, and respect, showing how small acts become habits. Endings are orderly and restrained, confirming that everyday faithfulness is sufficient to restore trust without resorting to grand gestures or dramatic revelations.
As the collection advances, the situations widen to include questions of livelihood, stewardship, and civic obligation. Characters must weigh personal convenience against responsibilities to kin, dependents, or neighbors. Key events include reproofs borne for the common good, delayed gratification in the management of property, and the careful distinction between pride and principle. The turning points often occur in public or semi-public settings, where an action might become a byword in itself. Though the stakes rise, the narrative maintains modest scale, keeping attention on process rather than spectacle. The proverbs chosen for these pieces underline constancy, thrift, and the cautious courage that sustains a community.
Midway, several tales shift into historical scenes, presenting figures who face danger or privation under older political or religious pressures. The maxims here concern loyalty, endurance, and the keeping of promises when the cost is borne over time. Pivotal moments involve the safe custody of messages, the protection of vulnerable persons, or the refusal to profit by treachery. Settings include households under watch, journeying under constraint, and quiet acts of service that must remain unannounced. By aligning a byword with an episode from the past, these stories demonstrate how brief wisdom survives changes of regime or fashion, remaining applicable even when outward circumstances are severe.
Other narratives return to contemporary life but place characters at a remove from home, where unfamiliar customs and expectations test judgment. Travel, temporary residence, and work among strangers require tact, hospitality, and careful speech. The bywords here underline the prudence of listening before acting and the value of kindness offered without presumption. Typical turning points involve recognizing a misread signal, accepting help without shame, or extending grace to an unexpected ally. The events are modest yet decisive, showing how a proverb can bridge difference when taken as a guide to patience rather than a weapon for fault-finding. Consequences are practical, immediate, and clear.
A notable strand concerns education and craft, particularly the steady influence of women and men who work without public notice. Governesses, artisans, clergy, and elder siblings model consistent duty rather than display. The sayings attached to these pieces stress doing the next task well, speaking precisely, and mastering impulse. A characteristic crisis is the temptation to dramatize a difficulty instead of quietly addressing it. Resolutions come through accurate information, shared labor, and timely restraint. These stories emphasize that competence and good order protect freedom, and that the strength of a household or workshop rests on observable, teachable habits more than on chance inspiration.
Later tales bring reputation into fuller view, exploring how a single act can become a label and how a label can distort judgment. Letters, tokens, and public reports carry weight, and small errors risk growing into settled mistrust. The bywords caution against hasty speech, encourage the rectifying of mistakes, and mark the point where silence is duty and where explanation is due. Turning points often occur when a witness steps forward or a record is corrected, allowing a fair account to replace rumor. The outcomes show consequences distributed fairly across those responsible, without dramatizing punishment, and with attention to restitution rather than revenge.
In the closing portion, several pieces echo earlier maxims, drawing threads together without binding the tales into a single plot. Choices are made with more foresight, and characters measure advice against both past missteps and present needs. A festive or commemorative scene reaffirms communal ties and recalls how shared sayings pass between generations. The book’s movement, from private mistakes to public trusts and back to settled domesticity, concludes with a quiet assurance that ordinary steadiness suffices. The bywords themselves emerge less as rules than as concise reminders, useful because they direct attention to the next right action rather than to dramatic outcomes.
Taken together, More Bywords offers a sequence of narratives designed to demonstrate how compact wisdom applies in varied circumstances. Without reliance on sensational plot turns, the collection presents decisions made under pressure from time, duty, affection, and conscience. Its essential message is that character is built through repeated, concrete choices, and that familiar sayings gain force when tested in practice. Key moments highlight truth told at cost, promises kept under strain, and patience exercised where haste would injure. The book’s order sustains this emphasis, moving from early lessons to mature judgment, and closing with the calm confidence that steady goodness endures.
Historical Context
More Bywords unfolds within the moral and social atmosphere of late Victorian Britain, with many scenes implicitly anchored in the Anglican parishes and village life of southern England that Charlotte M. Yonge knew intimately from Otterbourne, Hampshire. Written in the 1880s, the collection reflects a nation transformed by industrialization, imperial expansion, and legislative reform, yet still governed by parish rhythms, family duty, and charitable societies. Yonge’s world is that of schoolrooms, rectories, and mission committees, where the pulse of global events is felt through sermons, magazines, and subscription lists. The settings mirror a Britain negotiating modernity while holding fast to ecclesial order and communal responsibility.
The Oxford Movement, beginning in 1833, is the deepest historical current shaping Yonge’s moral imagination and thus the fabric of More Bywords. John Keble’s Assize Sermon on National Apostasy at St Mary’s, Oxford, on 14 July 1833 is often dated as its formal onset. Leaders such as John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882) issued the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), with Tract 90 (1841) igniting controversy about Anglican doctrine. Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 marked a rupture, but Keble (1792–1866) remained an Anglican parish priest at Hursley from 1836, where Yonge, living in neighboring Otterbourne, received enduring guidance. The movement’s parish reforms—frequent communion, catechizing, reverent liturgy, and organized charitable work—remade local religious life. Architecturally and ceremonially, the parish church regained centrality; educationally, National Schools and catechetical teaching were reinforced; socially, laywomen found structured avenues for service. Yonge edited The Monthly Packet (founded 1851), a Tractarian-leaning periodical that disseminated this ethos to a generation of educated Anglican girls. More Bywords, with its exemplary tales and proverbial touchstones, internalizes the movement’s emphases on duty, obedience, self-discipline, and sacramental community. Characters are tested against an ideal forged by the reforms: the Christian household linked to the altar, the schoolroom tied to the catechism, and charitable labor governed by pastoral oversight. Even where specific controversies of the 1830s and 1840s are not named, the work’s tone and moral architecture broadcast Keble’s Hursley model—the disciplined, beautiful, and socially responsible parish—as the measure of right conduct in an unsettled age.
British missionary expansion across the nineteenth century, especially in the Pacific, stands behind Yonge’s didactic celebration of self-giving service. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701) and the Church Missionary Society (1799) supported Bishop George Augustus Selwyn (consecrated 1841) in New Zealand and Melanesia. John Coleridge Patteson (1827–1871), consecrated Bishop of Melanesia in 1861, was killed at Nukapu in the Reef Islands on 20 September 1871, becoming a symbol of Christian martyrdom. Yonge famously devoted profits from The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) to fund the mission schooner Southern Cross in 1855. More Bywords echoes this missionary ethic, presenting sacrifice and steadfastness as normative Christian virtues.
The Crimean War (1853–1856) reshaped British ideas of public duty, medical care, and organized philanthropy. British troops fought at Alma (20 September 1854), Balaclava (25 October 1854), and endured the siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855). Reporting by William Howard Russell in The Times, together with Florence Nightingale’s nursing expedition to Scutari in 1854, exposed administrative failures and catalyzed reform, including the McNeill–Tulloch inquiry (1856). The war broadened respectable avenues for women’s service and sharpened ideals of endurance and self-sacrifice. More Bywords mirrors this climate by elevating quiet heroism and disciplined benevolence as civic and religious obligations within households and parishes.
Educational and parochial reforms provided the infrastructure for the moral cultivation that Yonge prized. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 (the Forster Act) created elected school boards and expanded schooling; the 1880 Act made attendance compulsory for children aged roughly five to ten; fees were effectively removed by 1891. Anglican voluntary schools, supported by the National Society (founded 1811), remained vital in many parishes. Parallel women’s organizations embodied practical faith: the Girls’ Friendly Society (founded 1875) aided working-class girls, and the Mothers’ Union (founded 1876 at Old Alresford by Mary Sumner) strengthened domestic piety. More Bywords situates characters amid such networks, illustrating how education and associational life shaped moral choices.
Political reform and class reconfiguration formed the backdrop to Yonge’s conservative Anglican social vision. The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884, with the Ballot Act of 1872 and the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885, broadened the electorate and rebalanced constituencies. Simultaneously, the Agricultural Depression (1873–1896), exacerbated by cheap American grain and the catastrophic wet year of 1879, strained rural economies in counties like Hampshire and prompted migration. Yonge’s fiction, including More Bywords, reflects unease about rapid change while advocating reciprocal obligations among classes. It models paternalistic stewardship and conscientious labor as stabilizing responses to democratization and economic uncertainty.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858 forced Britons to confront the moral and political ambiguities of empire. The uprising began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, spread to Delhi, saw atrocities at Cawnpore (Kanpur), and the prolonged siege and relief of Lucknow in 1857. Delhi was retaken on 20 September 1857, and the Government of India Act (2 August 1858) transferred rule from the East India Company to the Crown, followed by Queen Victoria’s Proclamation on 1 November 1858. Anglican missionary policy grew more cautious about cultural engagement. More Bywords, through cautionary tones about pride and presumption, reflects a chastened imperial ethic that prizes humility, service, and careful cross-cultural conduct.
As social and political critique, More Bywords interrogates the Victorian conscience by juxtaposing everyday choices with national moral trials. It exposes the fragility of class harmony when duty gives way to ambition, and it rebukes performative charity by insisting on accountable parish service shaped by Church oversight. The book’s preference for educated, conscientious women’s work—teaching, visiting, organizing—criticizes both idle gentility and exploitative employment structures. Its Anglican communal ideal challenges atomized liberal individualism, while its missionary references question imperial hubris and demand humility and restitution. In making proverbially framed choices reveal structural injustices, the work indicts complacency and calls for disciplined, sacrificial citizenship.
