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 books 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.
CONTENTS
| PAGE |
CHAPTER I | |
The Elder Sister | |
CHAPTER II | |
The New Court | |
CHAPTER III | |
The New Principle | |
CHAPTER IV | |
Honest Phyl | |
CHAPTER V | |
Village Gossip | |
CHAPTER VI | |
The New Friend | |
CHAPTER VII | |
Sir Maurice | |
CHAPTER VIII | |
The Brothers | |
The Wasp | |
CHAPTER X | |
Cousin Rotherwood | |
CHAPTER XI | |
Dancing | |
CHAPTER XII | |
The Fever | |
CHAPTER XIII | |
A Curiosity Map | |
CHAPTER XIV | |
Christmas | |
CHAPTER XV | |
Minor Misfortunes | |
CHAPTER XVI | |
Vanity and Vexation | |
CHAPTER XVII | |
Little Agnes | |
CHAPTER XVIII | |
Double, Double Toil andTrouble | |
The Rector’s Illness | |
CHAPTER XX | |
The Little Nephew | |
CHAPTER XXI | |
Charity Begins at Home | |
CHAPTER XXII | |
The Baronial Court | |
CHAPTER XXIII | |
Joys and Sorrows | |
CHAPTER XXIV | |
Love’s Labour Lost | |
CHAPTER XXV | |
The Thirtieth of July | |
CHAPTER XXVI | |
The Crisis | |
CHAPTER XXVII | |
Conclusion | |