In Founded on paper or Uphill and downhill between the two Jubilees (1898), the sequel to something of her parents’ story in The Carbonels (1895), Charlotte M. Yonge moves closer to her own experience of village life and the changes and improvements that can be wrought by a good family in residence.

This novel was published by the National Society for Promoting Religious Education. According to Ellen Jordan, this was ‘one of the books Yonge wrote with the specific audience of the "weary hardworked women" who belonged to Mothers' Unions in mind.’

Miss Yonge returned to the Carbonels, but this time there is only the unmarried Miss Sophia Carbonel in residence at Greenhow Farm. She ‘was still lady of all work to Uphill and something between a mother and a companion to Estrid and Malvina’, her grandnieces and patroness to the residents of Uphill who lives have reflected the social changes of Victorian England. The young hero of The Carbonels Johnnie Hewlett has become ‘Mr. Hewlett … churchwarden and head of the firm, hale and hearty as any man near upon seventy could wish to be’.

The daughter of the good schoolmistress of The Carbonels is the widowed Jane Truman. Her large family ‘she contrived to bring up in a somewhat superior way, between the boys' work and her own, as a good laundress and charwoman, with the proceeds also of a large garden and orchard.’

As the novel opens Mrs Truman has her ambitious son Wilfred at home with his crosspatch invalid sister Laura, terribly injured in an accident leaving her blind in one eye, scarred and dependent. Laura was a clever and talented child but increasingly introspective, making a little money with her needlework but preferring her awkward poetry. Charlotte Yonge is fascinated by the effect her accident has on Laura.

‘She had always been used to notice, and to be sympathised with was almost as good as to be admired. She loved and entered into religious poetry and good books, and could really believe that it was a wise and thankworthy dispensation that had cut her off from vanity in her good looks.’

While Laura is the most interesting female character, the one who causes a certain havoc is the nursery maid Lucy Darling. She is Wilfred’s beloved but unwittingly pursued by a gentleman artist who wishes her to model for his painting of St Elizabeth of Hungary and Thuringia. Wilfred Truman and Lucy Darling are shadowed in the narrative by the hopeless ne’er-do-wells from Birmingham, Alf Greylark and his bedraggled wife Eva.

Charlotte Yonge wrote in What Books to Lend and What to Give, that the female readers of this kind of novel wanted ‘incident, pathos and sentiment to attract them’. My goodness, whatever ‘class of woman’ reader you are, Miss Yonge packs incident after incident into the last third of this novel, and swipes at grieving, hypocritical relations, and the gutter press as well as a satisfying (and of course sentimental) ending for Lucy Darling.

This book was part of the November 2023 CMY Fellowship book group and read in conjunction with The Carbonels.