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To Hezekiah Butterworth
Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
[24 February 1877]

MS New York Public Library: Berg Collection

Dear Sir,

We are very much obliged for the patterns and catalogues you have so kindly sent us. The patterns are just what my brother wants. He asks me to enclose this account of a panic we were all thrown into this time last year by Captain Allen Young’s poor Esquimaux dog.1 If it will serve for one of the short articles in the Companion, and be worth a few dollars, he would be very glad to have them laid out on the small press and types advertised, but I will write further about this if the paper is accepted. I will send something of my own when I have time to shape it.2

In the course of next month you will receive the sum for ‘Jerusalem which is above’. I am afraid it is not equal to your rate of payment but the Monthly Packet has a circulation – good for a magazine of the kind here, but very poor compared with American opportunities.

Miss Peard is a Devonshire lady, who has a wonderful faculty of doing whatever she attempts as well as possible, whether in music, drawing or literature, and who is besides a valuable assistant in all good works. I know very few to equal her. I think her best story is in One Year, but most people prefer ‘Unawares’ or ‘the Rose Garden’3

Lady Charles Thynne has written two clever novels ‘Off the Groove’ and Colonel Falkland’s daughters are (I think) their names

Yours truly
C M Yonge

1Young was one of those who searched unsuccessfully for Sir John Franklin who was lost in the Arctic. He returned with a husky dog, which escaped and was supposed to have terrorized Hampshire, coming as near CMY as Silkstead. See the Hampshire Advertiser (12 January 1876), 3. CMY’s brother Julian was currently experiencing a financial crisis, but he had been attempting to place articles on general subjects for some years, e.g. the articles on bridge bracing and Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit factory refused by Macmillan in 1864 and 1865. He was also anonymously the translator of several French histories and biographies which appeared as ‘edited by’ CMY herself. No evidence of the publication of the present article has been found.
2Hezekiah Butterworth (1839–1905), American children’s writer and poet, was deputy-editor of the magazine Youth’s Companion. His poem ‘Jerusalem above is free’ appeared in MP (March 1877), 195-7.


Cite this letter


The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge(1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

URL to this Letter is: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/2574/to-hezekiah-butterworth

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