MS Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
My dear Elizabeth
Lewis or Frank is the question of tragedy & comedy, and I am quite ready to agree to his being the greater conception– though one should certainly have liked Frank the best in real life. I don’t think I know many people who could have done him.
I thought afterwards, should not Gerance in his reformation have gone out to help his father, or at any rate to see about him. He is so forgotten, I was in hopes Sir Richard would have come home, and blown away the nonsense and consented to the marriage. In point of fact till Lewis died, I don’t quite see what Frank had to marry on You see how real I have them all. I read it to myself to be quicker, so I have not seen how it strikes Gertrude but I should not think there was anything not desirable in the part about Emma Barker, provided you note her perfect respectability early enough. You could make Frank assure his father of it before he tames Pauline. I think however that my Andromeda repulsion is apart from the school room view for it comes back on me to shudder at the thing for a good woman.1
Gertrude begs me to ask you the address of a place you mentioned for setting work.2
Your [sic] affectionately
C M Yonge
I don’t think “setting work” refers to the finished objects. I think this is what the organisers of meetings to make garments for the poor or for missions did. They cut out the garments and possibly pinned the pieces together, and then at the meeting the members did the actual sewing. I think this is also what the teachers in village schools did when organising the girls’ sewing
Perhaps gertrude was asking for the name of a place like the warehouse where Mrs Duncombe in the Three Brides got the rough sewing who had been burnt out of their homes. I think the Working Ladies’ Guild’s main object was to by-pass the middleman in selling the poor ladies’ own productions, though they may have held some sewing meetings.