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Elderfield
May 21st [1886]

MS British Library Add MSS 54921: 142-4:

Dear Mr Craik

Thank you for your kind letter, I do see great advantages in the plan – but I confess I think it not possible to have such a book well and originally illustrated at such a price in any other way.

The doubt in my mind is whether the book would not – (to fulfil its purpose) have to be too common place in its facts to be on a level with the E. I. M. They would mostly have to come out of Sir T Martin and the Greville memoirs. I should be glad to be free from trying at Jubilee events especially Egyptian ones, which I don’t understand, and only mentioning any thing I wished, such as the Irish famine, the Crimean war, or Indian Mutiny, which could be touched on more or less as they affected the Queen.

I want to make the language as simple as I can without absolutely writing down which affronts people especially of the class I wish to reach. Please let me know whether this would suit Mr Carr’s views.1 I think I will send the accession chapter all I have yet attempted as what will best give an idea of the style I had thought of

The genealogy story is in Caroline Fox’s memoirs rather differently from this, but I have seen the pedigree on which the discovery was made. Dr Davysdaughter has it.2

As for the amount for the number, perhaps we had better settle that when we see how much there is of it, and how it answers

Yours truly
C M Yonge

1Joseph Comyns Carr (1849-1916), the editor of the English Illustrated Magazine 1883-6, in which Craik had proposed serializing the book which was to become CMY's Victorian Half-Century.
2This pedigree story is also referred to in a letter to Christabel Coleridge (6 June 1882).

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/2829/to-george-lillie-craik-64

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