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Sunday [December] 1846.

MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life 156-157

My dear Driver1
I never expected Henrietta2 to produce such pretty fruits. I am delighted with it. I wish you would give Linny3 Sintram4 to read, and see what she would make of it. Ours are hearing it with great satisfaction. The Tree was very successful; the gentlemen would come to look on, which made the children very silent, but they were exceedingly happy. Mr. Wither cut down the fruit, and there was much fun, They had calf manners exactly, merry and joyous, whispering to each other, and never pushing forward, altogether very nice. They had two pomegranates for tea, which Fanny told them came from Spain; then they looked at certain Indian birds of which they are never tired, and at my shells, some of which were so little that Lucy marvelled how a fish could be got into them. And the evening was filled up with dissected maps.

1CMY called Dyson ‘Driver’ and signed herself ‘Slave.’
2CMY’s story Henrietta’s Wish, or, Domineering: A Tale, which was serialized in the Churchman’s Companion, January 1849-May 1850, and published in volume form in 1850.
3One of Dyson’s pupils, who were nicknamed ‘the calves’.
4Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Sintram und seine Gefährten (1811). The Tractarians had a cult of La Motte Fouqué; Dyson’s own Ivo and Verena, or, The Snowdrop (London: Burns 1842) is a children’s version of of one of his allegorical romances.

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/2958/to-mary-anne-dyson-2

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