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To Mary Anne Dyson
Otterbourne
August 22, 1850

MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life 177-8

[No salutation]
Do you really mean that you are thinking of a rival magazine? I have a great notion it would be a very good thing, and you would make Mary Coleridge write, and keep her from being sentimental. Also mamma goes into it so vehemently that she desires it to be observed that it might be printed very well and cheaply by the man at Winchester who did Shiverydown, a communication which I consider as premature.1 Did you ever see such a dreadful little note as she has perpetrated to go in this letter? Pray tell the fellow-slave that I am going to Plymouth, and ask if she would like to have a chapter on flowers from thence.2 I send Edith a promised ear of mummy wheat, enough to sow the whole garden I should think.3 I am glad the curate has got his holiday, I hope it will cheer him up. Our new school-master comes just as we go, which is I think a pity. Amabel is at this moment in the midst of comforting Guy about his doom; he has just begun to establish an influence over Charles and to develop a soul in her, both very unconsciously. I don’t think I have thanked you for the reflections on Emmeline; thanks to both drivers, she wants an infinity of smoothings down.4 We are reading the Seven Lamps of Architecture, some part very pretty, other by writing fine very nonsensical, other very powerful, and the beginnings of chapters only fit to be in German.

Your most affectionate
C. M. Y.

1Shiverydown was the family name for the story published as Kenneth, or, The Rearguard of the Grand Army. The 1850 edition by John Parker was printed in Winchester.
2Anne Mozley (1809-1891), the editor of the Magazine for the Young, was the sister of the Tractarians J. B. Mozley (1813-1878) and Thomas Mozley (1806 - 1893). CMY had been contributing a series of 'Chapters on Flowers' , subsequently published as The Herb of the Field (Derby: Mozley 1853). The article, ‘Compound Flowers’ (September 1850) 305-15, looks forward to The Daisy Chain: ‘When you make a daisy chain you thrust the needle and thread through the receptacle or disk, and the center florets. . . Daisy chains are country children’s strings of pearls, the pearls of the meadow, as we may call them, for the very same word, Margarita, signifies at once a daisy and a pearl.' [308-9]
3Perhaps one of Dyson’s pupils, though the name does not appear among those listed on the 1851 census.
4By 'both drivers' CMY means Dyson herself and Anne Mozley.
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/2971/to-mary-anne-dyson-11

One Comment
  1. Ellen Jordan says:
    October 31, 2011 at 6:56 am

    Is it worth calling attention to “thanks to both drivers”? CRC says the second is Anne Mozley.
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