Frederick Daniel Hardy, An Anxious Time
A large orphaned family grows up in genteel poverty.
I have not yet read all Charlotte Yonge’s novels (see Novels 003, 053, 103), but of those I have read, this is the masterpiece. It is twice as long even as the average Victorian three-volume novel, but you will wish it longer.
“We do not think that many of those who begin the four volumes will be content to leave them unfinished; and few who do finish them will not feel as if a great group were added to their intimate friends. . . . Miss Yonge’s dramatis personæ have the reality which others seek in vain to give. . . . It is intimate realization of her own characters, as living people, that gives to Miss Yonge’s stories, in spite of their apparent want of construction, a consistency, a tendency to one point which we sometimes miss in novels more ambitiously composed, and involving an obvious and avowed ‘plot’. . . . Her skill in drawing a number of people, all of whom have a family likeness, while each is yet unmistakably distinct from all the others . . . and, at the same time, perfectly consistent in his or her own development, was never more severely tested than in this history of the thirteen young Underwoods, whose fortunes she follows for eighteen years. . . . The charm consists . . . in the admirably accurate delineation of the daily ‘hopes and fears, passions and pleasures,’ which mould the quiet natures and sway the otherwise uneventful lives of” her characters. Athenaeum, September 27, 1873
“Her range is of the narrowest, but within it she shows herself thoroughly the artist. Nearly all her characters here . . . have a distinct life and individuality of their own.” Examiner, December 6, 1873
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