Customer Reviews

The Daisy Chain

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If you really want to know what life in Victorian England was like, read Charlotte Yonge's novels, just like everyone else used to. The Daisy Chain remained on the "must read" list of every English family well into the 1950's. Clothing, manners, morality, faith, love, death, sorrow, combine with a lot of fun, humor, and an unbelievably large family into one of the best experiences of time-travel for pedestrians ever. Not to mention you get to meet Ethel and Dr. May. Read it. You'll see what I mean.

I would like to add another review for this excellent book. I ended up reading it after I randomly bought 'The Trial' in a used book store--that book (also very good) is sort of the sequel to this one, though sort of not. (I mean Charlotte Yonge's book, not Kafka's, haha.) But anyway: 'The Daisy Chain' is fun, especially if you were (even slightly) the kind of romantic lonely kid who daydreamed about life in one of these huge Victorian families. But it is also pretty interesting prose sometimes (I have since been noticing how many citations from Charlotte Yonge there are in the OED), and even better, the characters all come across as idiosyncratic, non-stereotyped, psychologically real people.

It is also intensely didactic, which has prevented me from recommending it to very many people, which is a shame. Because it's a kind of fraught and learned didacticism where people really suffer and have conversations about things like 'scrupulosity.' (George Eliot was a fan.)