I meant to read Charlotte Yonge's 1856 domestic novel The Daisy Chain in two days (Monday and Tuesday of this week) and here it is 12:43 AM on Sunday morning & I'm just finishing it, waiting for my Kindle to highlight some annoying speech of Flora's about how she mistook her hypocrisy for "quietness of conscience." OK, and now it's 12:50 and I've finished it. PRETTY DEPRESSING and also kind of boring! but that's what I signed up for by doing a domestic literature list, I guess. The Daisy Chain is about a family with eleven children growing up in a small town that may or may not be in Wales--or on the Welsh border?--and it's basically a case study of Victorian values of self-denial and living for others or (even better) for God and how great it is to be a nuclear family and how sentimental we feel about our dead mothers and also there is a lot of guilt. Since I've been so terrible about blogging lately, and since I realize that I really do need to write down my thoughts about what I've read every day because it's VERY EASY to forget what happens in these books, I'm just going to quickly sketch out the plot for myself, and then (in another entry, because this one got VERY LONG) some quick thoughts about themes & who knows what else.
So, the plot (stop reading if you ever think you're going to read this book, which you probably shouldn't do because it's very long and not very good)
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We meet the 11 May children + dad Dr Dick + mom Margaret + confusing houseguest Alan Ernescliffe. The only kids we care about so far are oldest daughter Margaret (pretty, nice), seeming protagonist Ethel (fifteen, gawky, intellectual, keeping up with her brother's classical studies even though she doesn't go to school), Norman, the classical brother, & Flora, the pretty, prim, well-behaved daughter. In Little Women terms they're Meg, Jo, Laurie, Amy. The mom & Margaret have a weird conversation about how when you get married you find someone in whose heart you are first, which is different from being a parent because you know you will be supplanted in your kids' hearts by their spouses, and the mom weirdly shivers imagining herself being supplanted in her husband's heart, and we the readers are like, "oh no is the dad having an affair" but it turns out this shiver is meaningless? maybe? A bunch of the kids go on a walk to a terribly-named & extremely bleak poor-person village called Cocksmoor to bring some food to one of their father's poor patients; Ethel is shocked by the spiritual (& I guess material) poverty at Cocksmoor and decides she will fix everything by building a church there, and makes a solemn vow to do so as she walks home with her family. At home, though, we find out that Mom, Dad, & Margaret have been in a carriage accident--the dad was always a reckless driver--and the mom has been killed, while Margaret has been paralyzed. Weeks pass with Margaret and the dad in dead swoons and Ethel and Flora having to grow up a little, and also the oldest son Richard coming home from Oxford where he has recently failed his exams, and proving that even though he is not intellectual he is very practical and nice, and becoming important to the dad. While he's home Richard decides to help Ethel with her Cocksmoor plan, but he makes her wait and be prudent about it, which is something Ethel is not that good at. Also he teaches her to make tea and keep her dress from trailing in the mud, because Richard is much more domestic than Ethel. The dad gets better, with a lingering arm injury and lots of guilt about killing the mom, and life goes on, with Ethel trying to work for the church while learning to control her headstrong desires to do everything right away, and Norman struggling to do well in school but not for the glory of doing well in school (a huge theme is how it is terrible to want any kind of fame and glory, even for people in your family, because the only glory is heavenly; and also waiting for providence to tell you to do stuff.) Ethel & Richard start off by setting up a little one-day-a-week school in Cocksmoor, funded by their dad, and it is slow-going because poor people are so dirty and ignorant and only care about money and not about their souls. Norman develops a nervous illness because he witnessed the carriage accident, and also because he is doing too much Latin, and also he has crazy visionary moments when he is REALLY good at Latin, and due to this he becomes head of the school at a shockingly young age, but then he is really on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the dad notices and he's like "Norman it would be better for you to do bad in school than to die or to become Mr Casaubon" but of course Mr Casaubon doesn't exist yet. So the dad forbids Norman to read and instead makes him drive the dad around to various patients, and in this way Norman & Dr May become friends with this sickly old banker and his beautiful perfect beautiful daughter Meta (!) (short for Margaret--oh, another thing about this book is that it's full of Margarets, which is why it's The Daisy Chain, but also because all the kids are daisies being pulled one by one into heaven by the dead mom yikes.) Meanwhile the third son, Harry, who is a little scamp, wants to go to sea, but he can't until he confesses to the dad that he went shooting with some bad boys from the school, and the dad is like "you are a noble boy for telling me" and the thing about the dad is sometimes he gets unnecessarily mad but sometimes he's nice so Harry is surprised by the niceness. Harry goes to sea with Alan Ernescliffe, who is a lieutenant, but not before 1) Norman + Ethel + Harry all get confirmed, which is a big deal esp since the dad almost prevents Harry from getting confirmed for some stupid reason, because the dad is the big religious authority in the family, and 2) Alan & Margaret get pre-engaged (pearl engagement ring=daisy chain, of course). Also going on at the same time is some upsetting school nonsense where Norman is a conscientious head boy (or "dux," which term I'd never heard before--lots of ducks & geese puns, though!) and shuts down some old guy who is selling the boys gin and beats up his own little brother Tom (brother #4; horrible, deceitful, "dusty") only to get implicated in some scandal where the boys make a bonfire and do some kind of crazy vandalism, and the terrible Anderson boys (the ones who got Harry to go shooting) somehow manage to blame it all on Norman and so he loses his Oxford scholarship and it goes to the older Anderson boy and the dad is like "I will fix this" and Norman is like "no, if I am reinstated under those circumstances there could be no order in the school." But that all gets resolved by Norman getting a different scholarship directly from Balliol--in competition with public-school boys, no less, wow!--and therefore there's money to get terrible little Tom away from those bad boys & sent to Eton, and then Tom reveals how terrible the younger Anderson boy is in some other scandal about drinking and the dad does interfere that time and gets Anderson junior expelled but then Norman intercedes for Anderson junior and wow the May family is so virtuous. And Tom goes to Eton and stops being quite so awful although he becomes a coxcomb (which Alan E.'s little brother Hector points out is a natural consequence of having been a slob, except he doesn't say slob, he says sloven I think.) Then everyone has fun having a picnic near some Roman campground and Harry tricks everyone by planting a Wellington medal and making them think it's a Roman coin, and then everyone plays a story game kind of like that part in Little Women, and Meta learns that although she is so beautiful and rich she shouldn't feel bad because her job is to be like a hummingbird. (Meta has already learned earlier that even though she's rich she can still make sacrifices like letting her maid go visit her sick mom, even though it means Meta's hair looks bad for a week. There is a lot of Little Women-type stuff about poor people being luckier than rich people because it's easier for them to make sacrifices and therefore their little homemade penwipers are better than all the expensive presents Meta can afford to buy for poor people.)
Then Harry & Alan go off to sea, and there's a break of three years just like in Little Women, and everyone's old enough to get married, practically. Flora has gotten all involved in Ethel's Cocksmoor project and has gotten the loathsome ladies' committee in town to set up a charity bazaar, which to Ethel just seems like Vanity Fair (why pay money for penwipers rather than just giving money directly to the cause, she wonders, which I've also always wondered about charity events.) Flora just wants to do everything the way she wants to do it, and she resents how domestic Ethel has become (even though Ethel isn't very domestic) and how close she is to the dad. Other changes are that Margaret doesn't seem to be getting better as had been predicted; the indistinguishable little children are starting to get personalities--Mary is kind of bland and innocent and likes Harry a lot, Blanche is a little flirt, Aubrey is being taught Latin and math by Ethel so that's his thing, and Gertrude/Daisy is not a baby anymore but still doesn't have a personality. Meta's drawling mustachioed brother George comes to the bazaar and flirts with all the little girls and ends up falling in love with Flora & proposing, and no one in the family thinks she will accept, but she does because she is totally mercenary. So she marries him and has a fabulous honeymoon in Europe & comes back with gorgeous clothes and presents for everyone. Meanwhile, uh, Margaret knows she's getting worse and shouldn't marry Alan but Richard convinces her not to break it off by letter but in person when the ship comes back to England. Norman has won a prize for Latin versifying at Oxford with a poem sort of inspired by stuff Ethel said when they were 15, but Ethel, who used to think she could make money by writing, realizes she is no good at writing and just admires Norman. Flora & George take Meta & Ethel on a super fun vacation to Oxford to see Norman read his poem, and Ethel totally falls in love with their Scotch cousin Norman (!) Ogilvie, but realizes she needs to consecrate herself to her dad (a different vow she took at some point) and decides she's going to go home right after the recitation, which it turns out she has to do anyway because they get news that maybe Alan and Harry's ship is lost at sea! so she goes home and it's like maybe the ship is lost at sea!! and then it turns out it was! or rather the ship caught fire and Alan & Harry's boat was lost. Everyone is devastated but Margaret is relieved she never broke it off with Alan AND now she never will. Alan's brother has to live with Alan's mean old captain and he's sad about that. But then like 20 pages later Harry shows up at the house, totally not dead, and it turns out they all escaped to some South Sea island but Alan died there of the fever, and there's a will endowing 20 thousand pounds to build a church at Cocksmoor, whoa!, and also Harry got really friendly with some Christian natives and met up with the family's Aunt Flora who lives in New Zealand. Norman has been thinking of becoming a missionary because he loves Meta and he doesn't think that's going to work out, but also because he has been having all these religious doubts (blame the Andersons again--the elder one, who got Norman's original scholarship, has become a Rationalist! and fighting against him all the time has tired Norman out and given him doubts) and he thinks maybe it's becasue he thinks about himself all the time and also he's worried if he went into Parliament or something he would think too well of himself so he has to be a missionary and it turns out they need them down there, according to Harry. But first Harry & Norman go visit Flora & Meta in London (oh, Meta's dad died, that was another tragic period we had to live through) and have fun dancing with rich people, and Harry's like, "are you going to marry Meta after all, Norman?" and Norman's like "she's too good for me" and Harry tells Meta that Norman says she is a fine lady now, which upsets Meta, who is being courted by some baronet (oh! it's the baronet who owns the land the church is being built on! and I forgot a major plot point, which is that we get the land because an old doctor friend of Dr May's shows up at some point, and he's like "Sir Walsinghame? I know that guy! I met him in the caves of Thebes when he had a fever" so Dr Spenser totally wrangles this church land thing, and also becomes a weird uncle to the May children and eventually architect of the church.) Then a HORRIBLE PART where Flora, who seemed to actually have made a pretty good choice in marrying George because they totally love each other, and also she gets to use George as a puppet in order to have a political career, is revealed to have made a terrible choice in everything, because her baby is getting sicker and sicker in London, and she doesn't want to take the baby home to the country because she wants Meta to marry Sir W and not Norman, whom Meta might run into more in the country, and then the baby is so sick that they call in the dad, and the dad is like "this baby is addicted to OPIUM" and it turns out the nurse has been giving the baby opium because it missed the mom and was fretful, and the baby DIES and it's all the mom's fault for not being around enough and therefore inspiring the nurse to DRUG HER BABY and Flora is like "well, my baby is in heaven but I am going to hell because unlike the rest of you I am totally materialistic and never was pious at all" and it's totally this calvinist thing where she's always been different and that's why she made these bad choices and that's why her baby is dead and she can't go to heaven. and the dad is like, "wait, I know how you feel because I killed your mom," and Flora's like, "no, you are pious and I am the worst" and the author seems to agree. Then they're laying the foundation for the church and Norman and Meta run into each other in the woods and Meta is like "I want to work hard not be a fine lady" and Norman is like, "seriously? will you be my Jane Eyre missionary bride?" and Meta is like "WILL I" and everyone thinks that's a great idea. And then the aunt comes from New Zealand and the church gets built and Margaret hears the bells and dies and then Flora has another baby and Meta almost doesn't go but she goes, and Ogilvie marries someone else but Ethel doesn't care because she has completely given up her self. And Flora is finally moved to want to give up her hectic London life for the sake of her new baby, but Ethel and Richard are like, "you've made your bed, now your punishment is to lie in it" because basically you need to do things that suck if you want to go to heaven. And at the end Ethel is in the church she built at Cocksmoor and is like, "will I ever be first in anyone's heart? Nope, unmarried women never are! but that's OK, I won't be totally alone until I'm pretty old, and here comes my old dad" and the dad is like "I am psyched to hear Richard preach in this church he is the curate of" and it is the end of THE DAISY CHAIN.
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