‘How differently it came upon her’: The Ageing Young Stepmother in Charlotte Yonge’s The Young Step-Mother and Dinah Craik’s Christian’s Mistake

Abstract

This article looks at two domestic novels of the 1860s, The Young Step-Mother by Charlotte Yonge and Christian’s Mistake by Dinah Craik, alongside Victorian vital statistics and family structure in order to argue that fictional stepmothers of the period — even very young stepmothers — are better understood as a portrayal of female middle age. One of the strongest conventions of the nineteenth-century novel is that its protagonist be young, especially if that protagonist is female. This youth convention prevented novelists from putting many aspects of women’s lives at the centre of their work; one such aspect was mothering a child past the age of infancy. When critics write about the stepmother in Victorian literature, they usually portray her either as a stereotype (the wicked stepmother of fairy tale) or as a representation of a common nineteenth-century reality. This article shows that a young stepmother-protagonist offered Victorian writers a way to respect the novel’s youth convention at the same time as exploring emotions and experiences not typically available to biological mothers until their thirties, forties or even fifties: dealing with the competing demands of infant and adolescent children, for example, or with a daughter’s unhappy marriage or son’s professional difficulties. Through showing how Yonge’s and Craik’s novels give mature experience to young women, this article offers a model for finding Victorian representations of age in unexpected places and unexpected bodies.