A Book of Golden Deeds

A Book of Golden Deeds. True Stories of Courage and Self-sacrifice. By Charlotte M. Yonge. Charlotte M. Yonge began writing in 1848, and published during her long life about 160 works, chiefly novels. Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to enable the schooner Southern Cross to be put into service on behalf of George Selwyn. Similar charitable works were done with the profits from later novels. Yonge was also a founder and editor for forty years of The Monthly Packet, a magazine (founded in 1851) with a varied readership, but targeted at British Anglican girls (in later years it was addressed to a somewhat wider readership). Among the best known of her works are The Heir of Redclyffe, Heartsease and The Daisy Chain. A Book of Golden Deeds is a collection of true stories of courage and self-sacrifice. She also wrote Cameos from English History, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands and Hannah More. Her History of Christian Names was described as the first serious attempt at tackling the subject and as the standard work on names in the preface to the first edition of Withycombe’s The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1944). Her personal example and influence on her god-daughter, Alice Mary Coleridge, played a formative role in Coleridge’s zeal for women’s education and thus, indirectly, led to the foundation of Abbots Bromley School for Girls. After her death, her friend, assistant and collaborator, Christabel Coleridge, published the biographical Charlotte Mary Yonge: her Life and Letters (1903).