ABSTRACT
Charlotte Mary Yonge's cultural matrix was the Victorian era, her religion the Church of England, her theology Tractarian. As a writer, she used the high church teachings of Keble, whose disciple she was, to mediate between an increasingly fragmented and unsure society and the role of the Church and its sacraments in producing personal and collective certainty, stability and peace. While following as loyally as Keble could have wished the doctrine of reserve, she is using both her fiction and her didactic work in the Monthly Packet as means of communicating religious knowledge and experience. She describes the daily lives of families in the middle, professional and upper classes, in an atmosphere of comfortable Tractarian piety. She pays particular attention, in both fiction and nonfiction, to Baptism and Confirmation, which latter admits one to full Christian privileges, including the Holy Communion.
