“TO FACE APPARENT DISCREPANCIES WITH REVELATION”: EXAMINING THE FOSSIL RECORD IN CHARLOTTE YONGE'S THE TRIAL

Abstract

Charlotte Yonge placed religious belief at the centre of her world view, yet this did not prevent her from engaging with nineteenth-century geological theories traditionally associated with crises of faith, namely the discovery that the earth pre-dates the existence of humans by millions of years and that forms of life long extinct once populated its surface. Fossils, which call to mind both geological “deep time” and the extinction of species, figure prominently in her 1864 novel The Trial, and Yonge herself avidly collected fossils. Yonge represents fossils in The Trial as buried traces uncovered after an unfathomably long time, and this article will argue that they serve as metaphors for a divine providence which eventually reveals the truth, despite the apparent success of erroneous human judgement. Instead of symptoms of a deep religious anxiety, Yonge's fossils allowed Victorian readers to further appreciate the transcendence of God.