Broken to Harness

While romance knows no bounds, a persons experiences certainly do. In Broken to Harness by Edmund Yates, a middle-class Victorian finds himself in a romance with an aristocrat. The two get married, but coming (as they do) from different social circles and conditions, they encounter friction & dispute between them.


Yates himself had an interesting life. The son of a theatre manager, Frederick Henry Yates, and an actress, Elizabeth Yates, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Edmund would go to have a career in the arts, namely as a novelist and playwright. After clerking at the Post Office for a while, Yates entered journalism. At 23, he published his first book, My Haunts and their Frequenters, after which he found more success as a novelist and playwright. While contributing to some British weeklys at the time, he found a friendship with Charles Dickens.


Yates also wrote under the pseudonym Atlas for a newspaper he helped start, The World. He wrote gossip in the paper, and began conducting interviews with the upper crust of London.


In 1884, just a decade shy of his death, Yates published Edmund Yates, His Recollections and Experiences, his autobiography. Over the course of his life, Yates published more than 20 works.