Information Sheet: Charles Kingsley

Normal Charles Kingsley was born on July 12, 1819, to Charles Kingsley Sr., who was Vicar of Holne in Devon, and Mary Lucas Kingsley. He matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1838. There he met and fell in love with Frances (Fanny) Grenfell. He left Cambridge in February 1842 to read for Holy Orders, and in July of that year he became curate of Eversley Church in Hampshire, which he served for the rest of his life. He married Fanny in January 1844 and became rector of Eversley in May.

He first became a figure of public note in 1848 in response to the working class agitation that climaxed in the Chartist collapse. He joined with John Malcolm Ludlow, Frederick Denison Maurice, whom he addressed as 'master', and others to form the Christian Socialist movement. Under the pseudonym 'Parson Lot' he wrote a series called 'Letters to the Chartists.' He wrote a series of novels and articles highlighting the social problems of workers including in 1848 'Yeast' which looked at the plight of agricultural labourers and in 1850 'Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet' which denounced the sweated tailor's trade. He also wrote several tracts denouncing the Catholic church, which brought on his disasterous clash with John Henry Newman in the 1860s. In 1852 The Christian Socialist failed, and his interests began to change.

He turned to historical fiction with the serial publication 'Hypatia; or New Foes with an Old Face' in Fraser's Magazine. Phaeton satirised Ralph Waldo Emerson as 'Professor Windrush' whose teaching he characterised as 'Anythingarianism.'

In 'Hypatia' issued in two volumes in 1853 he gave fictional expression to his belief in the providential character of history. The novel is set in fifth century Alexandria and portrays decadent Romans, effete Roman Catholics, sophisticated pagan philosophers and vital Germanic warriors struggling for mastery as the world around them collapses. By setting the novel in the 5th century he was able to attack 19th century attitudes which he believed were rending the fabric of English life. The fifth century was also the era which so appealed to John Henry Newman and other Tractarians. Kingsley was thus attacking what he considered to be destructive 'high-church' tendencies in Victorian England.

At about this time Kingsley read Hakluyt's Voyages, first published in 1582, and began discussing with his friend the historian James Anthony Froude the epic adventures of Elizabethan sailors. Kingsley believed he had located in the adventures of the great sailors of the Elizabethan age an heroic model for his own. Also, and importantly for Kingsley's career as it neared his clash with Newman, he found in Elizabethan materials the means by which to warn English Protestants of Catholic duplicity following the 'Papal Agression' of 1850. Once more Kingsley found in a bygone age a mirror wherein Victorians could see the issues of their own day reflected, and once more he could attack them from the distance history provided. Kingsley's presentation of Roman Catholicism in Hypatia and in Westward Ho! very likely provoked John Henry Newman in 1855 to publish his own historical novel Callista.

In 1856 Kingsly turned his interest in heroes and heroism to preparing a volume for children. The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is a retelling of ancient tales and indicates his growing interest in writing for children, an interest to which he would return in 1862 with The Water-Babies and in 1868 with Madam How and Lady Why. But in 1857 he returned to the contemporary Victorian scene in Two Years Ago, expressing satisfaction with improvements in the conditions of agricultural life since Yeast and exploring the chastening effects of the Crimean War on his physician hero. In this novel, which features a cholera epidemic, Kingsley also raised the twin issues of sanitation and public health. These issues increasingly occupied his attention. In the subplot he introduced the related issues of race and slavery in the United States. In 1858 he gathered his poetry into the volume published as Andromeda and Other Poems.

The 1860s brought both deserved recognition and the climax of his dispute with John Henry Newman that had been brewing for years. Largely on the strength of his historical fiction Kingsley was appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales. The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, arguably his most enduring work, appeared serially in Macmillan's Magazine in 1862 and was published in volume format in 1863.

The Water-Babies touches upon most of Kingsley's favourite themes; the working conditions of the poor, in this case those of chimney sweeps; education; sanitation and public health; pollution of rivers and streams; and evolutionary theory. In the central character's spiritual regeneration, Kingsley presents a vision of nature as the tool of divine reality, which Thomas Carlyle and F.D. Maurice had taught him underlies the imperfect human world. Viewing nature as governed by a redemptive spirit allowed Kingsley to remain untroubled by Darwinism.

The year 1864 was noteworthy for the publication of The Roman and The Teuton, a historical study which both recalls his novel Hypatia published eleven years earlier and anticipates Hereward the Wake which began its serial appearance in 1865. All three of these works, presented either as fiction or as history, extol bluff Germanic strength at the expense of effete and treacherous Latin civilisation. In fact, if one adds to the list Kingsley's earlier portrayal of Spaniards in Westward Ho!, one sees his consistent presentation of Rome's Catholic descendants as treacherous and effeminate and the pagan Germanic people or their English Protestant descendants as honest, trustworthy, and physically strong defenders of truth.

For years, therefore, Kingsley had opposed nearly everything Newman and the highchurch party at Oxford had advocated. Both Kingsley and Newman had been attacked for their positions, Kingsley from the high-church party and Newman from English anti-Catholic Protestants who had distrusted him since before his conversion to Catholicism.

In 1865 Kingsley published his final novel serially in Good Words; in 1866 it was published in two volumes as Hereward The Wake, "Last of the English". Here, in a heavily researched and footnoted novel, he marks the passing of the Anglo-Saxon heroic age as the last Anglo-Saxon hold out against the Normans succumbs to William the Conqueror. Once again Kingsley admires mythic Germanic-English muscularity in sharp contrast with Continental guile.

Although Kingsley contemplated writing other novels, he never did. Instead, he edited Fraser's Magazine briefly in 1867. In 1869 he resigned his Cambridge professorship, an academic position in which he had never felt comfortable. In 1868 and 1869 he published a series of articles for children; these were collected and issued in 1870 as Madam How & Lady Why: First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children. A tour of the West Indies followed in 1870, (when he was Canon of Chester Cathedral) producing notes which became At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies in 1871. In 1872 some of the lectures he delivered to the young men of Chester were published under the title 'Town Geology', 'the poor man's science' as Kingsley described it. In the preface to this book he urged the importance of studying the Natural Sciences. In 1872 he also became President of the Midland Institute in Birmingham.

The Grosvenor Museum was founded in 1885, and its origins are linked to the start of the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art, founded by Charles Kingsley in 1871. Kingsley enrolled as founder members such eminent naturalists as Huxley, Hooker, Tyndall and Lyell, while he was Canon of Chester Cathedral from 1870 - 3. He also brought together many local naturalists, and the Society built up large and important natural history collections. From this root germinated the idea of building a local museum, first suggested in 1871, to house the collections and use them for teaching.

In 1874 he published Health and Education, Charles Kingsley died on January 23, 1875 after returning to England from a six-month tour of the United States. He was worn out.

References

Letters & Memories (ed. by his wife)  2volumes. Pub. 1877, reprinted 1973.

The Kingsleys: A Biographical Anthology. Compiled by Elspeth Huxley. Pub. Allen & Unwin 1973.

Charles Kingsley: A Reference Book. Pub. 1981 by S. Harris

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