Charles Kingsley

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The English author and clergyman Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) became the ideal of "Muscular Christianity" through his books and active, many-faceted life.

The son of a country parson, Charles Kingsley was born on June 12, 1819. After attending several schools he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1838. He was more sportsman than scholar. Shortly after graduation in 1842, he was ordained an Anglican priest. In 1842 he became rector of Eversley, the parish he served until his death in 1875. In 1844 he married.

Kingsley was a tall, thin, excitable man with a stammer. His enthusiasms pulled him in many directions, just as they drew famous people, including royalty, to him. In 1848, with Frederick Denison Maurice and J. M. Ludlow, he founded Christian Socialism. To support the movement he wrote many articles over the signature "Parson Lot" and two novels, Alton Locke (1850), about the plight of the urban worker, and Yeast (1851), about the ills of the rural poor. However, Kingsley's opinions were far more Christian than socialist. Certainly he never wanted to upset the established social order.

Turning to history, Kingsley wrote two historical novels, Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho! (1855). He grew interested in biology and wrote Glaucus (1855), a nonfictional description of the wonders of the shore. These books as well as his Christian Socialism fit the term "Muscular Christianity," but Kingsley was a poet too. In Andromeda (1858) he wrote the "very best English hexameters ever produced," according to George Saintsbury. However, perhaps his best-loved book was The Water-Babies (1863), a children's story in which he combined his interests in natural science and religion.

In 1859 Kingsley was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria, and in 1860 he became regius professor of modern history at Cambridge. A man of so varied activities was hardly a scholar, but Kingsley's lectures, more about men than politics or economics, were popular. In 1861 he tutored the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in history.

From the first Kingsley had been anti-Roman Catholic. In 1864 he entered into a controversy with John Henry Newman, about whether Newman taught that truth was no virtue among Roman Catholic priests. The controversy led to an exchange of pamphlets, a public apology by Kingsley for misrepresenting Newman, and Newman's great autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua.

In 1869 Kingsley resigned his professorship of history and was appointed canon of Chester; in 1873 he became canon of Westminster. He died on Jan. 23, 1875.

Further Reading

Mrs. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life (1877), is a one-sided biography. Another study is Una Pope-Hennessy, Canon Charles Kingsley (1948). A good introduction to his life and work is Robert Bernard Martin, The Dust of Combat (1960).

Additional Sources

Chitty, Susan, Lady, The beast and the monk: a life of Charles Kingsley, New York: Mason/Charter, 1975, 1974.

Colloms, Brenda, Charles Kingsley: the lion of Eversley, London: Constable; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975.

Kingsley, Charles (1819-75). Vicar of Eversley (Hants), social reformer, novelist, and ‘muscular Christian’. Influenced by F. D. Maurice and Thomas Carlyle, Kingsley became a leading spirit in the Christian socialist movement of 1848-54, and under the pseudonym ‘Parson Lot’ contributed to Politics for the People (1848) and The Christian Socialist (1850-1). His novels Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850) were sympathetic middle-class descriptions of working-class life.

Kingsley, Charles (1819–75), English novelist, Anglican clergyman, and author of The Water‐Babies (1863), one of the most celebrated Victorian fantasies for children. Subtitled ‘a fairy tale for a land‐baby’, it is a curious but vivacious jumble of moral instruction, scientific fact, pronouncements on the nature of scientific thought and Darwin's theory of evolution, references to forgotten mid‐Victorian controversies, and choleric outbursts of prejudice on topics ranging from ‘frowzy monks’ to the absurd new fashion of dining at eight. Brian Alderson has pointed out how much the book owes to Rabelais, greatly admired by Kingsley, not just with the famous word lists, but also with the deliberate digressions and the satiric fantasy. A striking example of the latter is the fable of the Doasyoulikes which puts evolution into reverse.

It has always been a perplexing story. The dedication to his youngest son Grenville is followed by the couplet ‘Come read me my riddle, each good little man: | If you cannot read it, no grown‐up folk can.’ Kingsley gives the same weight to his vehement arguments that water‐babies are a fact as he does to his descriptions of natural phenomena, like the hatching of a dragonfly. While his enthusiasm for the wonders of nature is one of the most attractive features of the book, the most coherent section and the best‐remembered now is the first, where Tom, a little chimney sweep, goes with his master to sweep the chimneys of Harthover Place. He loses his way in the maze of flues, and comes down into the bedroom of a little girl named Ellie. Here for the first time he sees himself in a looking‐glass—‘a little black ape’, and is horrified at the contrast between himself and the white purity of Ellie. Pursued over the moors, he finally scrambles down a cliff face and seems to drown in the stream below. But the reader knows that he has become a water‐baby. At this point the narrative becomes chaotic. It might seem that Tom's trials and travels are a spiritual pilgrimage, and that the two fairies Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid and Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby (representing Law and Love?) are preparing him for heaven, but it could also be taken as an allegory of evolution, or a plea for reverence for nature (a favourite topic with Kingsley), while at least two critics have suggested that it is a masturbation fable. Nor does Kingsley help by telling his readers to remember ‘that this is all a fairy tale, and all fun and pretence; and, therefore, you are not to believe a word of it, even if it is true’.

Kingsley's retellings of Greek myths, The Heroes (1856), subtitled ‘Greek fairy tales for my children’, is far more straightforward. It was written as a corrective to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales (1853), which he found ‘distressingly vulgar’, and which undoubtedly falsified the originals. ‘No one’, wrote Roger Lancelyn Green in Tellers of Tales (1946), ‘has caught the magic and the music and the wonder of the old Greek legends as Kingsley did.’

Bibliography

• Alderson, Brian (ed.), The Water‐Babies (1995).
• Chitty, Susan, The Beast and the Monk (1974).
• Cunningham, Valentine, ‘Soiled Fairy: The Water‐Babies in its Time’, Essays in Criticism, 35.2 (1985).
• Leavis, Q. D., ‘The Water‐Babies’, Children's Literature in Education, 23 (winter 1976).
• Manlove, C. N., “‘Charles Kingsley and the Water‐Babies’”, in Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975).

— Gillian Avery

Quotes:

"Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know."

"Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell."

"There are two freedoms -- the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought."

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

"The men whom I have seen succeed best in life always have been cheerful and hopeful men; who went about their business with a smile on their faces; and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men; facing rough and smooth alike as it came."

"Young blood must have its course, lad, and every dog its day."

See more famous quotes by Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was an English clergyman, university professor, historian, and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and north-east Hampshire.

Contents 1 Life and character 2 Influences and works 3 Legacy 4 Bibliography 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Life and character

Kingsley was born in Holne, Devon, the second son of the Rev. Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary. His brother, Henry Kingsley, also became a novelist. He spent his childhood in Clovelly, Devon and Barnack, Northamptonshire and was educated at Helston Grammar School^[1] before studying at King's College London, and the University of Cambridge. Charles entered Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1838, and graduated in 1842.^[2] He chose to pursue a ministry in the church. From 1844, he was rector of Eversley in Hampshire, and in 1860, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.

In 1869 Kingsley resigned his professorship, and from 1870 to 1873 he was a canon of Chester Cathedral. While in Chester he founded the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art which played an important part in the establishment of the Grosvenor Museum.^[3] In 1872 he accepted the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute and became its 19th President.^[4] Kingsley died in 1875 and was buried in St Mary's Churchyard in Eversley.

In person Charles Kingsley was tall and spare, sinewy rather than powerful, and of a restless excitable temperament. His complexion was swarthy, his hair dark, and his eyes bright and piercing. His temper was hot, kept under rigid control; his disposition tender, gentle and loving, with flashing scorn and indignation against all that was ignoble and impure; he was a good husband, father and friend. One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley (Mrs Harrison), became well known as a novelist under the pseudonym of "Lucas Malet."

Kingsley's life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life, and presents a very touching and beautiful picture of her husband, but perhaps hardly does justice to his humour, his wit, his overflowing vitality and boyish fun.

Charles also received letters from Thomas Huxley in 1860 and later in 1863, discussing Huxley's early ideas on agnosticism.

Kingsley

Influences and works

Kingsley's interest in history is shown in several of his writings, including The Heroes (1856), a children's book about Greek mythology, and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia (1853), Hereward the Wake (1865), and Westward Ho! (1855).

His concern for social reform is illustrated in his great classic, The Water-Babies (1863), a kind of fairytale about a boy chimney-sweep, which retained its popularity well into the 20th century. Furthermore in The Water-Babies he developed in this literary form something of a purgatory, which runs counter to his "Anti-Roman" theology. The story also mentions the main protagonists in the scientific debate over Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, gently satirising their reactions.

He was sympathetic to the idea of evolution, and was one of the first to praise Darwin's book. He had been sent an advance review copy and in his response of 18 November 1859 (four days before the book went on sale) stated that he had "long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species."^[5] Darwin added an edited version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating that "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws'." ^[6] Kingsley was influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, and was close to many Victorian thinkers and writers, e.g. George MacDonald.

As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are brilliant; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy with children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children.

Kingsley also wrote poetry and political articles, as well as several volumes of sermons. His argument, in print, with the Venerable John Henry Newman, accusing him of untruthfulness and deceit, prompted the latter to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He also wrote a preface to the 1859 edition of Henry Brooke's book The Fool of Quality in which he defends their shared belief in universal salvation.^[7]

Kingsley coined the term pteridomania in his 1855 book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore.^[8]

Legacy

A statue of Charles Kingsley at Bideford, Devon (UK)

Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho! led to the founding of a town by the same name—the only place name in England which contains an exclamation mark—and even inspired the construction of a railway, the Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore Railway. Few authors can have had such a significant effect upon the area which they eulogised. A hotel in Westward Ho! was named for him and it was also opened by him.

A hotel opened in 1897 in Bloomsbury, London, was named after Kingsley. It still exists, but changed name in 2001 to the Thistle Bloomsbury. The original reasons for the chosen name was that the hotel was opened by teetotallers who admired Kingsley for his political views and his ideas on social reform.

Bibliography

• Saint's Tragedy, a drama
• Alton Locke, a novel (1849)
• Yeast, a novel (1849)
• Twenty-five Village Sermons (1849)
• Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850)
• Phaeton, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers (1852)
• Sermons on National Subjects (1st series, 1852)
• Hypatia, a novel (1853)
• Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (1855)
• Sermons on National Subjects (2nd series, 1854)
• Alexandria and her Schools (I854)
• Westward Ho!, a novel (1855)
• Sermons for the Times (1855)
• The Heroes, Greek fairy tales (1856)
• Two Years Ago, a novel (1857)
• Andromeda and other Poems (1858)
• The Good News of God, sermons (1859)
• Miscellanies (1859)
• Limits of Exact Science applied to History (Inaugural Lectures, 1860)
• Town and Country Sermons (1861)
• Sermons on the Pentateuch (1863)
• The Water-Babies (1863)
• The Roman and the Teuton (1864)
• David and other Sermons (1866)
• Hereward the Wake, a novel (1866)
• The Ancient Régime (Lectures at the Royal Institution, 1867)
• Water of Life and other Sermons (1867)
• The Hermits (1869)
• Madam How and Lady Why (1869)
• At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871)
• Town Geology (1872)
• Discipline and other Sermons (1872)
• Prose Idylls (1873)
• Plays and Puritans (1873)
• Health and Education (1874)
• Westminster Sermons (1874)
• Lectures delivered in America (1875)

Notes

1. ^ ODNB article by Norman Vance, ‘Kingsley, Charles (1819–1875)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 [1], accessed 13 April 2008.
2. ^ Kingsley, Charles in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
3. ^ "Information Sheet: Charles Kingsley". Chester City Council. http://www.chester.gov.uk/tourism_and_leisure-1/culture_and_leisure/grosvenor_museum/information_sheets/charles_kingsley.aspx. Retrieved 20 March 2008. 
4. ^ Presidents of the BMI, BMI, nd (c.2005)
5. ^ Darwin 1887, p. 287.
6. ^ Darwin 1860, p. 481.
7. ^ Thomas Whittemore. The Modern History of Universalism: Extending from the Epoch of the Reformation to the Present Time. (1860). p. 378.
8. ^ Peter D. A. Boyd's Pteridomania

References

• Darwin, Charles (1860), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London: John Murray, <http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F376&viewtype=text&pageseq=1> 2nd edition. Retrieved on 20 July 2007
• Darwin, Charles (1887), Darwin, F, ed., The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter., London: John Murray, <http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=39003&pageno=1> (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin) Retrieved on 20 July 2007

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Charles Kingsley

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Charles Kingsley

• Famous Quotes by Charles Kingsley
• Works by Charles Kingsley at Internet Archive (scanned books)
• Works by Charles Kingsley at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Charles Kingsley at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

• Index entry for Charles Kingsley at Poets' Corner

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