| Charles Kingsley |
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Introduction
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(1819-1875).—
Novelist and historian, son of a
clergyman, was b. at Holne Vicarage near Dartmoor, but passed
most of his childhood at Barnack in the Fen country, and Clovelly in
Devonshire, educated at King’s Coll., London, and Cambridge
Intended for the law, he entered the Church, and became, in 1842,
curate, and two years later rector, of Eversley, Hampshire. In the
latter year he published The Saints’ Tragedy, a drama, of
which the heroine is St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Two novels followed,
Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850), in which he deals
with social questions as affecting the agricultural labouring class,
and the town worker respectively. He had become deeply interested in
such questions, and threw himself heart and soul, in conjunction with
F. D. Maurice and others, into the schemes of social amelioration,
which they supported under the name of Christian socialism,
contributing many tracts and articles under the signature of
“Parson Lot.” In 1853 appeared Hypatia, in which the
conflict of the early Christians with the Greek philosophy of
Alexandria is depicted; it was followed in 1855 by Westward Ho,
perhaps his most popular work; in 1857 by Two Years Ago, and in
1866 by Hereward the Wake. At Last (1870), gave his impressions
of a visit to the West Indies. His taste for natural history found
expression in Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (1855), and
other works. The Water Babies is a story for children written
to inspire love and reverence of Nature. K. was in 1860 appointed to
the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, which he held until
1869. The literary fruit of this was Roman and Teuton
(1864). In the same year he was involved in a controversy with
J. H. Newman, which resulted in the publication by the latter of his
Apologia. K., who had in 1869 been made a Canon of Chester,
became Canon of Westminster in 1873. Always of a highly nervous
temperament, his over-exertion resulted in repeated failures of
health, and he died in 1875. Though hot-tempered and combative, he was
a man of singularly noble character. His type of religion, cheerful
and robust, was described as “muscular Christianity.”
Strenuous, eager, and keen in feeling, he was not either a profoundly
learned, or perhaps very impartial, historian, but all his writings
are marked by a bracing and manly atmosphere, intense sympathy, and
great descriptive power.
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University of Toronto Selected Poetry of Charles Kingsley prepared by members of the Department of English at the University of Toronto
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Be more creative Creative Quotations from Charles Kingsley
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By PanEris
using Melati.
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