Charles Kingsley
born June 12, 1819, Holne
Vicarage, Devon, Eng.
died Jan. 23, 1875, Eversley, Hampshire
Anglican clergyman and writer whose
successful fiction ranged from
social-problem novels to historical romances
and children’s literature.
The son of a clergyman, he grew up in
Devon, where he developed an interest in
nature study and geology. After graduating
from Magdalene College, Cambridge, he was
ordained in 1842 as curate of Eversley and
two years later became parish priest there.
Much influenced by the theologian Frederick
Denison Maurice, he became in 1848 a
founding member of the Christian Socialist
movement, which sought to correct the evils
of industrialism through measures based on
Christian ethics. His first novel, Yeast
(printed in Fraser’s Magazine, 1848; in book
form, 1851), deals with the relations of the
landed gentry to the rural poor. His second,
the much superior Alton Locke (1850), is the
story of a tailor-poet who rebels against
the ignominy of sweated labour and becomes a
leader of the Chartist movement. Kingsley
advocated adult education, improved
sanitation, and the growth of the
cooperative movement, rather than political
change, for the amelioration of social
problems. The strenuous tone of his Broad
Church Protestantism is often described as
“muscular Christianity.” His novels,
similarly, are often attributed to the
“muscular” school of fiction.
Kingsley soon turned to writing popular
historical novels. Hypatia (1853) is a
luridly erotic story set in early Christian
Egypt. Westward Ho! (1855) is an imperialist
and anti-Roman Catholic adventure set in the
Elizabethan period, and Hereward the Wake
(1866) is about Anglo-Saxon England and the
Norman Conquest, also with an anti-Catholic
slant. Kingsley’s fear of the trend within
the church toward Roman Catholicism, growing
out of the Oxford Movement, led to a
notorious controversy with John Henry (later
Cardinal) Newman. In answer to an attack by
Kingsley, Newman wrote his Apologia pro Vita
Sua (1864), the history of his religious
development.
The didactic children’s fantasy The
Water-Babies (1863) combines Kingsley’s
concern for sanitary reform with his
interest in natural history and the theory
of evolution. He was also a very competent
poet who wrote some memorable ballads
(“Airly Beacon,” “The Sands of Dee,” “Young
and Old” ). Kingsley became chaplain to
Queen Victoria (1859), professor of modern
history at Cambridge (1860–69), and canon of
Westminster (1873). His brother Henry
Kingsley was a novelist, and his niece Mary
Henrietta Kingsley was a travel writer and
adventurer.
