Charles Kingsley

Polymath and Church of England priest, Charles Kingsley’s prolific literary output, sanitary crusades, and “muscular Christianity” seem to epitomize the bustling Victorian man of faith and letters. Kingsley packed a lot of activity into a short life (b. 1819–d. 1875), including a good deal of controversy (most famously with John Henry Newman) and anguished struggles with himself. A strong rather than subtle mind, Kingsley saw intellectual activity as a pendant to physical activity. In practice the latter could overshadow the former at times, notably in his justification of armed conflict and imperial expansion. This conflict and expansion formed part of a racialist, providentialist view of England’s mission to subdue the world. Kingsley’s definition of “English” included Scots and English settlers in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as citizens of the United States, who gave Kingsley a hero’s welcome when he toured their country in 1874. Within a few years of Kingsley’s death the following year, swashbuckling historical novels such as Westward Ho! (1855) merged with that public-school manliness more often associated with Kingsley’s fellow Christian Socialist, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). Such works remained popular among teenage readers until World War II, while Kingsley’s reputation as a thinker on social justice stood surprisingly high among Fabian Socialists. Kingsley’s posthumous influence on British identity has been largely overlooked, however. Kingsley’s historical fiction and his 1860 appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University have aroused considerable scholarly interest in Kingsley as an “amateur” excluded from the ranks of “professional” historians in the founding era of the historical discipline in Britain. All of Kingsley’s writing is strongly gendered. Although heteronormative, Kingsley’s enthusiastic embrace of the sexual body within companionate marriage was unusual for the times. With the revival of interest in Kingsley in the 1970s, scholars became fascinated with this aspect of his personal life. Psychobiographical approaches found a rich field for investigation in Kingsley’s evolutionary fairy tale, The Water-Babies (1863). Many set themselves the task of exposing, pathologizing, or apologizing for Kingsley’s formal infelicities and intellectual shallowness or inconsistency. As scholars have become more attentive to, and curious about, the ways in which literary genres and disciplines have been constructed in historical time and discursive space, however, so Kingsley’s own engagement (often ludic and satirical) with such boundaries and categories have grown in interest. The engagement of historians of science with Kingsley’s writings has been particularly fruitful in this regard. In a sense, Kingsley scholarship of the 2000s and 2010s begins where the earlier generation left off: identifying the paradoxes and tensions in his thought is not the end, but serves as prolegomenon to discussion of the many ways in which his texts shaped the Victorian mind.

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