Kingsley, Charles

Kingsley, Charles (1819–75), rector of Eversley in Hampshire. He was professor of modern history at Cambridge (1860–9) and canon of Chester and Westminster. His blank verse drama The Saint's Tragedy (1848) deals with the conflict between natural affections and asceticism, and its introduction attacking celibacy strikes an anti-Tractarian note that recurs throughout his work. At this period he was much influenced by F. D. Maurice and Carlyle. He contributed, over the signature ‘Parson Lot’, to Politics for the People (1848) and to its successor, The Christian Socialist (1850–1).

In 1850 he published his first novel, Yeast (serialized in Fraser's Magazine, 1848), and Alton Locke. Both are reforming novels, showing his concern with the sufferings of the working classes. A visit to Germany in 1851 inspired his first historical novel, Hypatia, or New Foes with Old Faces (1853), set in 5th-cent. Alexandria, published in Fraser's in 1851. Newman's Callista was written in part to correct its hostile portrait of the early Church. His next novel, Westward Ho! (1855), was set in the Elizabethan period; its hero, Devonshire seaman Amyas Leigh, wages war against the Armada and the Spanish captain Don Guzman, his rival in love. Two Years Ago (1857) returns to the theme of social reform; and Hereward the Wake (1866) is a historical novel based on the exploits of the legendary outlaw.

Kingsley's other works include The Heroes (1856) and The Water-Babies (1863). The latter displays his interest in underwater and seashore life, as does his earlier work Glaucus: or The Wonders of the Shore (1855). Many of his songs and ballads remain popular; these include ‘Airly Beacon’ and ‘The Sands of Dee’, and many of his lines, such as ‘Be Good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ (quoted in Two Years Ago) and ‘For men must work and women must weep’, from ‘The Three Fishers’, have become proverbial. Kingsley also wrote tracts on many topics, published lectures and sermons, and his At Last (1871) is a record of a long-desired visit to the West Indies.

Kingsley seems to represent some of the central paradoxes of his age. A keen sportsman who was tender to animals, a champion of the working man who despised Negroes, a muscular Christian who wrote much (like his friend T. Hughes) of the virtues of ‘manliness’ and who nevertheless held an unusually explicit passion for his wife, he was both Philistine and artist; his strong didacticism, while it mars many of his works, is inseparable from them.