But even at the low ebb in Kingsley's reputation at the time of his death, no less a critic than Matthew Arnold could refer to his "fine talents and achievements in literature," and recent studies have emphasized the literary qualities of his work. In particular, the modern biographical studies of R. B. Martin and Susan Chitty have pointed the way for a new recognition of the psychological, not just the propagandist, sources of Kingsley's fiction. From the new studies there has emerged a new sense of the imaginative strength behind Kingsley's very diverse writings.
Charles Kingsley was born in 1819, the second son of a rather unworldly and conservative clergyman and a strong-minded, very practical, Evangelical mother from the West Indies. His elder brother, Gerald, entered the navy and died of fever aboard his becalmed ship in 1844; another brother, Herbert, died young of rheumatic fever in 1834; the two youngest, George and Henry, were both travelers and literary men. Only Charles followed his father into the church or attained early respectability.
With the gap of a few years in the Fen country near Peterborough, most of Kingsley's boyhood was spent in Devonshire, at Holne, Ilfracombe, and Clovelly, and two of his novels, Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857), are set there.During his early schooldays at Clifton, he saw the 1831 Bristol riots, with a "savage, brutal, hideous mob of inhuman wretches, plundering, destroying, burning," and charred bodies laid out in the streets before the smoldering buildings; some of his later sense of social apocalypse must have originated then.
This is a free page. This page contains 196 words. This
biography contains 6,125 words (approx. 20 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Charles Kingsley Access Pass.
