SOURCE: “Henry Kingsley: A Portrait,” in Edinburgh Review, Vol. CCXL, October, 1924, pp. 330-48.

In the following essay, Sadleir offers a brief overview of Kingsley's life and explores reactions to his writing, linking Kingsley's personal struggles with his disappointing literary career.

I.

Henry Kingsley's life-story—at once vivid and melancholy—is just such a one as would have appealed to his own romantic imagination. No writer of the mid-Victorian age had so delicate a sympathy for splendour in decay, so sensitive an admiration for the forlorn present of a noble past. He is the prose laureate of wasted beauty and his name persists, among those more solid names of his contemporaries, as some frail ruin will survive—ivy-throttled, rotten with neglect, but always lovely—among dwellings more carefully preserved but not so exquisite.

And the record of his books follows the same sad curve as that of his biography...