Kingsley

Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), novelist, poet, and social reformer, was born at the vicarage of Holme on the edge of Dartmoor. From King's College, London, he proceeded to Magdalene College, Cambridge, and, after graduating with double honours (1842), was ordained, and received the curacy of Eversley in Hampshire. He was presented to the living in 1844, and remained here throughout the rest of his life. Although, from the circumstances of his birth and education, Kingsley sympathised keenly with the tastes, the pursuits, and even the prejudices of the upper ranks of society - a bias which he retained to the end of his life - he was, nevertheless, an ardent champion of the rights of the working man, whose condition he regarded as a disgrace to a country professing Christianity. As a member of the little group called "Christian Socialists" he advocated the principle of co-operation, and the evils of the "sweating system" were vividly exposed in his first novel, Alton Locke (1849). In the same work he displayed his sympathy with the aims and aspirations, if not the methods, of the Chartists, whose cause he had already aided powerfully by his letters in the Christian Socialist and Politics for the People, signed "Parson Lot." Yeast (1851) showed a keen insight into the condition and the wants of the agricultural labourer. Kingsley also took an active part in promoting sanitary reform, and other measures for improving the material as well as the moral surroundings of the labouring population. He afterwards earned a more brilliant, though not more honourable, reputation by his historical novels Hypatia (1853), Westward Ho! (1855), and Hereward, the Wake (1866), dealing respectively with the struggle between the Church and the Neoplatonists at Alexandria in the 5th century, the conflict of England with Spain and of the Protestant with the Roman Catholic religion in the reign of Elizabeth, and the last efforts of the conquered Saxons against William the Norman. Kingsley was Professor of History at Cambridge from 1860 to 1869, when he was appointed a Canon of Chester. As a Churchman he must be classed with the "Broad church" section, but with him religion was a matter of intense personal conviction, and he carried into his own all the earnestness and vigour which were inseparable from his character. His drama, The Saint's Tragedy (1848), never attained wide popularity, but his beautiful lyrics, The Sands of Bee and The Three Fishers, have earned him a recognised place among the poets of the century. His brother, Henry Kingsley (1830-76), wrote many novels, at once stirring and pathetic, of which Ravenshoe (1861) is perhaps the best.