period he certainly shrank from reciting the Athanasian Creed in church, he was towards the close of his life found ready to join an association for the defence of this formulary. The more orthodox and conservative elements in his character gained the upper hand as time went on, but careful students of him and his writings will find a deep conservatism underlying the most radical utterances of his earlier years, while a passionate sympathy for the poor, the afflicted and the weak held possession of him till the last hour of his life.
Both as a writer and in his personal intercourse with men, Kingsley was a thoroughly stimulating teacher. As with his own teacher, Maurice, his influence on other men rather consisted in inducing them to think for themselves than in leading them to adopt his own views, never, perhaps, very definite. But his healthy and stimulating influence was largely due to the fact that he interpreted the thoughts which were stirring in the minds of many of his contemporaries.
As a preacher he was vivid, eager and earnest, equally plain-spoken and uncompromising when preaching to a fashionable congregation or to his own village poor. One of the very best of his writings is a sermon called The Message of the Church to Working Men; and the best of his published discourses are the Twenty-five Village Sermons which he preached in the early years of his Eversley life.
As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are among the most brilliant pieces of word-painting in English prose-writing; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy for children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children.
As a poet he wrote but little, but there are passages in The Saint’s Tragedy and many isolated lyrics, which are worthy of a place in all standard collections of English literature. Andromeda is a very successful attempt at naturalizing the hexameter as a form of English verse, and reproduces with great skill the sonorous roll of the Greek original.
In person Charles Kingsley was tall and spare, sinewy rather than powerful, and of a restless excitable temperament. His complexion was swarthy, his hair dark, and his eye bright and piercing. His temper was hot, kept under rigid control; his disposition tender, gentle and loving, with flashing scorn and indignation against all that was ignoble and impure; he was a good husband, father and friend. One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley (Mrs Harrison), has become well known as a novelist under the pseudonym of “Lucas Malet.”
Kingsley’s life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life, and presents a very touching and beautiful picture of her husband, but perhaps hardly does justice to his humour, his wit, his overflowing vitality and boyish fun.
The following is a list of Kingsley’s writings:—Saint’s Tragedy, a drama (1848); Alton Locke, a novel (1849); Yeast, a novel (1849); Twenty-five Village Sermons (1849); Phaeton, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers (1852); Sermons on National Subjects (1st series, 1852); Hypatia, a novel (1853); Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (1855); Sermons on National Subjects (2nd series, 1854); Alexandria and her Schools (1854); Westward Ho! a novel (1855); Sermons for the Times (1855); The Heroes, Greek fairy tales (1856); Two Years Ago, a novel (1857); Andromeda and other Poems (1858); The Good News of God, sermons (1859); Miscellanies (1859); Limits of Exact Science applied to History (Inaugural Lectures, 1860); Town and Country Sermons (1861); Sermons on the Pentateuch (1863); Water-babies (1863); The Roman and the Teuton (1864); David and other Sermons (1866); Hereward the Wake, a novel (1866); The Ancient Regime (Lectures at the Royal Institution, 1867); Water of Life and other Sermons (1867); The Hermits (1869); Madam How and Lady Why (1869); At last (1871); Town Geology (1872); Discipline and other Sermons (1872); Prose Idylls (1873); Plays and Puritans (1873); Health and Education (1874); Westminster Sermons (1874); Lectures delivered in America (1875). He was a large contributor to periodical literature; many of his essays are included in Prose Idylls and other works in the above list. But no collection has been made of some of his more characteristic writings in the Christian Socialist and Politics for the People, many of them signed by the pseudonym he then assumed, “Parson Lot.”
KINGSLEY, HENRY (1830–1876), English novelist, younger
brother of Charles Kingsley, was born at Barnack, Northamptonshire,
on the 2nd of January 1830. In 1853 he left Oxford,
where he was an undergraduate at Worcester College, for the
Australian goldfields. This venture, however, was not a success,
and after five years he returned to England. He achieved considerable
popularity with his Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn
(1859), a novel of Australian life. This was the first of a series
of novels of which Ravenshoe (1861) and The Hillyars and The
Burtons (1865) are the best known. These stories are characterized
by much vigour, abundance of incident, and healthy
sentiment. He edited for eighteen months the Edinburgh
Daily Review, for which he had acted as war correspondent
during the Franco-German War. He died at Cuckfield, Sussex,
on the 24th of May 1876.
KINGSLEY, MARY HENRIETTA (1862–1900), English
traveller, ethnologist and author, daughter of George Henry
Kingsley (1827–1892), was born in Islington, London, on the
13th of October 1862. Her father, though less widely known
than his brothers, Charles and Henry (see above), was a man of
versatile abilities, with a passion for travelling which he managed
to indulge in combination with his practice as a doctor. He
wrote one popular book of travel, South Sea Bubbles, by the
Earl and the Doctor (1872), in collaboration with the 13th earl
of Pembroke. Mary Kingsley’s reading in history, poetry and
philosophy was wide if desultory, but she was most attracted
to natural history. Her family moved to Cambridge in 1886,
where she studied the science of sociology. The loss of both
parents in 1892 left her free to pursue her own course, and she
resolved to study native religion and law in West Africa with a
view to completing a book which her father had left unfinished.
With her study of “raw fetish” she combined that of a scientific
collector of fresh-water fishes. She started for the West Coast
in August 1893; and at Kabinda, at Old Calabar, Fernando
Po and on the Lower Congo she pursued her investigations,
returning to England in June 1894. She gained sufficient
knowledge of the native customs to contribute an introduction
to Mr R. E. Dennett’s Notes on the Folk Lore of the Fjort (1898).
Miss Kingsley made careful preparations for a second visit to
the same coast; and in December 1894, provided by the
British Museum authorities with a collector’s equipment, she
proceeded via Old Calabar to French Congo, and ascended the
Ogowé River. From this point her journey, in part across
country hitherto untrodden by Europeans, was a long series of
adventures and hairbreadth escapes, at one time from the
dangers of land and water, at another from the cannibal Fang.
Returning to the coast Miss Kingsley went to Corisco and to the
German colony of Cameroon, where she made the ascent of
the Great Cameroon (13,760 ft.) from a direction until then
unattempted. She returned to England in October 1895. The
story of her adventures and her investigations in fetish is
vividly told in her Travels in West Africa (1897). The book
aroused wide interest, and she lectured to scientific gatherings
on the fauna, flora and folk-lore of West Africa, and to commercial
audiences on the trade of that region and its possible
developments, always with a protest against the lack of detailed
knowledge characteristic of modern dealings with new fields of
trade. In both cases she spoke with authority, for she had brought
back a considerable number of new specimens of fishes and plants,
and had herself traded in rubber and oil in the districts through
which she passed. But her chief concern was for the development
of the negro on African, not European, lines and for the
government of the British possessions on the West Coast by
methods which left the native “a free unsmashed man—not a
whitewashed slave or an enemy.” With undaunted energy
Miss Kingsley made preparations for a third journey to the West
Coast, but the Anglo-Boer War changed her plans, and she
