Charles Kingsley born 1819 – 1875

About:

Kingsley, was born the son of a clergy man in 1819 in Devon, and was brought up to follow in the paternal footsteps. He graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1842 and having married Fanny Grenfell with whom he had fallen almost instantly in love at Cambridge, he obtained a very good post as curate of Eversley church in Hampshire.

Kingsley however was not cut out to be a low profile parish rector. His was a type of faith which was to become known as Muscular Christianity – a strenuous, eager, active faith which above all believed that politics and religion were inseparable, it was a believer’s duty to affect the conditions of the time, conditions which Kingsley had noted and abhorred ever since his early brush with the Bristol Riots of 1831.

Against the background of the tumultuous events of 1848, with Europe wide revolutions and the battles of the Chartists in Britain, Kingsley, his mentor F. D. Maurice and several others began the Christian Socialist movement, one of whose major tenets was that it was your Christian duty to affect and improve the conditions of those around you.
His literary career began with the writing of many articles championing reform and several campaigning novels followed; - amongst them his novel Alton Locke (1850) addressing the conditions of agricultural labourers and those in the clothing trade, Hypatia (1853) an early exploration of religious extremism and intolerance and his most popular work Westward Ho!, (1855) a patriotic novel written during the horrors of the Crimean War.

His historical novels gained him the Regis Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge in 1860 and in 1861 he was made tutor to the Prince of Wales. In response to his teaching post and for his young son he wrote The Water Babies in 1863, scandalising many with its obvious use of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. His writing also however gained him the fury of the High Church in Britain, a battle which he took on with pleasure as his own faith was diametrically opposed to what he saw as the passivity and excess of the Catholic Church. His long public fight with John Henry Newman culminated in 1864 with Newman’s famous final response to Kinglsey’s attacks the Apologia.

The muscularity of Kinglsey’s Christianity was exhausting and in 1865 he retired from his teaching post at Cambridge. Unable to stop however, he embarked on a series of punishing tours around the West Indies and America. He had taken on the Cannonship of Westminster in 1873 but shortly after his return from his last trip to the United States in 1874 he died in January 1875.