Church of England parson, novelist, Christian Socialist, Protestant controversialist, "muscular Christian," poet, and amateur naturalist. Born on July 12, 1819, to Charles Kingsley, Sr., and Mary Lucas Kingsley, he counted among the early formative influences on his life his witnessing of the Bristol Riots in 1831. In 1832 he studied with Derwent Coleridge and in 1837 at King's College, London; in 1838 he matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He met Frances (Fanny) Grenfell, with whom he fell almost immediately in love in July 6,1839. In February 1842, Kingsley left Cambridge to read for Holy Orders; in July of that year he became curate of Eversley Church in Hampshire, which he served for the rest of his life. In January 1844, he and Fanny were married; in May he became rector of Eversley Church, and during the summer began corresponding with Frederick Denison Maurice, whose influence permeated every aspect of Kingsley's professional life and whom he addressed as "my Master."
Kingsley moved onto the public stage in 1848 in response to the working class agitation that climaxed in the Chartist collapse of that year. As a result of his interest in the condition of the working classes, he joined with John Malcolm Ludlow, Frederick Denison Maurice, and others in forming the Christian Socialist movement. Although he published "Workmen of England" anonymously, he adopted the pseudonym "Parson Lot" for an article, "The National Gallery," which he placed in a new journal Politics for the People. He also used this pseudonym for a series called "Letters to the Chartists."
Despite his interest in the problems of urban workers, Kingsley turned for his first novel to the plight of agricultural labourers. During 1848 he addressed their plight when his novel Yeast appeared serially in Fraser's Magazine. Two other works of note also appeared in this year: The Saint's Tragedy, Kingsley's only major effort at writing a tragedy, and "Why Should We Fear the Romish Priests?" Both of these works voice his early anti-Catholicism, which became a major theme of much of his writing and in the 1860s brought on his disastrous clash with John Henry Newman.
Kingsley's Christian Socialist sympathies voiced through the pseudonym "Parson Lot" continued to find expression in print at least through 1851. However, in 1852 The Christian Socialist failed, and Kingsley's interests began to change. In that year, for example, he pilloried the American New England Transcendentalists in Phaeton; or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers, and turned to historical fiction with the serial publication of Hypatia; or New Foes with an Old Face in Fraser's Magazine. Phaeton satirised Ralph Waldo Emerson as "Professor Windrush," whose teaching he characterised as "Anythingarianism."
In 1856, Kingsley turned his interest in heroes and heroism to preparing a volume for children. The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is a retelling of ancient tales and indicates his growing interest in writing for children, an interest to which he would return in 1862 with The Water-Babies.
The 1860s brought both deserved recognition and the climax of his dispute with John Henry Newman that had been brewing for years. Largely on the strength of his historical fiction Kingsley was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1860; in 1861 he was appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales. The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, arguably his most enduring work, appeared serially in Macmillan's Magazine in 1862 and was published in volume format in 1863.
The Water-Babies touches upon most of Kingsley's favourite themes: the working conditions of the poor, in this case those of chimney sweeps; education; sanitation and public health; pollution of rivers and streams; and evolutionary theory. In the central character's spiritual regeneration, Kingsley presents a vision of nature as the tool of divine reality, which Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice had taught him underlies the imperfect human world. Viewing nature as governed by a redemptive spirit allowed Kingsley to remain untroubled by Darwinism.
Although Kingsley contemplated writing other novels, he never did. Instead, he edited Fraser's Magazine briefly in 1867. In 1869 he resigned his Cambridge professorship, an academic position in which he had never felt comfortable. In 1868 and 1869 he published a series of articles for children; these were collected and issued in 1870 as Madam How and Lady Why: First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children. A tour of the West Indies followed in 1870, producing notes which became At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies in 1871. In 1872 he published Town Geology and became President of the Midland Institute in Birmingham. In the next year he collected a group of prose essays, publishing them as Prose Idylls, New and Old. In 1874 he published Health and Education and made an exhausting six-month tour of the United States. When he returned to England he was worn out. On January 23, 1875, he died.
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