KINGSLEY, CHARLES 875) , English clergyman, poet and novelist, was born on June 12, 1819, at Holne vicarage, Dartmoor, Devon. His early years were spent at Barnack in the Fen country and at Clovelly in North Devon. The scenery of both made a great impression on his mind, and was afterwards described with singular vividness in his writings. He was edu cated at private schools and at King's college, London, after his father's promotion to the rectory of St. Luke's, Chelsea. In 1838 he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, and in 1842 he was ordained to the curacy of Eversley in Hampshire, to the rectory of which he was not long afterwards presented, and this, with short intervals, was his home for the remaining thirty-three years of his life. In 1844 he married Fanny, daughter of Pascoe Gren f ell, and in 1848 he published his first volume, The Saint's Tragedy. In 1859 he became chaplain to Queen Victoria; from 186o to 1869 he was professor of modern history at Cambridge. In 1873 he became a canon of Westminster. He died at Eversley on Jan. 23, 1875.
Kingsley threw himself heartily into the movement known as Christian Socialism, of which Frederick Denison Maurice was the recognized leader, and for many years he was considered as an extreme radical in a profession the traditions of which were conservative. While in this phase he wrote his novels Yeast and Alton Locke, in which he showed sympathy with the aims of the Chartists. Yet even then he considered that the true leaders of the people were a peer and a dean, and there was no real incon sistency in the fact that at a later period he was among the de fenders of Governor Eyre in the measures adopted by him to put down the Jamaican disturbances. He looked rather to the exten sion of the co-operative principle and to sanitary reform for the amelioration of the condition of the people than to any radical political change. His politics might therefore have been described as Toryism tempered by sympathy, or as Radicalism tempered by hereditary scorn of subject races. He was bitterly opposed to what he considered to be the mediaevalism and narrowness of the Oxford Tractarian movement. In Macmillan's Magazine for Jan. 1864 he asserted that truth for its own sake was not obligatory with the Roman Catholic clergy, quoting as his authority John Henry Newman (q.v.). In the ensuing controversy Kingsley was completely discomfited. He was a broad churchman, who held what would be called a liberal theology, but the more orthodox and conservative elements in his character gained the upper hand as time went on.
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 natural history, rank high among books for children.
In person Charles Kingsley was tall and spare, sinewy rather than powerful, and of a restless excitable temperament. His com plexion 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), became well known as a novelist under the pseudonym of "Lucas Malet." Kingsley's life was written by his widow in i877, entitled Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memoirs 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 ; Yeast, a novel ; Twenty-five Village Sermons (1849) ; Phaeton, or Loose Thougkts 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 186o) ; Town and Country Sermons 0860 ; Sermons on the Pentateuch (1863) ; Water babies (5863) ; 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 (5872) ; Discipline and other Sermons (1872) ; Prose Idylls (1873) ; Plays and Puritans (1873) ; Health and Education (1874) ; Westminster Sermons 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. His contributions to the Christian Socialist and Politics for the People were frequently signed "Parson Lot."