Description
Book SynopsisNovelist, poet, Anglican priest, and controversialist, Charles Kingsley (181975) epitomizes the bustling Victorian man of faith and letters, a prolific polymath as ready to break a lance with John Henry Newman over Christian doctrine as he was to preach to schoolchildren on the virtues of manly, physical struggle. Kingsley's The Water-Babies and Westward Ho! were best-sellers which became classics of children's literature. Kingsley has come to epitomize the Victorian age.
On closer inspection, Kingsley is harder to categorize: a socialist who was also an imperialist, a Chartist revolutionary who was Queen Victoria's favourite novelist, a natural theologian who popularized Darwin, a priest who celebrated sex as sacrament. Kingsley only appears straightforward if you consider him one piece at a time. The debates he shaped remain with us today: faith and sexuality, economics and exploitation, race and identity. The aim of this book is to present the whole man: to co
Table of Contents
Introduction: Charles Kingsley: "The Most Typical Victorian of Them All" 1. "Love Me! Baby! Love God!": Courtship, Marriage, and the Emergence of a Kingsleyan Ascetics, 1839–1845 2. A "Yeasty State of Mind": Charles Kingsley and the Problem of Self-Culture 3. "To Amuse Merely as a Novel": Alton Locke (1850) and Literary Pleasure 4. Effeminate: Kingsley and the History of an Epithet 5. How Odd is Kingsley’s Hypatia? 6. The Fly in the Amber: The Controversy with Newman 7. Kingsley’s Muscular Poetics 8. Kingsley’s Old Testament Heroes 9. Charles Kingsley and the Evolution of Man and Morals in The Water-Babies 10. Evolutionary and Anglican Afterlives: Death as a Sacrament in Kingsley’s Water Babies 11. Kingsley on Race and Empire 12. Kingsley and the Irish 13. Histories and Historians Afterword: Charles Kingsley as Polymath
