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 decided to go first to South Africa to nurse fever cases. She died of enteric fever at Simon’s Town, where she was engaged in tending Boer prisoners, on the 3rd of June 1900. Miss Kingsley’s works, besides her Travels, include West African Studies, The Story of West Africa, a memoir of her father prefixed to his Notes on Sport and Travel (1899), and many contributions to the study of West African law and folk-lore. To continue the investigation of the subjects Miss Kingsley had made her own “The African Society” was founded in 1901.
Valuable biographical information from the pen of Mr George A. Macmillan is prefixed to a second edition (1901) of the Studies.