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FEATURES
While not Victorian England's most remarkable polymath, Charles Kingsley "surely ranks as one of the period's most earnest synthesists"Kingsley's writing demonstrated a devotion to the ideal of making all things work for all people.Copyright © 2004 Bruce Tober All Rights Reserved Charles Kingsley
The book, which, according to an article at schoolnet.co.uk, was written "for his youngest son, tells the story of a young chimney-sweep, who runs away from his brutal employer. In his flight he falls into a river and is transformed into a water baby. Thereafter, in the river and in the seas, he meets all sorts of creatures and learns a series of moral lessons." Kingsley was educated at King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge prior to becoming rector of Eversley in Hampshire. But eventually his interest in history and academia overtook his interest in the clergical life and his accepted a post as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. His writing, like his career, would appear to have focused on the religious first and then on the historical, but always on the concern with social issues and social justice. His first novel, Alton Locke, for example, published in 1850, was an expose of social injustice suffered by agricultural labourers and workers in the clothing trade.
Kingsley's early religious and social convictions were formed rather obviously by his clergyman father. But perhaps more influential, according to the schoolnet.com article was his reading of The Kingdom of Christ (1838) by Frederick Denison Maurice. Maurice's argued the inter-relatedness and inseparability of politics and religion. He also asserted "that the church should be involved in addressing social questions. Maurice's book rejected individualism, with its competition and selfishness, and suggested a socialist alternative to the economic principles of laissez faire." As a result of this influence, Kingsley became a Chartist. He joined Maurice, John Malcolm Ludlow, and Thomas Hughes to form the Christian Socialist (CS) movement when the House of Commons rejected the Chartist Petition in 1848, . The men discussed how the Church could help to prevent revolution by tackling what they considered were the reasonable grievances of the working class. The roles of members of the trio of Maurice, Kinsley and Ludlow have been described thusly, "Ludlow proffered the social ideas, Kingsley the prophetic fire, Maurice the anchorage in Christian doctrine. In this unusual crew Ludlow stood at the helm, Kingsley flew the flags and sounded the horns, Maurice poked round the engine-room to see that the engines were of authentic Christian manufacture." Kingsley, writing as "Parson Lot", published several articles in the CS's two journals, Politics of the People (1848-1849) and The Christian Socialist (1850-51) as well as in a series of pamphlets they produced, Tracts on Christian Socialism.
Kingsley's second novel was the historical Hypatia. Hypatia was a 5th century philosophy teacher in Alexandria, murdered by a group of Christian fanatics because they disapproved of her political and religious ideas. Some might say that plot reverberates even today in the USA. Four years later, in 1857, Two Years Ago was published. It's Kingsley's story of poor sanitary conditions and public apathy causing an outbreak of cholera. In it "...had it not been for the force of some of the characterdrawing in this novel" notes The Cambridge History of English and American Literature quoted at bartleby.com, "especially for the figure of the hero of the tale, Tom Thurnall, and for the vivid picturesqueness of the writing, both in passages of pure description and in the highly wrought episode of the storm, Two Years Ago would probably not have excited much interest as a story. The main plot, on the whole, is too transparent, and the advent of the cholera has been too fully prepared to tell strongly when it actually breaks out." The Cambridge History goes on to say that Kingsley believed "self-sacrifice in the cause of suffering humanity" was the true goal of society in the then current era. "...Not talk but work, albeit not to be brought home to the national conscience without a great deal of talk—and his conviction that sanitary reform and what it implied was the most pressing of its needs, were in harmony with some of the noblest impulses of the era of Florence Nightingale and her contemporaries. "But, of the vehemence of his earlier denunciations of existing social evils there is not much to be found in Two Years Ago. He has a kindly eye for helpless guardsmen, and even something more than this for well-meaning high-church curates; and the general note of his social philosophy is optimism. To Christianity, he steadfastly looks as to the crowning grace of all, and, in a corner of his heart, there lurks the belief that, in the crises as well as in the general conduct of life, a gentleman is not a gentleman for nothing."
He explains that Kingsley tried "valiantly, and conspicuously, to share the metaphor between science and religion. Kingsley used fiction as a soapbox for his sometimes radical, but always deeply felt, convictions." And he argues that in none of Kingsley's work is this better demonstrated than in Two Years Ago.
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