KINGSLEY, CHARLES

born June 12, 1819, Holne Vicarage, Devon, Eng. died Jan. 23, 1875, Eversley, Hampshire Anglican clergyman, teacher, and writer whose novels, widely read in the Victorian era, influenced social developments in Britain. He was one of the first churchmen to support Charles Darwin's theories and to seek a reconciliation between modern science and Christian doctrine. The son of a clergyman, he grew up in the country, where he developed an interest in nature study and geology. After graduating from Magdalene College, Cambridge, he was ordained in 1842 as curate of Eversley and two years later became parish priest there. He became a founding member of the Christian Socialist movement, which sought to correct the evils of industrialism through measures based on Christian ethics. His first novel, Yeast (printed in Fraser's Magazine, 1848; in book form, 1851), deals with the relations of the landed gentry to the rural poor. His second, the much superior Alton Locke (1850), is the story of a tailor-poet who rebels against the ignominy of sweated labour and becomes a leader of the Chartist movement. Written with heat and indignation and passionate sympathy for the poor, Kingsley's social novels were frankly didactic and were intended to awaken members of his class to their responsibilities to the workers. He advocated adult education, improved sanitation, and the growth of the cooperative movement, rather than political change, for the amelioration of social problems. In his messages to the workers, he advised them to seek spiritual as well as material gains and to look to something nobler than acts of Parliament as a cure-all for their sufferings. Kingsley soon turned to writing his immensely more popular historical novels: Hypatia (1853), a story of 5th-century Alexandria; Westward Ho! (1855), an anti-Catholic adventure set in the Elizabethan period; and Hereward the Wake (1866), about Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, also with an anti-Catholic slant. Kingsley's fear of the trend within the church toward Roman Catholicism, growing out of the Oxford Movement, led to a notorious controversy with John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman. In answer to an attack by Kingsley, Newman wrote his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), the history of his religious development. Kingsley, never robust, lost in his later years his capacity for hard work, wide interests, and ardent support of causes. He became chaplain to Queen Victoria (1859), professor of modern history at Cambridge (186069), and canon of Westminster (1873). The valuable inspiration he contributed to the development of democracy and social welfare was undermined by his intellectual limitations, by the inconsistencies of his class prejudices, and by his aggressive patriotism. Only in one direction does his subsequent influence remain important. He was one of the few clergymen to accept wholeheartedly Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection and to devote himself to the spread of the new knowledge of nature. His long-popular children's book, The Water-Babies (1863), was inspired by his thoughts on evolution, and he did much to encourage an interest in nature among the working people.