Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy

Description

Novelist, poet, Anglican priest, and controversialist, Charles Kingsley (1819–75) 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 consider the public crusades for public health alongside the most private fantasies of sexual intercourse; to consider the ardent imperialist alongside the Darwinist. It will be of interest to all students of Victorian studies, as well as of British/Imperial history, church history, and especially the history of science. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents List of Figures Foreword: Amyas and Me: A Personal History of Charles Kingsley Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations 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, 1839–45 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 List of Contributors Index