This Life of Charles Kingsley is a detailed intellectual biography, which is at the same time a critical and contextual study. Working from the original manuscript letters, the author has placed the events of Kingsley’s life against a social-historical-religious background, paying much attention to such mid-nineteenth-century issues as geological discoveries, the Oxford Movement, biblical Higher Criticism, Chartism, sanitary reform, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, Darwinism, the American Civil War, and the anti-slavery campaigns. Analyses of Kingsley’s relationships with important contemporaries are allotted ample space, and special emphasis has been given to themes on which previous biographies have remained relatively silent. Kingsley emerges from this study as one of England’s leading nineteenth-century voices as poet, novelist, social reformer, churchman and historian. |