Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy [Hardcover]

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, 18391845  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 Kingsleys Hypatia?  6. The Fly in the Amber: The Controversy with Newman  7. Kingsleys Muscular Poetics  8. Kingsleys 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 Kingsleys Water Babies  11. Kingsley on Race and Empire  12. Kingsley and the Irish  13. Histories and Historians  Afterword: Charles Kingsley as Polymath

Novelist, poet, Anglican priest, and controversialist, Charles Kingsley (181975) 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. Kingsleys The Water-Babies and Westward Ho! were best-sellers which became classics of childrens 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 Victorias 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 tols“