Novelist, third son of the Rev. Charles Kingsley, and younger brother of Charles Kingsley and George Henry Kingsley, was born at Barnack, Northamptonshire, on 2 Jan. 1830. He was educated at King’s College, London, and at Worcester College, Oxford, where he matriculated 6 March 1850. He left college in 1853 to go to the Australian goldfields with some fellow-students. After five years’ desultory and unremunerative employment he returned to England, and soon afterwards made himself known by the spirited and successful novel, “Geoffrey Hamlyn,” in which his Australian experience was turned to account. It was followed in 1861 by “Ravenshoe,” which also made its mark, and afterwards by many others. In 1864 he married his second cousin, Sarah Maria Kingsley, and settled at Wargrave, near Henley-on-Thames. He was afterwards for eighteen months editor of the “Edinburgh Daily Review,” an organ of the free church. During his editorship the Franco-German war broke out, and Kingsley went out as correspondent for his paper. He was present at the battle of Sedan (1 Sept. 1870), and was the first Englishman to enter the town afterwards. After giving up the paper he settled for a time in London, and renewed his work as a novelist. He subsequently retired to the Attrees, Cuckfield, Sussex, where he died of a cancer in the tongue after some months’ illness on 24 May 1876. Kingsley’s works are: 1. “The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn,” 3 vols. 1859. 2. “Ravenshoe,” 3 vols. 1862. 3. “Austin Elliott,” 2 vols. 1863 (French translation by Daurand Forgues, 1866). 4. “The Hillyars and Burtons: a Story of two Families,” 3 vols. 1865. 5. “Leighton Court: a Country House Story,” 2 vols. 1866. 6. “Silcote of Silcotes,” 3 vols. 1867. 7. “Mademoiselle Mathilde,” 3 vols. 1868. 8. “Stretton,” 3 vols. 1869. 9. “Old Margaret,” 2 vols. 1871. 10. “The Lost Child” (illustrated by L. Frölich), 1871. 11. “The Boy in Grey,” 1871. 12. “Hetty and other Stories,” 1871. 13. “The Harveys,” 2 vols. 1872. 14. “Hornby Mills, and other Stories,” 1872. 15. “Valentin: a French Boy’s Story of Sedan,” 1872. 16. “Reginald Hetherege,” 3 vols. 1874. 17. “Number Seventeen,” 2 vols. 1875. 18. “The Grange Garden: a Romance,” 3 vols. 1876. 19. “Fireside Studies,” 2 vols. 1876. He also edited the Globe edition of “Robinson Crusoe” in 1868, with a biographical introduction, and published in 1869 “Tales of Old Travels re-narrated.”

Personal

  He found his proper place as an essayist and a novelist, and in all his works there is to me a strange and nameless charm—a quaint humor, a genuine sentiment, an atmosphere all his own, breezy, buoyant, boyish, seeming to show a personality behind all his creations, that of their creator, a fair, frank, fresh-hearted man. He had true artistic talent, too, inherited from his grandfather, and he may have been just in judging himself capable of gaining far greater reputation as a painter than as a novelist even. His skill in drawing was amazing, and the few water-colors and oils left to his family—and unknown outside of its members—are masterpieces.

  The story of Henry Kingsley’s life may well be told in a few words, because that life was on the whole a failure. The world will not listen very tolerantly to a narrative of failure unaccompanied by the halo of remoteness. To write the life of Charles Kingsley would be a quite different task. Here was success, victorious success, sufficient indeed to gladden the heart even of Dr. Smiles—success in the way of Church preferment, success in the way of public veneration, success, above all, as a popular novelist, poet, and preacher. Canon Kingsley’s life has been written in two substantial volumes containing abundant letters and no indiscretions. In this biography the name of Henry Kingsley is absolutely ignored. And yet it is not too much to say that, when time has softened his memory for us, as it has softened for us the memories of Marlowe and Burns and many another, the public interest in Henry Kingsley will be stronger than in his now more famous brother.

  No one knows whether Henry Kingsley was precocious or dull at Oxford. Nobody seems to know anything about Henry Kingsley, at Oxford or anywhere else. In “The Memoir of Charles Kingsley,” by Mrs. Kingsley, she does not even mention the name of Henry Kingsley, her famous husband’s equally famous brother. The Encyclopædias, the Dictionaries of Authors, ignore him, or dismiss him with a line or two; he is rarely if ever mentioned, in the Biographies, in the Auto-biographies, or in the Reminiscences of his contemporaries; and yet he wrote some of the most wholesome, most fascinating novels of his century…. That he loved Oxford, and went often back to Oxford, in spirit, if not in body, is shown throughout his work. He sent “Ravenshoe” to “St. Paul’s” in Oxford, which was, perhaps, St. John’s. He educated Lord Welter and Austin Elliot at Christ Church. John Thornton in “Austin Elliot,” was a Servitor at Christ Church, who fell in love with the pretty daughter of a “well-to-do farmer living down the river not far from Oxford.” Arthur Silcote was the youngest tutor at Balliol. And “Leighton Court” is described as being “very like Balliol, uncommonly like Oriel, and a perfect replica of University.” Henry Kingsley, whatever was his life in Oxford, proved himself in after life to have been one of the best examples of the Oxford man. And if you care to see what sort of an imaginary Oxford man a real Oxford man can create, read the story of Charles Ravenshoe—who, like his creator, was brave, honest, simple, open-hearted, open-handed, and one of the noblest characters in modern fiction; and thereby you will see what Oxford has done, and can do, for the men she calls her sons.

General

  If nicknames were not rash as well as rude, we should be tempted to try our skill at one, and to call Mr. Henry Kingsley one of Heaven’s Undergraduates. Almost all his characteristics as a novelist are those of the typical undergraduate, intensified and sublimated of course. His ideals of male and female character—particularly his usual hero, who is a tremendous fellow at everything, but gets into awful scrapes, and is invariably forgiven by an angelic father—are intensely undergraduate, and so is his style with its perpetual flow of rather forced humour, partaking freely of exaggeration and burlesque. Now, although an undergraduate is a noble and interesting product, he is or ought to be essentially transitional, and Mr. Henry Kingsley shows no signs of transition, except occasional retrogressions into the schoolboy stage. The man who could write “Geoffrey Hamlin,” and “Ravenshoe,” we hardly remember how many years ago, ought by this time to have turned out something of real permanent value, and we fear that “Reginald Hetherege” can hardly be said to possess much value of any kind, except such as most of the better class of ordinary novels may claim.

  Many years ago Mr. Henry Kingsley … wrote “Geoffrey Hamlyn,” a book which, without being exactly a well-constructed story, had several cleverly-devised situations and clearly-marked characters, besides containing descriptions of Australian life endued with much freshness and novelty; drawn from his own experience of five years’ sojourn in the colony. He followed this up with a real good novel, “Ravenshoe;” and then came a second and third, “Austin Elliot” and the “Hillyars and Burtons,” half of iron and half of miry clay, exhibiting in parts the former painstaking and literary merit, and elsewhere somewhat of the carelessness of a school-boy rhapsodist. After that time, with less regard for criticism and for his own reputation as an author than his friends could have wished, he poured out a long series of tales, only one of which, “Mademoiselle Mathilde,” had as much pains bestowed on it as is essential to thoroughly good work. Sometimes, it is true, single passages and scenes of merit have redeemed a few of these later books, as “Silcote of Silcotes” and “Stretton,” which in spite of much extravagance of plot, are undoubtedly amusing; but sheer dulness was occasionally reached, as in “Hetty,” “Reginald Hetherege,” and some others.

  “Ravenshoe,” his most successful work, published in 1861, has more of plot and more studied delineation of character than is found in the majority of his books; the well-known incident of the rough and rather brutal Welter’s hesitation between right and wrong, when he is called upon to do his duty at the cost of a fortune to himself, shows a latent power which might have raised him to a very high place in literature.

  I worshipped his books as a boy; to-day I find them full of faults—often preposterous, usually ill-constructed, at times unnatural beyond belief. John Gilpin never threw the wash about on both sides of the way more like unto a trundling mop or a wild goose at play than did Henry Kingsley the decent flow of fiction when the mood was on him. His notion of constructing a novel was to take equal parts of wooden melodrama and low comedy and stick them boldly together in a paste of impertinent drollery and serious but entirely irrelevant moralizing. And yet each time I read “Ravenshoe”—and I must be close upon “double figures”—I like it better.

  His novels are extremely loose in construction, and he is no rival to his brother in that exuberance of spirits which gives to the writings of the latter their most characteristic excellence.

  A writer of distinctly lower literary merit [than Charles Kingsley] but of no little force and fascination as a story-teller, especially of Australian life.