Charles Kingsley is remembered today above all for Westward Ho! (1855) and The Water‐babies (1863). But his range of writings and interests were wide and represent many of the literary, social, scientific and religious concerns of the Victorian period. Brendan A. Rapple's informative Introduction ends with a list of over 40 topics that scholars have explored in his life and work – the important subjects, as this bibliography shows, include Protestantism and Catholicism, natural history, geology and what Thomas Carlyle called “the condition‐of‐England question”.
Rapple gives us a remarkable total of 544 items: biographies, articles, chapters from books, introductions and dissertations. Even so, he does not claim to be comprehensive, making clear that he is surveying selected writings. (A few additional items can be found in Elizabeth Cripps's contribution to the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 4). But every year between 1900 and 2006 is represented by several publications, testifying to the interest that continues to be taken in Kingsley's work. This interest seems to be increasing: Rapple deals with two items for 1928 whereas he finds no fewer than ten in 1998. He describes the contents of each published item objectively and clearly, though very occasionally using an evaluative word like “excellent” or making a brief comment – referring to one article (item 49) for example, as “laudatory with little critical analysis”. He notes unusual or controversial elements: A. Dwight Culler contends in his edition of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1956) that Kingsley's antipathy to Newman had a sexual cause and John R. Townsend in Written for Children (1983) thinks The Water‐babies is “one of the uncommon instances of children's books when an edited version is preferable to the original”. Rapple refers us to other sources for abstracts of the dissertations: ProQuest's Dissertations and Theses and Expert Information's Index to Theses of Great Britain and Ireland. The entries end with “descriptors or subject headings … that define major themes in the book, chapter, or article”. So Susan Chitty's 1974 biography, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley, is characterised as Full Book Treatment; Overview: Sexuality; Social and Political Views and a 1999 article by Amanda Hodgson entitled “Defining the species” covers the categories of The Water‐Babies; Science; Evolution; Characterization in Novels; Huxley, T.H.
Rapple valuably highlights relevant chapters or passages from full‐length literary and historical works: the third volume of Saintsbury's History of English Prosody (1910) for a consideration of Kingsley's poetry, William Irvine's Apes, Angels and Victorians (1955), Gertrude Himmelfarb's Victorian Minds (1968), Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) and A.N. Wilson's The Victorians (2002). It is useful to be directed to introductions, often overlooked, to reprints of Kingsley's novels: Ernest Rhys's brief prefatory appreciations of Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake in Everyman's Library in 1906 and 1908, L.A.G. Strong's 1954 introduction to a Collins reissue of Hereward the Wake and David Lodge's 1967 introduction to Alton Locke in the First Novel Library. Some of the critics and biographers that Rapple includes from the first half of the twentieth century are unjustifiably forgotten or seen as less rigorous than more recent commentators and so it is welcome to see their revival (for example, A.C. Benson, Lewis Melville and Oliver Elton).
The publications that Rapple lists in the past 20 years or so include a number influenced by recent discussions of gender and sexuality (particularly masculinity and feminism) and imperialism. Traditional biographical work continues, notably in reference books, such as the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (RR 2005/59), where Rapple finds that Norman Vance “provides an excellent overview of Kingsley's life and works”. Two of Kingsley's books predominate in the bibliography: Alton Locke (usually classified as a social novel) and The Water‐babies. One could not ask for a more eloquent tribute to the latter than the words Rapple quotes from a 1976 article by Q.D. Leavis: “the combination of drama, saga, nonsense, science, magic, poetry and comedy Kingsley invented is irresistible”.
The bibliography is not only a practical guide to Kingsley. It should stimulate interest in a writer who is an important, but sometimes neglected, novelist, poet, polemicist and advocate of religious and social causes. It will also be a valuable resource for students of the Victorian period, since Kingsley was involved, often controversially, in many of the leading issues of the mid‐nineteenth century.
