Home › Charles Kingsley › Charles Kingsley (Time in which Charles Kingsley)

Charles Kingsley (Time in which Charles Kingsley)

THE time in which Charles Kingsley lived and wrote was akin to our own. The rising of the oppressed workers and the social ferment in England following the revolution of 1848 in France were in a small way similar to the impetus toward freedom stirred by the Russian revolution throughout the world. Kingsley's vigorous yet sympathetic personality, his flashing scorn and hypocrisy and his fearless love of justice, made him a natural champion of the oppressed. "Alton Locke" and "Yeast" both appeared the year after the revolution. The first is an exposition of the sweating system in which London low life and working-class thought are pictured with extraordinary vividness and understanding. "Yeast," written in burning indignation at the condition of the agricultural laborer in England, has a "depth and passion and power, a life, an intensity, the tenth part of which would make the fortune of a novel now."

Kingsley was a tireless worker for practical reform, but the great lesson he tried to convey was that "the future welfare of society demands a new outburst of the latent forces of Christ's religion. It was not amazing, therefore, that he should have turned from English settings and subjects, in which he was so passionately interested, to a study of the fifth century. The empire at that period was enslaving the masses; a universal fermentation of human thought was in process. The Young Church and the Old World were at grips in a death-struggle. He wished to prove in a novel of that epoch that "Christianity is the only really democratic creed," so he wrote the brilliant and tragic "Hypatia."

The richness of Kingsley's personality is realized as one turns from "Hypatia" to the incomparable "Water Babies," whimsical, charming, eternally delightful to big and little children.

HYPATIA By CHARLES KINGSLEY Condensation by PROF. WILLIAM FENWICK HARRIS PHILAMMON could bear no more. Another moment and he had hurled down through the dense mass of spectators, clearing rank after rank of seats by the sheer strength of madness, leaped the balustrade into the orchestra below, and rushed across the space to the foot of the platform. "Pelagia! Sister! My sister! Have mercy on me! on yourself! I will hide you! save you! and we will flee together out of this infernal place! this world of devils! I am your brother! Come!"

She looked at him one moment with wide, wild eyes--the truth flashed on her-- "Brother!"

And she sprang from the platform into his arms.

A vision of a lofty window in Athens, looking out over far olive yards and gardens, and the bright roofs and basins of the Piraeus, and the broad blue sea, with the purple peaks of AEgina beyond all--and a dark-eyed boy, with his arm around her neck, pointed laughing to the twinkling masts in the far harbor, and called her sister. The dead soul woke within her; and with a wild cry she recoiled from him in an agony of shame, and covering her face with both her hands, sank down among the bloodstained sands. A yell, as of all hell broke loose, rang along that vast circle. "Down with him! Away with him! Crucify the slave! Give the barbarian to the beasts! To the beasts with him, noble Prefect!"