Last of the English: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake

Abstract

Charles Kingsley published six full-scale novels in the course of a career in which he managed to combine and confuse the roles of clergyman, poet, essayist, novelist, naturalist, socialist, social reformer, historian and tutor to the Prince of Wales. For each aspect of his life there is an appropriate, if unequal, literary expression. As an antagonistic reviewer of Westward Ho! grudgingly admitted in 1855, Kingsley was one of the most remarkable and voluminous writers of his age with, as he put it, ‘no small infusion of quicksilver’ in his veins.¹

‘Is it what you call civilisation that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is her inhabitants that have done this: it is an affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century…. All is race; there is no other truth.’

Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, Book II, Chapter XIV