Size: 14.50 x 10 cm.
Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was a
broad church priest of the
Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian and novelist. He is particularly associated with
Christian socialism, the
working men's college, and forming
labour cooperatives that failed but led to the working reforms of the
progressive era. He was a friend and correspondent with
Charles Darwin.
Kingsley was born in Holne, Devon, the elder of two sons of the Reverend Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary Lucas Kingsley. His brother, Henry Kingsley, also became a novelist. He spent his childhood in Clovelly, Devon, where his father was Curate 1826–1832 and Rector 1832–1836,[2] and at Barnack, Northamptonshire and was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Helston Grammar School[3] before studying at King's College London, and the University of Cambridge. Charles entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1838, and graduated in 1842.[4] He chose to pursue a ministry in the church. From 1844, he was rector of Eversley in Hampshire. In 1859 he was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria.[5] In 1860, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.[5] In 1861 he became a private tutor to the Prince of Wales.[5]
In 1869 Kingsley resigned his Cambridge professorship and, from 1870 to 1873, was a canon of Chester Cathedral. While in Chester he founded the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art, which played an important part in the establishment of the Grosvenor Museum.[6] In 1872 he accepted the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute and became its 19th President.[7] In 1873 he was made a canon of Westminster Abbey.[5] Kingsley died in 1875 and was buried in St Mary's Churchyard in Eversley.
Kingsley sat on the 1866 Edward Eyre Defence Committee along with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens and Alfred Lord Tennyson, where he supported Jamaican Governor Edward Eyre's brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion against the Jamaica Committee.
One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley, became known as a novelist under the pseudonym "Lucas Malet".
Kingsley's life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life.
Kingsley also received letters from Thomas Huxley in 1860 and later in 1863, discussing Huxley's early ideas on agnosticism.
Kingsley's interest in history is shown in several of his writings, including The Heroes (1856), a children's book about Greek mythology, and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia (1853), Hereward the Wake (1865) and Westward Ho! (1855).
He was sympathetic to the idea of evolution and was one of the first to welcome Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. He had been sent an advance review copy and in his response of 18 November 1859 (four days before the book went on sale) stated that he had "long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species."[8] Darwin added an edited version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating that "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws'."[9] When a heated dispute lasting three years developed over human evolution, Kingsley gently satirised the debate, known as the Great Hippocampus Question, as the "Great Hippopotamus Question".
Kingsley's concern for social reform is illustrated in his classic, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863), a tale about a chimney sweep, which retained its popularity well into the 20th century. The story mentions the main protagonists in the scientific debate over human origins, rearranging his earlier satire as the "great hippopotamus test". The book won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963.
His chief power as a novelist lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are brilliant; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy with children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children. Kingsley was influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, and was close to many Victorian thinkers and writers, including the Scottish writer George MacDonald.
Kingsley was highly critical of Roman Catholicism and his argument, in print, with John Henry Newman, accusing him of untruthfulness and deceit, prompted the latter to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua.[10] Kingsley was accused of racism towards the Roman Catholic Irish poor[10] and wrote in a letter to his wife from Ireland in 1860, "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country [Ireland]...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."[11] Kingsley also wrote poetry and political articles, as well as several volumes of sermons.
Kingsley coined the term pteridomania in his 1855 book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore.
Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho! led to the founding of a village by the same name (the only place name in England with an exclamation mark) and inspired the construction of the Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore Railway. A hotel in Westward Ho! was named for and opened by him.
A hotel opened in 1897 in Bloomsbury, London, was named after Kingsley. The hotel was founded by teetotallers who admired Kingsley for his political views and his ideas on social reform. It still exists and is now known as The Kingsley by Thistle.[13]
In 1905 the composer Cyril Rootham wrote a musical setting of Kingsley's poem Andromeda: the work was performed at the Bristol Music Festival in 1908. Like Kingsley, Rootham had been educated at Bristol Grammar School.
Eversley is a village and civil parish in the Hart district of northeast Hampshire, England. The village is located around 11 miles (18 km) northeast of Basingstoke and around 2.5 miles (4 km) west of Yateley. The River Blackwater, and the border with Berkshire, form the northern boundary of the parish.
Eversley is regarded as a wealthy community and is situated in the least deprived local council area in England.
Hampshire (/ˈhæmpʃər/, i/ˈhæmpʃɪər/; abbreviated Hants)[a] is a county on the southern coast of England in the United Kingdom. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, the former capital city of England. Hampshire is the most populous ceremonial county in the United Kingdom (excluding the metropolitan counties) with almost half of the county's population living within the South Hampshire conurbation which includes the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth.[1] The larger South Hampshire metropolitan area has a population of 1,547,000.[2] Hampshire is notable for housing the birthplaces of the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force. It is bordered by Dorset to the west, Wiltshire to the north-west, Berkshire to the north, Surrey to the north-east, and West Sussex to the east. The southern boundary is the coastline of the English Channel and the Solent, facing the Isle of Wight.
Hampshire is the largest county in South East England and remains the third largest shire county in the United Kingdom despite losing more land than any other English county in all contemporary boundary changes. At its greatest size in 1890, Hampshire was the fifth largest county in England. It now has an overall area of 3,700 square kilometres (1,400 sq mi),[3] and measures about 86 kilometres (53 mi) east–west and 76 kilometres (47 mi) north–south.[4]
Hampshire's tourist attractions include many seaside resorts and two national parks: the New Forest and the South Downs (together covering some 45% of the county). Hampshire has a long maritime history and two of Europe's largest ports, Portsmouth and Southampton, lie on its coast. The county is famed as home of writers Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, as well as the birthplace of engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The
cabinet card was a style of photograph which was widely used for photographic portraiture after 1870. It consisted of a thin photograph mounted on a card typically measuring 108 by 165 mm (4 1⁄4 by 6 1⁄2 inches).
The carte de visite was quickly replaced by the larger cabinet card. In the early 1860s, both types of photographs were essentially the same in process and design. Both were most often albumen prints; the primary difference being the cabinet card was larger and usually included extensive logos and information on the reverse side of the card to advertise the photographer's services. However, later into its popularity, other types of papers began to replace the albumen process. Despite the similarity, the cabinet card format was initially used for landscape views before it was adopted for portraiture.
Some cabinet card images from the 1890s have the appearance of a black-and-white photograph in contrast to the distinctive sepia toning notable in the albumen print process. These photographs have a neutral image tone and were most likely produced on a matte collodion, gelatin or gelatin bromide paper.
Sometimes images from this period can be identified by a greenish cast. Gelatin papers were introduced in the 1870s and started gaining acceptance in the 1880s and 1890s as the gelatin bromide papers became popular. Matte collodion was used in the same period. A true black-and-white image on a cabinet card is likely to have been produced in the 1890s or after 1900. The last cabinet cards were produced in the 1920s, even as late as 1924.
Owing to the larger image size, the cabinet card steadily increased in popularity during the second half of the 1860s and into the 1870s, replacing the carte de visite as the most popular form of portraiture. The cabinet card was large enough to be easily viewed from across the room when typically displayed on a cabinet, which is probably why they became known as such in the vernacular. However, when the renowned Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady, first started offering them to his clientele towards the end of 1865, he used the trademark "Imperial Carte-de-Visite."[1] Whatever the name, the popular print format joined the photograph album as a fixture in the late 19th-century Victorian parlor.
The reverse side of the card as seen above.
Ironically, early into its introduction, the cabinet card ushered in the temporary demise of the photographic album which had come into existence commercially with the carte de visite. Photographers began employing artists to retouch photographs (by altering the negative before making the print) to hide facial defects revealed by the new format. Small stands and photograph frames for the table top replaced the heavy photograph album. Photo album manufacturers responded by producing albums with pages primarily for cabinet cards with a few pages in the back reserved for the old family carte de visite prints.
For nearly three decades after the 1860s, the commercial portraiture industry was dominated by the carte de visite and cabinet card formats. In the decade before 1900 the number and variety of card photograph styles expanded in response to declining sales. Manufactures of standardized card stock and print materials hoped to stimulate sales and retain public interest in card photographs. However, as with all technological innovations, the public increasingly demanded outdoor and candid photographs with enlarged prints which they could frame or smaller unmounted snapshots they could collect in scrapbooks.
In no small part owing to the immense popularity of the affordable Kodak Box Brownie camera, first introduced in 1900, the public increasingly began taking their own photographs, and thus the popularity of the cabinet card declined.[2]
