When Dean Stanley delivered Charles Kingsley's funeral sermon to a ‘vast congregation’ of the great and the good in Westminster Abbey,Footnote ¹ the title under which he chose to eulogise the life and work of his subject was ‘Nature and religion’.Footnote ² Increasingly, historians of nineteenth-century science and natural theology are acknowledging what a fittingly-chosen epitaph this was. What emerges from the works under review is that there was more to Kingsley than ‘Christian manliness’, Christian Socialism and his acrimonious contretemps with Newman. His active and deeply religious engagement with evolutionary ideas is clearly an important subject for historians concerned with the interstices of science and religion in the nineteenth century. We learn, too, that Kingsley played an important role as an ally of Darwin and Huxley, and as a populariser of science. The study of marginalised but important figures finds its natural complement in the study of marginalised but important media and genres, so it is unsurprising to find the works reviewed here paying attention to conversation and children's literature. What is lacking is a proper appreciation of the importance of the scientific sermon, a genre to which Kingsley, one of the celebrated preachers of the Victorian era, was a prominent contributor.

J. M. I. Klaver's full-length biography largely recapitulates a familiar story, told in Fanny Kingsley's Letters and memories of her husband.Footnote ³ Kingsley emerges from these pages as a keen amateur scientist, an explorer of rock pools, collecting and dissecting specimens.Footnote ⁴ Klaver discusses Glaucus; or, The wonders of the shore, Kingsley's best-selling text on marine biology first published in 1855, and its reception in the periodicals, including its hostile review by an envious George Henry Lewes.Footnote ⁵ He offers an account of Kingsley's important and controversial 1859 sermon in favour of poor weather, noting its significance as a prominent clerical defence of the divine origin of natural laws; and he adverts to Kingsley's friendly relations with prominent scientists including Charles Bunbury, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker.Footnote ⁶ Klaver reminds us of Kingsley's favourable endorsement of Darwin's Origin (quoted as the work of that ‘celebrated author and divine’ in the preface to the second and every subsequent edition). Readers will also find a summary of Kingsley's emotional correspondence with T. H. Huxley that complements the excerpts that appear in the pages of Adrian Desmond's Huxley biography.Footnote ⁷ Klaver has consulted the original letters in almost every case where they survive, and his transcriptions usefully amend the many infidelities and interpolations of the Letters and memories by Fanny Kingsley. But ultimately, at least as far as Kingsley's involvement in nineteenth-century science and natural theology is concerned, little is done to justify the epithet ‘critical’ found in this biography's title.

Bernard Lightman's study, Victorian popularizers of science, makes a more developed case for historians of science and natural theology to take Kingsley seriously. Lightman seeks to demonstrate the importance of ‘popularizers’ who ‘assumed the role of interpreters of science for the growing mass reading audience’ of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸ Though marginalised by much historiography, such authors wrote ‘best sellers that were as widely read as the Origin of Species’.Footnote ⁹ Lightman situates Kingsley in particular among the Anglican clergymen who constituted ‘an important group within the ranks of Victorian popularizers’.Footnote ¹⁰ Throughout the book, Lightman is concerned to elucidate the strategies that authors used to address their audiences, and his account of Kingsley's career as a ‘popularizer’ shows how Kingsley's imagery and idiom worked to domesticate natural science and portray it as a socially meritorious pursuit for the middle classes.Footnote ¹¹ Lightman also offers rough estimates of the print runs of particular books printed to the end of the century, and although this is obviously an imperfect metric of impact, it is interesting to see Kingsley's Glaucus matching or exceeding works by prominent scientists such as Huxley and Tyndall.Footnote ¹²

Given Lightman's concern with natural theology throughout these pages, it is surprising that he does not seem to have taken account of the popularity of Kingsley's sermons, which often sought to mediate between science and religion. Published not only in numerous popular collections, but in journals such as the Evangelical and nonconformist organ, Good Words, these sermons clearly reached an extensive and diverse audience. One of them certainly made a considerable impression on the naturalist Charles Bunbury, brother-in-law to Charles Lyell, who recorded in his diary:

Indeed, the ‘scientific sermon’ more generally might have been an interesting subject for a book engaged in a project such as this. Of course, given Lightman's range, which accommodates over thirty of the most prominent nineteenth-century ‘popularisers’, such comprehensiveness would be an unreasonable counsel of perfection, and armed with Lightman's map of the terrain, historians are now better placed to undertake more of the in-depth study of reading and reception exemplified by James Secord's Victorian sensation.

Important steps in this direction have already been taken by Piers Hale, who has conducted some of the detailed prosopographical work that would have been beyond the scope of Lightman's study. Kingsley, Hale contends, was ‘an effective populariser’ of Darwin's ideas for a wide range of social constituencies, including the ‘highest echelons of Victorian society’.Footnote ¹⁴ Drawing on published and unpublished material, Hale demonstrates that Kingsley was accepted by the scientific establishment – not least by Darwin himself, who referred to Kingsley's endorsement of the Origin as a ‘capital paragraph’ and a ‘grand letter’, and asked him to review the duke of Argyll's The reign of law.Footnote ¹⁵ Hale shows us Kingsley on field trips with the geologist John Lubbock. We find him calling on Charles Bunbury at Barton Hall – where he met with his friends the Lyells, as well as ‘Hooker, Huxley and other members of the geological and scientific community on a regular basis’, and where he first met Darwin.Footnote ¹⁶ We see Kingsley operating in the scientific societies and London clubs, becoming a member of the Linnean Society in 1856 and the Geological Society in 1863; lecturing at the Royal Institution;Footnote ¹⁷ and attending meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he dined with Huxley at the short-lived Thorough Club and the Red Lions.Footnote ¹⁸ Hale explores the connections through marriage and friendship that helped Kingsley to move in these circles.

Lightman's work has already given some indication of how important Kingsley's popular science writing may have been, but Hale also explores another medium that has been more keenly appreciated in recent years thanks to the work of historians such as James Secord and Samuel Alberti: conversation.Footnote ¹⁹ Though evidence in this regard is inherently fragmentary, Hale does make a suggestive case. Kingsley was a regular guest at important country houses such as Ampthill Park, Wimpole Hall and The Grange. Hale shows that these gatherings were ‘not all shooting and fishing, but also frequently included discussion of science’.Footnote ²⁰ Kingsley, we learn, wrote to both Darwin and Huxley to tell them of his efforts as their ally, boasting to Darwin in 1867 that ‘even the Swells of the World are beginning to believe in you … I have found actually a Darwinian Marchioness!!!!!’.Footnote ²¹ Writing to Darwin, Huxley praised Kingsley as ‘an excellent Darwinian’.Footnote ²² After Kingsley's death, Charles Bunbury for one reflected, ‘I hardly think I have ever known a man whose conversation was so charming – so rich in matter, so various, so easy and unassuming, so instructive, yet so free from dogmatism and from any preaching or lecturing tone.’Footnote ²³ Hale marshals tantalising incidents like these to argue persuasively that Kingsley was a compelling advocate for Darwinism in country house circles, especially since his strong reputation for religious faith made it hard to impute heterodoxy to any opinions that he was willing to entertain.

Given that Hale cites Bunbury's testimony to how affecting Kingsley's scientific sermons could be, it is a pity that, like Lightman, he does not make use of them. While these sermons were obviously an important medium for popularising scientific ideas, they would support Hale's contention that Kingsley ultimately came to see science and religion as ‘two separate, although complementary, enterprises’.Footnote ²⁴ As Kingsley explained in the prefect to Westminster sermons, published in the year before his death:

Whether Kingsley was developing, or merely reiterating, the conventional natural theology of Paley and Butler, his sense of the consilience between religion and science was clearly very strong indeed.

Now that Hale and Lightman have established Kingsley's importance as a populariser, his engagement with Darwin has acquired new salience. Here, too, Hale has made a significant contribution to the sort of intellectual portrait that is clearly required. He identifies Kingsley as a striking example of an Anglican clergyman ‘who embraced a simian ancestry for mankind, and even a capricious and contingent evolutionary process, as quite compatible with a Christian world view’.Footnote ²⁶ As Kingsley put it, the alternative to a ‘master-magician’ God was not ‘the absolute empire of accident’ but rather ‘a living, immanent, ever-working God’, operating through immutable natural laws.Footnote ²⁷ Science, as the study of these laws, indicated how mankind might progressively improve itself in accordance with God's intentions. This was, Hale shows, the moral of Kingsley's most enduringly popular work, The water-babies, and the analysis of that book is taken much further here than in the work of previous commentators such as Gillian Beer.Footnote ²⁸ Hale is right to take The water-babies seriously, for Kingsley himself insisted to F. D. Maurice that ‘the physical science in the book is not nonsense, but accurate, earnest, as far as I dare yet speak’; a parable ‘wrapped up in seeming Tom-fooleries’.Footnote ²⁹

Degeneration is a theme of Water-babies, and Hale rightly emphasises how significant the idea was to Kingsley's conception of evolution. Kingsley's emphasis on this point accounts for his surprisingly hostile response to Darwin's Descent of man. In his presidential address to the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, Kingsley rued that Darwin had ‘entangled … his recent speculations on The descent of man … with a metaphysic which only cramps the free play of his noble intellect’.Footnote ³⁰ Darwin interpreted the condition of primitive peoples as a step on the path of progress; for Kingsley, their condition was a fallen state, precipitated by moral failings. Dissensions like these remind us of some of the simplifications inherent in characterising figures like Kingsley as mere ‘popularisers’ of science. They also raise questions about what we might call the nature of allegiance in nineteenth-century science: for Kingsley to be a ‘Darwinian’ meant something rather different from what it might mean today, and historians need to be especially alive to nuances of this kind.

Jonathan Conlin is another historian who has recently confronted Kingsley's complex and deeply religious engagement with natural science. ‘Kingsley’, Conlin writes, ‘sought to construct a Natural Theology of the Victorian age, one in which natural and national history merged completely.’Footnote ³¹ In this account of Kingsley's thought, evolution is no mere ‘metaphor of change’: instead, Conlin argues, ‘analogies between evolutionary science and national history collapse into identity’.Footnote ³² Punning on the title of the late John Burrow's study of Victorian historiography, Conlin proposes that Kingsley's vision of history constitutes an ‘illiberal descent’ that ‘cast a longer shadow than we might care to admit’.Footnote ³³

Though dismissed by Geoffrey Elton as ‘the last of the absurdities’ to occupy the Regius Chair in Modern History at Cambridge,Footnote ³⁴ as the author of best-selling historical novels and the private tutor to the prince of Wales, Kingsley certainly merits more attention for his interest in history. But whether he really did write ‘national history’ as a species of natural history is open to question. Kingsley certainly did write about natural and human history in similar ways, but this was ultimately because he regarded them as the story of ‘God educating man’.Footnote ³⁵ In fact, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge he explicitly repudiated any attempt to ‘merge’ natural and national history, since

That was in 1860; Kingsley had endorsed Darwin's Origin in 1859.

Nor is it necessary to identify evolutionary biology as the source of the evolutionary concepts in Kingsley's historiography. When Kingsley identifies an analogy between the youth, maturity and senescence of individuals and equivalent stages in the history of nations, Conlin seeks to attribute this to the popular embryological concept of ‘recapitulation’, which interpreted the development of an embryo as a recapitulation of the evolution of the species. Yet the most obvious debt is to the historiography of Thomas Arnold, and via Arnold to Niebuhr. Arnold followed Niebuhr in thinking that all nations went ‘through certain changes in a certain order’,Footnote ³⁷ and that historical comparisons between nations were only valid if both nations were in comparable stages of development,Footnote ³⁸ making an analogy between the life of a nation and the life of an individual. This notion of national life is similarly prominent in the work of many other so-called Liberal Anglican historians, such as Milman, Thirlwall, Hare and A. P. Stanley,Footnote ³⁹ and it is also a concept central to the theology of F. D. Maurice, whom Kingsley acknowledged as his ‘master’.

Kingsley's immersion in sources such as these is most obvious in his lecture ‘The forest children’, where the Goth is cast as a ‘great, simple, honest baby’, and the theory that ‘races, like individuals, have their childhood, their manhood, their old age, and natural death’ is explicit.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘I wish to impress strongly on your minds’, he declares, ‘this childishness of our forefathers. For good or for evil they were great boys; very noble boys; very often very naughty boys.’Footnote ⁴¹ Arnold's conception of the childhood stage was very similar. He once claimed that the boys of Rugby could not be proper Christians until they ceased to be boys, suspecting that ‘a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated among them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the human race’.Footnote ⁴² Boys will be boys; Goths will be Goths. This conception of development finds wide application in Kingsley's hands, and developmental analogies of this kind antedate Kingsley's Cambridge lectures: the Goths are depicted in Hypatia, just as they are thirteen years later in The Roman and the Teuton, ‘laughing and shoving each other about with the fun and childish wonder of a party of schoolboys’.Footnote ⁴³ So it seems implausible to interpret this conception of development, as Conlin does, as an attempt on Kingsley's part to elaborate a ‘vision of a scientific history’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Conlin's more general assumption that Kingsley should be situated within, if not the Darwinian revolution, then the so-called non-Darwinian revolution, is also fragile, for Kingsley's thought had already taken an evolutionary turn well before 1859. Under his pseudonym ‘Parson Lot’, Kingsley elaborated a model of evolution by selection, directed by God, in his ‘Bible Politics’ column on the front page of the Christian Socialist in 1851. Comparing the Canaanites massacred in the Old Testament to the Moro pirates of Sarawak recently subdued by James Brooke, Kingsley maintained that God achieves ‘the great work of increasing and civilizing, and raising the human race’ by ‘taking away those who might be harmful, or at least useless, and leaving room for others, who are …  more fitted to carry on the great work’.Footnote ⁴⁵ When, nine years later, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, Kingsley declares that all history was the story of ‘God educating man’ and that ‘the seeming waste, of human thought, of human agony, of human power, [the] inscrutable prodigality of nature … may be only necessary elements of the complex education of our race’,Footnote ⁴⁶ we have not come very far from the conception of Providential evolution articulated in the Christian Socialist nine years earlier, and it is unclear that Darwin, or even the non-Darwinian revolution, has contributed anything new to Kingsley's interpretation of history.

There are also problems with Conlin's reading of Kingsley's racial thought. For one, while Conlin situates Kingsley within ‘a shift from “monogenist” optimism’ to ‘a “polygenist” pessimism’ in Victorian ideas, Kingsley in fact explicitly repudiates polygenism – the notion that different races are the product of different lineages, and that mankind does not share a common ancestor – in a lecture on ‘The natural theology of the future’, delivered just four years before his death in 1875. ‘As for the negro’, Kingsley declares, ‘I not only believe him to be of the same race as myself, but that – if Mr. Darwin's theories are true – science has proved that he must be [a man and a brother]’, and he goes on to emphasise that we ‘all had one common ancestor’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Since Conlin focuses almost exclusively on the biological sources for Kingsley's ideas of race, he also tends to neglect the religious bases of nineteenth-century racial thought, so masterfully analysed by Colin Kidd. Kingsley, indeed, saw Darwin as merely confirming the narrative of the Old Testament:

This passage alerts us not only to the consilience that Kingsley perceived between evolutionary theory and the Christian religion, but also to some of the ambiguities in his racial thought. After all, in the Old Testament narrative almost all the actors ultimately derive from what the Victorians would have called the Semitic race: and in Kingsley's hands the language of race is a malleable idiom, encompassing a range of entities such as ‘the human race’,Footnote ⁴⁹ the ‘royal race’,Footnote ⁵⁰ the ‘English race’,Footnote ⁵¹ the Fenland ‘race’,Footnote ⁵² and the ‘lowland race’.Footnote ⁵³ Sometimes several different usages appear in a single chapter or lecture. So it seems a little over-drawn for Conlin to argue that, for Kingsley, ‘ “race” was not just another way of saying “nation” or “culture”; if anything, it was the sworn enemy of it’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this conception, ‘physiological and biological factors’ determine the forms of ‘political systems, laws and institutions’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Conlin's citation for this claim directs us to the work of Herbert Spencer, but it would be difficult to find Kingsley articulating this idea. Another slip occurs as Conlin reaches his peroration. ‘Race’, he tells us,

But what did Goldwin Smith mean? This passage is not, in fact, a celebration of racial historiography but a critique of its impoverishment. A page later Goldwin Smith explained what he meant. While he conceded that race ‘is a most important feature in history’, he argued that

So Conlin has inadvertently invoked Goldwin Smith as an exponent of a conception of history that he was, in fact, repudiating. In short, while Conlin's piece has done something to demonstrate the need for a serious appraisal of Kingsley's historiography, there remains much work to be done.