SOURCE: Henry Kingsley and Colonial Fiction, Oxford University Press, 1971, 48p.

[In the following excerpt, Barnes presents an introductory overview of Kingsley's life and fiction, followed by a largely thematic examination of his major Australian novels, particularly Geoffry Hamlyn.]

When Henry James wrote in 1865 that ‘Mr Henry Kingsley may be fairly described as a reduced copy of his brother’,¹ few, if any, of his American and English readers are likely to have disagreed with him. Charles Kingsley was widely known as a clergyman and a man of letters when Henry's first novel, Geoffry Hamlyn, was published in 1859. Inevitably, comparisons were made between the work of the brothers. ‘Fresh from the broad generous views and true representations of human life in the works of Charles Kingsley’, wrote the reviewer of Geoffry Hamlyn in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘we are chilled with the narrow scope and selfish consummation designed by one who bears that distinguished name’.² That was an extreme and untypical reaction. More usual was the stress on ‘the famous muscular system of morality’ (as James called it) to be found in the writing of both Kingsleys. Although there have been readers who have preferred Henry's novels, finding them more sympathetic and more entertaining, and others who have protested that Henry is not indebted to his brother to any great extent, the common estimate of Henry is that expressed by James.

The literary reputations of both Kingsleys have declined steadily since their lifetime, but Charles, however reduced his claims to literary recognition may seem now, is still a writer of considerable interest because of his involvement in the intellectual life of his time. Only in Australia does Henry now attract much attention as a writer, and only in Australia does he now have a reputation independent of his brother. To Australians he is ‘the author of Geoffry Hamlyn’, a novel which probably influenced the writing of Australian fiction more than any other single work of fiction about Australia during the nineteenth century. ‘The best Australian novel that has been, and probably will be written’,³ was Marcus Clarke's judgment in 1869. Twenty-five years after its appearance, Rolf Boldrewood (T. A. Browne) was referring to it is ‘that immortal work, the best Australian novel, and for long the only one’.⁴ By the end of the century it was spoken of as a major Australian novel, along with Clarke's His Natural Life (1874) and Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms (1888). Although it is regarded much less highly today, it remains interesting because of its historical position. Geoffry Hamlyn initiated the line of the colonial romance which runs through Boldrewood, Mrs Campbell Praed, and a host of lesser writers, and which was the staple of Australian fiction for more than half a century. Henry Kingsley, then, has been of significance in the course of Australian writing, and for this reason he finds a place in a series devoted to Australian writers.

Australian commentators have generally concentrated on Kingsley's attitude to local life and local values, and have largely ignored both the circumstances of his life outside Australia and his fiction which does not deal with Australia. To see him merely as the typical English gentleman writing about the colonies is just as inadequate a view as to see him merely as the younger brother of an eminent Victorian. In this brief study I have aimed at setting down the major preoccupations of his life and his writing more fully than has been done before, in the hope of illuminating the qualities of Geoffry Hamlyn; and at the same time I have aimed at placing that novel in relation to colonial fiction of the time, so that the nature of its appeal to Australian readers may be better appreciated. Geoffry Hamlyn is not of sufficient literary merit to repay extended close critical study, but it should be considered in the context of Kingsley's life and work. Its prominence in the history of Australian fiction is partly a matter of timing: it appeared when little had been written in novel form about the Australian colonies, and it was superior to what had been written. The reasons why Geoffry Hamlyn alone of Kingsley's novels was so successful and had such continuing popularity in the colonies will, I hope, emerge during the course of this study.

Henry Kingsley, the seventh and youngest child of an Anglican clergyman, was born at Barnack, Northamptonshire, on 2 January 1830. Soon after his birth the family moved to Devon where the Reverend Mr Kingsley became curate and then rector of Clovelly. The rectory, with its large garden, stood on the cliffs above the picturesque fishing village; across a lane was the Norman church in which Mr Kingsley preached, and the big house, Clovelly Court, dating back to Tudor times, of which Charles was to write in Westward Ho!.

Stories about the Elizabethan past must have been an important part of the imaginative life of the Kingsley boys; and while they lived at Clovelly there were storms and shipwrecks which they were never to forget. All the Kingsleys felt a lifelong attachment to this part of the country. Devon is the setting for the English scenes in Geoffry Hamlyn, and again in Ravenshoe.

In 1836 Lord Cadogan, to whom the Kingsleys were related, gave the living of St Luke's, Chelsea, to Mr Kingsley, who held it until his death in 1860. The Chelsea rectory by the Thames was Henry's home until he left for Australia at the age of twenty-three. Although only two miles from Piccadilly, Chelsea at this time still maintained its village character. In The Hillyars and the Burtons Henry writes nostalgically of the Chelsea he knew in his childhood. He was especially fascinated by the Elizabethan mansion, Essex House, which was pulled down when he was twelve, and by the old church, with its monuments; and both buildings are described in his novel.

The atmosphere in the Kingsley home was pious, but, as far as one can gather, Mr Kingsley was not a man of pronounced spirituality. He had entered the Church less from a sense of vocation than from a need to find a gentlemanly profession at the age of thirty. He came from an old family, one section of which believed itself to be descended from Robin Hood, and he had grown to manhood thinking that his future was assured. After being educated at Harrow and sampling Oxford for two months, he settled down on the family estate in Hampshire. A few years later he married the daughter of a West Indian plantation owner and judge, a man of travel and scientific interests, whom Henry Kingsley once claimed to have been friendly with Governor Phillip. Mr Kingsley had been only five when his father died, and the family affairs had been badly managed during his minority. Unfortunately, he was not the sort of man who could see ways of restoring the family fortunes: after his death Charles wrote that he ‘was said to possess every talent except that of using his talents’.⁵ When it became evident that he could not continue to enjoy the life of a country gentleman, he began to consider a profession. He chose the Church, hoping that he would eventually secure a comfortable living from among the landowners of his acquaintance. Giving up his estate, he studied at Cambridge; and at the age of thirty-five he had his first curacy. He was not in any way notable as a clergyman; his shrewd, practical wife looked after much of the administrative work and parish visiting for him, and one of Charles's biographers inclines to the view that ‘it was only her sex which kept her from being a good parish priest herself’.⁶

This family background naturally influenced the outlook of the Kingsley brothers very strongly. Of the four sons who survived childhood, only Charles entered the Church, and his decision, while at Cambridge, seems to have been due more to the influence of his wife-to-be than to the example of his father. Gerald, the second son, became an officer in the Navy, and died at sea of fever in 1844, when Henry was fourteen. George trained as a doctor, but spent much of his life in travel and hunting abroad, foreign travel being a treatment he prescribed for a number of his rich patients. He and his companion, the Earl of Pembroke, were the authors of a travel book, South Sea Bubbles by ‘the Earl and the Doctor’; and his daughter, Mary, became celebrated for her travels in West Africa in the last decade of the century. Henry, the youngest and physically the least impressive of the sons, was close to his mother, but his tastes seem to have been those of his father: field sports, natural history, sketching and painting. In the rectory library he and his brothers read books dealing with the West Indies which had been collected by his mother's ancestors, treatises of natural history, journals of famous voyagers, and standard works of theology. Of special interest were the manuscript journals of an eighteenth century ancestor, General William Kingsley, whose portrait by Reynolds was a family heirloom. It is not surprising that the Kingsley brothers were enthusiastic naturalists and travellers—and writers. The reminders of the family past that surrounded them as children must have stimulated their interest in history and that admiration for the ideal of the gentleman which is so strongly felt in the writing of both Charles and Henry.

Henry, ‘a sensitive, shy lad, delicate in health’,⁷ was sent at the age of fourteen as a day-boy to King's College School in the Strand, to which his brothers had gone, and afterwards he entered King's College, which then prepared students for Oxford or Cambridge and ‘finished’ the education of those going directly into careers. It has been said that his parents hoped that he would follow Charles and become a clergyman, but there is no way of confirming this. He is said to have ‘got into bad courses while at King's College’,⁸ but we do not know what these ‘bad courses’ were. Although he entered the General Literature and Science Department of King's College in 1847, there is no record of his having been registered there as a student in the succeeding years. In 1849 he was in Devon, studying with two other young men under Charles's former Cambridge tutor.⁹ On 6 March 1850 he matriculated to Worcester College, Oxford.

Having finally arrived at Oxford, Henry neglected his studies, but took rowing seriously. His sporting achievements, however, were rather less than has been claimed. His name appears only once in Oxford rowing records: in 1852 he was stroke of the Worcester Fours boat, which was defeated in its heat, the race having to be rowed three times because Worcester went to the wrong side of the post the first time and fouled the second.¹⁰ (Henry alludes to the episode in Ravenshoe, but alters the name of his college!) He did not win the Diamond Sculls, nor did he ever row for Oxford against Cambridge. His friend, John Cordy Jeaffreson, remembered his ‘weedy frame’ when he arrived in Oxford, and how he determined to succeed as an oarsman. According to Jeaffreson, ‘by strenuous exercise and training’ he became ‘one of the best scullers on the river’, and ‘so changed the habit of his body that he had the appearance as well as the physical capability of an athlete’.¹¹ His nephew remembered him as having a perfect build for a light-weight oarsman—‘heavy shoulders, immense depth of chest, and a long reach for his height’.¹² Although he became more robust during these years at Oxford, Henry could not add cubits to his stature or alter his features. He was a foot shorter than his brother Charles, and, as Jeaffreson recalls, he was self-conscious about his appearance:

Resembling Charles Kingsley (who was far from well-looking) in the straight mouth, and the deep line, descending on either side of the face from the unshapely nose to the corner of the graceless lips, which distinguished the clergyman's visage, Harry Kingsley was far plainer than his brother. That he was painfully sensitive of his extreme plainness appeared from the frequency with which he called attention to it.¹³

In the cloistered all-male society of Oxford colleges at this time, the looks of an undergraduate were, apparently, a topic for discussion. When Henry Kingsley asked Jeaffreson whether he thought him the ugliest man in Oxford, he had to admit that he did. Another Oxford man noted that Kingsley ‘ranked as one of the three ugliest men in Oxford’,¹⁴ and that he was one of a group who dressed carelessly, and were known as ‘the intellectual bargees’. Included in the group was Martin Irving, son of the preacher, Edward Irving, and afterwards Professor of Classics at Melbourne University, when Kingsley was gold-digging in Victoria.

With a friend of his schooldays who was also at Oxford—Edwin Arnold, now remembered as the author of The Light of Asia—Kingsley was involved in starting the Fez Club, a rather adolescent group of about fifty undergraduates, ‘who declared themselves haters of womankind, and vowed to pass their days in celibatic freedom’. The members wore decorated fez caps for meetings, used secret signs, and attracted disapproving public attention with their elaborate breakfasts in an Oxford hotel, followed by ‘smoking oriental tobaccos from eastern pipes’. The club did not last long, partly because it aroused so much gossip and hostility. This may have been merely ‘a droll and innocent affair’, as Jeaffreson called it, but even if it was, it points to Henry's emotional immaturity, and his temperamental inclination for male company. At the same age Charles was wrestling with religious doubt and falling in love with his future wife. Henry was remembered at Oxford—if at all—as a sporting man and a founder of the Fez Club.

Like his father, Henry was not very successful at managing his finances, and at Oxford he got seriously into debt. Rescue came in the form of a bequest from the widow of a cousin of Mr Kingsley's, who died early in 1853. Henry and his brothers each received £500, and so he was able to clear all his debts. He left Oxford without taking a degree, presumably because he had done too little work to make it worth his while attempting the examinations. Jeaffreson, who backed a bill of £80 for him, gives a glimpse of his distress:

The poor boy (yes, boy—though he was something older than myself) had for weeks and months been worried by a few contemptibly small creditors, whose importunities caused him so much mental distress, that he was incapable of preparing himself for ‘smalls’.¹⁵

With what was left of his inheritance he was able to purchase a passage to Australia, and in September 1853 he was on his way in the Gauntlet with an Oxford friend, Henry Venables, who was to settle in Victoria and later become the first Secretary of the Education Department.¹⁶

‘Poor dr. Henry started with good prospects & capital introductions from Captⁿ Sturt—he and Captⁿ Sturt's nephew went together’, wrote his sister-in-law, Fanny Kingsley, in a letter.¹⁷ He had wasted his time in Oxford, and now he had to make a fresh start. In the colonies he would have great opportunities, and he would be responsible for himself, with no family near at hand to step in and save him from possible disaster. Gold had been discovered in Australia in 1851, and all sorts of people had been attracted to the colonies as a result. The year before Henry emigrated, William Howitt, then aged sixty, had gone to the colonies in the hope of finding enough gold to secure his old age and to provide for the future of his two sons who went with him. Another literary man, R. H. Horne, sailed on the same ship, and he also had a set of miner's tools in his luggage. It is not clear whether Kingsley intended from the first to go looking for gold. Most probably, his knowledge of the colonies was slight and his plans were vague.

The chronological outline of Kingsley's stay in Australia is incomplete, and may never be established satisfactorily. At present the only facts which can be stated with certainty are that in 1854 he was on the sheep and cattle station of Langi-Willi in the neighbourhood of Skipton in Victoria, probably working as an overseer,¹⁸ and in 1857 he was on the Caledonia goldfields, twenty-odd miles north-east of Melbourne.¹⁹ From his writing it is clear that he knew the western and central areas of Victoria and the Monaro region of New South Wales, but just how extensively he had travelled in New South Wales is hard to determine. He recalled in after years having been in the Ararat gold rush, which took place in 1857, and he writes as if he had been in a rush to the Omeo goldfields.²⁰ According to family tradition he was in the mounted police, but gave up the appointment in disgust after having been compelled by duty to attend an execution.²¹ This is probable, but it has never been documented.

Whatever he did immediately after his arrival in Melbourne on 3 December 1853, we know that by June 1854 ‘a young man called Kingsley, who is fresh from college’²² was at Langi-Willi station. Gold was discovered within fifteen miles of Langi-Willi in September 1854, and a rush developed the following year. It may be that Kingsley first succumbed to gold-fever about this time. His experiences as a gold-digger were disheartening. His friend Henry J. Campbell, who joined him in 1857, spoke of their meeting nothing but disappointment; and it was in the following year that Kingsley finally gave up digging.

The pleasantest part of his colonial life was probably that spent on Langi-Willi, where tradition has it that he wrote all or part of Geoffry Hamlyn. Langi-Willi may be the comfortable homestead he describes in “Eyre's March”²³ as ‘a real old 100,000 acre, two thousand a year, Australian country house’, in which he had to stay for an indefinite time. Such surroundings, recalling the pattern of English country house life, could have stirred him to set about writing: Geoffry Hamlyn could have grown out of an attempt to write fiction as early as 1854, when we know for certain that he was at Langi-Willi. It was not until 1858, however, when he returned to England, that he wrote Geoffry Hamlyn as we now have it. Charles's publisher, Alexander Macmillan, visited Eversley Rectory in the autumn of 1858, and while there read about 100 pages of the novel, which Henry was then writing. Henry promised to go and see him when the story was near completion.²⁴

We can only guess at the reasons for the timing of his return. According to family tradition, he returned unheralded, and walked up and down outside the Chelsea Rectory for more than an hour, afraid to knock lest he should hear that his parents were dead. When he did knock at the familiar door, he learned that his parents were now living near Charles at Eversley, his father, aged seventy-six, having retired from active ministry. A desire to see his parents again must have been one of the motives in his deciding to return. It is unlikely that he ever lost touch completely with his family, as has been said, although there must have been long periods when they had no news of him.

Charles's son, Maurice Kingsley, believed that his father suggested to Henry the idea of writing a novel about Australian life.²⁵ Whether or not this was the case, Charles, an experienced novelist with such popular successes as Westward Ho! and Two Years Ago behind him, was an obvious source of advice. Charles's influence was probably responsible for the passages of preaching that appear in Geoffry Hamlyn, especially in the early section of the novel dealing with Devonshire village life, and for the comparatively well-disciplined plot development. The success of this first novel with the public was helped by its being known that the author was the brother of Charles Kingsley. Geoffry Hamlyn was published in England and America by the middle of 1859. The English edition of 1,500 copies was exhausted within a year, and was followed by a second edition of 6,000 copies.²⁶

This was the first real success that Henry Kingsley had known, and stimulated by it he settled down to writing a second novel. After his father's death in 1860 he continued to live at Eversley with his mother—about a mile away from Charles—gardening, fishing, and occasionally shooting (he was not a good shot or a good rider) for part of the day, and spending most of the night writing, with a jug of rum and water to sustain him. After the hardship and disappointment of his colonial years, his life was quiet and secure. The prodigal son was back in the fold, with his mother and brother to keep an eye on him.

In his second novel, Ravenshoe, Kingsley wrote of a hero much more like himself than Sam Buckley, the hero of Geoffry Hamlyn, had been, and drew upon memories of his youth before he went to Australia. With this novel he was, consciously or unconsciously, asking to be judged on the same terms as other English novelists: he was not aiming to make a reputation by exploiting interest in the colonies. Ravenshoe, over which he took much care, was serialized in Macmillan's Magazine from January 1861 to July 1862, and then published in book form. It was well received, and soon he was at work on another novel, declining the offer of the Daily Telegraph to be its war correspondent in America. Kingsley was now established as a writer of standing, and he could cheerfully dismiss a request from another publisher for a tale ‘with plenty of incident and a good moral’, telling his friend and publisher, Macmillan, ‘I neither can nor will write such miserable bread and butter stuff as I suspect they want’.²⁷ He cannot have been altogether confident of his ability to make a career as a novelist, however, as by the end of 1862 he had decided to prepare for the Bar. He was admitted to the Inns of Court as a student of the Inner Temple on 5 December 1862, but he was never called to the Bar,²⁸ and his studies were probably not taken very far.

Kingsley's third novel, Austin Elliot (1863), a story of high-life intrigues with a political background, did not fulfil the promise that he had appeared to show in the preceding novels. He must have felt the inferiority of this attempt to move away from what was most familiar to him, as in his next novel he turned to his Chelsea childhood and Australian experiences for material. The Hillyars and the Burtons was serialized in Macmillan's Magazine from November 1863 to April 1865 and then published in book form.

Kingsley was in the midst of writing this novel when he married a relative, Sarah Haselwood, who was a governess in the family of the new rector at Chelsea. His marriage on 19 July 1864, when he was thirty-four and his bride twenty-two, is represented by his biographer, S. M. Ellis, as ‘unwise’, because the new couple lacked money. Considering his past, Kingsley would have been prudent if he had looked around for a wife with money! Rather more to the point is the fact that in later years Charles blamed Henry's wife and her mother for Henry's financial troubles, describing them as ‘the two women who have both him and his earnings in their power’.²⁹ Ellis does not expand on his observation that Henry ‘was dominated by the over-bearing will of his wife’.³⁰

At first Kingsley was happy in his marriage. He and his wife settled in a house of their own in pleasant surroundings at Wargrave on the banks of the Thames in Berkshire. A year after the marriage, however, he was writing to Macmillan that ‘the fearful expense of pulling a sick wife about the country, literally to save her life, and setting up a new house, have superinduced an alarming financial crisis, and left me without any money at all’.³¹ Sarah Kingsley had several miscarriages during these years and the marriage was childless. Anxieties over his wife's health and their increasing indebtedness did not make writing any easier. He struggled on until 1869, bringing out a novel each year, contributing occasional reviews and articles to magazines, and finally completing his long-planned Tales of Old Travel Re-Narrated.

The novels of these years are factitious works, hard to read with any attention now. Kingsley wrote under difficulties, but it would be misleading to attribute defects of his fiction to external circumstances alone. ‘I am going to try and write a story which will please the Philistines’, he told Macmillan, while writing Leighton Court (1866); ‘if ever the day comes when I can do as I like, they shall catch it’.³² The harder he tried to please the Philistines, the less he succeeded: but popular taste was not really to blame for his failure as a novelist. Kingsley was not especially inhibited by what he conceived to be the demands of his readers. Rather, he was confused and uncertain about his own intentions and his own values. While at work on Silcote of Silcotes (which he hoped would be ‘interesting and exciting’, and would ‘make everyone the better for having read it’) Kingsley wrote to Macmillan that he had no idea what success the novel would have:

I have been carefully studying Miss Braddon's books abroad, and I find every rule of art violated in them. I could do the thing by the yard I honestly believe, but you are not the man I take you for if you published it for me. George Eliot is the model, but we must leave her alone in her glory.³³

In fact, he was as little capable of producing an efficient conventional novel as of learning from the example of George Eliot. His novels of this period, with their elaborate and intricate plots, ‘noble’ characters, profusion of incident, sudden shifts of direction and style, show a lack of coherence and inner control. The weaknesses of the more successful early novels—of Geoffry Hamlyn and Ravenshoe—are here magnified. There are passages of pleasant nature description, which Kingsley's admirers single out for praise, but these now read like exercises in a familiar convention, and lack the particularity and freshness of the earlier work. By the time he wrote Stretton (1869), Kingsley was close to re-hashing earlier plots and characters, and one gets the impression that in this novel he was near exhaustion as a writer.

During 1869 there was a crisis in Kingsley's affairs: after being laid up with a broken leg, and seeing his finances get into a worse state than ever, he abandoned his attempt to live as an independent writer and became editor of the Daily Review, the newspaper of the Free Church in Edinburgh. Kingsley was unfitted for the post, and although he was hired for three years the appointment ended in 1871. From Kingsley's point of view, the most rewarding period of his editorship was when he became war correspondent for his own newspaper and reported on the Franco-Prussian War. Out of these eight weeks at the scene of the fighting came the best journalism he produced, and later a novel, Valentin: A French Boy's Story of Sedan (1872). Back from Edinburgh Kingsley settled in London, once more attempting to make a living by writing fiction. He had great hopes of gaining fresh popularity with Oakshott Castle (1873), the last writing which his old publisher, Macmillan, accepted from him. A chaotic work, it was criticized for its improbabilities. Defending himself against such complaints, Kingsley wrote to G. L. Craig:

Oakshott is exactly what I should be if I had got the money. In my late miserable poverty I amused myself by thinking what I should be if I was rich. The result was Oakshott, a greater fool even than myself. Surely that is legitimate fiction.³⁴

This novel about a philanthropic, fey nobleman with great wealth is so uncontrolled and so absurd at times that it is like a burlesque. Kingsley's next novel, Reginald Hetherege (1874), shows some recovery and represents the best that he was capable of in these distressing post-Edinburgh years.

Towards the end of 1874 the Kingsleys moved from London to the Sussex village of Cuckfield. In declining health he struggled on writing, two books actually appearing in the year of his death, and a further volume the following year. He died from cancer of the tongue on 24 May 1876, in his forty-seventh year.

Henry Kingsley's final years had been most miserable. He endured patiently the increasing pain of his physical condition and the humiliation of his poverty. Appealing to Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes) for a loan in 1871, he wrote that Macmillan would no longer advance him money on unwritten books, and that he could not ask his brother Charles for help.³⁵ He had sold the copyright of his existing work in 1867 to Macmillan, from whom he borrowed money two years later.³⁶ By 1871 Charles was of the opinion that ‘emigration to Australia seems the only chance’, since Henry and his wife were only ‘a disgrace’ in England.³⁷ Henry received three grants from the Royal Literary Fund, and his wife is reported to have made continual applications for support to various people and institutions, giving great offence to Charles and his family. The desperate need for money explains the dogged industry of Henry's last years. At his death he left an estate of £450.

The social outlook of Henry Kingsley's fiction was derived from his family background. The Kingsleys were gentry, with good connections: pride in family (such as Sam Buckley shows) is an important element in all his novels, which tend to be family histories in one form or another. His heroes are gentlemen, perfect gentlemen at heart, whatever failings they may exhibit. It was Kingsley's belief in the superiority of gentlemen in the pioneering society of the colonies which irritated Furphy into remarking in Such is Life on ‘the three-penny braggadocio of caste which … makes the rosy-cheeked darling of the English rectory show the saddle-hardened specialists of the back-country how to ride a buck-jumper’, a remark which appears to be directed at Kingsley specifically. Furphy's protest at ‘that insult to common sense, that childish slap in the face of honest manhood, the “gentleman” of fiction, and of Australian fiction preeminently’, was prompted by the strength of a convention which Kingsley's writing helped to establish. For Kingsley, however, it was more than a literary convention that the hero of a novel should be a gentleman. The naive enthusiasm with which he writes about his gentleman heroes is an index of his commitment to such an ideal.

Sam Buckley, the hero of Geoffry Hamlyn, is not significantly tested by the circumstances of his life. Charles Ravenshoe, however, undergoes the ordeal of separation and alienation from all that he has hitherto cared for—a pattern of experience suggested by Kingsley's own life and worked over in several novels. In his despair, feeling that he had lost his identity, Ravenshoe tells us that he sometimes lost hold of ‘the only spar to which I could cling—the feeling that I was a gentleman’. And this ‘creed’ is vindicated when Ravenshoe's right to the title is finally established. Later in the same novel Kingsley himself remarks:

I am a very great admirer of the old feudal feeling, when it is not abused by either party. In parts of Australia, where it, or something near akin to it, is very strong indeed, I have seen it act on high and low most beneficially; giving to the one side a sense of responsibility, and to the other a feeling of trust and reliance.

(Chapter XLII)

Such comments (and indeed the whole portrayal of pastoral life that is given in Geoffry Hamlyn) probably owe as much to Kingsley's own emotional life as to his observations of men and manners. Kingsley's writing develops no interpretation of the characteristics of Victorian society, such as emerges from the novels of Dickens. His sympathy for the poor leads to scenes of pathos, but his interest in the working of contemporary society does not go beyond that. His favourite subject was the life of the landed family in the historic country house, surrounded by a respectful tenantry. In his fiction Kingsley could make his characters live in the sort of circumstances which he imagined the Kingsley forbears to have lived in. At the end of his first novel he brought his characters back to ‘that charming English country-life, the like of which, I take it, no other country can show’.

Anyone at all familiar with the circumstances of Henry Kingsley's life will see immediately that his own life was far from the life which he admired and tried to describe in his novels. He was physically unlike his heroes; he was a failure as an emigrant; he went to war for a few weeks, but only as a newspaper correspondent and not as an officer; he was not distinguished in sport or studies or in public life. Overshadowed by his two brothers, he spent much of his adult life as a hack writer. It is not surprising that the element of wish-fulfilment in his writing is pronounced, not least in Geoffry Hamlyn.

Kingsley's religious outlook was, as might be expected, more conventional than individual. Although he had the family dislike of Roman Catholicism, he did not feel it with any great force, and he writes of priests more tolerantly than we would expect, even finding good words for the villainous Father Mackworth of Ravenshoe. Nothing in his writing suggests that he had ever thought deeply about religious issues. In Geoffry Hamlyn, more than elsewhere, he was influenced by Charles's ideal of what was called ‘Muscular Christianity’. (Chapter XII originally bore the heading: ‘In Which A Very Muscular Christian Indeed, Comes on the Stage’.) Charles Kingsley disliked the phrase which was popularly applied to his emphasis on ‘a healthful and manful Christianity; one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine’.³⁸ A highly sexed man, Charles had a horror of the ‘effeminate’ and was most hostile to the ideal of celibacy, which he thought unhealthy. In Henry's writing, apart from such figures as Frank Maberly in Geoffry Hamlyn, the Christianity of his heroes is purely nominal, part of the vague ‘nobility’ which they possess. In addition to what James called ‘the old Kingsleian air noble’, however, there is in Henry's presentation of his heroes an emotional quality which seems to point to a strain of homosexual feeling, whether or not he was aware of it.

In Geoffry Hamlyn the narrator's grief for his dead friend, Jim Stockbridge, is cast in sentimentally religious terms (‘Oh! dear old friend, could you not wait for me?’) and passed over fairly quickly. The friendship between Sam and the other young men of the same age is presented as pure and delightful camaraderie. From Ravenshoe onward, however, there are references in Kingsley's novels to ‘boy-lovers’, and to the morally valuable effect of such love. In Old Margaret it is described as ‘a love between men, a pure and beautiful love surpassing the love of man for woman’; and in “Jackson of Paul's” we are told that ‘there is no love except the love of a good woman which surpasses it in purity and in the incitement to noble deeds’. In the three novels which followed Geoffry Hamlyn the central characters form these boy-friendships: Charles Ravenshoe and Lord Welter (Ravenshoe); Austin Elliot and Lord Charles Barty (Austin Elliot); Erne Hillyar and Jim Burton (The Hillyars and the Burtons). In the third instance, this love bridges a great gap in social status, an idea which finds its most extreme expression in the allegorical tale, The Boy in Grey, where prince and peasant embrace.

Kingsley would hardly have introduced the theme of boy-friendships in such terms if he had not felt at least great sympathy with such passions of childhood. His stress on the value of such relationships makes one wonder if he felt the need to justify himself. One finds a comment like this coming from the approving narrator:

A curious fact these boy-friendships! A wise schoolmaster told me the other day that he should not know what to do without them, and that he had to utilize them.

(The Hillyars and the Burtons, Chapter XXII)

A recent commentator³⁹ has discussed Kingsley's story, “Jackson of Paul's”, in which Charles Jackson's love for Lord Edward Eyre leads to his loving Lord Edward's sister, pointing out certain similarities to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and noting the common source: student life in Oxford. From the scanty accounts of Kingsley's life at Oxford and afterwards one gets the impression that he was inhibited with women, and that his most intense friendships were with other young men. His marriage meant his leaving home at the age of thirty-four, and the woman he married appears to have been as strong-willed as the mother he left. Whether or not Henry Kingsley experienced homosexual passion in any meaningful sense is less significant than what his writing reveals about his feeling for male youth and beauty. He writes warmly and nostalgically of boy-lovers, and is apparently unconscious of possible sexual abnormality. Boy-friendships are at the centre of Kingsley's picture of boyhood and adolescence as a golden time—a picture that grew brighter as his adult life grew darker.

At the end of The Hillyars and the Burtons Kingsley summarizes the later development of Erne, remarking that ‘he saw that life was not as one would have it: that one must submit to the failure of one's boy-dreams, and not whine over them’. Kingsley himself found it difficult to give up his boy-dreams, and he regarded life as being a process of disillusionment and disappointment. Far from being a confident Muscular Christian himself, he shrank from life and feared its demands. Running through his novels is the notion that a man must ‘dree his weird’ (submit to his fate). ‘I must go forth and dree my weary weird alone’, says Charles Ravenshoe, after being told that he is not the heir to Ravenshoe. In Austin Elliot we read that ‘Austin went to prison in due time, and dreed his weird there …’. Erne Hillyar mistakenly believes that the ‘weird’ of the ancient house, Church Place, cannot extend to him.

The most extended use of this idea of fate comes in The Boy in Grey, which reflects the inner concerns of Kingsley more directly than any of his other works precisely because it is not an attempt to describe the real world. A mixture of fairytale and uncertain allegory, it draws upon Bunyan, Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley. The central action is the search of the Prince Philarete (lover of virtue) for the peasant, the Boy in Grey, whom he finally discovers in Australia. Kingsley introduces an odd Christian association when he describes the state of the Prince: ‘The weird of the Boy in Grey was on him, as it was, speaking with deep reverence, on some twelve men more than eighteen hundred years ago. The child wished to be alone, he knew not why, but he wanted utter solitude’. The Fairy Anangke (necessity) directs that the Prince will travel around the world to Australia. In the course of the journey he sails along the River of Happy Recollection, seeing Kingsley's favourite literary characters. Arriving in Australia, where the colonists are seen on the shore teaching their grandmothers to suck eggs, the Prince undergoes a test of spirit: he finds himself ‘standing high and dry on the awful desolate shore alone—with God’. He follows the footsteps of the Boy in Grey, till he finds him on the windy downs under the stars. Their meeting is described in excited prose, which has the air of private sexual fantasy about it.

The allegory is erratic and confused, as Kingsley veers from the whimsical to the portentous, from the nonsensical to the vaguely religious. Such unity as the work has comes from the idea of the search which the Prince is inwardly compelled to make for the other boy, who is, in a sense, his fate, and without whom he cannot live. He is whole and fulfilled when he embraces this other ‘self’ in the lonely wastes of Australia—a country which had a significant place in Kingsley's inner biography.

It was perhaps as a result of the disappointment of his Australian years that Kingsley came to think of life as ‘dreeing one's weird’. However, as he wrote no autobiography and no novel based directly on his Australian experiences, we shall probably never understand fully what those years meant to him. According to his wife, he never talked of his Australian experiences, and such recollections as he gives us casually in his writing do not tell us very much. A passing comment in Geoffry Hamlyn hints at an area of experience which he left unexplored in his stories of emigrants:

Only those who have done so know how much effort it takes to say, ‘I will go away to a land where none know me or care for me, and leave for ever all that I know and love’. And few know the feeling which comes upon all men after it is done—the feeling of isolation, almost of terror at having gone so far out of the bounds of ordinary life; the feeling of self-distrust and cowardice at being alone and friendless in the world, like a child in the dark.

(Chapter XVII)

The psychological drama of the emigrant is what we should look for today, but Kingsley and the writers of his generation offer disappointingly little. In Kingsley's case there was his temperamental aversion to writing about ‘disagreeable things’. ‘I would be myself in favour of all sunshine’, he remarks in Stretton (Chapter XXXVI), and his tendency to sentimentalize is obvious in his handling of the villains in his novels.

Kingsley's Australian experiences may have affected his health, and almost certainly affected his spirit. But that is not the impression we get from Geoffry Hamlyn, in which he imagined, with affection and delight, colonial life before the upheaval of the gold rushes. An unsuccessful gold-digger himself, Henry Kingsley wrote his first novel in the guise of Geoffry Hamlyn, the successful pastoralist.

The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, to give the novel its full title, is a history of three families—the Thorntons, the Buckleys, and the Brentwoods—narrated by the old bachelor, Geoffry Hamlyn, who is supposed to be nearing ‘sixty years of memory’ when he turns author. At the beginning of the novel we are asked to believe that the author is reading the history (from Chapter II onwards) aloud to the elder Buckleys and Brentwood at Baroona on a hot February afternoon in the year 1857. This convention is briefly remembered in the final chapter, but we are also told there that the narrative which we have read is a revised and enlarged version of what Hamlyn read aloud at Baroona. The novel ends with Hamlyn at the Buckley family seat of Clere in the year 1858 (the date is mentioned in the text several times). This rather awkward shift may represent a change of intention on Kingsley's part, or it may be a reflection of the circumstances in which the novel was actually written. Whatever the case, the use of an elderly narrator, who draws upon documents and the recollections of others, and whose interests and enthusiasms colour the writing, represents a deliberate effort on Kingsley's part to combine the immediacy and familiarity of the autobiographical manner with the scope of the omniscient novelist. The course of the narrative is ‘erratic and irregular’ (as Hamlyn admits), and our awareness of the narrator fades at times, but his presence at crucial points effectively sustains the illusion of a family chronicler.

Australian readers have not always kept in mind Hamlyn's remark: ‘I am writing a history of the people themselves, not of their property’ (Chapter XX). Geoffry Hamlyn, then, is not one of the ‘books of travel in disguise’ (Frederick Sinnett's apt description of some early novels about Australia), but a chronicle of family life, with some episodes

… which I have thought it worthwhile to introduce, as being more or less interesting, as bearing on the manners of a country but little known, out of which materials it is difficult to select those most proper to make my tale coherent. …

(Chapter XXII)

Descriptions of the new land and its emerging society are subordinated to the romance. In the introductory chapter our attention is drawn to the old horse Widderin, and we are promised the full story of what ‘caused Sam to take a certain famous ride upon him’. Sam's Ride is the heroic peak of the novel, the episode in which Kingsley most completely achieves his ideal of romance.

As originally published, Geoffry Hamlyn was divided into three volumes, of which the first (Chapters I to XVII) was set wholly in England. All the major characters, except the Brentwood family, are introduced in this first volume, which covers events leading to the emigration of what Dr Mulhaus calls ‘my English microcosm’. The central thread of the action is the Mary Thornton-George Hawker affair, an unremarkable and conventional plot, which Kingsley handles very smoothly. The plot unfolds against a background of village life in Devonshire, the small details of everyday life in Drumston and the descriptions of the surrounding landscape giving a charm and an air of naturalness to what could seem very hackneyed. The greater extent of the descriptions of Australian scenery in Geoffry Hamlyn has led readers to overlook the delight that is shown in the English countryside also, in such passages as the opening paragraphs of Chapter X, describing idyllic days of summer fishing. Kingsley's enjoyment of natural beauty, English and Australian, is constant throughout the novel.

The Drumston community which Kingsley sketches includes two exotic figures—the German Dr Mulhaus (really an aristocrat in exile) and the gipsy Madge, mother of George Hawker. Dr Mulhaus is prominent throughout the course of the narrative but Madge disappears from view at the end of the first volume and reappears only briefly at the end of the third. In the Drumston narrative Madge is at the centre of one of the most striking episodes, which contributes greatly to the romantic tone of the whole work. Turned out into the storm by old Hawker, she walks to the house of the Buckleys, who shelter her and promise to warn George that the police are looking for him: next morning as she leaves she blesses the house of the Buckleys. In creating Madge the Witch, as she is known, Kingsley was obviously inspired by Scott's Meg Merrilies, and her blessing on the Buckleys has a similar function in the narrative to Meg Merrilies's prophecy to the Laird of Ellangowan. Kingsley's indebtedness to Scott—and, in particular, to Guy Mannering, which he admired as exemplifying ‘romance in its highest, purest form’⁴⁰—is not confined to this one instance; nor is it just a matter of conscious or unconscious recollection of features of Scott's fiction. From Scott Kingsley acquired a notion of the picturesque and the heroic which governed his approach to colonial material in Geoffry Hamlyn. One can see other influences—Dickens and Thackeray throughout his writing—but in Geoffry Hamlyn Scott's influence seems to me to have been of a more fundamental nature, and to have guided the conception of the work.

In 1856 Frederick Sinnett shrewdly observed that ‘the natural and external circumstances of Australia partake much more of what we used to call romance than those of England’.⁴¹ Kingsley appears to have realized this, whether or not he had read Sinnett. In The Hillyars and the Burtons he reflects on bushranging, and remarks: ‘How quaint that old Australian life seems to one! High refinement in many cases, but the devil always at the door’ (Chapter LXII). The ‘old Australian life’ before the colonies were transformed by the gold rushes is what Kingsley creates in Geoffry Hamlyn, and in its essentials it is closer to the eighteenth century Scotland of Scott's fiction than it is to the nineteenth century England in which the first part of the novel is set. It is a way of life, already disappearing when Kingsley wrote, in which heroic action of the traditional kind, such as Sam's rescue of Alice, can be imagined without difficulty.

We first see Australia through the eyes of Hamlyn and his companion Stockbridge, as they sit on their horses watching the sun go down on a prospect of the Snowy region. The opening description of ‘A new heaven and a new earth!’ is one of Kingsley's best pieces of writing. The sense of a drama, suggested by this opening panoramic view of the country, is continued in the description of the Buckley party driving its mob of cattle in the valley below. To Hamlyn it appears as ‘the scene so venerable and ancient, so seldom seen in the Old World—the patriarchs moving into the desert with all their wealth, to find a new pasture-ground’. One cannot doubt that the ‘blessing of God’, invoked by the gipsy, is on the enterprise. The newcomers set about making ‘a new Drumston in the wilderness’, and live the life of country gentry on their Australian estates. Kingsley pleasantly mingles the dignified and elevated with the domestic. Baroona and Garoopna station homesteads are comfortable Australian country houses where the standards of ‘Home’ are kept up. Kingsley is especially good at evoking the lazy, sleepy atmosphere of the afternoons spent on the veranda, looking across scent-laden colourful flower beds to the plains and distant hills (which is as good an argument as any for thinking that he wrote Geoffry Hamlyn at Langi-Willi). In such comfortable surroundings a new generation grows up.

Kingsley is little interested in documenting the working lives of his pioneers, or in considering the effect of the environment on the younger generation. The young Englishmen, Sam Buckley and Jim Brentwood, seem unmarked by having spent their formative years in the new country, and no one should be surprised when Sam declares that he wants to be ‘a real Englishman, not half a one’, and that he would prefer to be ‘the Buckley of Clere’ than ‘young Sam Buckley of Baroona’. In Kingsley's eyes, Sam has fulfilled his role of hero only when he has recovered the place in English society that his ancestors had. The attractions of the ‘new Drumston’ are felt so strongly, however, that Sam's determination to recover the English estate seems arbitrary. Unconsciously, one starts to identify him with the Australian setting.

Throughout the second volume the emphasis is upon the fortunes of the transplanted English microcosm, with a gradual build-up of tension as George Hawker, who has turned bush-ranger, reappears, and the threat of violence clouds the scene. The narration proceeds at a relaxed pace, without that crowding of incident and intricacy of plot which is more typical of Kingsley. Sam Buckley is educated, and very properly falls in love with the sister of his closest friend. Kingsley makes only passing reference to the growth of colonial cities and colonial institutions: his focus is the semi-feudal household of the squatter. Sam is educated at home and so is not exposed to the temptations that beset a public school boy and a university student. His tutor is Dr Mulhaus, who rejoins his English friends, making a spectacular entrance on Christmas night. (Sam is dozing over Boswell's Life of Johnson when he first sees Alice—which is, presumably, a sign that the doctor has done his work well and that Sam is an educated young gentleman!) Kingsley's re-introduction of Dr Mulhaus and Frank Maberly gratifies his love of surprises, and at the same time avoids wasting two characters well established in the English section of the novel. Moreover, the presence of these two men strengthens our impression of a complete society centred on the ‘big house’: Dr Mulhaus represents learning, and Frank Maberly established religion.

H. M. Green observed that in Geoffry Hamlyn Kingsley provided ‘the romance of station life with practically the whole of its “properties”’:⁴² the bushfire, the fight with blacks, the kangaroo hunt, the child lost in the bush, the episodes with bushrangers, and the drama of the branding of the cattle. The episodes are so well spaced out and so tactfully distributed among the characters that we tend to accept them unquestioningly as part of the chronicle of station life. The way in which Kingsley handles these ‘properties’ is worth noting, as it points to the nature of the book's continuing appeal. Kingsley incorporates details of day-to-day activity on the station only when they have some picturesque or dramatic value. The episode in the drafting yards, for instance, is included not because it gives us a glimpse of what the squatters do when not drinking claret and water on the homestead veranda, but because it affects the relationship of Sam and Alice. The episode of the lost child is similarly tied in with the rivalry of Sam and Cecil, but here Kingsley's contriving to gain an emotional effect is too obvious to be successful.

Kingsley is most at home with those episodes which can be treated in heroic or martial terms. A natural calamity such as a bushfire is described as an enemy or contestant: Hamlyn's ride, pursued by the fire, is an exciting race in which his life is the prize. The fight with the Aborigines, which occurs in the same chapter, is like a skirmish in a colonial war:

Two hundred black fellows were on us all at once, shouting like devils, and sending down their spears upon us like rain. I heard the Doctor's voice, above all the infernal din, crying ‘Viva! Swords, my boys; take your swords!’ I heard two pistol shots, and then, with deadly wrath in my heart, I charged at a crowd of them, who were huddled together, throwing their spears wildly, and laid about me with my cutlass like a madman.

(Chapter XXIV)

A passage like this could come from a boy's book of adventures in almost any age. Later in the novel the bushrangers are the enemy against whom Kingsley's heroes, young and old, prove themselves. Military virtues are praised throughout the novel, and the military experiences of characters are frequently mentioned: Buckley and Brentwood are heroes of Waterloo; Dr Mulhaus is really Baron von Landstein, wounded at the battle of Jena; Halbert is on leave from India, and Jim Brentwood becomes a hero of Crimea. Sam Buckley is not a commissioned officer, but in the wars of the bushrangers he behaves like a military hero, and in his ride to save Alice he acquires the status almost of a hero of legend. The famous ride is described with an infectious enthusiasm, but such limited reality as the characters have disappears when Kingsley aims at heroic elevation:

In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognized, said, in a fierce whisper,—

‘Give me one of your pistols, sir!’

‘Leave that to me!’ he replied in the same tone.

‘As you please,’ she said; ‘but I must not fall alive into their hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.’

(Chapter XLI)

It is in such instances, where Kingsley relies upon the clichés of melodrama, that the weakness of the novel is most apparent. The essential criticism to be made of Kingsley as a romance writer is not that the action contains improbabilities, but that the action has too little basis in character. The characterization of the major personages is superficial, with its roots in convention rather than in any individual conception of the realities of human nature; and the events in which they are involved do little towards fixing their identities.

Joseph Furphy's mockery of Geoffry Hamlyn is well known. In Such is Life he created the caricature figure of Mrs Beaudesart, supposedly the daughter of ‘Hungry Buckley of Baroona’, and through his narrator, Tom Collins, he scoffed at the notion that Geoffry Hamlyn gave a true picture of pastoral life in nineteenth century Australia. His criticism was that of a creative writer aiming at a strict realism of form as well as of detail, and totally out of sympathy with romance conventions. (At the same time, I suspect that Furphy knew Geoffry Hamlyn thoroughly and drew hints from it for his own novel.) Discussing types of squatters which he might have introduced into his narrative, he excludes ‘the slender-witted, virgin-souled, overgrown schoolboys who fill Henry Kingsley's exceedingly trashy and misleading novel with their insufferable twaddle’ (Chapter IV). When we have conceded that this is a telling, if exaggerated, description of Kingsley's squatters, we have to add that Kingsley nowhere attempts the kind of realistic portraiture that Furphy demands. Willie Mitchell, the owner of Langi-Willi, may have provided Kingsley with a model from whom he took some details, but that is hardly relevant to the critical point. Kingsley's squatters are idealized figures—Christian gentlemen, Tom Browns who happen to be in Australia, and who spend part of their lives on stations. The Buckleys, father and son, are untouched by their years in the colonies, and no one seems to experience psychological problems of adjustment.

Two characters seem to hold some promise of psychological complexity and development—Mary Thornton and her lover George Hawker. J. C. Horner has described Geoffry Hamlyn as ‘… the romance of a woman who found that, until she faced her past and expiated her foolishness, the contentment offered by physical flight to a new land was illusory’.⁴³ It is misleading, however, to suggest that the novel produces such singleness of effect, or that the thematic interest is so clearly focused. The consequences of Mary Thornton's folly are one strand of the novel, but equally important is the colonial adventure in which Hamlyn, the Buckleys, Brentwood, and Mary and her cousin Tom Troubridge enrich themselves, while living out the ideal of their class. The bushranging gang, led by Hawker, is an effective means of integrating the major strands of the novel and producing a climax. Hawker's transformation into the notorious ‘Touan’ is not shown in the novel, but Kingsley gives some attention to Hawker on the run from the battle in which he has killed his own son. The guilt-ridden man meeting his fate alone in the mountains appeals to Kingsley's imagination, but he does not get close to his criminal. There is a final scene between Hamlyn and the condemned criminal, exemplifying Kingsley's belief that there is good in the worst of men; but the end of the writing is pathos rather than the illumination of the character of a weak man who has become corrupt. Although Mary Thornton is nominally part of the little society of ‘noble’ men and women who return to live at Clere, she hardly belongs there. The pretty, wilful girl of the Drumston years becomes a doting mother and a sexual tease in the Australian years. Hamlyn, supposedly one of her admirers, cannot help pointing out her ‘selfishness and violence’, and describes her histrionic behaviour unsympathetically through the eyes of Frank Maberly. But he keeps his distance, and does not explore the depths of feeling which he glimpses. ‘One never knows what a woman of this kind, with strong passions and a not over-strong intellect, may be driven to’, comments Hamlyn, who would rather forget her desire to have Tom shoot George should he appear at Toonarbin.

Although none of the characters could be called memorable, at least some of the minor characters in Geoffry Hamlyn show Kingsley's lively observation of colonial life. He gets the style of conversation among station hands very well. Lee, the corrupter of George Hawker in Devonshire, is better drawn in the Australian section, where he is represented as an ex-convict type. His yarn about meeting the bushranger who turns out to be George is told in a convincingly colloquial manner, and is an early example in fiction of the bush habit of yarning. The episode at Baroona, when ‘one of those long-legged, slab-sided, lean, sunburnt, cabbage-tree-hatted lads … one of those representatives of the rising Australian generation’ takes a fancy to a paper-weight in Mrs Buckley's drawing-room, has been justly admired by critics like H. M. Green and A. A. Phillips.⁴⁴ It is quite a minor episode, but in retrospect it is a strikingly accurate sketch of local manners. The most attractive side of Kingsley's personality shows up in incidental touches, such as the sketch of the lonely bush child who imagines that on the other side of the river are children who beckon him to cross to the forbidden bush.

In Geoffry Hamlyn Kingsley presented himself to the reading public as a kindly old bachelor writing about his friends. The very cosiness which the narrator projects adds to the popular appeal of the novel. The writing makes no demands upon us: it invites relaxation and encourages us to feel that the characters are our friends. Hamlyn's style is characterized by an almost boyish enthusiasm for his characters and the stories he has to tell about them; he is quietly sentimental about them, amusement sometimes mingling with admiration. Only in the consciously heroic or melodramatic scenes (where Kingsley aims at Dickensian effects) does the friendly reminiscent tone of the narrator disappear completely. The narrator is only slightly characterized, but he is enough to provide Kingsley with a mask: the persona of Hamlyn interposes between Kingsley and a possibly critical reader.

When he came to write Ravenshoe, Kingsley had the undoubted success of Geoffry Hamlyn to encourage him. This second novel, however, which is more ambitious in intention, shows signs of strain and uncertainty. Quite early in the narrative he is apologetic about his possible incapacity to create Charles Ravenshoe: ‘He is a reality to me, though I may not have the art to make him so to you’ (Chapter XXVIII). Later we read that he knows ‘that what I have to say in this chapter must be said without effort to be said well’ (Chapter XLVIII). Again: ‘It now becomes my duty to use all the resources of my art to describe Charles's emotions at the first sight of Sebastapol’ (Chapter LIV). And when he begins to describe, in Chapter LIX, Lord Ascot's moral struggle in terms of a bad and a good angel, he adds a footnote intended to ‘stop all criticism at this point’ by citing literary precedents. These self-conscious remarks may be attributed to the narrator, but I suspect that readers who skip the Preface are unaware that the narrator is to be taken as distinct from Kingsley until they reach Chapter XLV, when the narrator is named and is a participant in the action. I have been led to wonder whether this introduction of the narrator as an eyewitness at the end of the novel isn't an afterthought caused by Kingsley's instinct to defend himself against criticism.

Kingsley's narrator is writing the family history of his dear friend Charles Ravenshoe. The presence of a narrator implies a distance between Kingsley and the central character, who can fairly be described as Kingsley's version of himself. Unfortunately, Kingsley's partiality for his hero is merely transferred to the narrator—‘I love the man. I love his very faults in a way’ (Chapter XXVIII)—and Kingsley's admiration for Charles's nobility gets in the way of character-drawing. Despite some interesting insights, Charles is too incomplete as a character to affect the reader very strongly.

Unlike Geoffry Hamlyn, Ravenshoe develops no theme of larger interest than the fortunes of the individuals. With the Buckleys and their friends, the reader of Geoffry Hamlyn discovers and experiences a version of colonial life. Ravenshoe ranges over high and low life in England, but as one reads one is conscious of Kingsley's dependence on Dickens and Thackeray (the influence of the latter is most obvious in the episodes of Welter and Adelaide in London society). The novelty of the subject matter and the freshness of observation in the first novel are missing here. Kingsley himself wrote that ‘the plot is very intricate and so overborne by incident that it would be difficult to give a precis of it’,⁴⁵ and one must agree with him. On the merely technical level of complication and mystification the plot works well enough, but it works at the expense of consistent characterization. At times the plot seems to open up possibilities of significant meaning, but these are neglected by Kingsley. The revelation that the groom is apparently the true heir suggests questions about social rank that are never asked. And the effect of this disclosure on Charles, who has been brought up to believe himself to be a gentleman by birth, is powerfully described by Charles himself in one speech but developed no further.

Charles Ravenshoe's feeling of ‘loss of identity’, as he puts it, could have been the focus for a psychological study of some depth. Kingsley was attracted by the situation of the outcast and alienated figure, but he was incapable of investigating it closely. Instead of introspective analysis we have incidents, chance meetings, the pathos of the war casualty; and Charles never becomes really interesting even at this level.

In relation to Kingsley's oeuvre, Ravenshoe is a more representative work than Geoffry Hamlyn. It contains the usual ingredients of his later novels—the English country house setting, problems of inheritance, esclandre (a favourite Kingsley word), relationships of brothers, evocation of southern English landscapes. The reasons for Kingsley's failure to develop as a novelist can be found in this, the most highly praised of his novels. ‘Practically every fault that a novelist can commit Henry Kingsley commits’, as his admirer, Hugh Walpole, noted.⁴⁶ But his lack of technique, his uncertain control over his materials, his reliance upon convention, are symptomatic of something deeper: a radical incoherence of feeling. Even in Ravenshoe one gets the impression that there is a private significance behind the story which Kingsley is unable to recognize or to clarify.

In The Hillyars and the Burtons, another family chronicle, Kingsley's lack of self-understanding is again evident. When originally published as a book, it carried a preface in which Kingsley declared that he had presented the conflict of love and duty through the story of Emma Burton, adding an apologetic comment:

I have used all my best art in putting the question before the reader, and must leave him to draw his own [conclusion]. I am only sorry to see such an important social question, a question which (thanks to the nobleness of our women) comes en visage to us continually, so very poorly handled.

This claim that the novel deals with a fundamental social issue prompted Henry James to ask: ‘Does the author really believe that any such severe intention is discernible among his chaotic, inartistic touches?’ Kingsley did believe so, but as in his other novels he fails to shape his material to illuminate a central theme. It is always difficult to describe Kingsley's novels because so much is crammed into them—as one reads one notes interesting themes only partially recognized, possibilities of characterization and development of scenes passed over and neglected. His narratives are crowded with incidents, their complicated and mechanical plots imperfectly controlled by thematic intentions.

In this novel Kingsley may have intended the Emma-Erne relationship to be the centre of the work, but the main interest is located in two themes that he had already treated in Geoffry Hamlyn and Ravenshoe. One is obviously the theme of successful emigration, the making of a new life in the colonies. And the other is what might be defined tentatively as the theme of identity within the family, a theme that is worked out in the story of the Hillyar family. As in Ravenshoe, Kingsley describes the relationships of young men who are brothers and lovers. Charles Ravenshoe grows up thinking that he is the younger brother of the heir, but he is ultimately revealed as the only son of a different father, and the undisputed heir. He is bound to both Cuthbert (‘his elder brother’) and William (his foster-brother and his groom) by a love which he regards as fraternal. In boyhood he loves Welter (his bad angel), and in later adolescence he loves John Marston (his good angel). The love that each of these feels for Charles is seen as an ennobling and purifying force, the ‘sentiment’ which triumphs over all other considerations.

As in Ravenshoe, inheritance is a key issue in the Hillyar family, and there are changes of identity which affect the claims to the inheritance. Reuben Burton, who grows up believing himself to be the son of a criminal, is in reality the son of an aristocrat and eventually comes into his own. His role is a passive one: the active sufferer is Erne Hillyar, the younger brother of Reuben's real father, and it is he who undergoes a period of ordeal from which he emerges, like Charles Ravenshoe, marked forever by ‘a dull settled, dreaming melancholy’ (the words describe Charles). After nearly dying on the goldfields and losing Emma, Erne goes off to the Crimean War. Kingsley describes him as surviving the siege of Sebastopol, ‘changed from a fanciful sentimental child, into a thoughtful melancholy man; with the puzzle of life placed fairly before his eyes at last’.

Erne Hillyar, the aristocrat who is described as ‘a glorious lad … graceful as a deer’, and Jim Burton, the blacksmith's boy, are attracted to each other, and Jim's feeling for Erne is certainly more real to us than Jim's feeling for the girl he marries. Kingsley develops a triangle situation, such as he creates in “Jackson of Paul's”: Erne falls in love with Jim and then with Jim's sister. Apart from this ‘noble’ relationship with Erne, Jim Burton is a rather colourless character. Nevertheless, he is an effective narrator, who tells more than half the story of the two families. Through Burton Kingsley can present a first-hand account of childhood in the Chelsea of his own youth; and the result is some of his most evocative writing. Similarly, he can comment directly, as he did through Hamlyn, on colonial life, offering bits of information, and introducing a reminiscent note with allusions to his recent fortunes—Jim Burton has become rich and is a pillar of Cooksland society—outside the scope of the novel. With the division of authorial responsibility, Kingsley avoids straining probability by pretending that a narrator could have known all that occurs, but can still present a great deal through the eyes of a participant in the action.

The scenes of the Burtons in Chelsea owe a great deal to Dickens, and to Great Expectations in particular. The Burtons are middle class, but they are seen among ‘low’ characters, whom Kingsley merely outlines, borrowing names from Shakespeare and Dickens for them. There is more substance in the characterization of the two villains, George Hillyar and Samuel Burton. The relationship of the older with the younger man of higher social status is a re-working of the Hawker-Lee relationship in Geoffry Hamlyn, with a basic similarity in the two sets of characters. George Hillyar, the ‘son of a wild, fierce, gipsy-looking mother’, struggles against violent, destructive impulses in his own nature. Despite his sentimental inclination, Kingsley appears to be fascinated by this type of man. Although the psychological study of George's course of self-destruction is too sketchy to make him a memorable figure, there are some compelling moments, such as this description of George's ‘sleepy petulance’:

He had read some account of the fascination of snakes, and, because it seemed a bizarre, and rather wicked sort of amusement, he had tried it for himself. He used to go out from the barracks on Sunday afternoon, find a black snake among the stony ridges, engage its attention, and stare at it. The snake would lie motionless, with its beady eye fixed on him. The fearful stillness of the horrible brute, which carried instant death in its mouth, would engage him deeply; and the wearying attention of his eye, expecting some sudden motion of the reptile, would begin to tell upon the brain, and make the watcher, as I have said before, petulant and dull. At length the snake, gathering confidence from his stillness, would gleam and rustle in every coil, stretch out its quivering neck, and attempt flight. Then his suppressed anger would break forth, and he would arise and smite it, almost careless, for the moment, whether he died himself or no.

(Chapter XV)

Such passages compensate for the banality one finds elsewhere, but still leave one wishing that Kingsley had been a writer better able to develop his insights. In drawing Samuel Burton, Kingsley may have had Magwitch in mind. However, although the character is established with some vigour, he becomes little more than an instrument of the plot as he travels back and forth from England to Australia. Kingsley was interested in ‘the history of the soul of a thorough-going rascal’, but he admits that he cannot write it.

The other character in the novel who calls for comment is Gerty Neville, the pretty, naive chatterbox, who is used to point up the conflict of colonial and English manners in an English setting. Gerty's slangy conversation, especially in English drawing-rooms, is entertaining, but Kingsley leaves Gerty as an oddity rather than a fully created character. The story of her walk home, which could have been a dramatic highlight, lapses into fantasy.

The Hillyars and the Burtons opens with a scene set in Australia, but the early part of the book is memorable more for the Chelsea scenes, in which Jim Burton recalls ‘Golden hours which can never come back any more’. Chelsea as a place is more vividly realized than any other setting in the novel. The Australia to which the Burtons emigrate is the colony of Cooksland, which Kingsley locates north of New South Wales. It is presumably a version of Queensland, which was proclaimed a separate colony in 1859. Kingsley does not seem to have intended that his readers should be able to identify his colonial settings, however. As in Geoffry Hamlyn, there are appreciative sketches of Australian scenery, but the landscape is less prominent here and generally less attractive. Wisely, Kingsley doesn't try to repeat the success of his first novel by covering the same aspects of colonial living: the Burtons are a lower class than the Buckleys, and they make their fortune as mine-owners not as pastoralists.

In the Australian sequences one chapter stands apart from the main stream of the narrative: the account of Erne's suffering on the Omeo goldfield. In the description of the scene as Erne and Tom leave the goldfield, now deserted by all except one old man, whose medicine has saved Erne's life, Kingsley goes beyond mere notation of scenery:

As they crossed the great wooded ridge which divided them from the watershed of the Mitta Mitta, they turned and had a last look at the place where they had suffered so much, and which they were never to see again. The lake lay sleeping in the inexorable heat, sometimes dreaming into a fantastic mirage like a nightmare, in which the trees and mountains were horribly inverted. All around the great snow-hills folded in vast ridges; and there was but one living thing in sight. The old man—a mere speck in the vast scenery which seemed rolling in on all sides, in white waves, to overwhelm him—stood there, poor, weak, feeble, alone; with all the powers of untamed Nature against him; solitary among the dreadful mountains.

(Chapter LXXII)

It is a dream-like scene, in which the frailty of the human figures is set against the power of antagonistic Nature. Kingsley's imagination was deeply stirred by his vision of the country as being ‘in the state of preparation’, a state which involved ‘great sacrifice of human life’ to tame it and make it fruitful. This theme of the drama of men struggling in a land ‘still in its cruel, pitiless phase’ is only marginal to the success story of the Burtons—a straightforward story of material gain, without the atmosphere of tragedy that Kingsley momentarily evokes here.

Despite some fine sequences, The Hillyars and the Burtons is a less successful novel than Geoffry Hamlyn, partly because it is more uneven, partly because it is so overladen with plot, and partly because—apart from the Omeo episode—the account of colonial life is less vividly imagined. Kingsley has set his narrative later in time, and instead of an heroic little society, threatened by Aborigines and bushrangers, we have land auctions, mining companies, political manoeuvring, debates over land policy and glimpses of colonial high society. The light-hearted satire of colonial politicians, which is introduced late in Geoffry Hamlyn, is a fairly substantial part of the Australian section of this novel. Although Kingsley's shafts are on target, they do not strike very deeply, and a non-Australian reader is unlikely to be much interested. The descriptions of the new society being built in the colonies are hardly more than clever journalism, for the most part.

Even more than Geoffry Hamlyn, The Hillyars and the Burtons shows Kingsley's inability to sustain characterization. He does not lack ideas about people, and in a figure like James Oxten, the Colonial Secretary and leader of the squatters in parliament, he creates a recognizable portrait of a type of colonial politician. But he does not make colonial society real to us in terms of characters. The Hillyars and the Burtons is a novel that is full of possibilities that Kingsley does not manage to realize. It should be read along with Geoffry Hamlyn, however, by anyone who wants to discover Kingsley's view of Australia.

The only other novel of Kingsley's in which Australia is described is Reginald Hetherege, where the Australian background provides exotic interest for an adventure. The Hillyars and the Burtons was the last novel in which he wrote at length of Australian life, and the last in which he rises above the level of circulating library fiction. From this time onward Kingsley's novels are almost all totally devoid of the throb of ‘felt life’; increasingly they are an incoherent mingling of convention and private fantasies. Henry Kingsley's claims for consideration as a novelist rest on the three novels that I have discussed, and of these Geoffry Hamlyn is most likely to find readers today.

Notes

1. Henry James, ‘The Noble School of Fiction’, The Nation (New York) 6 July 1865; reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass., 1921). The novel under review was The Hillyars and the Burtons.

2. Review of Geoffry Hamlyn, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 August 1859; reprinted in L. T. Hergenhan, ‘Geoffry Hamlyn Through Contemporary Eyes’, Australian Literary Studies II, 4 (1966).

3. Marcus Clarke, Preface to Long Odds (Melbourne, 1869).

4. Rolf Boldrewood, Old Melbourne Memories (Melbourne, 1884), Chapter XVII.

5. Quoted in R. B. Martin, The Dust of Combat: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London, 1959), p. 20.

6. ibid., p. 21.

7. B. E. Martin, Old Chelsea (London, 1889), p. 146.

8. J. M. Ludlow, Autobiography (Cambridge University Library MSS. Add. 7450/5). Quoted in R. B. Martin, op. cit., p. 97.

9. R. B. Martin, op. cit., p. 110. The Registrar's Office of King's College advises that available records are incomplete, but ‘it seems clear that there was no Henry Kingsley registered in the years 1848-9 and 1849-50’. (Letter dated 21 October 1969.)

10. W. E. Sherwood, Oxford Rowing (Oxford, 1900), p. 249.

11. J. C. Jeaffreson, A Book of Recollections (London, 1894), p. 81.

12. Maurice Kingsley, ‘Personal Traits of Henry Kingsley’, The Book-Buyer XI, 12 (1895) 730.

13. Jeaffreson, op. cit., p. 80.

14. W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (London, 1900), p. 124.

15. Jeaffreson, op. cit., p. 84.

16. I am indebted to Mr K. Dear of Monash Teachers' College for information on the later career of Venables.

17. Fanny Kingsley to J. M. Ludlow, 5 September 1853 (Cambridge University Library MSS. Add. 7348/5). Quoted by R. B. Martin, op. cit., p. 167.

18. Kingsley is referred to in a letter written by Mrs Phillip Russell, 21 June 1854. See P. L. Brown (ed.), Clyde Company Papers, Vol. VI, 1854-58 (London, 1968), p. 115. Phillip Russell was the owner of Carngham station, which was eight miles from Langi-Willi; Mrs Russell's brother was at the time overseer of Langi-Willi. For discussion of Kingsley's stay at Langi-Willi, see Brian Elliott, ‘The Composition of Geoffry Hamlyn: The Legend and the Facts’, Australian Literary Studies III, 4 (1968); Hugh Anderson, ‘The Composition of Geoffry Hamlyn: A Comment’, Australian Literary Studies IV, 1 (1969); John Barnes, ‘“A Young Man Called Kingsley”’, Meanjin Quarterly XXX, I (1971). The date of Kingsley's arrival was noted by Rosilyn Baxter in Australian Literary Studies IV, 4 (1970).

19. Reminiscences of Henry J. Campbell in S. M. Ellis, Henry Kingsley 1830-1876: Towards a Vindication (London, 1931), p. 47.

20. Henry Kingsley, ‘The Last Two Abyssinian Books’, Fortnightly Review, II (1867), 547-8 (new series). The relevant passages are reprinted in Barnes, op. cit.

21. Clement Shorter appears to be the first to make this statement, but he gives no source.

22. Letter from Mrs Phillip Russell, 21 June 1854. See note 18.

23. “Eyre's March”, in Hornby Mills and Other Stories (London, 1872); reprinted in The Boy in Grey and Other Stories (London, 1895). The article originally appeared in Macmillan's Magazine, in two parts, in October and November 1865.

24. Letter from Alexander Macmillan to James MacLehose, 27 October 1858, in C. L. Grave (ed.), Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London, 1910), p. 121. From an unpublished letter of Charles Kingsley to his wife, dated 5 July 1858, it would appear that Henry had returned home some time before that date (Parrish Collection, Princeton University Library).

25. Maurice Kingsley, op. cit., p. 730.

26. According to Macmillan records, Kingsley received £400 on 23 April 1859 for the first edition and £300 on 13 June 1860 for the second. The advertisements at the end of Volumes I and III of the copy of the first edition in the Houghton Library are dated 15 April 1859. Robert Lee Wolff has established that the American publishers received the first sheets from Macmillan by May 1859. See R. L. Wolff, ‘Henry Kingsley’, Harvard Library Bulletin XIII (1959).

27. Letter to Alexander Macmillan, 1862, in Ellis, op. cit., p. 120.

28. Information supplied by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.

29. Letter from Charles Kingsley to Lord Houghton, quoted in Una Pope-Hennessy, Canon Charles Kingsley (London, 1948), p. 267.

30. Ellis, op. cit., p. 66.

31. ibid., p. 134.

32. ibid., p. 133.

33. ibid., p. 161.

34. ibid., p. 189.

35. Pope-Hennessy, op. cit., pp. 265-6.

36. Kingsley sold in full the copyright of Geoffry Hamlyn, Ravenshoe, Austin Elliot, The Hillyars and the Burtons, and Leighton Court for £350 on 17 January 1867 (British Museum MSS. 54916 811A).

37. Letter from Charles Kingsley to his wife, dated 2 February 1871 (Parrish Collection, Princeton University Library). The letter was written on royal notepaper at Sandringham!

38. Charles Kingsley, quoted in R. B. Martin, op. cit., p. 220.

39. R. L. Wolff, op. cit.

40. Henry Kingsley, review of Samuel White Baker's The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile, in Fortnightly Review V (1866), 654. The other novels mentioned are Robinson Crusoe and Martin Chuzzlewit.

41. Frederick Sinnett, ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’, Journal of Australasia (September 1856); see bibliography for details of republication.

42. H. M. Green, A History of Australian Literature (Sydney, 1961), p. 213.

43. J. C. Horner, ‘Geoffry Hamlyn and its Australian Setting’, Australian Literary Studies I, 1 (1963) 4.

44. Green, op. cit., p. 210; A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition (Melbourne, 1958), pp. 60-2.

45. Letter to Alexander Macmillan, 1861, in Ellis, op. cit., p. 117.

46. Hugh Walpole, ‘Novelists of the Seventies’, in H. Granville-Barker (ed.), The Eighteen Seventies (Cambridge, 1929), p. 37.