[In the following essay, Wellings studies critical reaction to Kingsley's novels, and responds to charges that the novel Ravenshoe is characterized by careless writing and lack of structure.]

Henry Kingsley is badly served by literary studies of the twentieth century. Mention, let alone critical recognition, is scarce. The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature gives Henry Kingsley four entries, one of which is a mistaken date of publication for Ravenshoe.¹Introductions to English Literature Vol. IV The Victorians and After 1830-1914, edited by C. Batho and Bonamy Dobrée, gives Kingsley more space but less accuracy, mistakes occurring in both first and second editions (1938 and 1950 respectively). There is one extract in The Oxford Book of English Prose, but that given only reinforces an assessment that relegates Kingsley's abilities to a secondary position, namely, his creation of charming characters. Walter Allen's The English Novel: A Short Critical History² appears to treat Kingsley better. But one reads that Kingsley served in the Crimea as a war correspondent, and hence the ‘vividness’ of the Crimea battle scenes in Ravenshoe. Kingsley did serve as a war correspondent, but in the Franco-Prussian war, and did not, as far as one knows, even visit the Crimea. It was Michael Sadleir who put forward the idea as an interesting possibility, and was unable to support it.³ So much for the ‘History’ as indicated in Allen's title; ‘Criticism’ fares no better. His assessment is an amalgam, and not a felicitous one at that, of criticism by Henry James⁴ and Michael Sadleir.⁵ An examination of critical reviews reveals that no articles on Henry Kingsley appeared between the publication of the major full length study of Kingsley, S. M. Ellis's Henry Kingsley: Towards a Vindication (London, 1931) and 1950, a lengthy omission and one which leaves Ellis's hopes unrealized. Since 1950 interest has revived and eight articles have appeared.⁶ These vary in quality from: ‘His [Kingsley's] impish humour is at its best enchanting, especially in his description of animals and children. His pathos when unforced wrings the heart’,⁷ to the more competent studies by William E. Buckler, Leonie J. Kramer and Robert Lee Woolf. But these are only studies of particular novels, with the exception of the biographical and bibliographical study by Woolf. There has been no attempt to rationalize these studies. Henry Kingsley is being over-looked.

Can one expect a fairer, and more importantly, a more informed assessment from the past? At first sight, this might be so, but the odd neglect occurs again. The Dictionary of National Biography (Vol. XXXI, 1892) is cursory in its treatment, although Sir Leslie Stephen was well known to the Kingsleys. Further Henry Kingsley was not mentioned in the biography of Charles Kingsley, by Charles Kingsley's wife, although this could be explained by a family difference. But Ravenshoe appeared in nine separate editions over fifty years, and, when first published in the Everyman edition (significant in itself) in February 1906, was reprinted in December of the same year. From this it will appear that Kingsley achieved immediate popularity. In seeking to explain the popularity, Saintsbury is the authoritative starting point. ‘The absence of composition, which Flaubert deplored in English novels generally shows at its height in Henry Kingsley whose Ravenshoe for instance, has scarcely any plot at all, and certainly owes nothing to what it has, while he was a rapid and careless writer.’⁸ And further: ‘But he had, in a somewhat less elaborate form, all his brother's talent for description of scene and action, and his characters, if more in the way of ordinary life, are also truer to that life.’ Some indication of Kingsley's popularity is given. Saintsbury was to be more explicit in his essays: ‘It is difficult for even expert analysts to say exactly where the attraction of the book [Ravenshoe] lies, for it is almost everywhere diffuse and evasive.’⁹ And again: ‘There are few novels not actually masterpieces that have been longer favourites, or more frequently returned to for actual reading with and by the present writer—a testimonial subject of course to the quantum valeat discount; but perhaps more to the point in the case of novels than any other.’¹⁰ Saintsbury, although raising, and not answering, points of criticism (and being strangely perplexed) attests to the popularity of Kingsley's works, but has difficulty in saying what that popularity is. Similarly with other critics. They have tried ‘to say exactly where the attraction of the book lies’, with varying degrees of success.

To Lewis Melville ‘The secret of Henry Kingsley's attraction is the possession of the one quality that out-weighs all others; he has the saving grace of charm. He is so human, so like a big rollicking schoolboy.’¹¹ Andrew Lang finds ‘high spirits, and an engaging reckless manner in Ravenshoe, a delightfully topsy-turvy tale.’¹² ‘An immense body of vitality in this book [Ravenshoe]—humour, imagination, observation in the greatest wealth, and that delightful kind of satire that springs from a warm heart well reined by a keen intellect’ is noted by the Spectator.¹³ Sadleir takes as significant Kingsley's ‘swift and humorous vigour, such power of perpetrating loveliness, such unfailing instinct for the rhythm of language.’¹⁴ A similar tone is noticed by G. W. E. Russell: ‘A real though unregulated humour, and a closely observant eye for Nature, both in her softer and stormier aspects.’¹⁵ A writer in the Academy¹⁶ leads us to another quality ‘nobility’; ‘All his novels are what I should call brave books.’ And this is developed by Russell: ‘Everything he wrote is pure and upright and manly’ (p. 159). But it was Henry James who was to seize on this quality of ‘nobility’ in Kingsley's heroes: ‘Human nobleness, when we come across it in life, is a very fine thing; but it quite loses its flavour when it is made so cheap as it is in these works’ (p. 63). More significantly Henry James indicates what must have been the essential nature of Kingsley's attraction ‘Kingsley fever—which we take to be a malady natural to youth like the measles or scarlatina—leaving the subject much stronger and sounder’ (p. 60), thus pointing up the ‘rollicking schoolboy’ quality of Kingsley's books. Here, then, are the indications towards an understanding of Kingsley's popularity; a complex plot in which all rights itself, charm of description and character, manliness, and adolescence.

This, however, will only demonstrate the popularity of Ravenshoe, only explain it away, not explain it. For this we need a closer examination of that criticism which is concerned, and rightly, not with adulation, or the use of the novel to serve some imported ‘philosophy’, but with the proper assessment and placing of a given novel. E. A. Baker points the way: ‘He [Henry Kingsley] never mastered the art of construction. The story as a whole may be naught, yet scenes remain vivid and single episodes often seem matchless pieces of narrative.’¹⁷ But Baker relies fairly heavily on Saintsbury's strictures of lack of composition. However, the Spectator noted in its original review, ‘We ought, we suppose, to say something of the exceedingly awkward, sprawling, self-willed plot of Ravenshoe. Why it comes to a conclusion at all is a question which everybody would instinctively answer by external reasons … it has no artistic necessities’ (p. 637). Subsequent critics have had to recognize this failing, even if giving it greater or lesser significance in their assessments. The Kingsley-identified critics take it as part of the charm,¹⁸ while more objective critics regard it as having a wider, more damaging, significance. Saintsbury in his ‘On Writing Out and Henry Kingsley’ sees this as a serious (as it must be) failing, and one which detracts from the more entertaining passages of Ravenshoe. Sadleir, reluctantly, has to follow Saintsbury's destructive argument: ‘Of course the failure to discipline his written work was a failure to discipline himself. As a man he was all over the place; as a novelist (style always apart) he is slapdash, promiscuous and crude. He will not pivot his crowded tales on any central idea.’¹⁹ This is a considered opinion; it is a rephrasing of Sadleir's own comments six years earlier in the Edinburgh Review.²⁰ Sadleir, however, seeks to find critically sounder positives in Kingsley, than any of the detached critics, or any of the identified. They lie in Kingsley's power of ‘perpetuating loveliness—whether of landscape, or of storm, or of speed, or of decay, and for his unfailing instinct for beautiful language and its rhythm’ (p. 334). This, six years later, becomes, ‘As a word painter of landscape he is probably unexcelled by any English artist; as a master of the subtle music of prose, as master of beautiful phrases, he is unrivalled’ (TLS [Times Literary Supplement]). One year after this article S. M. Ellis published his Henry Kingsley: Towards a Vindication and develops a quality noted before (by the Spectator), pathos: ‘For it is the alliance of humour with pathos that endows the protagonists of fiction with lasting fame’ (p. 58).

A pattern, then, has emerged. Popularity for fifty years or so, with only Henry James as a detractor, an attempt at elucidation and analysis by recognized literary critics and scholars²¹ in order to place Henry Kingsley in nineteenth century literary history, finally neglect. Much of this can be correlated to social changes, and fashions in literary criticism (which now hectors, where it should inform); but literary-social analysis of this sort, though marginally helpful, cannot, nor should be used to, explain Ravenshoe. If it does, then criticism loses its own sense of priorities.

Ravenshoe first appeared in Macmillan's Magazine between June 1861 and January 1862, and was then published by Macmillan's later in 1862 in three volumes. It purports to be a family chronicle. There is the episodic recital of past events in the history of one family, the Ravenshoes. This is the only apparent unity in the novel—how Charles Ravenshoe is brought up, what he does, how he is affected by outside events, his dispossession and subsequent reinstatement as heir to Ravenshoe Hall, his life as a gentleman and a groom, his marriage—a domestic drama, and melodrama, relying on lawsuits, property, romance, realism, and adventure. Further, the novel contains an intricate plot which demands close attention from the reader. It is a straightforward picaresque-with-a-difference mid-Victorian novel. But it cannot be left at that. The Author's preface should prepare us:

The language used in telling the following story is not (as I hope the reader will soon perceive) the Author's, but Mr William Marston's.²²

The Author's intention was, while telling the story, to develop, in the person of an imaginary narrator, the character of a thoroughly goodhearted and tolerably clever man, who has his fingers (as he would say himself) in everyone's pie, and who, for the life of him, cannot keep his own counsel—that is to say, the only person who, by any possibility, could have collected the gossip which makes up this tale.

Had the Author told it in his own person, it would have been told with less familiarity, and, as he thinks, you would not have laughed quite so often.

Thus there is a narrator, whose character is developed so quietly and naturally that when he enters the tale towards its end, and is married to Miss Eliza of Humby, there is no sense of a false intrusion. More significantly, the stated intention is to entertain, the realized intention is to do more than this. The invention of an imaginary narrator is not so much to cover ‘the preacher that in a Kingsley inevitably lurked’²³ nor, as has been suggested, as a mere device necessary to heighten the quality of ‘nobility’ ‘necessary as the price of reinstatement’.²⁴ The reader is told that the narrator is in a special relationship to Charles Ravenshoe, ‘The good worthy fellow whom I learnt to like years ago. The man whose history I am proud to write’ (Ch. XIV). It would be more appropriate and convincing to regard Charles Ravenshoe's history as a loose autobiography of Henry Kingsley himself. Reference outside the text to Charles Ravenshoe's and Henry Kingsley's ‘lives’ support this.²⁵ More revealingly, in ‘Coup de Grace’ (Ch. XXVII) the narrator retires and Charles ‘speaks for himself’. The preface to David Copperfield states the problem that autobiographical novels, or in this case, the novel with an autobiographic nature, present—the difficulty of getting sufficiently far removed from the experience out of which the tale grows. Given then this difficulty, Kingsley invested William Marston as narrator, or catalyst, for his own experience. William Marston is a successful character in his own right, but whether he is a successful persona for Henry Kingsley is debatable. It is easy to say he would have been (and not very much to the point), if Henry Kingsley had been better at delineating character. Charles Ravenshoe is a static character, a character to whom things happen, who grows up, but who does not develop. This is a serious defect in Kingsley's craft as a novelist, and one that cannot be overlooked, or justified by indicating the quality of ‘nobility’ he possesses, but one that can be explained by pointing to the special relationship between Charles Ravenshoe and Henry Kingsley: ‘but the two (characters) who are with me always are the peak-faced man Charles Ravenshoe and the lame French girl Mathilde.’²⁶ Charles is ‘flat’ in that Kingsley, despite the device, was not able to become significantly aware of his own experience. The invention of William Marston is an attempt to achieve a significant awareness, but not a fully successful one. However, as a device for collecting and imparting ‘family gossip’ it is difficult to see how he could be bettered, or what other device could have been employed so successfully. The plot of Ravenshoe is involved, but whether it is ‘chaotically managed’ is another problem for criticism. That there is ‘chaos’ has been accepted by all critics of the tale. But this is because, I would suggest, the plot does not stay in the reader's mind. But, then, does that of (say) Bleak House? The major fault is that the major characters are not demonstrated to have the vitality necessary to overcome the complications of the plot. Kingsley took considerable pains to make the plot ‘historically’ correct. He cannot be faulted in his use of dates.

‘Such is Ravenshoe Hall at the present day, and such it was on the 10th of June 1831 (I like to be particular).

(Ch. III)

Kingsley is particular. There are only two instances of factual fault; the first, where Charles, when ten years old (Ch. V) travels from Exeter (presumably) to Twyford on an as yet unbuilt Great Western Railway, the second, where Lord Barkham's (Lord Saltire's son) age, when killed in a duel, is twenty-one in Ch. X and nineteen in Ch. XL, but these are too trivial to have any significance. But Saintsbury and other critics have accused Kingsley of carelessness.²⁷ There is carelessness in Ravenshoe but it is of a different nature. Henry Kingsley slips up in detail, but not in the ‘historic’ construction of his plot. The most noticeable example is that John Marston becomes Charles Marston in Ch. XIV, a mistake that stands in all the editions of Ravenshoe except the Nelson Edition of 1903. What Saintsbury calls carelessness lies in the numerous asides and interpolations, which are part of the intention of the novel—integral, not in the manner of a major novelist where all subserves the central purpose, but to beguile and entertain. The same can be said of the footnotes, especially, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has pointed out, the footnote on the most desirable type of banister for sliding down (Ch. V). The carelessness is thus intentional, and can be seen to be intended. The fault lies, not so much in the manner, but in the misproportioned weight Kingsley attaches to it. If any support other than the text is needed, one can turn to a letter to Macmillan reproduced by Ellis (p. 118):

I think we may let Ravenshoe go to the world pretty much as it stands. It has had a good deal of overlooking.

This testimony is real. If then one realizes the full significance of the Author's preface (‘Had the Author told it in his own person’), there would have been a very different Ravenshoe.

An intricate plot is the given idea; a powerful, and probably painful, experience from which the author needs to distance himself is the creative spring. What then is the mode of expression? Again the Author's preface prepares one (‘you would not have laughed so often’). The expression relies on Kingsley's humour—a quality noted but not fully explored. In itself it has a ‘distancing’ function, and thus is the only mode open to Kingsley given his initial ‘problem’. More significantly, it becomes a mode for expressing a wider range of emotion. It can be used for mock (and mocking) moralizing (Ch. LXII), or for debunking (the description of Oxford, Ch. XXII), but more importantly for controlling the reader's flow of sympathy. Charles is in the following passage watching part of London life from his place in the stables where he is employed as a groom:

Next came a butcher with a tray of meat, who turned into the area of No. 16, and left the gate open. After him came a blind man, led by a dog. The dog, instead of going straight on, turned down the area steps after the butcher. The blind man thought he was going round a corner. Charles saw what would happen; but, before he had time to cry out, the blind man had plunged headlong down the area steps and disappeared, while from the bottom, as from the pit, arose the curses of the butcher.

Charles and others assisted the blind man up, gave him some beer, and sent him on his way. Charles watched him. After he had gone a little way, he began striking spitefully at where he thought his dog was, with his stick. The dog was evidently used to this amusement, and dexterously avoided the blows. Finding vertical blows of no avail, the blind man tried horizontal ones, and caught an old gentleman across the shins, making him drop his umbrella, and catch up his leg. The blind man promptly asked an alms from him, and, not getting one, turned the corner; and Charles saw him no more.

(Ch. XXXII)

The Spectator comments that ‘the pathos is very deep and fine, sometimes hidden under a cloud of sportive expression’ (p. 637). It is not so much that the ‘pathos is deep and fine’, but that Kingsley can use what appears to be an external mocking and cruel humour, to control one's sympathies for the blind man. The cruelty becomes sympathy. Regrettably, Kingsley's use of humour is not of this quality throughout; he often tends towards the ponderous:

Well, whatever you trimmers make by their motion now-a-days, the Ravenshoes were not successful either at liberal conservatism or radical liberalism.

(Ch. I)

And where more ponderous, the interest is retarded. This retarding and withholding of the interest leads to the major fault of Kingsley as a writer. He has been so limited by his desire to put a ‘character’ between himself and his experience that his considerable gifts in his chosen mode of expression are not commensurate with the resolution of his personal needs. The problems remain unresolved; balance is lost. Hence the longeurs, and the concensus of informed critical opinion being baffled response, or over-eager identification.

Only the disadvantages of the framework of the plot, the given personal need, and the mode chosen have been indicated. The advantages are considerable, although not considerable enough to outweigh the disadvantages, and thus raise the stature of Ravenshoe. Kingsley, by refusing to order his plot, can allow himself considerable freedom in its manipulation. Ravenshoe is a family chronicle, and a complex one at that, but its complexity is aided by this freedom, not hampered. He can dispense with the restrictions usually associated with the ‘realistic’ novel: it is Lord Welter and Adelaide who first tell the reader that Charles is the rightful heir after all; physical description of Welter and Lord Saltire are kept to the final chapter; Father Mackworth's sudden stroke does not jar one's sense of the probable; Adelaide's elopement is natural. A straightforward recital would require a much more rigid approach, with a consequent diminution of interest. But Kingsley goes further, he prepares one for the ‘shocks’ in Ravenshoe. One learns in Ch. II that Father Mackworth has some hidden knowledge; Mackworth gives more hints in Ch. XVIII; Charles's eventual restoration is indicated (Ch. XXXIX); Cuthbert's death is alluded to and prepared for. Ravenshoe did have ‘a pretty good deal of overlooking’.

Flexibility with regard to material is not all; the manner and humour allow Kingsley to establish a relationship with the reader that any mere ‘recital’ could not achieve. The reader is taken into the narrator's confidence (‘Come take my hand, and we will follow them on to the end’) (Ch. III); but it is not such a direct partnership as is implied, fun is poked at the reader where Kingsley explains his reasons for giving Charles's experiences at Oxford in some length; he can forestall the reader (Ch. XLVIII) again easily and naturally. Significantly, it is the humour that is called into service here.

The ‘distancing’ and the several varieties of humour, then, are the limitations within which Kingsley chose to write Ravenshoe. His chosen mode of narration is to observe and report, and not to present the feelings of the protagonist. Again, as with the device of Marston, the narrator, he places an agency between himself and his material. Thus at the first major crisis in the novel—where Charles learns that he is an imposter—Kingsley interrupts the current of action to give an aside on sudden death, and only after this does he allow the blow to fall. Significantly:

I try to think how he [a sailor who is suddenly killed] looked.

(Ch. XXVI)

Again Charles cannot remember the whole of the scene that follows, neither is the reader given any indication, other than that of an eyewitness, of what happened. Charles stands away from the reader; and this points to the nature of the relationship—the experience is shared but only descriptively, it is not felt to be shared, for there is no interior monologue, no dramatization. Similarly, when Charles, now enlisted in the dragoons ready to sail to the Crimea, comes to visit Mary Corby at Lady Hainault's, the narrator ‘declines to go into the drawing room at present’ (Ch. XLVII). But it would be misguided to criticize Kingsley for not doing what he has indicated he will not do; one cannot ask a mid-nineteenth century novel to be written as a late-nineteenth century one. One can only indicate that Ravenshoe stands outside that tradition for dramatization that has led to the twentieth century novel, for Ravenshoe does stand away from experience. Where criticism is sounder, however, is when it shows that Kingsley, having set his own limitations, fails to keep within them:

The mate, a tall, brawny, whiskerless, hard-faced man, about six-and-twenty, who had been thrust into a pea-coat, now approached.

“Where's mamma, Mr. Archer?” said the child.

“Where's mamma, my lady-bird? Oh dear! Oh dear!”

“And where's the ship, and Captain Dixon, and the soldiers?”

(Ch. V)

The questioning of the child (Mary Corby) places the reader's response, and heightens it. Mr Archer's reply is wooden, and bathetic. Again, Kingsley calls his humour into play when Charles is blind to Mary's affection, but the humour fails to serve its purpose as Kingsley has now ‘approached’ too closely with Mary. Charles, unintentionally, appears blunt, not merely misguided, through his affection for Adelaide. It is in such instances, that Kingsley, in failing to be consistent within his limitations, shows his inability to ‘organize’, to see clearly the actualities of ‘construction’, and ultimately shows little awareness of human nature.

These could be justified as minor technical faults if Kingsley could convince one of a sure grasp, an informing awareness, of the characters he creates to live out his plot. Unfortunately, his plot is a separate, and separately conceived, entity, superimposed carefully, but infelicitously, on his characters. Charles is a ‘failure’ in that, given his search for identity, he identifies himself with reference to external codes only, and then only externally. The code is that of a gentleman:

This (loss of identity) … washed away from me the only spar to which I could cling—the feeling that I was a gentleman.

(Ch. XXVII)

Charles does not act out this code; it does not become tangible, does not become real through him, but remains a set of attitudes.²⁸ Charles's own actions betray that Kingsley's interests are other than those of writing a centrally pivoted novel. Charles rows in the winning university eight; he is one of the ‘immortal six hundred’; he is an ‘adventurer’. The problem is insoluble given Kingsley's desire to stand away from experience, and to romanticize Charles. Only where Kingsley drops the function of the narrator, and makes Charles ‘speak for himself’, does Charles become alive. The deeply personal experience is here given a wider significance, and it is this wider significance that gives Charles his ‘life’. For the rest, Charles is merely described, he strikes attitudes, he is manipulated through the plot until the tale rounds itself off neatly in a happy ending. The cause for this is the uneven struggle between romanticism and realism. A tale such as Ravenshoe would have to be realistic, and Kingsley, as I have indicated, was determined to make it factually convincing. But he has not come to terms with, not recognized the undertones of, the romanticism of the mid-nineteenth century, a romanticism which is finally unpreoccupied with, and unperceptive of, human behaviour. ‘The peak-faced man Charles Ravenshoe’ indicates the presence of romanticism; John Marston cast into the role of the rejected suitor (Ch. XVIII) reinforces the indication. The intention of this episode is that it is to act as a contrast to Charles, and to heighten one's recognition of Mary's love for Charles—but the loss of credulity does not make up for the gain. One might then expect death to be mawkish and falsified, but (irritatingly) Kingsley shows that he is aware of such dangers. The death of Joe, the shoe-black (Ch. LX), is not falsified; more importantly, it gains its conviction from the widely sympathetic account of conditions in the tenements of South London. The Thames, as for Dickens in David Copperfield, stands as a symbol of human corruption. The device is derivative, but Kingsley shows he is aware of the deeper undertones of the symbol. The slum scenes themselves show Kingsley's wide, and organized sympathy. But the perception that informs the action in instances such as these is withheld from Charles, and Charles has too great a weight in the tale to be handled statically. Lord Saltire and Lady Ascot, however, demonstrate the function of static characters aptly. This is where Kingsley is at his best. The characters are not required to develop in the way that Charles is. Thus, conceived and drawn, within this limitation, they are successful. The Spectator's comment (p. 637) that they alone of the two characters have all ‘the clear cut irony and humour’ is largely true. But the criticism that ‘it is nearly impossible to understand what the underlying mass of characters is meant to be’ shows a lack of relevance. One is told, and shown, enough about them for the plot to continue. They are, in fact, minor characters, and serve as anti-romantic foci in the tale. One does not need to understand them, and Kingsley, rightly, does not ask one to. Their presence is sufficiently established. Where Kingsley does show imbalance is in the handling of Lord Welter and Adelaide, for these are the two characters who alone have any dramatic force. Father Mackworth is, and remains, a villain, and Kingsley's control prevents him from appearing stagey. But Kingsley cannot control Welter and Adelaide. Adelaide elopes with Lord Welter so that she might acquire a title, but has to trade respect and ‘social power’. The relationship is clearly established; but the relationship develops into a fuller partnership as, firstly, Adelaide becomes a bait to trap unwary gamblers to Welter's tables, and, secondly, the partnership develops into a new found trust, acceptance, and eventually love. For Kingsley invests these two with too much vitality. (Welter's ‘strong masculine cunning’ which Adelaide fears and respects—they are of like kind). The implicit contrast between Charles and Welter, Mary and Adelaide, works to the advantage of the ‘villains’, and thus Charles and Mary are further neutralized. Balance has been irrevocably, and fatally for the tale, lost; hence Kingsley's excessive punishment of Adelaide—she is bed-ridden for life. One's sympathies are with Welter, not with the war-wounded Charles. Kingsley has ‘put too much’ into Welter—Charles as a character suffers.

Previous criticism has also taken account of Kingsley's ‘style’, but as an abstract entity. The flexibility in approach has been noted above, the variety of the humour indicated. It is not surprising to find a corresponding range and flexibility in the writing in Ravenshoe. The humorous mode has been given prominence in The Oxford Book of English Prose. Attention should also be drawn to Kingsley's descriptive powers, as in the opening of Ch. XXXII; the observation and perception of a wide range and an overriding ability necessary to found a ‘natural’ and ‘human’ framework for the presentation of spring, these are impressive. The wreck of the Warren Hastings (Ch. VI) is vivid in its ability to grip and guide one's response. The death of Cuthbert Ravenshoe (Ch. XLVIII) stands as a third mode, a passage of resolved calm, with the writer quietly and convincingly in control. The perception which Kingsley withheld from Charles and squandered on Welter is in this passage fused with an awareness for place and language. But Kingsley's power is revealed by:

If you were a lazy yachtsman, sliding on a summer's day, before a gentle easterly breeze, over the long swell from the Atlantic, past the south-westerly shores of the Bristol Channel, you would find, after sailing all day beneath shoreless headlands of black slate, that the land suddenly fell away and sunk down, leaving, instead of beetling cliffs, a lovely amphitheatre of hanging wood and lawn, fronted by a beach of yellow sand—a pleasing contrast to the white surf and dark crag to which your eye had got accustomed.

(Ch. LII).

This is more than mere description, but a subtle and certain working out of contrasts ‘beetling cliffs’ and ‘hanging lawn’, ‘yellow sand’ and ‘white surf and dark crag’, the ferocious and the gentle in the natural world, again firmly, but restrainedly, serving to bring one's response to the inhospitality of the coast and the hospitality, the homeliness of the bay. Later one has:

On the east bank of the little river, just where it joins the sea, abrupt lawns of grass and fern, beautifully broken by groups of birch and oak, rise above the dark woodlands, at the culminating point of which on a buttress which runs down from the higher hills behind, stands the house I speak of, the north front looking on the sea, and the west on the wooded glen before mentioned—the house on a ridge dividing the two.

(Ch. III)

The house is thus realistically and imaginatively placed, influenced by the land and the sea, by the gentle and the violent. But having thus placed Ravenshoe Hall (and similarly with Ranford), Kingsley does not allow these two houses to exert any influence on the tale. They are, of course, linked with the characters, but that is their only function—they do not stand as focal points for the action, nor as terms of reference for the feelings of the characters in the tale; they are, in short, unrelated. Further, Kingsley is not often in such control over his technique. An attempt to reveal the fears of Cuthbert and Charles on the night of the storm breaks down when Kingsley introduces a misplaced humour (Ch. VI). But Kingsley, despite the occasional lapses, is in careful control of his technique. Sometimes he is too self-conscious as in his footnote (Ch. XLVII) on Romance and Anglo-Saxon words, at others so delighted by the rush of his own words that the fineness of control is endangered, The Rajah of Ahmednuggur (Ch. XLIV) being an example of such an interruption—but in this instance his humour acts as a saving restraint. Kingsley also acknowledges his debt to other writers, notably Dickens and Sterne. The influence of Dickens's use of the Thames in David Copperfield has been noted. Another parallel exists between the two books, and that is in the storm scenes. Kingsley is indebted, but usefully. There are also references in the text to The Old Curiosity Shop (Ch. XXXVI) and The Pickwick Papers (Ch. LVII), but these are more in the nature of tributes than any indication of an active influence at work. Not so are the references to Sterne:

This paragraph and the last are written in imitation of the Shandean-Southey-Doctorian style. The imitation is a bad one, I find, and approaches nearer to the lower style known among critics as Swivellerism; which consists of saying the first thing that comes into your head.

(Ch. LII)

One should not read this too literally as Kingsley is being ‘sportive’ again, it can more readily be taken as revealing that Sterne's ‘humour’ has exerted an influence on Kingsley. Speech and technique operate closely together for Kingsley as well as for Sterne. Kingsley's humour and sympathy also suggest derivation.

This has been an attempt, not to redefine the place in the history of the novel that Kingsley has been assigned, but an attempt to elucidate certain aspects of Ravenshoe not accounted for in extant criticism, and to find a more appropriate critical apparatus for the tale. The charges of carelessness have, I hope, been countered, the strictures on the lack of structure explained, and a unifying force tending towards centrality (unfortunately not achieved) emphasised in the varied manner and range of his broadly sympathetic humour. Criticism and time have been more than a little unfair to Henry Kingsley, and it is essential that the unfairness be removed. This has been such an attempt, and an attempt to analyze the ‘attractiveness’ of Ravenshoe, but not, an attempt to claim it is a great novel; its minor nature has been implied. However many of the elements in the tale have not been evaluated. The expression of sympathy has been noted, but not developed, Kingsley's assessment of human conduct as one of opposition between ‘principle’ and ‘sentiment’ and its application in this tale could have been discussed, and a closer examination of Kingsley's use of language and skill in handling conversation made. An assessment, however, that looks merely for entertainment in a narrow sense operating through a humorous and charming ability to create characters, and a descriptive power persuasive in evoking well-known scenes, will overlook Kingsley's real virtues, even although those virtues are of a minor order.

Notes

1. p. 177. ‘Ravenshoe, 3 Vols., 1861.’ This in fact is the date of serialization in Macmillan's Magazine (January 1861-June 1862) Vols III and IV. Ravenshoe was not published in book form until 1862. Since this article was written Ravenshoe has been republished by the University of Nebraska Press (1967) edited with an introduction by William H. Scheuerle.

2. (London, 1954), later reprinted by Pelican Books (1958).

3. ‘Henry Kingsley: A Portrait’, Edinburgh Review (Oct. 1924), pp. 330-348.

4. ‘The Noble School of Fiction’, The Nation (New York), 6 July 1865, reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Camb. Mass., 1921). Page references are to this edition.

5. Sadleir's first article in The Edinburgh Review was revised for publication in The Times Literary Supplement, 2 January 1930, and further revised for inclusion in his Things Past (London, 1944).

6. Angela Thirkell ‘Henry Kingsley’ Nineteenth Century Fiction 5 (1950-1951), Part I Dec. 1950 pp. 175-187; Part II March 1951 pp. 273-293; William E. Buckler: ‘Henry Kingsley and The Gentleman's Magazine’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology, L(1951), pp. 90-100; Leonie J. Kramer, Henry Kingsley: Some Novels of Australian Life, Canberra University College Commonwealth Literary Fund Lectures 1954; Robert Lee Woolf: ‘Henry Kingsley’ Harvard Library Bulletin, XIII (1959), 195-226; see the Annual Bibliography of Australian Literary Studies for articles on Kingsley since 1963.

7. Thirkell, op. cit., pp. 185-186.

8. A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (London, 1919), p. 352. But Saintsbury's alignment is revealed by: (Henry Kingsley's) ‘life was not long, as he was unfortunately compelled during most of it to write for his living’, loc. cit.

9. ‘On Writing Out and Henry Kingsley’, Collected Essays of George Saintsbury 1875-1920 (London, 1923), Vol. II, p. 349.

10. ibid., p. 350.

11. Victorian Novelists (London, 1906), p. 240.

12. A History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne (London, 1912), p. 632.

13. Spectator, 7 June 1862. Vol. 35, p. 637.

14. Times Literary Supplement, 2 June, 1930.

15. Selected Essays on Literary Subjects (London, 1914), p. 158.

16. ‘C.K.B.’, ‘Friends that Fail Not: II Henry Kingsley’, Academy, Vol. XL (1901), p. 310.

17. The History of the English Novel (London, 1924-1928), Vol. 9, 188-189.

18. G. W. E. Russell, op. cit., p. 155.

19. Times Literary Supplement, loc. cit.

20. ‘He is in every way his own worst enemy’, Edinburgh Review, p. 337.

21. Although Sadleir, the most informed, does come out with, ‘Nowhere in fiction are blood-bounds treated so lovingly or so perceptively as in Silcote or in Stretton’, Edinburgh Review, p. 338.

22. See also second footnote to Ravenshoe Ch. XLIV: ‘for no kind of unfairness is so common as that of identifying the opinions of a story teller with those of his dramatis personae’.

23. Sadleir, Edinburgh Review, p. 336. Sadleir and James agree (surprisingly) in this. See James, p. 59.

24. Sadleir, Edinburgh Review, p. 337.

25. See Dictionary of National Biography.

26. Henry Kingsley, Stretton (London, 1869), Vol. III, Epilogue to final Chapter.

27. Saintsbury, Collected Essays, p. 348.

28. Cf. Charles's treatment of the police officer, Ch. LX.