SOURCE: “The Wargrave Novels,” in The Neglected Brother: A Study of Henry Kingsley, Florida State University Press, 1971, pp. 100-27.

[In the following essay, Scheuerle focuses on Kingsley's novels of the mid to late 1860s, arguing that these works exhibit a general decline into literary absurdity and carelessness, but occasionally demonstrate artistic merit, as in Leighton Court and The Hillyars and the Burtons.]

The Hillyars and the Burtons, Kingsley's fourth novel which had been partly written before his marriage, is a much tighter, more closely knit work than either of his two earlier major ones and could have been his best novel. Subtitled “A Story of Two Families,” the novel traces the misfortunes of the Burtons, the noble blacksmith family, in England and their astonishing rise to wealth and prominence in Australia. Jim Burton, the oldest son, becomes the Honorable James Burton, a commissioner to the International Exhibition of 1862; and his younger brother Joseph, “a hunchback … with the face of a Byron,” becomes a famous orator, Minister of Education, a member of the Governor's Council, and the husband of a young, pretty, and rich widow, Mrs. North. The novel also deals with the Hillyars of Stanlake, an old aristocratic house plagued by the problems of heirship, which, like those in Ravenshoe, focus on the usual confusion of births and the missing document, in this case a will. The half-brothers involved in the fraternal contest are George Hillyar, a less villainous George Hawker (Geoffry Hamlyn), and Erne Hillyar, the amiable and gentle boy who must learn responsibility. Plausibly, Kingsley so entangles the fortunes of these families that they never become separated.

When the novel was first published in 1865, some critics ridiculed the Burtons' gushing goodness and nobility. Twenty-two-year-old Henry James, in particular, entitled his review of Kingsley's novel “The Noble School of Fiction” and, in an attack ostensibly directed toward Charles Kingsley, reprimanded writers for attributing heroic proportions to commonplace characters, especially blacksmiths who have “none but the minor virtues—honesty, energy, and a strong family feeling.” Snobbishly, James reminded such writers that “there is no such thing as a gentleman in the rough. A gentleman is born of his polish.”¹

The Burtons, it is true, are larger-than-life. James Burton the elder is “the ideal of all the blacksmiths who ever lived” (Vol. I, ch. 2), and his wife, “the most affectionate and big-hearted of women we [have] ever known” (Vol. II, ch. 4), is unhappy only when the family's newly acquired wealth restricts her from doing her own housework. Together, Mr. and Mrs. Burton “would have made it home even on an iceberg. Their inner life was so perfectly, placidly good, the flame of their lives burnt so clearly and so steadily that its soft light was reflected on the faces of all those who came within its influences” (Vol. III, ch. 2). Unreal as they may be, the Burtons, nevertheless, continue the line that Kingsley had set up with the Buckleys, in Geoffry Hamlyn. For him, the Buckleys, the Burtons, and all of the other great-hearted, noble gentlemen, be they impoverished aristocrats or blacksmiths, personify the “good life” that Kingsley cherished.

When Kingsley concentrates on narrating his story of the two families, he creates some meritorious scenes. The loving description of Chelsea and the Burtons' home, Church Place (Vol. I, chs. 2, 5); the Omeo gold mining disaster in which Erne almost dies (Vol. III, ch. 23); old Sir George Hillyar's death as recounted by Samuel Burton, Jim's uncle and young George Hillyar's enemy, in his marvelous letter (Vol. II, ch. 20); George Hillyar's premonitions in the Palmerston Post Office that foreshadow his dreaded meeting with Samuel Burton (Vol. I, ch. 15), as well as the scenes of the Australian terrain and of the cyclone which devastates the Burtons' Australian home (Vol. III, ch. 38) are all first-rate Kingsley. And the incident when Sir George drags the lake for the supposedly drowned Erne (Vol. I, ch. 10) is as entertaining a one as can be found in any Kingsley novel.

The novel suffers, however, from a superimposed moral. In his “Preface” (which was not republished in all subsequent editions) Kingsley wrote:

In this story, an uneducated girl, who might, I fancy, after a year and a half at a boarding-school, have developed into a very noble lady, is arraigned before the reader, and awaits his judgment.

The charge against her is, that, by an overstrained idea of duty, she devoted herself to her brother, and made her lover but a secondary person. I am instructed to reply on her behalf, that, in the struggle between inclination and what she considered her duty, she, right or wrong, held by duty at the risk of breaking her own heart.

“Probably no living novelist,” generalized the Saturday Review, “is less fit than Mr. Henry Kingsley to treat a subtle moral question or to describe a conflict of delicate motives.”² Basically, this criticism is just. Ravenshoe demonstrated that Kingsley's art lies in his humor and in his deft depiction of external life, not in psychological studies. In fact, another Kingsley-Waugh comparison can be noted here. Assuredly, the nineteenth-century Kingsley lacks the twentieth-century Waugh's satirical cleverness, as well as his disciplined intellect, but in their individual ways these two writers, at their best, are witty mimics, handling well the frivolous and the farcical situations. Both seem to look at the world with the eyes of perceptive urchins; but whereas Kingsley wistfully dreams heroics, Waugh (or, at least, the early Waugh), with a child's insensitivity, gleefully smears comedy over social criticism and brutal physical suffering alike. Lacking delicacy of perception and, possibly one can say, passionate sensitivity to philosophical/ethical problems, both men seem unable to deal well with serious emotional themes, whether the theme be love/duty, as in The Hillyars and the Burtons, or religious faith/secular love, as in Brideshead Revisited.

Understandably, then, The Hillyars and the Burtons inadequately treats the declared moral, and, actually, the love/duty theme fails to dominate the novel. But since Emma Burton, the uneducated girl torn between her love for Erne Hillyar and her duty—the determination to dedicate her life to her deformed brother Joseph—is a major character, the moral must be satisfied at the end of the novel. Although sensible and loving in all other matters, she pursued her idea of duty so zealously that it seems to be an obsession with her, and instead of being the heroic maiden, as Kingsley planned, she becomes a foolish and spiteful girl who victimizes and ruins her lover.

Since Kingsley greatly admired The Mill on the Floss (1860), it is possible that in writing his novel he was influenced by George Eliot's presentation of Maggie and Tom Tulliver and Philip Wakem; and in juxtaposing characters and fitting them to his own purposes, Kingsley transformed the hunchback lover of The Mill on the Floss into a dependent brother. If so, once again a comparison makes evident Kingsley's inability to analyze such a profound situation, realizing all of its nuances. Whereas George Eliot carefully builds Maggie's love/duty struggle to its ultimate display of sisterly devotion in the sacrificial flood scene, Kingsley depends entirely upon repetitive statements, such as “I have devoted my whole life to one single object, and nothing must ever interfere with it,” and a few contrived circumstances to tell the reader that Emma's sacrifice is necessary. Kingsley fails to convince. If Joseph, like Tom/Philip, had stayed in England, where the social structure may have obstructed his professional rise, Emma's devotion might have had a real cause, but since the action of the novel takes place in opportunity-laden Australia her sacrifice seems rather pointless, for without Emma's help Joseph had enough intelligence to achieve all of the honors mentioned.

Mainly, the reader's disgust and anger are directed against Emma's (and Kingsley's) treatment of poor, gentle Erne, who suffers harsh tests—especially the lacerating severity at Omeo—in order to win Emma's withheld love. Like Charles Ravenshoe and Austin Elliot, Erne matures, changing from a “fanciful sentimental child into a thoughtful melancholy man,” but in Erne's case the tragic life has not been fully justified for Erne's misfortunes have been forced upon him by unsatisfactory circumstances.

Erne's maturation recalls George Meredith's handling of a comparable problem in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Erne's childhood parallels many facets of Richard's. Both boys are secluded young heirs, pampered and dominated by a father whose sense of pride has been wounded by an unfaithful wife. Erne's Rayham Abbey is Stanlake, a “brazen tower … filled with grey-headed servants.” Finally discovering the female sex—Erne at seventeen, Richard at eighteen—they rebel against the stern parental authority and escape or are thrown into an unfamiliar world, where, at length, they are crushed. Richard's ordeal, however, convinces the reader because Meredith has psychologically analyzed the involved ambiguities that motivated the various familial and societal relationships that led to Richard's disillusionment. Also, although Richard's severe trials were initiated by Sir Austin's misdirected and selfish love, they are furthered by Richard's own stubbornness. But when Kingsley tells us at the end of his novel that the innocent Erne finally “saw that life was not as one would have it: that one must submit to the failures of one's boy-dreams, and not whine over them,” we feel justifiable indignation and disbelief because Erne's “boy-dreams” have been perversely shattered by Emma's and his half-brother's refusals to return, fully in Emma's case, Erne's passionate and natural love.

In fact, the entire ending of the novel is a disappointment. Like Geoffry Hamlyn, this romance is packed with fun and gaiety; we expect and want another glorious grand finale as we had in that earlier novel. We find, instead, only gloom darkening the last part of The Hillyars and the Burtons: the old house at Chelsea has been torn down, Emma has died in a shipwreck, Erne has tried to “purge” himself in the “smoke of Sebastopol,” the childlike Gerty Hillyar, George's widow, wanders half-demented over the Australian glades, and the once-spirited Lesbia Burke, a symbol of Australian strength, roughness but nobility, stands looking solemnly out over the waters where Emma had drowned. Here, it seems, we have Kingsley's personal realization that “life was not as one would have it”; the boy-dreams of Geoffry Hamlyn have become darkly clouded.

Kingsley was stung by the critics' handling of The Hillyars and the Burtons, especially that of the Saturday Review, which not only dismissed as absurd Kingsley's love/duty moral but attacked his characterizations of both the Burtons and Gerty Hillyar, who, admittedly, talks a language all her own. At times, her words are little more than nonsense: “Are these pink cups ice-cream! I wonder whether I dare eat some. I have never seen iced cream before in my life. Perhaps I had better not; it might make me cry” (Vol. I, ch. 26). At other times, she reverts to her Australian dialect: “Well! if this don't bang wattle gum … I wish I may be buried in the Bush in a sheet of bark. Why I feel all over centipedes and copper lizards. For you to go and see the devil with that dear child, and teach him not to let his mother know, and in Whitley Copse, too, of all places. … You ought to be——. You ought to get——. Why, you ought to have your grop stopped——” (Vol. III, ch. 3). “Is this wit, or humour or realism or some new-fangled literary Pre-Raffaelitism?” the critic of the Saturday Review asked.

Because of this criticism, Kingsley struggled with his next major novel, Silcote of Silcotes. “It would,” he declared, “be very dry. There will be no fun” (E. [Ellis, Stewart Marsh. Henry Kingsley, 1830-1876. Towards a vindication Grant Richards: London, 1931], p. 144). His letters, however, show a nagging fear of an inability to produce a different type of novel:

Do give me your frank opinions about Silcotes. I want to be correct and thoughtful without being dull. I fear dullness above all things.

(E., pp. 156-57)

I want to tell about good things and good people without being “goody.” I want to be tragical without Braddon and Collins [sic]³ bigamy and poisoning. I want to write a story which shall be interesting and exciting, and make everyone the better for having read it. And I shall do it, if God wills.

(E., p. 159)

Silcotes is all hardbitten, earnest work, but it must be made more lively. There is a dreary purism about the earlier numbers of Silcotes which is, even to myself who understand it, very dull. The slanginess and rapidity of Ravenshoe were far preferable.

(E., p. 162)

Silcotes … the terrible pull on my resources.

(E., p. 163)

You see I have recast Silcotes; it must and shall succeed.

(E., p. 166)

[Silcotes], as I have revised it, can at least give no offense. I have carefully attended to every word of criticism.

(E., p. 167)

Even the asides in the novel show his worry and struggle:

It is not necessary to follow Miss Lee and her charge through their long afternoon's walk. It might be funny! but we don't want to be funny.

(Vol. I, ch. 12)

So comes one long story to an end. Nothing remains but to give the various characters their departure, and to finish one of the most difficult efforts of story-telling ever attempted.

(Vol. III, “Conclusion”)

Striving to make accurate all details in the novel in order to avoid adverse criticism, Kingsley made a hurried trip to Normandy the month after the serialization of Silcote of Silcotes had begun in Macmillan's Magazine to witness the Army Maneuvers of 1866. The final action of the novel revolves around the Italian War of Liberation in Lombardy, specifically the battles of Montevella and Solferino in 1859, where the combined forces of France and Sardinia defeated the Austrians, but because expenses prohibited Kingsley from going to northern Italy he thought that the Maneuvers would enable him, as he told Macmillan, to “see large masses of French troops. I cannot see Solferino without that. … I can do the Austrian business well enough. I am familiar with German troops, but I want to see these curious swarms of scarlet, grey, and white shifting and changing” (E., p. 158).

But with all of Kingsley's great care, the novel was not popular with most of the critics. The influential Saturday Review, for example, wrote that “in many respects, Silcote of Silcotes is the very worst story that Mr. Kingsley has ever produced—the only point about it upon which we can congratulate him being that in it he has written a novel without a purpose. As long as he steers clear of that fault, there is a vivacity and good nature about him, even in his worst moments, which will always secure for him a certain amount of popularity.”⁴ The critic, possibly John Morley, criticized Kingsley for relying too heavily upon his stock figure, the muscular hero (in this case, Tom Silcote), the complexity of the plot, and the “too refined” language of the characters, especially that of Mrs. Sugden, a farmer's daughter who had been a Duchess' maid for two years and, as we later learn, was secretly married in a Scottish ceremony to Tom Silcote.

Improbable as her dialogue is for her station, there is, as Robert Lee Wolff has recently noted, a “curious power” in some of Mrs. Sugden's conversation, especially in her answer to Squire Silcote's proposition to make her son his groom:

“No. Let him stick to his sheep. I, you see, know more of domestic service than most, and my answer is, ‘No.’ Let him freeze and bake on the hillside with his sheep. Let him stay up late with his team, and then get out of his warm bed in the biting winter weather to feed them again at four. Let him do hedge and ditch work on food which a Carolina negro would refuse; let him plough the heaviest clay until the public-house becomes a heaven and a rest to him; let him mow until the other mowers find him so weak that he must mow with them no longer, lest he ruin the contract; let him reap until his loud-tongued wife can beat him at that—for he must marry, O Lord, for he must marry, and in his own station too; let him go on at the plough tail; among the frozen turnips, among the plashy hedgesides, until the inevitable rheumatism catches him in the back, and the parish employs him on the roads to save the rates; and then, when his wife dies, let them send him to the house, and let him rot there and be buried in a box; but he shall not be a domestic servant for all that, Silcote. I know too much about that. We have vices enough of our own, without requiring yours”

(Vol. I, ch. 11).⁵

It is unfortunate that Kingsley did not align that rhythmically forceful speech with a more appropriate character.

In order to substitute for the eliminated humor and to fill the standard three-volume edition, Kingsley, unwisely, included too many eccentric characters, along with “balderdash,” to use his favorite word, and excessive action. In the case of the characters, he has erred most. Although accustomed to Kingsley's presentation of characters through outward behavior rather than by revelation of their mental processes, the reader, nevertheless, demands that the characters act consistently if they are to win his full credulity. The unbelievable characters that dotted the pages of the first two novels, with the possible exception of Mary Thornton Hawker, never upset the reader either because the novel did not depend upon their credibility or because Kingsley had so enwrapped them with a special charm that the reader gladly accepted their improbability. Importantly, all of them seemed to act causally, never shifting out of the mold into which Kingsley had placed them. But Eleanor Hilton (Austin Elliot) and Emma Burton sharply reveal what can happen to his novels when Kingsley fails to understand complex major figures.

Actually, the central impetus of Silcote of Silcotes is built around an improbable characterization. Supposedly, Henry Silcote, the patriarchal Dark Squire of the family, is a man feared by all—as terrifying as the unexpected “lightening which shattered the ash tree … and killed two of the sheep.” But the Henry Silcote the reader sees is an irascible though kindly grandfather, as easily tamed as the bloodhounds that guard him. Hinging the initial action on a contrived situation, Kingsley asks the reader to believe that jealousy had led Silcote, a brilliant lawyer, to suspect his first wife of murderous intent against him, a suspicion without any evidence, which finally led to her death. We all know Othello by heart and thus realize that similar happenings can be fictionalized successfully, but careful characterization, prepared incidents, intensity of language among other things are needed. Kingsley does little. Dating the occurrence twenty years before the novel opens, Kingsley merely tells us that it happened and demands that we believe it so that the parts of his story may fall into place. The impossible becomes even more ludicrous when Kingsley further informs us that the crimes were initiated by Silcote's sister, the foolish and melodramatic Princess of Castelnuovo, and her cohorts, whom Silcote has always believed to be scheming imbeciles.

Kingsley himself, apparently aware that something was wrong in his characterizations, repeatedly tried to rationalize their actions by stating that outside influences or hypersensitive feelings unnaturally swayed their common sense. Through Silcote, for example, he warns that a novelist would have a difficult time making the Princess a good central figure in a novel because “her folly is too incongruous; the ruck of commonplace fools who read novels will not have sufficient brains to appreciate the transcendental genius of her folly” (Vol. III, ch. 8). But this type of circumlocutory explanation will not suffice when her motiveless action effects major crises in the novel, such as Silcote's twenty-year seclusion. Nor does it explain why Silcote ever believed his sister's accusation about his wife in the first place.

The novel proper deals with Silcote's relationship with his three sons: Algernon, the disowned son of Silcote's first wife, a minister who is converted to Puseyism; Tom, the likeable profligate and the heroic soldier; and Arthur, the priggish youngest son, who loves the governess, Miss Lee. Intermingled with these threads are the Princess' intrigues with foreign spies, do-gooders, and assassins, and the story of James Sugden, Tom Silcote's unknown son, through childhood to young manhood.

Besides packing the novel with the excessive action necessary to tie together all of those threads, Kingsley strangely devotes half a chapter to a colloquy among Charles Ravenshoe, Austin Elliot, and Lord Edward Barty. This practice of introducing former characters into later novels is not unusual with Kingsley. Sometimes they maintain their familiar personalities, as with Lord Saltire and Lady Ascot, who appear briefly in three other novels besides Ravenshoe, while others merely retain a former character's name, such as the three different Gil Macdonalds, who appear in Austin Elliot, Old Margaret, and The Boy in Grey. Never are their appearances obtrusive, either because they perform minor functions and leave the scenes quietly or else because they are merely mentioned. But in Silcote of Silcotes when Austin Elliot asks “What the dickens are we doing in this room?” the reader wants to know the same thing. There is absolutely no reason to include those three boys in the novel, because, chorus-like, they only reiterate the already told Silcote history. What is even odder is the manner in which Kingsley deals with them. They have aged greatly: “The tallest of the three was a rather pale man, with dark hair and very prominent features; the next in height was pale also, but very handsome. Both of these men looked some ten years older than they were, and spoke in a low and deliberate voice, like men who had been in some way tamed.” Their conversation contains the balderdash typical of this period of Kingsley's writings:

“Old Silcote now put the Silcote crown on the head of the second son by his second wife, who, as I am informed by Miss Raylock, refused it with scorn. If that is the case,” said Charles Ravenshoe, “it is the only good I ever heard of him. He is an utterly narrow-minded prig, of the worst Oxford model.”

“The stamp of man who rusticated you, for instance,” said Austin Elliot.

“Your remark,” said Charles Ravenshoe, “is not only coarse and impertinent, but also falls wide of the mark. I am trying to enlarge your little mind, narrowed into smaller limits than even its natural ones, by your worship of this new gospel of Free Trade and Cobdenism. You interrupt me with personalities. I wish to tell you about these Silcotes.”

“You can't deny that you set the College on fire, and aimed four-penny rockets at the Dean's window. It was entirely owing to your evil guidance that that quiet creature Ascot got sent down, you old sinner!” replied Austin Elliot.

“Don't chaff, you two, or at least wait till we get home,” said Lord Edward. “I am bored here, and I want to hear more about these Silcotes. That Charles is an old ruffian we all know; we will get more of his confessions out of him, and tell Eleanor if he don't go on.”

The history continues with occasional references by Lord Edward and Austin to Charles' rustication. Then, as Charles continues his tale:

“Arthur of Balliol has rejected the crown, and has systematically bullied and insulted him; he has an awful tongue, this Arthur. The Oxford fellows who were—

“Rusticated for setting the College on fire,” suggested Austin Elliot.

“I shall have to do violence to this man,” said Charles Ravenshoe; “I shall have to fight a duel with this fellow.”

There was such a sharp sudden spasm in Austin Elliot's face as he said this that Charles Ravenshoe hurried on, cursing inwardly his wandering tongue.

(Vol. II, ch. 16)

It is difficult to know exactly what Kingsley had intended to accomplish with all this. Assuredly, the scene does not jell. The stressing of the boys' permanent scars of melancholy, which are only emphasized by the references to the college-days antics, probably reflects Kingsley's personal mood at this time, for his youth also has passed. But the mention of the duel in which Austin's friend and Lord Edward's brother, Charles Barty, was killed upsets the reader as a macabre joke. And annoyingly, while Kingsley expected his readers to be familiar enough with references to incidents from previous novels, he seemed to have forgotten the proper identification of his characters. Lord Edward says that he will “tell Eleanor” if Charles does not continue with the story. Charles is married to Mary Corby, whereas it is Austin Elliot who is married to Eleanor Hilton.

The disillusionment with life that jarred the ending of The Hillyars and the Burtons also affects Silcote of Silcotes. At the close of the novel, Dora, the wife of the young hero, James Sugden Silcote, and now the recognized mistress of Silcotes, laments that “the old house will never be what it was before. I know that the new order will be better than the old, but I am wicked and perverse, and I hate it.” She then relates her earlier impression of Silcotes: “‘In old times this house was a very charming one. There was a perfectly delicious abandon about it. … Coming as I did from the squalor of my father's house, this was a fairy palace for me. True, there was an ogre; my grandfather Silcote was the ogre; but then I liked ogres. There was a somewhat cracked princess—a real Italian princess—in velvet and jewels; and I like people of that kind. Then there was a dark story, which we never could understand, which was to us infinitely charming; there was almost barbarous profusion and ostentation, which everybody … loves in their heart of hearts; there were these bloodhounds which I hated at first … but which I have got to love as the last remnants of the ancient régime; there were horses, grooms, carriages, ponies, deer, as indeed there are now, with all their charm gone; and lastly, one could do exactly as one liked; one could revel in all this luxury and beauty, set here like a splendid jewel among the surrounding forest, without a soul to control one. And this was very charming’” (Vol. III, ch. 20). Besides recording Kingsley's lamentation for bygone days, Dora's words sum up well the reader's feelings concerning most of Kingsley's works of this period. Although a romantic aura still hangs over the novels, Kingsley's despondent meditation has dispelled most of their charm and liveliness. Whereas Geoffry Hamlyn and Ravenshoe seemed to have been spontaneous endeavors, these later works strike the reader as tedious struggles.

On January 1, 1867, while Silcote of Silcotes was still running serially in Macmillan's Magazine, Edward Walford, the editor of The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review, wrote to Kingsley, “I am authorized by Messrs Bradbury Evans & Co to offer you the sum of £600 (six hundred pounds) for the copyright of a novel which shall run through eight or nine numbers of the Gents Mag. & afterwards be published by themselves on their own account.”⁶

This proposal is significant because it shows that even with the adverse criticism received by The Hillyars and the Burtons, Kingsley, in January, 1867, had enough of a reputation for Bradbury & Evans & Co. to ask him “to write the first story which has ever appeared in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ in a course of 137 years.”⁷ Also the finished story, Mademoiselle Mathilde, reveals how Kingsley adapted his style of storytelling to editorial restrictions. Walford admonished Kingsley that “Neither Messrs B&E as proprietors, not I as Editor, wish to fetter you as to your subject; but you will doubtless remember that the readers of the GM are a particular and special class, with rather retrospective tastes, & a story which has its scenes laid chiefly in the colonies would scarcely be as likely to interest them as one which deals with Old England, or at all events with Europe.”⁸

Needing the money, Kingsley readily accepted the restrictions and assured Walford that the magazine would receive a “sedate gentlemanly thoughtful story,” interesting and original, “thrown into the past, and bringing the reader face to face with some one or more of great men of whom he has heard, and whom he will see reappear familiarly with the deepest interest.” Probably thinking again of past critical disapproval of his “new-fangled literary Pre-Raffaelitism,” Kingsley added that he was looking “forward with great eagerness to this engagement. I wish very much to see whether or not I can succeed at a more sedate style of story, and I feel sure that I can.”⁹ Decidedly then, the story could not be Kingsley's usual rambling type dealing exclusively with the history of old declining families nor could it rely upon his Australian experiences, for it had to be directed to “a particular and special class” of readers whose interest was historical. In his “Preface” to the three-volume edition, Kingsley acknowledged his apprehension when he accepted the proposal: “I was extremely diffident, feeling somewhat like a modest young curate, who has to return thanks for the clergy before a large audience principally composed of dissenters; I was not reassured by being told, before I began, that a large number of the subscribers strongly objected to the arrangement.”

“The choice of a story,” Kingsley also tells us in the “Preface,” “was extremely difficult” until someone, possibly Anne Thackeray, to whom, as previously stated, Mademoiselle Mathilde was dedicated, suggested that he relate the one that he had heard the previous summer at St. Malo when he had gone to France to get background material for Silcote of Silcotes and that he had “so often spoken [of] since.” This story focuses on the English-French D'Isigny family, especially the daughter Mathilde, and their involvement in the French Revolution. The climax of the story is Mathilde's sacrificial death on the guillotine for her sister, Adèle.

Taking “liberties” with the original story in order to turn it “from a simple narrative to a dramatically-written fiction” (“Preface”), Kingsley carefully tailored the story to his special audience. In the serialization, footnotes (some so long as three-hundred words); asides which quoted sources for historical information; and direct references to the readers of the magazine, such as “It seems to me that The Gentleman's Magazine is the periodical of all others in which the names of heroes, with their performances, should be embalmed,” all attest Kingsley's great concern. The direct references and many of the asides and footnotes were dropped in the three-volume edition.¹⁰

Aware that his previous novels had been criticized for their loose construction, Kingsley endeavored to tighten this one, and, on the whole, his handling of structural problems is unusually fine. He repeatedly tells Walford that he is taking care to write a novel “which will pay as a whole.” He has not, he says, “confined myself to a sensational ending to each No.”¹¹

Within the first three paragraphs of Chapter 1, “A Chapter Which Will Have To Be Written Several Times Again: Each Time In Darker Ink,” Kingsley reveals his heroine's character as she is about to sacrifice her comfort by venturing into a tempest to visit a dying woman:

It is quite impossible, so Mademoiselle Mathilde D'Isigny concluded, that any reasonable being could dream of going out on such an afternoon. It was not to be thought of. Nevertheless, she began thinking at once about her sabots and her red umbrella.

A wild revolutionary-looking nimbus, urged on by a still wilder wind, which seemed, from its direction, to have started from America, had met the rapidly-heated and rapidly-cooled strata of chalk in the valley of the Stour in Dorsetshire. The nimbus, chased by the furious headlong American wind, met the chalk downs while they were cooled by a long winter's frost, and at once dissolved itself into cataracts of water; into cataracts more steady, more persistent, and, in the end, more dangerous, than any which ever came from the wildest and noisest summer thunderstorm.

It was quite impossible that any reasonable woman could go out on such an afternoon; still the sabots and red umbrella dwelt on her mind, for it might under certain circumstances become necessary, although impossible.

Mathilde, the “sacrificial act,” and the “revolutionary” atmosphere, natural and manmade, are interlinked, and, as both the title of the chapter and Kingsley's words at the end of the first chapter predict, this trinity will reappear rhythmically (and in darker ink) during the rest of the novel: “Mademoiselle Mathilde is already developed. The circumstances around her will develop; but she will remain the same.”

Relying upon parallelisms and antitheses, Kingsley introduces the setting, characters, and circumstances for Mathilde's future sacrifices. The novel focuses on the two countries, England (chs. 1-4) and France (chs. 5-8); and then specifically on the D'Isignys' two great houses, Sheepsden and Montauban, the former being struck by an atmospheric tempest, while a war storm rages over the latter; and on Mathilde's antithesis, her weak-willed sister, Adèle. Most of the action during the first half of the novel occurs in peaceful England, but the Revolution for Mathilde enters in the figure of the French soldier, Louis de Valognes, whom she loves. In “The First Sacrifice” (Vol. I, ch. 17) the ink darkens. Mathilde dies “one of her deaths” when she denies herself Louis after seeing him and Adèle embrace.

Near the middle of the novel Kingsley pauses to tell his readers (and probably to point out to his critics that he knows the rules of artistic unity) that he has placed before them all of the causes and motivations and is ready to show the effects.¹² Moving Adèle to France as the Marquise de Valognes, a member of a family especially targeted by the Revolutionists and, thus, into the heart of the Revolution, Kingsley, in an aside about two-thirds through the novel, sets up the final sacrifice: “So the interest of our story concentrates now, I hope naturally, upon the two sisters, and, to some extent, on the two houses in which they lived so entirely separated from one another” (Vol. III, ch. 2). In “The Journey” (Vol. III, ch. 8), a chapter title which recalls Mathilde's first journey out into a storm, Mathilde undertakes her unwilling trip to France, which ends darkly in her sacrificial death for Adèle.

Kingsley also strengthens the novel with minor character antitheses: Mathilde's French lover, André Desilles, is set against her English one, Sir Lionel Somers; the villainous French servant Barbot, who attempts to kill André, against the friendly English groom William the Silent; and the termagant Madame D'Isigny against the noble Lady Somers, Mathilde's English surrogate mother.

Although Kingsley attributed the sole inspiration for Mademoiselle Mathilde to the story heard at St. Malo, a reader cannot help but notice the similarities between Kingsley's novel and Dickens' historical romance A Tale of Two Cities, published nine years earlier. Kingsley, himself, even calls attention to the connection between the two novels. About to describe a mob scene he stops to say, “Who can describe a mob? Dickens himself has to be very general when he does so” (Vol. II, ch. 11), and, later, he refers directly to Dickens' novel: “The weather was as white and hot, and fierce, as were the Parisians, and the smell which Mr. Dickens, in his ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ calls ‘the smell of imprisoned sleep,’ was hot and heavy” (Vol. III, ch. 18).

It is an exaggeration, however, to assert, as George Saintsbury has, that Mademoiselle Mathilde is a direct imitation of A Tale of Two Cities.¹³ A reading of the two works clearly shows that Mademoiselle Mathilde is no more that than A Tale of Two Cities is a direct imitation of, let us say, Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni (1842), another tale which utilizes the French Revolution setting and the sacrifice-on-the-guillotine device. Kingsley, like Dickens, was too original a writer to copy wholesale another writer's novel. Not only do Dickens' and Kingsley's story lines have obvious differences but Mademoiselle Mathilde is filled with usual Kingsleyan characteristics: a history of a family group; the concentration on a central character who must suffer, must undergo tests before he realizes his goal (or dies obtaining it); an emphasis on the nobility of man; and the loving depiction of ancestral homes. Also, unlike Dickens, Kingsley followed the pattern of English historical fiction set up by Scott of including historical personages as characters in the novel: Marat plays an important part, while Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Henri de LaRochejaquelin, among others, are introduced briefly.

Familiar as he was with Dickens' works, Kingsley would have immediately seen the basic similarities between the St. Malo story and A Tale of Two Cities. These similarities, plus both Kingsley's desire to write a successful novel and Walford's restriction and admonition, may have led Kingsley to rely even more heavily on Dickens' formula for a historical romance. Some of the “liberties” Kingsley took with the original story tend to substantiate this assertion.

In the “Preface” Kingsley makes no mention that any of the action in the St. Malo story was set in England. Indeed, the implication is that the original story was set entirely in France. But Kingsley followed Dickens' lead and placed part of the French family in England. To make this living arrangement possible, he gives Mathilde and Adèle—like Lucie Manette—an Anglo-French parentage. Then, when Kingsley needed to move the action to France, he relied upon the same device Dickens had of having a daughter's marriage with French nobility force the French family living in England into the Reign of Terror. Not only did this change from the original story offer Kingsley the contrast between the two countries which had worked so well for Dickens, but it gave him an opportunity to describe his beloved English countryside.

Another alteration of the original story is Kingsley's characterization of Mathilde. In the St. Malo story she was not Adèle's rival in love but her married sister. The love triangle did not exist. In the finished novel, even though Mathilde has other lovers, her sacrifice resembles Carton's. Both characters deny themselves the one they love and finally sacrifice themselves for their love's spouse. Sidney Carton's words to Lucie, “I would embrace any sacrifice for you and those dear to you” (Book II, ch. 13), reflect Mathilde's unspoken words to Louis. Also both Mathilde and Carton are involved in actions that forebode the substitution on the guillotine. Carton had saved Darnay in the English Court scene; Mathilde, as stated above in the discussion of the chapter “The First Sacrifice,” had died “one of her deaths” when she gave up Louis to Adèle.

Other less conspicuous resemblances, slightly altered, exist between the two novels. Madame D'Isigny is pictured as a Royalist Madame Defarge, who constantly mends fishnets instead of knitting aristocrats' names in a scarf. Like Madame Defarge's, her fury is monomaniacal, caused by a frenzied desire for personal revenge. Whereas Madame Defarge wanted to avenge herself on those who had destroyed her family, Madame D'Isigny wanted to infuriate and belittle her republican husband, who had never yielded to her. Mathilde's Mrs. Bone, a typically down-to-earth English housekeeper, is a less determined and heroic Mrs. Pross; William the Silent, Kingsley's “solid young Englishman,” is a more refined Jerry Cruncher, but like Dickens' character, William adds a light touch to the serious novel; the two sisters imprisoned in the Abbaye with Mathilde suggest Sydney Carton's little seamstress; and a child's death in the street initiates the mob's admiration for D'Isigny's kindness instead of its hatred for the Marquis St. Evrémonde's inhumanity.

But even with Dickens' romance as a model and even with its tight structure, Mademoiselle Mathilde, which was Kingsley's favorite novel,¹⁴ is, for the most part, dull reading today. The major reason must lie with its place of publication. In trying to satisfy the readers of The Gentleman's Magazine while always keeping his eye on the critics, Kingsley wrote the novel without his usual lightness and humor, and lacking the “slaginess and rapidity of Ravenshoe,” the novel is too weighted down with historical references and serious political evaluation. When Kingsley attempted to lighten the novel, he unfortunately relied again upon eccentric characters, in this case the exasperating Monsieur and Madame D'Isigny with their impractical and ridiculous attempts to alter the course of the Revolution.

Much can be said in favor of Mathilde herself. Although, like Emma Burton, Mathilde gives up love for duty and always seems to be striving for perfection, she has human faults, and, like Charles Ravenshoe, she is not the epitome of human beauty: “Every one called her plain, and yet Sir Joshua Reynolds … painted her. Her figure was almost deformed, and her gait was very clumsy. She was very broad, though not fat; and above her shoulders was that half-Norman, half-Teutonic head, which gave rise to so many theories as to what was inside it. A short clumsy woman, with such a head as I have mentioned” (Vol. I, ch. 1). What with her near-deformed shoulders and rather masculine look—modeled, possibly, after Marian Holcombe, in Collins' The Woman in White (1859-60)—Mathilde is actually a fascinating character. The scenes that could have been mawkishly sentimental, such as Mathilde's view of her fellow prisoners, especially the two sisters, in the Abbaye, and Mathilde's death are treated with remarkable restraint.

In the first of these scenes, Mathilde, recently imprisoned, has just entered the Abbaye and looks around her:

Against the whitewashed wall sat a girl with a square, fine face, of great beauty and power, who was sewing; in her lap lay the head of her sister, a golden heap of splendid beauty. The younger sister lay there utterly wearied, utterly idle, and petulant in her idleness; playing at times with the string of her sister's apron, at times with the hands which sewed so diligently; at times sighing in her ennui, at times rolling her restless head into some new position. Mathilde watched this pair with intense eagerness. They suited her. The younger sister was only another Adèle, and she thought how Adèle would have been in the same situation but for her; but then without her. She listened to their conversation.

The younger sister said, “This is so triste and dull, that I shall die if I stay here: and I have nothing to amuse me, nothing whatever. I wish that I had brought my squirrel now, but they said we were to go back again directly.”

Mathilde saw the elder sister sew faster, but say nothing whatever. She understood her.

“That foolish, giddy Contine will forget to feed him, and he is petulant if he is not fed. Sister, do you know what I wish?”

“No, dearest.”

“I wish I had flowers. My garden will be half-ruined when we get back, for I took it so entirely in hand myself that none of our gardeners dare meddle with it. And those balsams should be in their largest pots now; they will not show beside Faustine de la Rivère's. Thou are weeping now, sister, for thy tears fall on my face. Have I made thee weep?”

Mathilde sat as rigid as stone listening to this, drinking it in, every word. The elder sister, with whom she was in deep friendship that night, told her the bitter truth. Their château was burnt; their estate was ruined; their father and mother in the Conciergerie; their servants dispersed or faithless; the wolf in their garden, the hare upon their hearthstone. But she had kept it all to herself, and had flattered her giddy sister with the hope of a speedy return to what was gone for ever.

“How could I tell her? She was the little singing-bird in our house. Would you have me stop her singing forever?”

(Vol. III, ch. 16)

In a few days the two sisters are ordered to the Conciergerie and sentenced to their death. When the order comes for Mathilde, Kingsley allows the reader to follow her only as far as the main passage in the Abbaye. “I have seen too many [“harrowing death-bed scenes”] to describe one,” Kingsley wrote in Silcote of Silcotes, and wisely he does not venture to describe Mathilde's death with the drenching sentimentality Dickens used in Sidney Carton's final speech. Mathilde's last words are brief. To William, in words that echo those in “The First Sacrifice,” she declares that dying is not hard because “I have died before now,” and to her friend Journiac de St. Meard she whispers simply, “If you live to see any one whom I loved tell them I love them still.” Then “she went down the steps carrying her missal, and entering the dark passage was lost to sight.” Two later speeches confirm her death. Upon his acquittal, Journiac de St. Meard says, “My friends … lead me, for I am going to shut my eyes. One lies here, I doubt [i.e. fear], whom I loved.” More directly, William announces Mathilde's death to her parents: “I have escaped by running; but they have murdered Mademoiselle Mathilde” (Vol. III, chs. 19, 20). Kingsley heightens the tragic tone of her death by convening Monsieur and Madame D'Isigny and later Louis de Valognes, each in his own way responsible for Mathilde's death, before their own court of self-accusations, with Mathilde's missal, their only relic of her, lying among them.

One other notable character in Mademoiselle Mathilde needs to be mentioned—the fanatic revolutionist Barbot, whose deep hatred for the aristocratic André Desilles, Mathilde's undeclared lover, suggests the inexplicable aversion between characters that Melville achieved so well thirteen years earlier in the Babo-Benito Cereno relationship and perfected later in the Claggart-Billy Budd conflict. Ambivalently, the anguished Barbot cries: “Go thy way, Captain Desilles, I hate thee utterly. I hate thee for thine order's sake, and for thine own. I hate thy delicate white hand and thy delicately dressed hair. You are good, you are brave, and you are beautiful. Curse you! I know you are all three of these things, and I hate you for them” (Vol. I, ch. 6). Kingsley slowly kindles this great antipathy until, in “Barbot's First Revenge” (Vol. II, ch. 8), he skillfully creates a scene in which Barbot's inflamed hatred explodes, foreshadowing Desilles' final doom. After spewing forth his vehemence against all aristocracy and his master, Desilles, in particular and preaching insurrection and wholesale slaughter to the shocked English servant William, the incensed Barbot, infuriated by his inability to slay Desilles legally, accomplished a temporary revenge by cruelly “wounding” him: “He had taken André Desilles down a thick pleached alley in the rectory garden, and had shown him Sir Lionel and Mathilde. Her head was on her lover's bosom, and he was playing with her hair. With one deep sob, and only one, André Desilles turned away; and Barbot saw that his dagger had gone home to the noble heart, hilt deep.”

There are many excellent elements in Mademoiselle Mathilde, but it is not a first-rate novel, although the potentiality to be one exists in it. Like the reviewer of Mademoiselle Mathilde for the Saturday Review, “one always feels that Mr. Kingsley ought to have written so much better a book than he actually does write.”¹⁵

Kingsley's clumsiest, most confused, and tedious novel during this period is Stretton, a novel in which he has evidently lost control over his ability to recognize good taste.¹⁶ So preposterous and exaggerated is the novel in its depiction of four high-spirited, excessively noble and patriotic English boys that it reads like a poor burlesque of the manly adventure stories that flooded the libraries during the 1860s. In presumptuousness these boys outstrip any hero that Kingsley had previously set forth. For Roland and Eddy Evans and John and James Mordaunt, “all possibilities of any disturbing causes seemed absolute nonsense. The chances were so infinitely in their favour. Money was to be had for the picking up; they had talents, prospects, health, high spirits; the world was theirs, in a way, if they cared to go into it and succeed; or if they failed, here were two homes of ancient peace ready for them to come back to. Misfortune, thanks to settled old order, seemed in their cases to have become impossible” (Vol. I, ch. 11).

After carrying his boys through their riotous schooldays, Kingsley gloriously sends three of them into the Indian Mutiny, where, self-righteously, they clamor to save England's “greatest inheritance”: “This is the beginning of a great crisis. Now is the time for a lesson to them. The odds against us are not great. We are eighty men to their two thousand. Come, sir, I tell you plainly, it rests in your hands to assist in the saving of India, or to assist in sending back her history for a hundred years” (Vol. III, ch. 16). Although Kingsley had erred before in his characterization of gentlemen, never is his unawareness of good manners, of breeding, of what is a gentleman more flagrant than in the characterization of these boys and their associates. In the scene in which James Mordaunt has followed Roland Evans to the 140th Dragoons, the Colonel, speaking of Mordaunt, says to Roland:

“You know him then?”

“Yes, sir. I know one of the finest fellows who ever walked—in his way—in your way; by Jove, sir, you have strengthened the regiment by ten men.”

“And who is the lady in this case?” said the Colonel.

“I fear it is my sister,” said Roland, quite off his guard. In a moment afterwards, he was praying the Colonel to forget, not to have heard, to ignore, his last speech. And the Colonel said, quietly, “My dear young man, I am the best colonel of cavalry, socially speaking, in the army. Is it likely that I could say one word?”

(Vol. II, ch. 9)

One is accustomed to the English in their novels revealing officious conceit, but Kingsley piles Ossa and Pelion on Olympus.

The excessiveness in this novel has prompted Michael Sadleir to suggest that Henry Kingsley was trying to reinstate himself into his family by portraying in his novel qualities which were not inherent in him but which abounded in Charles and his novels.¹⁷ That suggestion may be partly true for Henry's pleas for money had so embarrassed Charles Kingsley and his wife that the two brothers were becoming alienated. And certainly the two Evanses and Jim Mordaunt duplicate if not exceed Amyas Leigh's superhuman qualities. But Sadleir's suggestion cannot explain all of the wild feverishness and carelessness in this novel. For example, at one point Kingsley suspensefully builds up the fact that Roland leaves early one morning on a very dangerous military mission, a distance of one hundred and forty miles. Yet, a few pages later, in the afternoon of the same day, Roland has returned with the mission accomplished. How was the long trip possible in such a short time? What did Roland actually accomplish? Was the trip dangerous? Again, in another scene Roland asks his aunt, Eleanor, who he knows is unmarried:

“But you did not make such a fool of yourself when you were married, Aunt.”

“My dear, I never was married,” said Aunt Eleanor, quietly.

This so took the wind out of Roland's sails that he had to start on a fresh tack.

(Vol. I, ch. 20)

Such absurdities can only be explained by saying that Kingsley was dashing off this novel with his left hand in order to bring in some badly needed money. His reliance upon such stock devices as switched babies, the discussion of family histories, college scenes that echo those in Ravenshoe, the usual “sacrificial act” (in this case Allan Gray, the fanatic Christian and legitimate heir to Stretton, who dies to save Jim Mordaunt), as well as the fact that little mention of Stretton is made in his published letters, add credence to the assumption. Certainly, the novel shows his concern for money. Besides the great wealth which he gives to his major characters, some of his asides break in discordantly to discuss irrelevant financial information: for example, “One of my neighbours, a commoner, has £20,000 a year; another, just in sight, has £60,000; another, also a commoner, within four miles, has just died worth £5,000,000” (Vol. I, ch. 11). Unpolished and silly, the novel reveals the dismal results of an author so plagued by personal worries that he failed to concentrate upon his work and, instead, strewed on paper his unfulfilled dreams of heroics and wealth.

In the midst of all the eccentricity and absurdities of Silcote of Silcotes, Mademoiselle Mathilde, and Stretton, however, scenes arise that vividly, yet forlornly by comparison with earlier works, recall Kingsley's old artistic power. Besides the already mentioned scenes in Mademoiselle Mathilde, Kingsley carefully describes the great houses of Sheepsden, Silcotes, and Stretton, with their traditional beauty, and, with admirable simplicity, he paints Mrs. Sugden's and her brother's departure from Silcotes: “A very few days afterwards, the steward was standing at his door, in the early dawn, when the Sugdens came towards him, and left the key of their cottage, paying up some trifle of rent. They were expedited for travelling, he noticed, and had large bundles. Their furniture, they told him, had been fetched away by the village broker, and the fixtures would be found all right. In answer to a wondering inquiry as to where they were going, James merely pointed eastward, and very soon after they entered the morning fog, bending under their bundles, and were lost to sight” (Vol. I, ch. 11). Even with the incredible Princess of Castelnuova, Kingsley achieves a very touching scene when she is keening over the dead Tom Silcote, her nephew. Holding Tom's head in her lap, she rocks herself to and fro: “Singing in a very low voice, sometimes in German, sometimes in Italian. Her grief was so deep that Providence in His mercy had dulled it. There was a deep, bitter gnawing at her heart, which underlay everything else; as the horror of his doom must make itself felt in the last quiet sleep of a criminal before his execution, let him sleep never so quietly” (Vol. III, ch. 17). The bodily action wonderfully symbolizes the Babel-like versatility of tongue and both symbolize the Princess' own rootlessness and confusion of values. Finally, Kingsley still retained his talent for rendering in prose the loveliness of the English countryside: “Down below in the valley, among the meadows, the lanes, and the fords, it was nearly as peaceful and quiet as it was aloft on the mountain-tops; and under the darkening shadows of the rapidly leafing elms, you could hear, it was so still, the cows grazing and the trout rising in the river” (Stretton, Vol. I, ch. 1).

Overshadowed by the major works of this period is Kingsley's fifth novel, Leighton Court, a two-volume romance, which as Kingsley said, “was written so entirely according to [the critics'] orders” (E., p. 144). Undertaking to write a story with “no tragedy and no nonsense—and so awfully genteel” (E., p. 132),¹⁸ Kingsley managed to please the usually hostile Saturday Review: “Mr. Kingsley has told his plain story with great skill and taste. He has denied himself almost entirely those senseless oddities and unmeaning freaks which in his last two novels struck everybody as being so wonderfully childish and so offensive. … This little comedy … though sufficiently slight, is one of the most agreeable things that Mr. Henry Kingsley has written.”¹⁹

The two modern critics who have mentioned the novel either dismiss it as a “rather tame and insipid story of country life,” or condemn it as having “a plot which even wet towels round the head will not make any clearer.”²⁰ While the first opinion is superficial, the second is erroneous, for Leighton Court is decidedly Kingsley's simplest novel up to 1866. Furthermore, it shows that Kingsley, during this troubled time, could write a better than average work if he kept his subject under control and did not attempt panoramic novels such as The Hillyars and the Burtons, Silcote of Silcotes, and Stretton.²¹

The novel concentrates on two love triangles. Laura Seckerton falls in love with her father's (Sir Charles) whip, George Hammersley, who, unbeknown to the Seckertons, is really Robert Poyntz, the legitimate brother of Sir Harry, Sir Charles' sole creditor. Rebuked by Laura, George leaves and is presumed to be dead; Laura becomes engaged to a high-minded nobleman, Lord Hatterleigh. Sir Harry, because of a dislike for his younger brother and because of his weakening brain, spreads the rumor that the disguised Robert was really an illegitimate brother. Concomitantly, because of Laura's part in trying to dissuade her friend Maria Huxtable from marrying himself when she really loved the unreceptive Captain George Hilton, Sir Harry plans to disgrace Laura and to ruin her father. He repents, and through a series of incidents the proper parties are united: Lord Hatterleigh frees Laura from the engagement and happily marries someone else; Sir Harry dies, and Maria marries Captain Hilton; Robert returns, assumes his title, marries Laura, and releases Sir Charles from his debt.

There are more things in this novel to praise than to condemn. Opening with one of Kingsley's incomparable descriptions of Devonshire, the novel goes on to demonstrate that Kingsley has not lost his facility for handling descriptive action. In one scene, Tom Squire, the Seckertons' trusted servant, graphically reproduces Robert Poyntz' ride into the ocean: “‘He turned to the left out of the Bell Yard, and broke into a gallop. Then I saw that he was going to try the sands that night, and I cried out, like a man in the falling sickness, “The tide's making! the tide's making!” Perhaps he did not hear, at all events he did not heed. I ran, but what was the good of that? I heard him only a few minutes, but I ran on, guessing which way he had gone; and all I could find of him was the way that the deer still stood gazing as he had startled them’” (Vol. I, ch. 24).

For the first time since Ravenshoe, Kingsley has concentrated on his characters. Laura Seckerton is one of Kingsley's best examples of the impudent heroine; she follows faithfully the line of Juliet, Beatrice, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, and Lily Dale. Surely England's most wonderful contribution to the art of character portrayal, these heroines strike out against the man's world with their tart tongues but never lose their femininity.²² The valetudinarian Lord Hatterleigh, “a young man of great promise aged twenty-two, who wore galoshes, carr[ied] a bulgy umbrella, and took dinner pills,” reveals Kingsley's ability to create a humorous character who does not sink into utter ridiculousness. Kingsley amusingly describes the inept Hatterleigh trying to court Laura at a dinner party:

He sat next Laura, but his silence continued until he had finished his soup and his fish. He did nothing but smile. He had invented something pretty in the retirement of his chamber which he was to say to Laura, but he had forgotten it, and his soul was consumed in spasmodic efforts to remember it. Laura saw this to her intense amusement. At the end of the fish she thought he had got it, for he brightened up and gave a sigh of relief. She was wrong, he had only abandoned the effort. He slopped out a glass of water, looked sweetly at her, and said—

“I take it that the great duration of the Liverpool ministry arose mainly from the absence of anything like decision or force of character in the chief. The whole, too, was a mere coalition as profligate as that between Fox and North. The very possibility of a coalition argues an entire absence of principle in the coalescing parties, and of policy in the coalition itself”.

(Vol. I, ch. 9)

Most outstanding, though, is the Kingsleyan villain, Sir Harry Poyntz, who, Laura believes, “is wicked enough to do anything.” Her first meeting with him occurs when she inquisitively visits Berry Morecombe Castle. Sitting in the dark with Sir Harry, Laura is “longing to look on what should be, by all accounts, the wickedest, meanest, most worthless face that ever troubled this unhappy earth.” Visualizing the man, “she could see that he was tall, and she pictured him satanic: a dark melancholic man, with sloping eyebrows, wicked little eyes, and an upward curl at the corner of his mouth; the man she knew so well by Cruikshank's art; the swaggering fiendish cavalier who has come home from the Spanish main, and who is no less than the fiend himself; a man with a wicked leer for a woman, and a twopenny-halfpenny, who-are-you, Haymarket scowl for a man.” But then: “Huxtable, coming in with a candle, upset all her fine theories. She saw, instead of her corsair, a bland fat, flabby, lymphatic man, with a flat pale blue eye, with less depth in it than a wafer; who was too fat for his apparent age; a man who had apparently, by some mistake in Nature's cookery, been boiled instead of roasted; a man who would not even grill well, but would remain mere flabby meat, with a coating of brown. He was so utterly unlike what she had thought, that she forgot Hannah More and all that sort of thing, and burst out laughing. But the nasty, shallow, light-blue, dangerous eye was steadily on hers, with a look of power too; and she stopped laughing” (Vol. I, ch. 14).

It is possible that Kingsley, in depicting Sir Harry, was influenced by the witty and fat Count Fosco, whom Wilkie Collins, in The Woman in White, had sprung on his surprised readers, but Sir Harry Poyntz' name plus his corpulence suggests even more that Kingsley was deliberately alluding to Henry IV, Part I. The droll Sir Harry is an effective composite of the nobility and authority of Prince Hal, the stealthiness of Poins, and the rascality (and size) of stout Jack Falstaff. Seemingly nefarious in the way in which he plots to ruin Laura, Sir Harry, in reality, deliberately and cunningly contrives to bring Laura and Robert together after the latter's brave conduct in the Indian Mutiny. When finished with his creation, Kingsley takes care to kill him off appropriately: Sir Harry dies laughing at Lord Hatterleigh's sincere but foolish challenge to a duel.

Although no one would call the slight Leighton Court a great novel or even a major one, it is, nevertheless, a successful fusion of Kingsley's artistic gifts: the humor is controlled, the description is lyrical, and the characters are not only believable but attractive. In fact, as Silas Marner is overshadowed by the great stature of Adam Bede and Middlemarch, Leighton Court suffers primarily from being written by the author of Geoffry Hamlyn and Ravenshoe.

Notes

1. Originally published in The Nation, July 6, 1865 and reprinted in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass., 1921), pp. 59-67. For other reviews see Athenaeum, XLI (May 27, 1865), 716-17; Saturday Review, XIX (May 13, 1865), 576-77; Spectator, XXXVIII (May 6, 1865), 501-2. An interesting sidelight on the subject of the Burtons' nobility arose in a favorable American review of the novel, written just two months after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Ending his discussion by praising Kingsley's depiction of the Burtons, the reviewer patriotically acclaims that the North likes and fosters such “great-hearted gentlemen,” whereas the Southern system encourages “listlessness” and “indolence” (North American Review, CI [July, 1865], critical notice 22, 299). Considering Kingsley's view of the Civil War, one wonders about his reaction to the comparison. Ticknor and Fields published three editions of the novel, totaling 4,140 copies.

2. For Kingsley's reaction to the Saturday Review article, see Ellis, pp. 144, 149.

3. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of the melodramatic and sensational Lady Audley's Secret; Wilkie Collins.

4. XXV (January 4, 1868), 26. Ticknor and Fields published just one edition, 1,000 copies.

5. Robert Lee Wolff, Strange stories and other explorations in Victorian fiction, Boston: Gambit, 1971, pp. 205-6.

6. Printed in William Buckler, “Henry Kingsley and The Gentleman's Magazine,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], L (1951), 90. Mr. Buckler prints the correspondence leading up to the publication of Mademoiselle Mathilde in the magazine and discusses the textual changes between the serialized novel and the later three-volume edition. Additional unpublished letters between Walford and Kingsley concerning Mademoiselle Mathilde are in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Mademoiselle Mathilde ran through fourteen numbers instead of “eight or nine,” from April, 1867, to May, 1868.

7. “Preface” to first edition. Kingsley's story was intended to boost a sagging circulation. As Buckler notes, “We do have indications … that the condition of The Gentleman's Magazine was not good at this time: The very fact that it was thought necessary to add the attraction of a serialized novel in the face of opposition from many of the subscribers; the fact that Trollope refused to allow The Vicar of Bullhampton to be published in it; the fact that its contents were completely revised—to one of general literature—after May, 1868 [completion of Mademoiselle Mathilde] and the price reduced from two shillings and sixpence to one shilling” (p. 97n31).

8. Buckler, p. 90.

9. Ibid., p. 91. Kingsley's fear of the critics and of waning popularity is also implied in one of the unpublished letters to Walford: “I desired to give you this story for reasons of my own. And it was absolutely necessary that it should be a first rate one, and should not be written in a hurry” (Houghton Library).

10. See Buckler, pp. 93-96.

11. Unpublished letter, Houghton Library.

12. “It seems to me, in any good story which I have ever read, that there is a kind of pause, or breaking line, about the middle of it. The author, in spite of himself, puts the causes before you in the first half of his story, and gives you the effect of them in the second. I do not know a readable story which does not fulfill this rule. I fancy it is the great rule of story-telling” (Vol. II, ch. 8).

13. “On Writing Out and Henry Kingsley,” Collected Essays and Papers (New York, 1923), II, 352.

14. Ellis, pp. 168, 173, 180.

15. XXV (May 23, 1868), 694.

16. Stretton was harshly reviewed; see Athenaeum, LXVII (June 5, 1869), 759-60; Saturday Review, XXVII (June 19, 1869), 814-16. When Stretton was reissued in 1875 by Estes and Lauriat (Boston), the Atlantic wrote, “What especial need there was of raking up Mr. Henry Kingsley's Stretton from its easily-won obscurity, it would be hard to say. A few years ago this novel appeared, was read, and then disappeared; and now that a new edition is sent into the world, there is but little chance of altering the verdict it received before” (XXXVII [February, 1875], 239). Presumably, neither Macmillan nor Bradbury & Evans would publish the novel, since it first appeared serially in The Broadway Annual, from September, 1868, to August, 1869, and then in a three-volume edition by Tinsley Brothers.

17. Edinburgh Review, p. 337.

18. See other letters, Ellis, pp. 136, 140, 143.

19. XXI (March 10, 1866), 300. Ticknor and Fields published two editions, 2,750 copies.

20. Wolff, p. 205; Angela Thirkell, “The Works of Henry Kingsley,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, V (March, 1951), 279.

21. Even Kingsley's puns are better. A rich suitor is Count Ozoni Galvani, brother to the Duke of Pozzo di Argento, later the Duke of Pozzo d'Oro, which are, after all, neither better nor worse that Byron's Strongenoff and Stokonoff, Tschitsshakoff, Roguenoff, Chokenoff, Koklophti (Don Juan, Canto 7), or, best of all, Cazzani and Count Corniani (Canto 1).

22. George Saintsbury has said in his preface to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that “In the novels of the last hundred years there are vast numbers of young ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in love; there are at least five of whom, as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can help doing so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington [C. Kingsley's Yeast], Beatrix Esmond and Barbara Grant [R. L. Stevenson's Catriona and David Balfour].”