Bevington, Merle Mowbray. The Saturday Review,
1855-1868: Representative Educated Opinion in Victorian England (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1941).
Bevington relates how Kingsley received sympathetic and complimentary
reviews in the Saturday Review for his novels Hypatia and
Two Years Ago . However, after he became Professor of History at
Cambridge in 1860, historians on the Saturday mercilessly reviled
his historical abilities. Hereward the Wake was particularly censured
for what was considered to be its bad history.
Saturday
Review ; History
Professor .
Chadwick, Owen. "Charles Kingsley at Cambridge,"
The Historical Journal Vol. XVIII, No. 2 (1975): 303-325.
Chadwick examines Kingsley’s time at Cambridge both as an undergraduate
and as the Regius Chair of Modern History. In addition to considering
the circumstances of his election as Professor and the reactions of University
personnel and the wider community, Chadwick discusses such topics as his
pedagogical abilities, the responses of the students, the content of his
lectures, and his philosophy of history. Chadwick also intersperses
accounts of many of Kingsley’s views on, for example, Catholicism, Newman,
science, evolution, sanitation, sexuality, muscular Christianity, together
with brief treatments of some of his novels. He concludes: “But unsophisticated,
no; natural, only when he intended naturalness; innocent, not merely no
but quite the opposite – who would have thought the good man to have so
much blood in his fancy? If you go along with Kingsley until you
begin to know him, you wonder whether this unsubtle man was not one of
the most complicated souls you ever met” (325).
Overview
; Cambridge
University ; History
Professor ; History
; Social
and Political Views .
Chadwick, Owen. “Kingsley’s Chair,” Theology
Vol. LXXVIII, No. 655 (Jan., 1975): 2-8.
In this brief article Chadwick considers the background to Kingsley
being offered the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge. He
also posits that later critics have tended to be unfair in their critical
accounts of him as a scholar of history. Though Kingsley was no Creighton
nor Acton, he was better than Goldwin Smith, his contemporary at Oxford.
Moreover, Kingsley was well appreciated by Cambridge's undergraduates.
History
; Cambridge
University ; History
Professor .
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