The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The illogic of the ‘Broad Church’ position would infuriate, on the one hand theological bigots, on the other those heirs of Enlightenment thought who believed the human race had left behind the need for a religious framework to life. But viewed differently, the intellectual ‘inheritance’ of Dean Stanley and friends was precisely a source of strength. They accepted the rigours of the scientific principle when it applied to science; they went on reading Plato, convinced that a religious attitude to the universe was allowable even when the mind had recognized the implausibility of many, perhaps most, perhaps all, Christian dogmas. In rather comparable ways, the alliances and rivalries of the changing political scene allowed an aristocracy to survive in England while a bourgeois democracy was forged: the two were not, as on the continent, deemed incompatibles. This ability to live with contrarieties which are not necessarily contradictions was one of the foremost strengths of Victorian England, seen in many aspects of life, not least – a theme for later in the century – in the writings of those British Hegelian philosophers who in large degree grew out of, though many would come to despise, the Broad Church theology of which Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was so charming and delicate an exponent.

  fn1 ‘Ipsa adest; et in egregia formae pulchritudine in benigna dulcium oculorum luce, in fronte illa nobili et pudica, nobis omnibus qui hic adsumus innatus virtutes animae velut in speculo licet …’ (She is here present; and to all of us who are gathered here it seems as though, as in a looking-glass, these innate virtues are reflected, in the surpassing beauty of her appearance, in the kindly lights of her sweet eyes, in her noble, modest face.) Oratio ad illustrissimum principem Albertum Edwardum Principem Walliae ab Edwardo Galfrido Comite de Derby. 16 June 1863.

  19

  Charles Kingsley and The Water-Babies

  MOST OF US first read Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies in some lavishly illustrated edition – though whether the illustrator was Heath Robinson, Mabel Lucie Attwell or Margaret Tarrant, they tended to overlook the fact that water-babies, having returned to a state of innocence and redemption, were naked. Kingsley explicitly states that the drowned chimney-sweep’s boy Tom ‘felt how comfortable it was to have nothing on but himself’.

  This story, however, ‘a Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby’, first appeared not as a beautiful ‘children’s book’ but serialized in two grey, unillustrated columns of Macmillan’s Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863. Those who first wanted to follow the adventures of Tom, who works for the cruel Grimes the chimney-sweep, who is shoved up a chimney flue at Harthover Place, comes down into the bedroom of little Ellie and is accused of being a thief, had to do so by turning over prolix articles by Leslie Stephen on the economic-liberal case for supporting the Confederacy, lengthy reviews by Matthew Arnold on Stanley’s Jewish Church, scientific disquisitions on oysters, on geology, or the antiquity of man; or a worthy consideration by Thomas Hare on the ideal form of local government in the Metropolis.

  There is something apt about the fact that we must search for The Water-Babies among the periodical literature of the day, jostling with Kingsley’s eminent contemporaries. Kingsley’s energetic engagement with his times, his taste for controversy, his extraordinary range, can all be found reflected in The Water-Babies. His wife said it was ‘perhaps the last book he wrote with any real ease’; he dashed it off, completing the first chapter exactly as published, and without alteration (5,000 words at least?), in an hour.1

  He was forty-two when he wrote it: destined to die aged fifty-six, exhausted by an American lecture tour, by chain-smoking, and hyperactivity. Staring at Kingsley’s dead face in late January 1875, Dean Stanley thought him ‘like the stone effigy of an ancient warrior, … resting as if after the toils of a hundred battles, this was himself idealised. From those mute lips there seemed to issue once more the living words with which he spoke ten years ago before one’ – i.e. the Prince of Wales – ‘who honoured him with an unswerving faithfulness even to the end. Some say’ – thus he spoke in the chapel of Windsor Castle – ‘some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth, or a man or woman left to say “I will redress that wrong, or spend my life in the attempt.’”2

  A grave in the Abbey was offered, but the family preferred to bury Charles Kingsley in the graveyard of the parish church at Eversley, south of Reading, where he had been rector since the 1840s. The concourse was huge. The Bramshill Hunt, complete with their horses and hounds, stood respectfully as eight villagers bore to his grave this keen sportsman, naturalist, countryman. Dean Stanley read the service. The bishop of Winchester – Harold Browne, an Etonian Gladstone appointee who succeeded Soapy Sam two years before – gave the blessing. The Hon. A. Fitzmaurice represented the Prince of Wales, who had been taught by Kingsley at Cambridge. Macmillan the publisher was there at the graveside of his bestselling author. But separated by the churchyard wall from the academics and the clergy and the London literati were the local gypsies, and the villagers. No figure comparable to Kingsley could be imagined in the twenty-first century.

  Apart from his personal distinction, Kingsley’s was a splendid illustration of the flexible use which could be made of a country parsonage in the nineteenth century before motor cars and a bureaucratic Church of England waged their war on the amateurism of the clergy. Himself a parson’s son, Charles Kingsley was – in spite of occasional forays to local grammar schools – educated largely at home. At four, he enjoyed composing poetry and sermons, and from early life he was a keen and well-informed natural historian, starting by collecting shells by the Devonian shore of Clovelly. At Cambridge, while gaining a classical first and ‘senior optime’ in the mathematical tripos, he devoured Coleridge, Carlyle, and above all F.D. Maurice, the guiding light of his life. He hated team games, but learnt boxing from a negro prize fighter.3

  He was ordained aged twenty-three to a curacy at Eversley, becoming rector of the parish a couple of years later, a position he retained for the rest of his life. At the same time he was deeply engaged with the Christian Socialist movement (Thomas Hughes was to become his best friend); a popular author of novels – Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851) popularized the Chartist position; a queen’s chaplain; and, from 1860 to 1869, regius professor of history at Cambridge. (He tried living in Cambridge but found it too expensive, and took to merely staying overnight to deliver his lectures before returning to Eversley.) In spite of all this activity, he was a far from negligent parish priest – witness the grief of the villagers, the hunt servants, the farm labourers and cottagers when he died.

  Edward White Benson – future archbishop – discovered when he became its headmaster that Wellington College was ‘within a fairly easy walk of Eversley’. The two men saw a lot of one another, though rather different both in character and ecclesiastical politics. Kingsley sent his eldest son Maurice to Wellington, despite Benson’s reputation for severity. Kingsley, it was noted by the sacerdotalist Benson, wore a suit of rough grey cloth, knickerbockers and a black tie. He seldom dressed as a clergyman. He was such an addict of tobacco that he hid clay pipes in bushes and tree roots around Eversley in case the need to smoke came upon him while visiting the houses of his parishioners. The services in the parish church startled Benson by their lack of formality. For example, when the curate preached, Kingsley sat in the rectory pew in lay clothes but rose at the end to bless the congregation. He sat behind the Jacobean screen during Matins, taking no part whatever. But then the congregation would hear the rector’s sonorous voice reciting the Lord’s Prayer and knew that the Communion Service had begun. They were always surprised that the stammer which caused him such nervous agitation during conversation appeared to leave him when he recited the liturgy. He was a proper Church of England man, despising what he deemed the unmanliness of the Puseyites, but insistent on, for example, the eastward position when celebrating the Communion – that is, standing facing east, symbolically fac
ing Jerusalem, or the new Jerusalem – and recognizing that the holy table was a symbol of the altar of God; and bowing low (as Dean Swift had done in the reign of Queen Anne) at the Gloria and the name of Jesus. The devotion of this Anglican priest and his country congregation was compared to the parish of George Herbert in the seventeenth century.

  The Victorian parson did not ask for great riches – Archdeacon Grantly (the worldling of Barchester Towers) was a rare bird. Kingsley was never a rich man, but the living of Eversley gave him independence, and this is surely reflected in the robust unpredictability of Canon Kingsley’s views. He abominated slavery, for example, but he tried to persuade Thomas Hughes that ‘the Northerns had exaggerated the case against the South infamously’. All the same he thought the Civil War ‘a blessing for the whole world breaking up the insolent and aggressive republic of rogues, & a blessing to the poor niggers, because the South once seceded, will be amenable to the public opinion of England; & also will, from very fear, be forced to treat its niggers better’.4 He was also a supporter of Governor Eyre against the Jamaica Committee. Perhaps the most that a twenty-first-century reader can make of this is to suggest that, regrettable as we may find it, the huge majority of our forebears had attitudes to race which would horrify us. Kingsley can be absolved of racialism. A year before the Governor Eyre episode he had entertained Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands at Eversley. Fanny Kingsley, his wife, had wondered at ‘the feeling of having a Queen civilised, and yet of savage, even cannibal ancestry sleeping under one’s roof in Charlie’s and my room – eating at one’s table – talking of Tennyson and Tom Brown’s Schooldays!’5 They had also accommodated the Queen’s entourage of servants, black and white, and found her black chaplain, who stayed in the Rectory, ‘a delightful man’. It was in fact the socialist in Kingsley that approved of Governor Eyre’s severity; the point for Kingsley was not that those massacred and hanged had been black but that they had been creating mayhem: the severe justice was to protect the security of the majority.

  But in his attitudes to race, as in his attitudes to other aspects of life, Kingsley was intuitive more than drily ratiocinative. To read The Water-Babies, with its teasing denunciations in Chapter Two of scientific materialism, and its attacks on Professor Owen and Professor Huxley, you might think Kingsley was anti-scientific, but:

  The great fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of all the fairies for many a year to come, can only do you good, and never do you harm; and instead of fancying, with some people, that your body makes your soul, as if a steam engine could make its own coke … you will believe the one time … doctrine of this wonderful fairy-tale, which is that your soul makes your body, just as a snail makes his shell.6

  Or again:

  Ah, … when will people understand that one of the deepest and wisest speeches which can come out of a human mouth is that – ‘It is so beautiful that it must be true?’ Not till they give up believing that Mr John Locke (good and honest though he was) was the wisest man that ever lived on earth: and recollect that a wiser man than he lived long before him; and that his name was Plato the son of Ariston.7

  In fact Kingsley enjoyed a friendly correspondence with Darwin. The dean of Chester once asked Kingsley how he reconciled science and Christianity. ‘By believing that God is love’ was the reply. And to one who objected that the explanation of the development of the Mollusca given by Darwin could not be orthodox, Kingsley answered, ‘My friend, God’s orthodoxy is truth; if Darwin speaks the truth, he is orthodox.’8

  This did not prevent Kingsley, in The Water-Babies, developing one of his most successful satires on his selfish, hedonist, capitalistic contemporaries: the lazy Doasyoulikes who evolve backwards, moving from houses to caves, through savagery and ugliness (‘when people live on poor vegetables instead of roast beef and plum-pudding, their jaws grow large, and their lips grow coarse, like the poor Paddies who eat potatoes’). Pass five hundred years and they have grown hairy and stupid and are forgetting the use of language; in subsequent generations they go back to being apes. The point of this parable, however, is not to mock Darwin, but to suggest that human individuals, and societies, can choose between ‘a downhill and an uphill road’.9 It is an almost unbelievable fact to us that children were still being sent up chimneys until the publication of The Water-Babies and that a year after its publication, Parliament abolished the abuse.

  As with science, so with politics, Kingsley derived his view from the belief that God is love. His socialism derived from a simple sense of decency, and from his reading of Maurice’s Kingdom of Christ, a book which Fanny Grenfell gave to Kingsley before she married him and which, by his own confession, changed his life. It was a book which deplored the narrowness of the High Church and Low Church squabbles and looked for a true Catholicism which was both truly inclusive, and which saw that an obsession with the minutiae of doctrine was meaningless: the glaring and obvious call for nineteenth-century Christians was to recognize the incarnate Christ in the suffering poor, and to make society more just, more equal and more fair.

  Since the gift came from Fanny, one cannot help recognizing how closely interwoven Kingsley’s religion was with his sexuality. As a young undergraduate at Cambridge, he had been a variety of pantheist, highly sexed and incapable of celibacy. His first physical encounter with a woman was probably with a prostitute at Barnwell or Castle End, and he was so bugged by guilt about it that he felt the need to confess it to Fanny. ‘You, my unspotted, bring a virgin body to my arms. I alas do not to yours. Before our lips met I had sinned and fallen. Oh, how low! If it is your wish, you shall be a wife only in name. No communion but that of mind shall pass between us.’10

  Clearly at this stage of the courtship, Kingsley was worrying about venereal disease. To punish himself for impure thoughts he fasted and prayed. On 1 November 1843, when temperatures must have been sinking towards zero, ‘I went into the woods at night and lay naked upon thorns and when I came home my body was torn from head to foot. I never suffered so much. I began to understand Popish raptures and visions that night, and their connexion with self-torture. I saw such glorious things.’11 During a long engagement when he was separated from Fanny he wrote a life of St Elizabeth of Hungary and drew lavish illustrations of this story of naked young women being tortured by monks. A Cambridge tutor who saw the drawings said that no pure man could have made them, and Kingsley admitted that ‘St Elizabeth is my Fanny, not as she is but as she will be.’

  Before their wedding Fanny wrote in anticipation:

  After dinner I shall perhaps feel worn out, so I shall just lie on your bosom and say nothing but feel a great deal, and you will be very loving and call me your poor child. And then you will perhaps show me your Life of St Elizabeth, your wedding gift. And then after tea we will go up to rest! We will undress and bathe and then you will come to my room, and we will kiss and love very much and read psalms aloud together, and then we will kneel down and pray in our night dresses. Oh! what solemn bliss! How hallowing! And then you will take me up into your arms, will you not? And lay me down in bed. And then you will extinguish our light and come to me! How I will open my arms to you and then sink into yours …12

  Twelve years after they were married, Kingsley wrote to Fanny, ‘I am sitting in my mother’s old dressing room where we spent four days of heaven twelve years ago. I have turned it into a study though the room is so full of the gleam of your eyes and the scent of your hair. I cannot help thinking of you and love all the while.’

  Not only did it remain, for its entire duration, a marriage which was soaked in shared sexual appreciation and pleasure, but much of the language of their commonly held eroticism drew like some Gothic novel on the imagery of Catholicism. Not only was the marriage bed ‘our altar … there you should be the victim I the priest, in the bliss of full communion!’13 but some of the more kitsch accoutrements of ‘Monk’ Lewis or Horace Walpole – whips, penances – were fed into their mild consensual sadomasochistic games. ‘St Elizabeth�
� in Kingsley’s reworked The Saint’s Tragedy is found in Act II naked in her bedroom, and wincing as her husband touches her body and finds it covered with self-inflicted welts and lash-wounds.

  Alas! What’s this! These shoulders’ cushioned ice,

  And thin soft flanks, with purple lashes all,

  And weeping furrows traced!14

  Kingsley was more than ordinarily aware of the connections between kinky sexuality and religious symbolism, and like many Protestants of the period the fact that he found titillation in the thought of naked nuns, copulating monks, pious doses of flagellation made him view with all the more suspicion those who wanted to put the clock back and, instead of Maurice’s progressive Catholic Christianity, to revive the mummeries, perversions and superstitions (as he saw them) of medieval religion. Kingsley’s erotic drawings, accompanying his poems and fantasies, only saw publication in the late twentieth century. They depict such subjects as ‘the hallowed lovemaking of Charles and Fanny’. They are naked and roped to a large cross: or they show Fanny, her long hair loose, her feet bare in Magdalene-pose, kneeling before Kingsley as he says, ‘I absolve thee from all thy sin in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!’

  Far from it being a post-Freudian perception that religious emotions were in reality a substitute for sexual feeling, Victorian Protestantism took it for granted that Catholicism, whether in Roman or Puseyite manifestations, went naturally and hand in hand with sexual perversion. Protestant propaganda abounded in quasi-pornographic descriptions of what the Puseyites and Roman Catholics enjoyed doing behind their sinister grilles, or Gothic convent-gates.

  ‘“Take that thing off,” said the Mother Superior. I replied, “I cannot, Reverend Mother, it’s too tight.” The Nun who was present was told to help me to get it off. A deep feeling of shame came over me at being half-nude. The Mother then ordered the Nun to say the Miserere and while it was recited she lashed me several times with all her strength.’15 Or: ‘Archdeacon Allen … told me he had known three clergymen who had practised this teaching of habitual Confession as a duty, who had fallen into habits of immorality with women who had come to them for guidance.’16 In addition to the belief that Catholicism, real or ersatz, Anglo or Roman, was a form of erotic inversion, there was also the widely held view that as well as wanting your daughter for immoral purposes, they also were after your money. ‘In the Sisterhood of All Saints, Margaret Street, it is provided by the Statutes, that no Sister leaving the Sisterhood, even if “dismissed”, shall have any right to any portion of the money or property which she has given to it whether as a dowry or otherwise.’17 If anything could be calculated to outrage decent bourgeois opinion more than Reverend Mothers wielding the cat-o’-nine-tails, it was the thought of these ‘cults’ who lured young women into their clutches laying claim to their capital.