An Eminent and Unconventional Victorian Mary Henrietta Kingsley, 1862–1900

AN EMINENT AND UNCONVENTIONAL VICTORIAN MARY HENRIETTA KINGSLEY, 1862-1900 ALBERT COLBY COOKE FIFTY years ago, when Mary Kingsley died on June 3, 1900, the journals of the English-speaking world, which had reviewed her three books on West Africa and published articles and letters from her pen, paid tribute to the life and work of a young woman who, in eight years of activity, achieved a remarkable reputation as a traveller, ethnologist, and critic of British colonial administration. Today her personality and writings are overshadowed by those of her uncle, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, but the social passion which characterized his early novels Alton Locke and Yeast was matched by her championship before the British public of the African native and her determination to make known his nature and his needs and to destroy the ignorance and apathy which she felt were to be found not only in unofficial circles but in the Colonial Office itseU. Interest today in the condition of under-developed countries and the weUare of native peoples gives pertinence to the views on these matters of one who gave them much careful and anxious thought half a century ago. Mary Kingsley's father was Dr. George Henry Kingsley who was eight years younger than Charles and three years older than Henry, who was also a novelist. He had secured his medical education at St. George's Hospital and in Edinburgh and Paris. It is characteristic of his adventurous spirit that he helped erect barricades in Paris in 1848 and got a musket ball through his arm for his pains. He had what his daughter described as "a joyous sense of life," and, to gratify his taste for adventure and to provide opportunity for foreign travel and the study of nature, he hit upon a unique way to practice his profession; this was to prescribe world cruises for titled and wealthy patients whom he accompanied as personal physician. In this way he travelled with the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Pembroke and others, through the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Aegean, Spain, the South Seas, Japan, the American West, and the Canadian North. Some of these expeditions are chronicled in his Notes on Sport and Travel and some in South Sea Bubbles, the latter written in collaboration with the Earl of Pembroke. He wrote, as he lived, with zest and gusto, and he had a great gift of graphic description coupled with scientific curiosity and a sense of humour, qualities which equally 329 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY1 vol. XX, no. 4, July, 1951 330 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY characterize the writings of his daughter. George Kingsley's descriptions of the South Seas, of buffalo hunting in Nebraska with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, of whaling and deer stalking, of the castles on the Rhine, and the pyramids and tombs and temples of Egypt, are lively and entertaining, and the full accounts of his adventures which he sent home during his absences of months at a time were eagerly awaited and devoured by his long-suffering family. Mary Kingsley describes her mother as a woman of "extraordinary benevolence" with a "faculty for managing affairs of business" very valuable to her husband and family. "The only thing," she writes, "that ever tempted her to go about among her neighbours was to assist them when they were sick in mind, body or estate. So strongly marked a characteristic was this of our early home life, that to this day I always feel I have no right to associate with people unless there is something the matter with them." During her father's long absences, Mary Kingsley read voraciously in his library, and, in the absence of any formal education, acquired a remarkable quantity of information in the fields of her father's interests---medicine, Elizabethan literature, ethnology, travel, natural science, and philosophy. When the family moved to Cambridge for the education of her younger brother Charles, she read Darwin and Huxley, Tyndall and Lyell, and was introduced to an intellectual circle of friends of her father who found the rather angular, awkward girl interesting and intelligent. She learned German that she might help her father by reading for him...