The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (review)

In 1872, Vanity Fair remarked that "Time and opinions move so fast that it is difficult to recall the period, though it is really so recent, when the Rev. Charles Kingsley, sometime author of 'Alton Locke' and now Chaplain to the Queen [. . . ] was one of the most daring and advanced revolutionists of his cloth" (qtd. in Klaver 472; Klaver's ellipsis). Vanity Fair omits many reasons why Kingsley might fascinate modern Victorianists: his complex emphasis on manliness, masculinity, and the body; his immersion in scientific projects (sanitation reform) and debates; his jingoism and sense of national mission, even when these sanctioned brutal or near-genocidal violence; the conflict with John Henry Newman; his children's books, especially The Water Babies (1863); and his interest in sexual satisfaction within marriage as an almost sacramental blessing. And yet all too frequently, knowledge of Kingsley can devolve into the following series: muscular Christian; self-destructive combatant of Newman; author of Alton Locke (1850) and The Water Babies, plus a few other works. J. M. I. Klaver's The Apostle of the Flesh seeks to restore Kingsley to a more central place in the Victorian period.

Kingsley biographies fall in two camps: those before and after Susan Chitty's The Beast and the Monk (1974). What set Chitty's biography apart was less a painstaking recreation of Kingsley's intellectual life or the Victorian world he inhabited, but rather her unprecedented access to Kingsley's correspondence with his wife, Fanny (Frances Eliza Grenfell), which revealed, in a startlingly direct way, the urgency behind their sexual love. This urgency was accompanied, before marriage, by a negotiated set of fantasies and rituals that Kingsley and his fiancée used to mark the time until consummation. These rituals included, on Kingsley's part, self-mortification, though he refused Fanny's pleas to whip her (74–75). These letters are so revealing that the biographies written without such access, even the most useful (such as Brenda Colloms's Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley [1975]) seem pallid by comparison. This is not simply a prurient interest: anyone who's read Kingsley knows his lifelong interest in cleanliness, and so these letters read as a private application of his public project. Also, as Klaver repeatedly suggests, Kingsley's basic distrust of Newman arises in part from his sheer disbelief in celibacy as a Christian ideal.

Klaver fully exploits the Kingsley marital correspondence, and he improves on Chitty in one crucial respect: his citational practice is consistent, so that one can actually follow his work. More than this, Klaver makes clear how Chitty sutured together Kingsley's letters to make them fit her narrative exigencies. For scholarly purposes, then, The Apostle of the Flesh is now the most authoritative biography, and in this respect, it makes four major contributions. First, Klaver's reading in Kingsley is exhaustive, allowing for profitable connections, such as when he finds Kingsley's long-ignored study of The Hermits (1868) to be "Kingsley's answer to Newman's Apologia" (587). Given the daunting task of collating poems, journalism, sermons, and novels, all future students of Kingsley must be grateful to Klaver. Second, Klaver's enthusiastic account of the Christian Socialists and their various publishing ventures is fascinating. Focusing largely on Kingsley, F. D. Maurice, and John Ludlow, Klaver shows how Kingsley triangulates between his friends, relying on Maurice for ideas and Ludlow for action.

The third, and probably most crucial contribution, is Klaver's use of Kingsley's undernoticed correspondence with Thomas Henry Huxley. Klaver quotes extensively from these letters, both to show Kingsley's serious engagement with science, but also to show that Victorian men of science, even such notorious skeptics as Huxley, took Kingsley very seriously. Huxley remarked that he could write "more openly and distinctly to [Kingsley] than I ever have to any human being except...