Madame How and Lady Why Paperback / softback - 2014

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire. Kingsley's interest in history is shown in several of his writings, including The Heroes, a children's book about Greek mythology, and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia, Hereward the Wake and Westward Ho! His concern for social reform is illustrated in his great classic, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (which won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963) a kind of fairytale about a boy chimney sweep, which retained its popularity well into the 20th century. Furthermore in The Water-Babies he developed in this literary form something of a purgatory, which runs counter to his "Anti-Roman" theology. As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are brilliant; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy with children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children. Kingsley also wrote poetry and political articles, as well as several volumes of sermons. His argument, in print, with John Henry Newman, accusing him of untruthfulness and deceit, prompted the latter to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He also wrote a preface to the 1859 edition of Henry Brooke's book The Fool of Quality in which he defends their shared belief in universal salvation. Kingsley coined the term pteridomania in his 1855 book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore.