qtd. in

I subscribe to a number of different academic subrebbits, and this semester, I feel like I've seen a lot of questions on a number of the "Ask" ones (e.g., "AskAcademia," "AskLiteraryStudies," "AskProfessors") about whether it's okay for an academic writer to cite someone's citation of someone else, rather than dig back into that original source themself.

There are two ways to think about this question. The first is that can you do this? And the answer to this is pretty simple: yes. I don't know how it goes for other citation formats, but in MLA you do this by putting "qtd. in" in your parenthetical citation and then indicating where you found your quotation; the best practice is that the signal phrase should indicate who actually said it. Here's an example from own eternally in progress book:

In an 1872 letter to an unknown correspondent, Charles Kinglsey vented his frustration at the way many men of science excluded men of religion: “There are many men – I among them – who love physical science as dearly as Spencer and Tyndall can; who are ready to follow Darwin… without the least fear. But when it is said to us. No. You shall not be a scientific man and a Xtian… then, I think, an honest man has a right to lose his temper deliberately, and use a few hard words” (qtd. in Conlin 123).

The signal phrase makes it clear that Kingsley is who said this, but the parenthetical makes it clear that to find this quotation, you will need to go to Conlin. Then, if you go to the Works Cited (which I've included at the bottom of this post), you can see where I actually got the quotation from.

So this achieves the two goals of every citation: giving credit, and providing documentation.

But as a wise man once said, "Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing" (Meyer and Martin qtd. in 137th Gebirg). There a couple problems that "qtd. in" is prone to, and a couple circumstances in which it is definitely warranted.

First, you are trusting that the source you read gets it right.

Charles Kingsley and his wife

This isn't always the case! Even among academics, sources can be misquoted, or even if quoted correctly, they can get the context wrong. For example, in his The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), Francis Darwin (Charles's son) quotes a letter from Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin saying, "I have to thank you for the unexpected honour of your book [the Origin]. That the Naturalist whom, of all naturalists living, I most wish to know and to learn from, should have sent a scientist like me his book, encourages me at least to observe more carefully, and perhaps more slowly" (81). This is quoted all over the place. When I read this, I was surprised—would Kingsley really call himself a scientist, especially back in 1859 before the word really took off?

So I tracked down the letter in the Darwin Correspondence Project, where we find that Kinglsey actually says, "a sciolist like me" (emphasis mine). A sciolist is, as the OED tells us, a "person whose knowledge is only superficial, esp. one who makes much of it; a pretender to learning"; this is a far more likely thing for Kingsley to be calling himself. But searching "'charles kingsley' 'a scientist like me'" gets 1,490 hits on Google, whereas "'charles kingsley' 'a sciolist like me'" gets seven! That 1887 Francis Darwin misquotation has been endlessly reproduced and requoted by people who have not checked the original. (Both formulations get exactly three hits in Google Scholar, however, so professional academic have been more careful.)

Second, you may not be giving adequate intellectual credit (or not making an original contribution).

The most obvious form of plagiarism is, as everyone knows, taking someone else's language without credit. But it's also plagiarism (as, in my experience, many students do not know) to take someone else's ideas without proper credit. This actually recently happened to me; I was asked to peer review an article about a novel (let's call it "novel A") that I had published about myself. The paper I reviewed took another text (let's call it "essay B") and applied it to novel A—the exact same second text that I had been the first to apply to novel A. It cited me, but only in the sense that the citations didn't actually quote essay B themselves, they quoted my quotations (e.g., qtd. in Mollmann).

Now is this plagiarism in the sense of borrowing language without attribution? No. But I do think it was pretty fishy. One, it was my idea to bring these two texts together, and nothing in the article I peer reviewed made that clear, I was just cited as the source of quotations for essay B. There was a failure to adequately give credit for a comparison that only I had thought of, even if none of my language had been stolen. Furthermore, I did the work of picking out the relevant passages from both novel A and essay B, but received no credit for it. (The writer clearly had not read essay B themselves, because they quoted nothing from it that I hadn't.)

Second, even if adequate credit had been given... what's the point? If they don't go back to that original source themselves, they are entirely dependent on my interpretation, and thus cannot be making much of an original intellectual contribution—which is the whole point of academic writing. Even if I was credited, someone else had already had the idea of pairing novel A with essay B. Why do I want to read someone else making the exact same combination of texts, using the exact same selection of passages?

For me, this is the real issue with not going back to the original source. If one writer pulls a line that's important to them out of a source, I don't need a second writer to re-pull that same line. I want to know what the second writer thinks is important to their point.

So when is it a good idea to use "qtd. in"?

I searched my book manuscript for uses of "qtd. in" in order to write this post, and discovered that I use it thirteen times in 424 pages. My uses fall into two main categories:

First, when the original source isn't readily available. This is, I believe, the case with the Kingsley letter I quoted via Conlin above. (It has been a long time, so I'm not 100% sure, but I do feel sure I would have quoted the original if I could have.) Some sources just can't be easily accessed: they are letters that have never been reprinted or periodicals that have never been digitized and are only available in some archive in another country. This makes you entirely dependent on someone else... but what else can you do? In a quick skim of my "qtd. in"s, I would guess this accounts for more than half of them.

Second, when you are working with a secondary source, but you also want to provide some detail by quoting its quotation of a primary source. There must be a more elegant way of putting that, but let me provide some examples. For one, here's a passage where I'm discussing the work of my academic grandfather, George Levine:

Levine examines how self-abnegation figures into epistemology beginning in the 1830s, both within literature and within the work of actual scientists, drawing on the writing of scientists such as Tyndall who claimed “a self-renunciation that has something lofty in it… is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science” (qtd. in Levine 4). Levine does not examine any specific discipline, but examines both scientists and scientist-like figures during the Victorian period to see how self-abnegation functions as a narrative: how does science create a narrative of self-abnegation, and how do literary narratives incorporate self-abnegation?

Social Darwinism: "There's always a bigger fish" (Lucas qtd. in benjay2345).

Yes, I'm quoting Tyndall, but here I'm quoting Tyndall in order to elucidate something about the Levine passage where he quotes Tyndall. Thus, I think I'm doing a better job of giving Levine credit if I make it clear that this is his quotation of Tyndall that supports his point. Similarly, when discussing social Darwinism in the novel Zalma (1895), I draw on the ideas of Mike Hawkins:

But this is not purposeless violence; an important keystone of Darwinism was “that social conflict (at least in certain guises) could be presented… as the motor of progress” (Hawkins 146). Applying this kind of evolutionary vision to humankind leads Pahlen to anticipate some of the Darwinist writers who would come after Zalma. The German general Friedrich von Bernhardi would write in 1912, “Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a biologically just decision” (qtd. in Hawkins 209), and the socialist writer La Monte argued in 1917, “Let us… assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution!” (113)

In this case, I think it's important to show that Bernhardi is Hawkins's own example of the idea he's discussing, though I also supplement them with my own example pulled from La Monte.

On the other hand, if you read a source that points you to another source, and you end up taking stuff from the second source that the first source did not, and don't use any of the ideas of the first source, I don't think there's any obligation to cite the first source. Yes, it was nice of that first source to lead you somewhere useful, but I would argue that it didn't make an intellectual contribution to your piece.

So... can you just depend on someone else's citation, and cite them? Well, sure, you can. But is it always the best choice? I don't think so. Like many aspects of writing, it's about context.

Works Cited

benjay2345. “Qui-Gon's quote 'There's always a bigger fish' in the first film of the Saga foreshadows the final film of the saga.” Reddit, 22 June 2020, www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/hdzke3/quigons_quote_theres_always_a_bigger_fish_in_the.

Conlin, Jonathan. Evolution and the Victorians: Science, Culture and Politics in Darwin’s Britain. Bloomsbury, 2014. 

Darwin, Francis. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. 1887. Vol. 2, D. Appleton, 1888.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kingsley, Charles. Letter to Charles Darwin. 18 Nov. 1859. Darwin Correspondence Project, U of Cambridge, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2534.xml.

La Monte, Robert Rives. “Science and Revolution.” The Social-Democrat, vol. 13, no. 3, 15 Mar. 1909, pp. 105-13. HathiTrust, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101067578953&view=1up&seq=115.

Levine, George. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 2002.

137th Gebirg. “The President's Address at Khitomer - Star Trek VI: TUC.” The TrekBBS, 8 June 2007, www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-presidents-address-at-khitomer-star-trek-vi-tuc.33640.

“sciolist.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, doi: 10.1093/OED/3809113041.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Dean Winnstay, Naturalist (Alton Locke, 1850)

Trade paperback, 452 pages
Published 1983 (originally 1850)
Acquired January 2019
 Read February 2019

Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography
by Charles Kingsley

'Mak a style for yoursel, laddie; ye're na mair Scots hind than ye are Lincolnshire laird: sae gang yer ain gate and leave them to gang theirs; and just mak a gran', brode, simple, Saxon style for yoursel.' (99)

Was Charles Kingsley a two-hit wonder? The more I read the more I wonder. The Water-Babies was good, and I appreciated Two Years Ago, but none of the other novels I've read by him have done much for me. Or anything really. There's fertile ground in Alton Locke, a first-person narrative of a cockney tailor's ascent to poetry and political revolution, but like Hypatia, so much of it is boring tedium where nothing happens.

He does meet a man of science, though, the Dean of a Cambridge college, who both wants to teach Locke science and to experiment on him scientifically. I like that he says, "the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way" (167)-- never was the project of the scientist in the scientist novel so clearly expressed; the man of science is a microcosm for science, and the novel is a microcosm of the universe. But though it might apply to scientist novels, Alton Locke is not one, and thus have little to recommend itself to me, and honestly, it has little going for it for others, too.

(I do like Kingsley's political stirrings, especially the Chartist Scot quoted above, but there's just so much other stuff that's just not interesting.)

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Hypatia, Mathematician (Hypatia, 1853)

Hardcover, 438 pages
Published 1968 (originally 1852-53)
Acquired and read January 2019

Hypatia by Charles Kingsley

"Have I not an intellect, a taste, a reason? I could appreciate what she said.—Why should not my faculties be educated? Why am I only to be shut out from knowledge? There is a Christian Gnosis as well as a heathen one. [...] Is not my very craving for knowledge a sign that I am capable of it?" (131)

Hypatia, the late Roman-era Alexandrian mathematician, is often called an early female scientist, so it seemed like it behooved me to read the novel about her by Charles Kingsley, a man who did write two proper "scientist novels" (Two Years Ago and The Water-Babies). In terms of my project on Victorian scientists, I needn't've bothered. Hypatia as Kingsley tells it might be a mathematician and a philosopher, but she is no scientist-- she is never shown observing the world or engaging in experiment. Mostly the focus is (as in the above quotation, from a young Christian monk who wants to study under her) on her moral instruction.

In terms of reading a good book, I needn't've bothered, either. It was supposedly Queen Victoria's favorite Kingsley novel, which surely correlates to why I dislike it: it's boring and rambly and Kingsley never really makes anyone who doesn't care about hating Catholics care about what's going on. There are a couple good jokes (I don't know why he threw a gang of murderous Vikings into the mix, but I love it), but on the whole, it's one of those books where masses of pages go by and you don't know what's printed on them because you don't care to. This could be the material for a good novel, but alas, it is not.

Review: Glaucus by Charles Kingsley

Hardcover, 245 pages
Published 1899 (originally 1855)
Acquired and read June 2017

Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore
by Charles Kingsley

When a few more years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick [...] and the group of brave men who accompanied and followed them, will be looked back to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they had to endure from well-meaning fanatics [...] who tried (as is the fashion in such cases) to make a hollow compromise between fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just enough to make them fit the fancied meaning of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make it fit the fancied meaning of the facts. But there were a few who would have no compromise; who laboured on with a noble recklessness, determined to speak the thing which they had seen, and neither more nor less, sure that God could take better care than they of His own everlasting truth. (13-4)

Glaucus is in theory a natural history text, detailing the amazing life-forms to be found on the English coast, complete with illustrations in both color and black and white. What I found more interesting, though, was Kingsley's discourse about the moral benefits of natural history itself, which probably takes up a third of the book. Kingsley's novel Two Years Ago (1857: vol. i and ii), which was published just two years after this, is pretty clearly a fictionalized version of the line of thinking he began in this book. For Kingsley, the vision of the naturalist is morally superior: it gives him more beauty to see in the world, it lets him glimpse the work of God, it gets him out of the home and saves him from indolence. (It was a review of Two Years Ago where, of course, the term "muscular Christianity" debuted.) According to Kingsley, "A frightful majority of our middle-class young men are growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune" (50), and "What is wanted in these cases is a methodic and scientific habit of mind; and a class of objects on which to exercise that habit" (51).

Even just a small snapshot of the virtues Kingsley ascribes to the naturalist is somewhat ridiculous: he is gentle, courteous, brave, patient, reverent, full of wonder, scrupulous, not hasty, not lazy, not melancholy, not proud and much much more. (To be honest, this sounds like the Scout Law, which makes sense, as I'd bet you could draw a line from muscular Christianity in the mid-Victorian period to Scouting for Boys in the early twentieth century.) Partially these virtues come from the way of seeing you must cultivate in order to perceive the natural world accurately in its minute glories, and partially they come from the physical activities you will have to undertake in your explorations. Recurrent throughout the text-- as indicated in my epigraph above-- is the idea that the true naturalist is a man of God, and a true man of God is a naturalist.

Kingsley is a lively and engaging writer, and his descriptions of natural historical work make me want to become a "muscular Christian" myself. I did sort of zone out whenever he started describing crustaceans or whatever, but his take on the moral virtues of natural history is compelling and fascinating, and will definitely inform my next read of Two Years Ago.

Thomas Chatterton: Eighteenth-Century Forger

A comment by a dissertation committee member had me going through Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago looking for bits where people talk about poetry. What I discovered was a conversation between the kindly old Doctor Thurnall, naturalist and physician, and the young John Briggs, would-be poet. Doctor Thurnall tells Briggs he's gotta love nature more to be a good poet:

"Throw away the safe station in which God has certainly put you, to seek, by some desperate venture, a new, and, as you fancy, a grander one for yourself? Look out of that window, lad; is there not poetry enough, beauty and glory enough, in that sky, those fields,—ay, in every fallen leaf,—to employ all your powers, considerable as I believe them to be? Why spurn the pure, quiet, country life, in which such men as Wordsworth have been content to live and grow old?"

The boy shook his head like an impatient horse. "Too slow—too slow for me, to wait and wait, as Wordsworth did, through long years of obscurity, misconception, ridicule. No. What I have, I must have at once; and, if it must be, die like Chatterton—if only, like Chatterton, I can have my little day of success, and make the world confess that another priest of the beautiful has arisen among men."

So this is useful to my purpose (as it suggests a good poet is a good scientist), but I was like-- who the heck is Chatterton? Because obviously I've heard of Wordsworth, but I've never heard of this fella, which maybe suggests Briggs is full of it. (He usually is. He later changes his name to Elsey Vavasour because he believes it's more a proper poet's name.) Thomas Chatterton turns out to be an eighteenth-century poet, born in 1752.

Chatterton's big thing was that he made up a fifteenth-century poet, and most of his poetry was ostensibly work by one Thomas Rowley that he had supposedly discovered in manuscript form. Amazingly, he was only sixteen years old at the time. Born into poverty, he tried to leverage his "discoveries" into acquiring a patron, to little success; he turned to political poetry, and didn't get very far there, either. He committed suicide in 1770 at the age of seventeen.

Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton (1856)

He did come to fame after that; in 1777, a book of the poetry of Thomas Rawley was published by a credulous editor. Word about the forgery spread, but it might not surprise you that the Romantic poets loved this guy. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley all mention him in their poetry or dedicate poems to him. I'm guessing from the tenor of the above passage, though, that Kingsley was not a fan.

It's Been a Kingsley Kind of Week

I get the man on the brain, I guess. This Wednesday, I was teaching Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (among other pieces on the difference between oral and written language) in my book history course, and I wanted to read something aloud to my students, then get them to read the same passage, so we could talk about the differences. I meant to grab a Calvino collection on my way out the door, but I forgot, so I was limited to whatever I could find on my office bookshelf. Eventually I settled on The Water-Babies, remembering its great passage about how no one seeing a water-baby is not the same as water-babies not existing. It culminates with

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.

"And still the lobster held on!"

The Water-Babies is meant to be a bedtime story of sorts, so it's written in a storytelling style, including (in this passage) objections from the listener:

     "But surely if there were water-babies, somebody would have caught one at least?"
     Well. How do you know that somebody has not?
     "But they would have put it into spirits, or into the Illustrated News, or perhaps cut it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor Huxley, to see what they would each say about it."

I had forgotten that until I selected the section, but it worked well with Ong's point that much written communication mimics the style of oral communication. (He uses some of Aquinas's theology as an example, so this was a little less heady.)

And of course I like this book, it has Owen and Huxley jokes.

That morning, I had been cleaning up a dissertation chapter that includes a discussion of Kingsley's Two Years Ago, though I hadn't actually gotten to that part of it yet, but I guess I had him on the brain, though I didn't make that connection until Thursday. Thursday I actually did work on the Kingsley part of the chapter, and one of the larger changes I made (aside from deleting, because I sort of belabor my points in this chapter) was to replace where I had cited someone else's take on The Water-Babies with my own analysis of a little story: in this case, the tale of Professor Ptthmllnsprts, who cannot see a water-baby even when it is right in front of him because he thinks like a materialist man of science, and does not allow mythology to influence him. In revenge, a fairy curses him to believe in everything, including that the moon is made of cheese, and his scientific career ends in embarrasment.

Ptthmllnsprts (whose name is now added to my spell-check but I can now spell without checking) is probably based on Huxley. Owen claimed humans were distinguished from apes by the hippocampus minor, but Huxley demonstrated that apes also has hippocampus majors. In The Water-Babies, Ptthmllnsprts's big claim to fame is demonstrating that both humans and apes have the "hippopotamus major" in their brains:

But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape's brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother from having been an ape too. No, my dear little man; always remember that the one true, certain, final, and all-important difference between you and an ape is, that you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, and it has none; and that, therefore, to discover one in its brain will be a very wrong and dangerous thing, at which every one will be very much shocked, as we may suppose they were at the professor.

But if Ptthmllnsprts is a pisstake on Huxley, he's an affectionate one, as Kingsley and Huxley were as friendly as a Christian minister and the man who coined the term "agnostic" could be. I was disappointed he wasn't based on Owen's side in the debate, as Owen has always looked to me like he eats the souls of children to sustain his life-force:

I'm not sure my students appreciated Kingsley per se, but the content wasn't really the point of the thing, and some of them did laugh at the bit about pterodactyls, though since I gave them no context,  I think they were a bit thrown about the whole 25-years-ago-they-were-discovered thing. I don't know why I always come back around to Kingsley these days!

The Reverend Charles Kingsley, Victorian Sexter

I've been spending the last couple weeks learning about the Reverend Charles Kingsley, a mid-Victorian author of mid-level repute. He's a pretty interesting fellow, more than I'd given him credit for before beginning these investigations. (I'm writing about his "scientist novel" Two Years Ago in my dissertation, and I'm trying to do some intellectual contextualization.)

The Reader of the Sacred Books

Kingsley is perhaps most famous these days for his children's novel The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863), about the adventures of a dead chimney sweep who transforms into a water sprite. (Doctor Who fans will know it as one of the three Sacred Books of the Earth culture of the year 2,000,000, along with Moby-Dick and U.K. Habitats of the Canadian Goose by H. M. Stationery Office.) The Water-Babies is an odd book to modern sensibilities, but it's noteworthy for being heavily involved in the evolutionary discoveries of its time; there are jokes about the the Hippocampus Controversy (in the form of "the great hippopotamus test"), and the scientist character Professor Ptthmllnsprts (Put Them All in Spirits, not Pull Them All Apart, as I used to somehow believe) is based on both creepy old Richard Owen and young firebrand Thomas Henry Huxley.

But, as the first half of my title indicates, Kingsley was a reverend, and a very devout man, too. He was the big instigator of what came to be called "muscular Christianity": the belief that a pious man ought to be healthy, muscular, and rugged. Don't just sit around reading about the world, get out in it and explore! Conquer the Crimea, defeat cholera epidemics, and catalog the wonders of the shore! (Eventually his ideas spread to America, where they led to the existence of the YMCA, so without Kingsley I may have never learned how to swim.)

Science is cool, kids--
it has volcanoes!

In an era we often stereotype as being all about science-vs.-religion, Kingsley had a much more sophisticated position. Darwin actually sent him a copy of the Origin upon publication, and Kingsley was an enthusiastic reader of it (Darwin actually quoted Kingsley's praise in the second edition). He wrote a number of science books, mostly for children, such as Madam How and Lady Why (1868-69), whose preface suggests that all good Christians are men of science, and all good men of science are Christians: "God’s Book, which is the Universe, and the reading of God’s Book, which is Science, can do you nothing but good, and teach you nothing but truth and wisdom. God did not put this wondrous world about your young souls to tempt or to mislead them" (xii). You can detect in that passage, I think, a little bit of disdain about the ideas of Philip Henry Gosse, the fellow who supposedly-but-not-quite-actually said that God put fossils of ancient organisms on the Earth to test our faith.

Kingsley actually wrote to Darwin to suggest that fauns, satyrs, elves, and dwarves were probably the missing links between man and animal: "That they should have died out, by simple natural selection, before the superior white race, you & I can easily understand." (Darwin's response is of the uh-huh-how-very-interesting variety, though he can't avoid being racist in a typical Victorian fashion: "In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.")

In addition to all his religious and scientific writing, however, Kingsley was also the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University from 1860 to 1869, where he was very popular with undergraduates but very unpopular with other faculty. I have the sense that Kingsley's historical credentials were dubious at best; he was slated for not doing very much original research, and he was also really into the "Great Man" version of history. But he seems to have been an excellent storyteller, so put him up at a podium and get him to lecture about Roman Britain, and you get something really quite enjoyable.

Not that kind of "positive," Grumpy Cat
courtesy Leigh Ann's Blog

Kingsley viewed his history professorship as part of his religious mission; he was afraid of the increasing influence of Auguste Comte's positivism (a sort of scientific study of history) in English universities, which he feared would lead historians to neglect the human in favor of inflexible and not altogether accurate scientific laws. Indeed, his inaugural lecture, "The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History," was on this very important topic: "For young sciences, like young men, have their time of wonder, hope, imagination, and of passion too, and haste, and bigotry. Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the beauty of the few laws they may have discovered, they are too apt to erect them into gods, and to explain by them all matters in heaven and earth" (315). He was blasted for his lack of understanding of Comte, which eventually led to him reading twelve volumes of Comte in preparation for his final 1869 lecture, about how Carlyle was way more awesome than Comte. This is no small feat-- even fans of Comte thought that he was a terrible writer!

For all the unpopularity this approach yielded amongst Cambridge's other faculty (William Whewell was kind of a dick to him, apparently), it did what Kingsley wanted it to do: there's a letter from a student to Kingsley that says, "Your whole series last term, and especially the grand concluding one on Comte, have made an expression just at the moment it was needed […and] put into the minds of many young men the same living belief in a living God" (qtd. in Klaver 602). And such was his reputation that during his time at Cambridge, Kingsley was also engaged as private history tutor to the Prince of Wales-- later King Edward VII.

Kingsley was also really into sanitary reform, but let me tell you, that is not easy to be interested in, or to say much interesting about.

get a look at those sex maniacs
(within the bounds of marriage)
courtesy Charles Kingsley:
The 20th Century Heritage

My favorite thing I've learned about Kingsley, however, to finally come to the second half of my title, is that he was really into dirty letters! He wrote his wife Fanny sexy letters, complete with smutty illustrations! It doesn't exactly fit your stereotype of a clergyman, especially a Victorian one, but hey, having sexy times within marriage is in fact your Christian duty-- perhaps even moreso if you're a muscular Christian! It's nice to know the Victorians were people too, you know, and not the uptight prudes it's easy to stereotype them as.

Sources

Chitty, Susan. The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley. New York: Mason/Charter, 1975.

Kingsley, Charles. "The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History." 1860. The Roman and the Teuton: A Series of Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge. London: Macmillan, 1891. 307-43.

---. Preface. Madam How and Lady Why, or First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children. 1870. New York: Macmillan, 1893. vii-xv.

Klaver, J. M. I. The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2006.

Wright, C. J. "'My darling baby': Charles Kingsley's Letters to His Wife." British Library Journal 1984: 147-57.

Review: The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley

Trade paperback, 198 pages
Published 2008 (originally 1863)
Previously read July 2009

Acquired and reread November 2012

The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby
by Charles Kingsley

Kingsley was an interesting fellow-- a proponent of "muscular Christianity" but also a believer in the potential of science. Before reading the Origin, he wrote Darwin to say he would go in unbiased: "From two common superstitions, at least, I shall be free, while judging of your book. 1) I have long since [...] learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species. 2). I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore & pro loco, as to believe that He required a fresh act of inter-vention to supply the lacunas wh he himself had made" (Darwin Correspondence Database, Entry 2534). On the other hand, he also wrote Darwin to say that he had found "species intermediate between man & the ape. It has come home to me with much force, that while we deny the existence of any such, the legends of most nations are full of them. Fauns, Satyrs, Inui, Elves, Dwarfs—we call them one minute mythological personages, the next conquered inferior races" (DCD 3426).

So it's probably not surprising to learn that The Water-Babies merges scientific fact with fantastic whimsy, usually favoring the whimsy. Perhaps best, it contains a passage where Kingsley explains that dragons do exist, scientists just call them a different name so they can feel more dignified: "Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist" (40).

My primary reason for (re)reading the book was, of course, its scientist character, the delightfully named Professor Ptthmallnsprts (Richard Beards, who edited the edition I am reading, suggests he is possibly based on Huxley). Ptthmallnsprts is a Professor of Necrobioneopalæonthydrochthonanthropopithekology at a university in the Cannibal Islands, and he is obsessed with being the first to discover worms (and, if you tell him he's not, he'll tell you it's not a worm, so he can still be right about something). Furthermore, he knows, because he once heard a paper on it, that there are no mythological creatures; therefore, he refuses to believe in water-babies even when he has one right in his hands. Oh, those scientists and their limited worldviews and lack of imagination!

But it's all in good fun, and our little water-baby Tom, upon becoming human again, even becomes "a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things" (188). The moral of the story is, of course, be nice to efts.

Review: Two Years Ago—Vol. II by Charles Kingsley

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2004 (originally 1857)
Read July 2012

Two Years Ago—Vol. II
by Charles Kingsley

The impending cholera epidemic felt like a game-changing storm at the end of the first volume of Two Years Ago, so it's disappointing when it actually hits and turns out to be a few people getting sick (except for one). What does cast a long shadow over the rest of Two Years Ago is the Crimean War. I think that this is the first Victorian novel I've read to actually deal with this in a substantive way; almost all the characters end up serving in the war in some way, shape, or form. (Though it's not as hard-hitting as something like Master Georgie, that's for sure.) Beyond that, there's just a lot of moralizing here, both from the narrator and Tom's father, but don't you worry: Tom soon learns that his keen scientific gaze can be used in the service of God and not just money (even he was functionally kinda doing this already). It turns out that atheistic cunning is best as tying itself up!

It's not quite so one-note as I'm making it sound, as there's a minister who learns from Tom that sitting around thinking about dogma isn't terrible useful; this novel led to the coining of the term "muscular Christianity" and it shows.

Review: Two Years Ago—Vol. I by Charles Kingsley

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2004 (originally 1857)
Read July 2012

Two Years Ago—Vol. I
by Charles Kingsley

Two Years Ago is the story of Tom Thurnall, the son of a doctor, and himself a physician-- and, like many physicians of his period, an amateur naturalist. So of course I was obligated to read it for my exams. Kingsley's big emphasis on what makes Tom as a scientist different from the people around him is his method of observation: he sees well. He doesn't conform to the stereotype of the scientist as socially clueless; rather, he's the sort of person who sees others very, very keenly. But not quite well enough: "He had watched human nature under every disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the savage, and formed his own clear, hard, shallow, practical estimate thereof." He understands people very well, especially their weaknesses... but is often unable to see their strengths. He can manipulate them, but not love them.

If you guess that this results in the novel being about Tom learning to see the goodness within people, you'd be right. But though the narrator always has time to stop and drop a moral judgment on Tom ("the possession of power, sought at first from self-interest, has become a passion, a species of sporting, which he follows for its own sake"), Tom is actually a very good scientist and a very good person, bringing a number of positive changes to the town where he takes up residence, and handling tricky situations in a way to fair to all-- even the terrible people! A lot of the last chapter is about his fear of an approaching cholera epidemic, and he does a lot to stop it from hurting anyone.

Running alongside his hijinks is a subplot about his love for Grace, who is (surprise) a religious woman. She loves him, too, but he suspects her of theft, and she can't tell him what she thinks did happen, so separate they shall remain. A lot of the novel's threads come together at the climax at the end of the first volume... but the cholera is still on its way and no one can stop it. Thankfully there's a whole second volume to drag his reformation out through.