'MY DARLING BABY': CHARLES KINGSLEY'S
LETTERS TO HIS WIFE
C. J. WRIGHT
A FEW days before his marriage on io January 1844 to Frances Grenfell, Tanny' as she
was called by her family, Charles Kingsley wrote to his bride-to-be about their
honeymoon, 'shall I bring down all our letters to Cheddar?—I think so. —My baby, we
will classify them, & put the answers with them, & keep a box on purpose for them, &
often look at them in after years & at last leave them as an heir-loom to our children, to be
studied often—but never published!'^ As is usually the case, this injunction against
publication was to be disregarded but in this instance by someone with a moral right to do
so. When in January 1875 Kingsley died, aged only fifty-five, his heart-broken widow
set to work to compile a 'Life and Letters'. She thought that in her husband's case
his correspondence was particularly important. The memorial volume was, indeed,
eventually titled Charles Kingsley: his letters and memories of his life (London, 1877).
Fanny was convinced that in his lifetime Charles's letters had helped to save men's souls
and the thought that they might continue to do so in future was her consolation for 'giving
out of my treasure-house what naturally I should wish to keep private'." After her death,
however, her husband's papers vanished from sight until they were used by Susan Chitty
in her biography of Kingsley, The Beast and The Monk (London, 1974), published to
mark the centenary of his death. It is part of this collection which has been acquired by the
British Library and, with some other family letters, now forms Add. MSS. 62552-62557.^
Even Kingsley's contemporaries had been struck by the intensity of the relationship between husband and wife, which Fanny Kingsley's biography revealed. Lord
Aberdeen's son Douglas Hamilton-Gordon, a Canon of Salisbury, on reading it had
written to his brother Arthur, an acquaintance of Kingsley, 'my only wonder about him is
his devotion to his wife, whom I used to know well. . . She never struck me as a person to
worship, as he evidently did.'''" Despite this, when Lady Chitty's biography appeared it
caused a sensation. It was not only that Kingsley's letters to his wife were, in their
unedited form, remarkably frank for a Victorian clergyman, but the drawings in which
he indulged were even more sexually explicit. Most of these latter are missing from
the present collection, although the Department of Manuscripts already possesses his
unfinished prose life of St Elizabeth of Hungary (Add. MS. 41296), a wedding present
for Fanny which contains similar illustrations. Kingsley himself would probably have
dismissed the furore. If some of the Tractarians saw celibacy as the ultimate expression of
147
/
y
'%h&:^ ^
. /. The ardent suitor, 1843: a self-portrait in pencil by Charles Kingsley at the end of a letter to
Fanny Grenfell with the injunction, 'Kiss this head, I have kissed it.' Even before their marriage
in January 1844 Kingsley, as here, was in the habit of addressing her as 'My beloved own own wife',
Add. MS. 62552, fol. 93
the Christiati ideal, for him it lay in conjugal felicity. It is therefore not unfitting that his
letters to his wife should already have become a locus classicus for students of Victorian
sexuality.
All the same, it would be a mistake to take them out of context. The key to Kingsley's
personality lies in the strength of his feelings. He was a deeply emotional man and, what is
not always the same, a very sensitive one. His powers of imaginative intuition far outran
his ability to articulate or analyse them. He could often hit on the truth and yet break
down utterly when he attempted to express it. The most famous example of this was the
disastrous dispute he sparked off when in 1864, almost in passing, he accused the Roman
Catholic clergy in general and Newman in particular of equivocation. 'Father Newman
informs us . . . that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith
to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in
marriage.'^ The wording of this charge is instructive. Nevertheless, it was gross and
regrettable and Newman, who had indeed been endowed by Heaven with an unusual
degree of intellectual subtilty, had no difficulty in running rings round it. That Kingsley
was no very profound thinker was further confirmed in the minds of contemporaries by
148
his performance as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Such was his enthusiasm
and verve that the lectures were hugely popular with the undergraduates. However,
Arthur Hamilton-Gordon summed up the accepted view when he commented to
Roundell Palmer, the future Lord Chancellor, 'their picturesqueness charms me—their
shallowness and gross prejudice worry and disgust me'.*^
Not only was Kingsley a sensitive man himself but he belonged to that generation of
mid-Victorian Romantics who were not afraid of displaying their emotions. "^ He was thus
very different from the products of the burgeoning public schools where the boys,
possibly reverting to a more traditional pattern of behaviour, learnt in Lord Annan's
words to 'betray neither their comrades nor emotion'.^ Kingsley had not been to a public
school himself and was anxious about sending his own sons to one, though Maurice
eventually went to Wellington and Grenville to Harrow. In 1856 he recorded of a
conversation with Mrs Senior, 'she vows her boy shall not go to school. She says that even
in Tom Hughes it begot a hardness w[hich] took years to cure.'^ His own emotions were
notably volatile. In her biography of him Fanny published the letter he wrote to her from
Edinburgh before the first in a series of lectures he had agreed to deliver, admitting 'I was
dreadfully nervous before hand, & actually cried with fear up in my own room.'^*^ He also
valued a show of emotion in others. Sending Fanny a budget of local news, he chronicled
meeting a parishioner who had just lost his wife, 'blubbering like a great boy— I loved him
all the better for it.'^^
Apart from Fanny this intensity of emotion found its fullest expression in his relations
with his children, on whom he doted. It may possibly have been a trifle overpowering.
The results, certainly, were not altogether satisfactory. His elder son Maurice, named
after F. D. Maurice the Christian Socialist theologian, was intended by his father to be a
soldier but showed early signs of wanting to emigrate. His family insisted he go up to
Cambridge but he did not take a degree and soon made his way out to the Argentine.
Kingsley was much alarmed by what he wrote home about the 'recklessness &
murderousness of society'^^ there. Almost as bad was the fact that without any capital
Maurice had no chance of purchasing farming land. This rather than any childhood
dream of seeing the Spanish Main was the explanation of Kingsley's voyage to Trinidad,
which he described in At Last. The idea had been suggested by the Governor Arthur
Hamilton-Gordon, who was married to the niece of one of Kingsley's parishioners. Lord
Eversley. Kingsley hoped it might lead to a grant of land to Maurice for cattle farming and
decided to go off'& "prospect" for him\^^ In the event, the visit was not as successful as
Kingsley had hoped. Gordon had gone down with yellow fever and wrote back pettishly to
England of it, 'the other chief domestic event . . . has been the visit of Mr and Miss
Kingsley. He preaches admirably but in other respects has disappointed me being full of
little weaknesses, vanities, and self-indulgencies, which I had not anticipated.'^"^ Maurice
went out not to Trinidad but to the United States, where he eventually settled, and where
Kingsley visited him in the last year of his life. His younger son Grenville inherited the
family tendency to melancholy and had an unhappy life. After a scandal involving a
married woman following his father's death, he was packed off to Australia. It was
149
Grenville for whom Kingsley wrote The Water Babies. Possibly he was never able to
recover from the consequences of the stifling affection which surrounded him as a child.
Like Alistair Grahame, the dedicatee of The Wind in the Willows., and Peter Llewelyn
Davies, the partial inspiration of Peter Pan^ he met a sad end.
As Kingsley himself became a public figure, his devotion to family and country was
extended to embrace the highest family in the land. After what he regarded as fifteen lean
years in his country parish, his growing success as a writer and his consequent emergence
into London society brought him to the attention of the court. A clergyman with an
interest in education, model dwellings and sanitation was exactly the sort of person to
catch the Prince Consort's eye. In 1859 he was appointed a Royal Chaplain and in
November had to go to Windsor 'to kneel and kiss hands'. Lady Chitty records him as not
caring for this piece of etiquette. ^^ What he, in fact, wrote to Fanny was that he 'didn't
dislike it'. ^^ The next year the Prince secured him the Cambridge chair and in 1861 he was
appointed one of the tutors to the Prince of Wales during his stay at the university. The
year ended in tragedy with the Prince Consort's death by typhoid. The Queen thought his
spirit had been broken by his discovery that the Prince of Wales had had an affair with an
actress at the Curragh that summer, and decided that the Prince must marry. Both
Charles and Fanny were invited to his wedding at Windsor on 12 March 1863. In a
portion of a letter to E. P. Campbell, which Fanny decided to omit from her biography
during the Queen's lifetime, Kingsley described 'the Queen's sad sad face, scarred with
sorrow, and yet determined to be glad. You will see in the Times that she wept at the
Chorale—It was not so. She kept herself all through: but at the Chorale she threw back
her head, and looked upwards, gradually shutting her eyes, with a magnificent
Expression. I said to Norman McLeod "Good Heavens look at her" so struck was I.
"Yes" he said "She is worshipping her husband in Spirit"—and so it was.'^'' Kingsley
developed a fervent attachment to the young Prince, not believing the stories that were
soon going round. Perhaps this was just as well for he was himself so opposed to gambling
he would not even allow cards to be played for money in his presence. In 1871 he
published an exhortation to the young men of Chester, where he was by now a Canon, to
desist from betting on horses. ^^ Nevertheless, when the Prince of Wales fell victim that
year to the same disease that had killed his father, Kingsley rushed to Lynn to be near
Sandringham. His papers contain a draft letter of congratulations to the Prince on his
recovery. Were the author not Kingsley, its vehemence would be disconcerting. 'Most
August Prince and beloved Master, I trust that your Royal Highness will deign at your
leisure to read these lines. I could not help writing them . . . The delight wh[ich]
I feel, the whole realm feels also. Till I heard we were in the most imminent danger of
losing you, I did not know how I loved you.'^^
The evolution of Kingsley's pohtical opinions was probably also strongly governed by
personal feelings. Apart from his distrust of Roman Catholicism and the Tractarians,
there was little of the ideologue about him. What he hated were particular injustices rather
than any abstract concept of injustice. The Dean of Chester described him after his death
as a mixture of radical and tory.^° As a teenager he had witnessed the Bristol Reform Riots
150
. 2. Doing 'a stroke of work', 1843; Kingsley's belief in the nobility of manual labour finds early
expression in this sketch in a letter to Fanny of himself, on the right, taking a pickaxe to a block of
granite in a mine near Helston in Cornwall. The figure on the rope ladder is Fanny's brother,
Pascoe Grenfell, Add. MS. 62552, fol. 66^
of 1831 and these had turned him into *the veriest aristocrat'.^^ Lady Chitty, however,
almost certainly postdates his conversion to radicalism when she attributes this to a stay
with Fanny's brother-in-law Sydney Godolphin Osborne in April 1844.^^ Six months
earlier he had written to Fanny 'I am such a spiritualleveller[.] "Toryism", realToryism is
no part of Xtianity.'^^But, significantly, while he was on this visit to Helston, he remarked
of the Cornish 'they are such gentlemen., working Mammon's work, & yet so undefiled by
it.'^^For though he took the strongest practical interest in the well-being of the poor, he
clearly felt that in the end material possessions were immaterial. What he detested was not
'nobility'^^ itself but the superficial values of the Veneerings—'"Refinement!" The
invention of sensual minds wh[ich] look only at the outward & visible sign.'^^ Thus the
man who was an ardent Christian Socialist would also have restored the feudal system if
he could, believing it 'the highest form of civilisation—in ideal, not in practice,—which
Europe has seen yet.'^*^
This attitude may have been coloured, of course, by his belief that he himself came of
an ancient family, despoiled of its wealth. During their courtship, discussing with Fanny
the possible publication of some of his writings, he proposed to take the nom de plume
'Lackland'.^^ Like most Victorians who had received a Liberal Education, he nursed an
intense distaste for trade. He clearly disapproved when Lady Maria Loftus, a daughter of
the Marquess of Ely, married a Springfield of Norwich, 'whose family made a fortune by
improvements in silk & crape\^^ and was taken aback when at Sandringham he met the
head man of Garrard's the Jewellers who turned out to be 'a conoisseur in art—& far more
highly cultivated than 19/20 gentlemen—so much for the bourgeoisie.'^*' If it was
possible to mistake tradesmen for gentlemen, it was also possible to find some Royalty
bourgeois. He thought the Princess Royal 'a very common looking person. Might be
anybody's daughter of the town middle class, or farmers', if you did not know.'^^ Of
course, Kingsley was prepared to admit that trade and the prosperity it generated
benefited the country and that merchants and bankers had their own rules of conduct to
guide them but, as he wrote to his son Maurice when he went away to school, 'a gentleman
& an officer should have nothing to do with making bargains.'^^ Sadly, in view of his pride
in his family, Kingsley was not destined to revive its fortunes. The American children of
Maurice were to lose touch with their British relatives, and none of Kingsley's other
children had issue. Charles's letters to Fanny were acquired by the Department of
Manuscripts from a collateral descendant.
MANUSCRIPT MARKINGS
Although Kingsley's letters to Fanny are only known to have been used twice by biographers
before they reached the Department of Manuscripts, they have acquired a confusing array of
annotations and distinguishing marks. The earliest letters are numbered in ink, revealing that most
ofthem are missing. Those present are 3, 8, 11, 13,23, 28, 48, and 72 (Add. MS. 62552, fols. 1-20,
23, 28), dating from November 1840 to 30 June 1842. These particular letters span, therefore,
much of the period between Charles and Fanny's first meeting on 6 July 1839, which Kingsley was
to refer to as 'my real wedding day', and the year beginning September 1842, which they spent
152
without meeting or corresponding as a test of their feelings for one another. It is possible, though
not certain, that this enumeration is early. When Fanny worked through the collection in the 1870s,
preparing the Life of her husband, she left extensive evidence of her progress, dating some letters,
deleting from and annotating others. It seems probable that the small circle, the exact function of
which is unclear but which appears on many of the letters, was connected with this work. Each of
the letters also bears a number in pencil. These appear to be of recent origin and, though randomly
distributed, may reflect the physical arrangement of the collection before it was made available to
Lady Chitty.
REFERENCES IN THE BEAST AND THE MONK—\ COLLATION
Lady Chitty has assigned a number to many of the letters she cites in The Beast and the Monk. As
these numbers are not on the letters themselves, the following table provides a collation between
her references and the present foliation of the collection. It should be noted that the folio reference
is to the first folio of any given letter, rather than to the quotation itself A question mark does not
necessarily indicate the absence of a letter from the collection, merely that it is as yet untraced.
Chitty
letter
number
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
Page(s)
on which
cited
30
51
Add. MS.
cf. no. 6
198
73
62552
62553
62552
109
62553
rii
68
62555
3
58
62552
6
60
7
53,61
16
79
17
18
20
79
79
76
76
21
76,80
22
80
23 ( 0
45, 49,
73 (n- 15), 85
73 (n. 14)
54, 80, 95
(2)
24
26
27
102
36
cf. no. 107
120
244
19
First folio
of letter
154
I
10
it
6
49
cf no. 16
cf no. 16
?
62552
,,
55
57
cf. no. 23 (i)
62552
66
23
70
80
77
85
29 ( i )
82
85
97
(2)
83
134
30
52, 81, 124
99
Chitty
letter
number
Page(s)
on which
cited
31(1)
54
(2)
84
95
(3)
32
82
34
35
36
97
Add. MS.
))
j j
71
)j
17
37
39
102
109
121
106
89
cf. no. 30
84
75, 77
98
55,82
First foho
of letter
62552
113
))
121
41
42
82
141
129
69
134
43
44
45
46
49
86
152
172
92
50
51
52
57
)J
177
54, 72
)1
162
43,86
)J
179
87, 91, 92
))
201
cf. no. 62
cf. no. 53 (1)
90
23
53(1)
59
(2)
81
62552
>,
58
59
86
58
83,86
62
89, 91
64
88
70
93, 94
98
98
62554
62553
71
62552
62553
,,
57
71
76
80
81
82
98, 103
ro4
83
84
85
104
104
91
123
96
98
III
100
103
105
107
89
120
137
119
126
62553
185
147
I
3
))
5
27
,1
,,
•>•)
yy
62555
62553
62555
62553
•>•)
62553
125, 128
38
201
70
90
61
94
96
98
100
223
137
71
121
128
168
162
154
First folio
of letter
Chitty
letter
number
Page(s)
on which
cited
no
133, 145
199
112
164
114
115
116
137
223
180
117
126
122
125
126
127
135
142
143
144
147
148
152
155
158
159
147, 164
„
190
125
148, 151
62555
62553
31
209
151
125, 160
„
211
164
174
174
174
174
146
194
195
196
198
201
203
204
205
31
„
103
229
36
62555
62554
„
,,
163
182
191
190
192
„
146
172
20
33
,,
190
186
62554
16s
165
183
185
225
163, 164
163
164
169
180
181
182
185
187
147
162
176
Add. MS.
49
55
71
161
88
62556
62554
91
„
171
roi
106
175
185
It
134
175
,1
121
203
1)
151
62555
128
30
190
208
208
227
205
227
227
206
?
175
^^
62556
62554
62556
62555
182
192
„
„
103
206
69, 175
257
228
62554
62555
62554
228
155
184
16
60
93
155
205
231
119
Chitty
letter
number
Page(s)
on wbich
cited
Add. MS.
229
161
226
206
209
213
214
217
218
212
„
175
225 (i)
(2)
62555
211
„
175
174
62556
62554
,,
253
226
227
228
231
255, 256
232
272
237
244
239 (i)
226
62555
„
247
(2)
244
245
248
252
9
14
112
51
224
121
48
33
„
•>•>
255
62554
62555
251
,,
257
258
256
62556
62555
62556
25
18
205
150
162
3
221
40
58
63
78
161
281
281
259
263
265
268
216
222
218, 220
226
221
First folio
of letter
283
283
102
„
127
286
62554
62556
352 (i)
30
62554
80
133
169
(2)
431
40
134
62553
446
227
?
270
311
89
89
337
343
?
128
and then . . . he carefully tore them into little
fragments and cast the great handful from the
window.' A. K. H. B[oyd], The Recreations of a
Country Parson: Third Series (London, 1878),
1 Add. MS. 62553, fol. 8.
2 Violet Martineau, John Martineau (London,
1921), p. 136.
3 There are only a handful of Fanny's letters in the
collection and it is not clear how many may
survive. Kingsley wrote to her on one occasion 'I
got your darling note, I kissed it & burnt it'. Add.
MS. 62556, fol. 120. When he was staying at St
Andrews in 1867 his host observed with a trace of
exasperation that 'he read his letters, eight or ten:
156
173
pp. 201-2.
4
5
6
7
Add. MS. 49224, fol. 160.
Macmillan's Magazine, ix, 51 (Jan. 1864), p. 217.
Add. MS. 49217, fol. 112.
David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning
(London, 1961), pp. 83-9.
8 Noe\ /\.nnnn, Roxburgh of Stojre (London, 1965),
p. 6.
9 Add. MS. 62554, fo'- 9110 Ibid., fol. 16.
11 Ibid., fol. 178.
12 Add. MS. 49272, fol. 81.
13 Ibid., fol. 82.
14 Add. MS. 49217, fol. 138.
15 Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk (London,
1974), p. 203.
16 Add. MS. 62554, fol. 151.
17 Add. MS. 62557, fol- 3518 [F. E. Kingsley (ed.)], Charles Kingsley: His
Letters and Memories of his Life. Edited by his wife
(London, IQ01-2), vol. iv, pp. 101-7.
19 Add. MS. 62557, fol- 4120 F. E. Kingsley, op. cit., vol. iv, p. 151.
21 S. Chitty, op. cit., p. 40.
22 Ibid., p. 91.
23 Add. MS. 62552, fol. 71.
24 Ibid., fol. 81.
25 In 1844, while reading Wordsworth's Excursion,
he declared to Fanny that he meant to show that
'reai nobility is independent of rank, or Conventionalities of Language or Manner, wh[ich] is
but the fashion of this world.' Add. MS. 62553,
fol. 44.
26 Add. MS. 62552, fo!. 71.
27 F. E. Kingsley, op. cit., vol. iv, p. 97.
28 His full name was to have been 'Ernest Lackland'. Wilde would have been intrigued to know
that Fanny's name for Charles at this period was
'Ernest'. Add. MS. 62552, fol. 61.
29 Add. MS. 62555, fol- 15930 Ibid., fol. 36.
31 Add. MS. 62554, fol. 153.
32 Add. MS. 62557, fol. 20.
157