'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