South West Authors & CollectionsCharles Kingsley
Will Abberley
'Now, then!' roared Amyas. 'Fire, and with a will! Have at her, archers: have at her, muskets all!' . . . The golden flag of Spain, which the last moment flaunted above their heads, hung trailing in the water. The ship, her tiller shot away, and her helmsman killed, staggered helplessly a moment, and then fell up into the wind.
'Well done, men of Devon!' shouted Amyas, as cheers rent the welkin.
Charles Kingsley was born at Holne on Dartmoor, spent much of his childhood in Clovelly, North Devon and was educated in Helston, Cornwall. His knowledge of the West Country helped win it mythical status through his historical war novel Westward Ho! The warriors of Bideford repel the Spanish Armada in a yarn of patriotic heroism that chimed with contemporary conflict in Crimea. Writing against the 'hodge' stereotype of rural backwardness, Kingsley constructs the West Country of the past as a sort of Elizabethan Camelot. His seafaring hero Amyas Leigh embodies this myth of a military Golden Age in Devon, which has proved so enduring that the town of Westward Ho! near Bideford was named after the novel (and remains the UK's only place-name containing an exclamation mark).
Kingsley wrote his now most famous work The Water Babies in Clovelly, which was also the setting for his earlier novel Two Years Ago. The tale depicts a cholera outbreak in the coastal town and is highly critical of current government policy on sanitation and housing.
Among other novels, Kingsley drew on his Helston days to use Cornwall as a location in parts of his condition-of-England novel Yeast and Hereward the Wake, which re-imagines the Norman Conquest.
Kingsley was a passionate amateur geologist and made systematic collections of shells, rocks and other specimens on the coasts of Devon, which were instrumental in his writing of Glaucus or the Wonders of the Shore.
My PHD thesis titled Progress and Purity: Science and Philology in Mid-Victorian Literature traces the influence of theories about language and its origins on Kingsley and other writers in the period.
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