Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy ed. by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy ed. by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver Oded Steinberg (bio) Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver; pp. 284. New York: Routledge, 2021, $170.00, $52.95 paper, $47.65 ebook. In the preface to the new edition of Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton (1864), published a short while after his death, his close friend and scholar of Comparative Languages Friedrich Max Müller wrote: "Charles Kingsley will be missed in England, in the English colonies, in America … aye, wherever Saxon speech and Saxon thought is understood. He will be mourned for, yearned for, in every place in which he passed some days of his busy life" ([Macmillan and Co., 1889], 1). Indeed, the industrious life of the famous novelist and "polymath" Victorian Kingsley—with all his inner doubts, contradictions, and controversies—is studied magnificently in this new volume edited by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver (251). Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy includes fourteen essays (not including a foreword and an afterword) on the different facets of Kingsley's life, delving into his personal life, Christian attitudes, racial perceptions, and of course his celebrated and less celebrated novels. Kingsley was a man of contradictions, a Christian socialist who supported the South during the American Civil War, a fervent Anglo-Saxonist who advocated for racial mixing, and a devoted Christian who supported some aspects of the theory of evolution. Instead of adopting a binary perspective, a recent trend of many works, labelling historical figures or phenomena under the simplistic verdicts of good or bad, the volume presents a far more composite approach throughout. The volume does not shy away from Kingsley's contentious ideas, while also discussing his contribution to Victorian culture and beyond. The question of Kingsley's perception of race is, without a doubt, situated in the heart of these contentious ideas. There is no coincidence, therefore, that Müller praised Kingsley as a symbol of (Anglo-)Saxonism. As evident throughout the volume, [End Page 337] Kingsley's understanding of Anglo-Saxonism or Teutonism includes complex racial, national, and religious identities. Simon Goldhill's chapter underscores this complexity as he shows how Kingsley's Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (1853) lauded the benefits of racial mixing in Alexandria between the Teuton and Roman as the key to racial growth and Christian success. His treatment of the Irish, Norman Vance illustrates, is further evidence of Kingsley's support of racial mixture, claiming that such process may benefit the English. However, as Theodore Koditschek and Goldhill show, this argument for miscegenation did not mean that Kingsley was refuting any notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority. As a liberal scholar, it is argued, Kingsley mediated complex ideas such as race to a larger audience. Piers J. Hale argues that "Evolution" was another emerging concept that Kingsley attempted through The Water-Babies (1863) to publicize among English children. The younger generations, Kingsley believed, must comprehend that no contradiction existed between God and nature. Also drawing on The Water-Babies, Alan Rauch shows that the reconciliation between religion and science is through the fact that death retained meaning in both fields. Kingsley thought that such equilibrium, fusing religion with evolution, is only possible in Protestant and Teutonic England (and perhaps some of the German entities). For Kingsley, another advantage of Teutonic and Protestant England was its "manly" character, which separated it from the "effeminacy" of the Catholic nations (1, 71). Kingsley, James Eli Adams writes, adopted the term effeminate for a variety of uses, including to characterize the "national well-being" of England (76). In one of his lectures, Kingsley stated in front of his Cambridge students that England, more than any other place in Europe, succeeded in cherishing the Teutonic value of manliness and freedom, while avoiding the feminine influence of Rome and Catholicism: "our English law, our English ideas of justice and mercy, have retained, more than most European codes, the freedom, the truthfulness, the kindliness, of the old Teutonic laws … England escaped, more than any other land, the taint of effete Roman civilization" (Roman, 266...