Most Popular Books by Charles Kingsley

Charles KINGSLEY (1819 - 1875)The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for my Children by Charles Kingsley is a collection of three Greek mythology stories: Perseus, The Argonauts, and Theseus. The author had a great fondness for Greek fairy tales and believed the adventures of the characters would inspire children to achieve higher goals with integrity.

Uneducated and regularly mistreated by his master, his filth only matched by his moral and spiritual baseness, Tom is a typical Victorian chimney sweep. While on a special job at a noble’s estate, prejudice pins a crime on him and he flees in fear of retaliation. The chase eventually takes him to a stream in which he bathes for the first time and, doing so, finds himself reborn as a water-baby. Now a denizen of the fairy world, so close yet so alien to ours, Tom begins a journey of moral and spiritual growth. Through the teachings of the fairies, he is made aware of the consequences of his own cruelty and ignorance, for which he learns to own up to, and ultimately understands the importance of doing as he would be done by. This is the premise of The Water-Babies, a children’s book written by Charles Kingsley in 1863. As a man of the cloth who wrote children’s fiction with a taste for science, Kingsley bears similarities to Lewis Carroll, whose Alice’ Adventures in Wonderland would be published two years after The Water-Babies. But while Carroll eschewed didacticism, Kingsley embraced it. Kingsley had a clear moral purpose in writing his book. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed in the importance of providing children with a moral education—the nature thereof being often in contention. In particular, Kingsley clashed with the American author Samuel Goodrich, who was contemptuous of fantasy and insisted that children be given only facts and taught to reach objective truth through empirical means. Kingsley, in opposition, held that children need a balanced manner of apprehension: limiting them to mere facts would not automatically provide them with the insight and critical thinking needed to produce anything useful. Fantasy adds an element of wonder to education, allowing children to engage and play with ideas, and opening their minds to various, sometimes unconventional, inferences. Goodrich is lampooned in the book as Cousin Cramchild; the consequences of his methods are shown through vegetable children who are “all heads and no bodies”: full of information yet lacking in wisdom and unable to do anything at all. Kingsley also had a scientific interest in writing his book. A well-rounded moral education, he thought, required an alliance of faith and science, something he understood as a clergyman. In The Water-Babies, he explores the harmony between faith and science, using fantasy and humor to illustrate his views and introduce children to the scientific method as well as Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. But The Water-Babies is not just a work of whimsy for children. Like Carroll, Kingsley imparts darkness into his work. While he is careful not to shock his intended audience, adults can easily pick up that the water-babies were once children who died from abuse or neglect. Tom leaves his dirty husk behind so his true self can finally be free to wander and wonder, to learn and grow, to find in the afterlife as a fairy what he had been denied in life as a human—a fulfillment of the Christian promise. Under the playfulness of the tale lie the horrors of the Industrial Revolution that forced so many into child labor. Kingsley’s outrage, however, didn’t go unheard: The Water-Babies became a bestseller, echoing the sentiment of other reformers. The Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act, which aimed to improve the conditions of chimney sweeps, passed a year after the book’s publication. It is no exaggeration to say that Kingsley, through his book, helped to make a difference for many children and young men. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Charles Kingsley’s classic, The Water Babies, was extremely popular in England, and was a mainstay of British children''s literature for many decades. It tells the story of a young chimney sweep, Tom, who drowns in a river and is turned into a ‘water-baby’. Tom then embarks on a series of adventures and lessons underwater, and meets characters such as the major spiritual leaders of the water world, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mother Carey. This classic fairy tale, originally published in 1915, contains eight incredible colour illustrations and many beautiful and intricate black and white drawings by W. Heath Robinson. An English cartoonist and illustrator, best known for drawings of ridiculously complicated machines – for achieving deceptively simple objectives. Such was (and is) his fame, that the term ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the English language during the First World War, as a description of any unnecessarily complex and implausible contrivance. Pook Press publishes rare and vintage Golden Age illustrated books, in high-quality colour editions, so that the masterful artwork and story-telling can continue to delight both young and old.

Set initially in Bideford in North Devon during the reign of Elizabeth I, Westward Ho! follows the adventures of Amyas Leigh, an unruly child who as a young man follows Francis Drake to sea. Amyas loves local beauty Rose Salterne, as does nearly everyone else. Much of the novel involves the kidnap of Rose by a Spaniard. Amyas spends time in the Caribbean seeking gold, and eventually returns to England at the time of the Spanish Armada, finding his true love, the beautiful Indian maiden Ayacanora, in the process; yet fate had blundered and brought misfortune into Amyas''s life, for not only had he been blinded by a freak bolt of lightning at sea, but he also loses his brother Frank Leigh and Rose Salterne, who were caught by the Spaniards and burnt at the stake by the Inquisition.

The Water Babies is a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is a children''s novel by the Reverend Charles Kingsley. Written in 1862-63 as a serial for Macmillan''s Magazine, it was first published in its entirety in 1863. It was written as part satire in support of Charles Darwin''s The Origin of Species. The book was extremely popular in England, and was a mainstay of British children''s literature for many decades, but eventually fell out of favour in part due to its prejudices (common at the time) against Irish, Jews, Americans, and the poor.

Charles Kingsley was an English writer and priest. Kingsley''s works for children, a fairy-tale The Water-Babies (1863) in particular, are considered to be the first works in the children''s fantasy genre.On the one side, the novel is a didactic fairy-tale typical of the Victorian era, and on the other side, it is part satire in support of Charles Darwin''s The Origin of Species.The main character of the book is Tom, a young chimney sweep who, after being chased out of the house and encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie, drowns in a river and transforms into a "water-baby". In the underwater world, Tom has a lot of adventures that help him come through a long way of moral development.