As a boy Charles
Kingsley became fascinated by freshwater biology whilst living on
the edge of the East Anglian fenland. Later in life he was part of
a social network of scientists and environmental reformers centred
on the Bunbury family of Great Barton.
When he was 12 years
old, he experienced violent social unrest first-hand in the Bristol
riots of 1831, and until his death in 1875, was deeply involved
with the social and environmental ferment of industrial
development. One way or another, between the 30's and the 70's, he
became associated with all major political and social reform
movements of the age of steam. Kingsley's life coincided with the
first historical period when primary evidence for future historians
accumulated at an unprecedented rate. He moved within, and between,
the circles of Royalty, the aristocracy, the church, business, and
science. We can enter this world of technological change and social
ferment through his novels, sermons and letters, and
cross-reference to contemporary evidence about the lives of his
friends and enemies. We can 'view' Kingsley from the writings of
others, and study the events, and 'visit' the places and social
movements which moulded his thoughts about families and the
environment.
Charles Kingsley was
a crusader for environmental health reform, with a deep knowledge
of what we now call the ecological principles which create and
maintain local biodiversity. In the following poem Kingsley
attempts to equate the interdependence of living things in
ecosystems with a Christian ethic of self-sacrifice. He imagined
that the 'crowning glory of bio-geology', when fully worked out,
might, after all, only be 'the lesson of Christmas-tide- of the
infinite self-sacrifice of God for man'.
The oak,
ennobled by the shipwright's axe-
The soil,
which yields its marrow to the flower-
The flower,
which feeds a thousand velvet worms
Born only to
be prey to every bird-
All spend
themselves on others: and shall man,
Whose
two-fold being is the mystic knot
Which couples
earth with heaven, doubly bound,
His being
both worm and angel, to that service
By which both
worms and angels hold their life,
Shall he,
whose every breath is debt on debt,
Refuse,
forsooth, to be what God has made him ?
Only someone who had
actually felt the touch of earthworms could have written
this.
Kingsley
particularly promoted the use of religious imagery based on nature
to carry notional messages to communicate his concept of
God.
On his return from a
holiday in the tropics to his Chester deanery, Kingsley married his
recent experience of walking the forest floor with spiritual
readings of stone pillars and vaults as follows.
"Now, it
befell me that, fresh from the Tropic forests, and with their forms
hanging always, as it were, in the background of my eye, I was
impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the
likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of
Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself
into one of those green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be
seen again, make one at once richer and poorer for the rest of
life. The fans of groining sprang from the short columns, just as
do the feathered boughs of the far more beautiful Maximiliana palm,
and just of the same size and shape: and met overhead, as I have
seen them meet, in aisles longer by far than our cathedral nave.
The free upright shafts, which give such strength, and yet such
lightness, to the mullions of each window, pierced upward through
those curving lines, as do the stems of young trees through the
fronds of palm; and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up
into the infinite, and took off a sense of oppression and captivity
which the weight of the roof might have produced. In the nave, in
the choir the same vision of the Tropic forest haunted me. The
fluted columns not only resembled, but seemed copied from the
fluted stems beneath which I had ridden in the primeval woods;
their bases, their capitals, seemed copied from the bulgings at the
collar of the root, and at the spring of the boughs, produced by a
check of the redundant sap; and were garlanded often enough like
the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery of parasite
leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copied from
the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even the
fatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that
highest level of the forest aisles, where the trees, having climbed
at last to the lightfood which they seek, care no longer to grow
upward, but spread out in huge limbs, almost horizontal, reminding
the eye of the four-centred arch which marks the period of
Perpendicular Gothic".
"He is the God of
nature, as well as the God of grace. For ever He looks down on all
things which He has made: and behold, they are very good. And,
therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect
works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever
beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cave or mountain peak,
in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly.
But Himself ?-Who
can see Him ? Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He
reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in
truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor
quintessential diamond".
Apart from offering
a personalised view of an important period, which witnessed the
dawn of mass production and a greatly increased pace of world
development, Kingsley's writings ring-true today because he was a
social reformer who viewed society as a system driven by
interacting processes which integrate community and
production. He was a polymath with a wide ranging grasp of
the connections between scientific discovery, industrial
development, social well-being, and environmental
well-being.
