Scarica Charles Kingsley vita opere ricezione e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian and novelist. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men's college, and forming labor cooperatives that failed but led to the working reforms of the progressive era. He is a central Victorian figure (priest, university professor, Private Chaplin of the Royal Family) but he was one of the weirdest, most eccentric figure of the entire century. He was full of contradiction, he championed workers rights in public, in private referred to the Irish poor as white chimpanzees, he was an apostle of healthy living but an obsessive smoker, a mesmeric (hypnotic) preacher who suffered of a debilitating stammer. He was especially obsessed with water and being clean, he was a big supporter of sanitation reform. There were practical measured he wanted to take to stop the spread of cholera, encourage healthy drinking water for ordinary people, but for Kingsley being clean and cleanness is not just a matter of sanitation and being clean on the outside but that’s also a prove of being clean on the inside, like in an endless baptism. Much influenced by the theologian Frederick Denison Maurice, he became in 1848 a founding member of the Christian Socialist movement, which sought to correct the evils of industrialism through measures based on Christian ethics. Kingsley advocated adult education, improved sanitation, and the growth of the cooperative movement, rather than political change, for the amelioration of social problems. Despite his interest in the problems of urban workers, Kingsley turned for his novels to the plight of agricultural laborers, his early anti-Catholicism, which became a major theme of much of his writing and in the 1860s The Water-Babies touches upon most of Kingsley's favorite themes: the working conditions of the poor, in this case those of chimney sweeps; education; sanitation and public health; pollution of rivers and streams; and evolutionary theory. In the central character's spiritual regeneration, Kingsley presents a vision of nature as the tool of divine reality, which Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice had taught him underlies the imperfect human world. Viewing nature as governed by a redemptive spirit allowed Kingsley to remain untroubled by Darwinism. He was sympathetic to the idea of evolution and was one of the first to welcome Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. He had been sent an advance review copy and Darwin added his response in the next edition of his book, stating that "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws'."
