SOURCE: “Editor's Introduction,” in Ravenshoe, by Henry Kingsley, edited by William H. Scheuerle, University of Nebraska Press, 1967, pp. vii-xxv.

In the following introduction to Ravenshoe, Scheuerle recounts Kingsley's life and writings, and gives a generally positive assessment of the novel.

One evening in the summer of 1961, my wife and I were enjoying dinner in a small restaurant in Bloomsbury, when an elderly lady at the next table said to her companion: “Do you remember Sam Buckley's ride on that wonderful horse Widderin?” As one who had just spent many days in the Bodleian Library reading nineteenth-century reviews of Henry Kingsley's novels, I was stunned to discover that Charles Kingsley's lesser-known brother had two more admirers just a couple of feet from my table. Those two ladies—as any Henry Kingsley devotee well knows—were recalling a scene from his first novel, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859).

My later...