SOURCE: Henry Kingsley and Colonial Fiction, Oxford University Press, 1971, 48p.

In the following excerpt, Barnes presents an introductory overview of Kingsley's life and fiction, followed by a largely thematic examination of his major Australian novels, particularly Geoffry Hamlyn.

When Henry James wrote in 1865 that ‘Mr Henry Kingsley may be fairly described as a reduced copy of his brother’,¹ few, if any, of his American and English readers are likely to have disagreed with him. Charles Kingsley was widely known as a clergyman and a man of letters when Henry's first novel, Geoffry Hamlyn, was published in 1859. Inevitably, comparisons were made between the work of the brothers. ‘Fresh from the broad generous views and true representations of human life in the works of Charles Kingsley’, wrote the reviewer of Geoffry Hamlyn in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘we are chilled with the narrow scope and selfish consummation designed by one...