SOURCE: “The Wargrave Novels,” in The Neglected Brother: A Study of Henry Kingsley, Florida State University Press, 1971, pp. 100-27.

In the following essay, Scheuerle focuses on Kingsley's novels of the mid to late 1860s, arguing that these works exhibit a general decline into literary absurdity and carelessness, but occasionally demonstrate artistic merit, as in Leighton Court and The Hillyars and the Burtons.

The Hillyars and the Burtons, Kingsley's fourth novel which had been partly written before his marriage, is a much tighter, more closely knit work than either of his two earlier major ones and could have been his best novel. Subtitled “A Story of Two Families,” the novel traces the misfortunes of the Burtons, the noble blacksmith family, in England and their astonishing rise to wealth and prominence in Australia. Jim Burton, the oldest son, becomes the Honorable James Burton, a commissioner to the International Exhibition of...