Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography: Autobiography

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Amazon Digital Services LLC - KDP Print US, Jan 14, 2019 - Fiction - 286 pages
Thomas Hughes QC (20 October 1822 - 22 March 1896) was an English lawyer, judge, politician and author. He is most famous for his novel Tom Brown's School Days (1857), a semi-autobiographical work set at Rugby School, which Hughes had attended. It had a lesser-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).Early lifeHughes was the second son of John Hughes, editor of the Boscobel Tracts (1830) and was born in Uffington, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). He had six brothers, and one sister, Jane Senior who later became Britain's first female civil servant. At the age of eight he was sent to Twyford School, a preparatory public school near Winchester, where he remained until the age of eleven. In February 1834 he went to Rugby School, which was then under the celebrated Thomas Arnold, a contemporary of his father at Oriel College, Oxford.Hughes excelled at sports rather than in scholarship, and his school career culminated in a cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground.In 1842 he went on to Oriel College, and graduated B.A. in 1845. At Oxford, he played cricket for the university team in the annual University Match against Cambridge University, also at Lord's, and a match that is still now regarded as first-class cricket...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 labour cooperatives that failed but led to the working reforms of the progressive era. He was a friend and correspondent with Charles Darwin. He was also the uncle of traveller and scientist Mary Kingsley.LIFE AND CHARACTERKingsley was born in Holne, Devon, the elder of two sons of the Reverend Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary Lucas Kingsley. His brother Henry Kingsley and his sister Charlotte Chanter also became writers. He spent his childhood in Clovelly, Devon, where his father was Curate 1826-1832 and Rector 1832-1836, and at Barnack, Northamptonshire and was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Helston Grammar School before studying at King's College London, and the University of Cambridge. Charles entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1838, and graduated in 1842. He chose to pursue a ministry in the church. From 1844, he was rector of Eversley in Hampshire. In 1859 he was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria. In 1860, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. In 1861 he became a private tutor to the Prince of Wales.In 1869 Kingsley resigned his Cambridge professorship and, from 1870 to 1873, was a canon of Chester Cathedral. While in Chester he founded the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art, which played an important part in the establishment of the Grosvenor Museum. In 1872 he accepted the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute and became its 19th President.In 1873 he was made a canon of Westminster Abbey. Kingsley died in 1875 and was buried in St Mary's Churchyard in Eversley.Kingsley sat on the 1866 Edward Eyre Defence Committee along with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, John Tyndall, and Alfred Tennyson, where he supported Jamaican Governor Edward Eyre's brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion against the Jamaica Committee.One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley, became known as a novelist under the pseudonym "Lucas Malet."Kingsley's life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life.Kingsley also received letters from Thomas Huxley in 1860 and later in 1863, discussing Huxley's early ideas on agnosticism.

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About the author (2019)

Charles Kingsley, a clergyman of the Church of England, who late in his life held the chair of history at Cambridge University, wrote mostly didactic historical romances. He put the historical novel to new use, not to teach history, but to illustrate some religious truth. Westward Ho! (1855), his best-known work, is a tale of the Spanish main in the days of Queen Elizabeth I. Hypatia: New Foes with Old Faces (1853) is the story of a pagan girl-philosopher who was torn to pieces by a Christian mob. The story is strongly anti-Roman Catholic.. Hereward the Wake, or The Watchful Hereward the Wake, or The Watchful (1866) is a tale of a Saxon outlaw. The Water-Babies (1863), written for Kingsley's youngest child, "would be a tale for children were it not for the satire directed at the parents of the period," said Andrew Lang. Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851) reflect Kingsley's leadership in "muscular Christianity" and his dramatization of social issues.

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