G.H. Kingsley

Artist Info

G.H. KingsleyBarnack, Northamptonshire, 1827 - 1892, Cambridge

LC name authority rec. n87906252

LC Heading: Kingsley, G. H. (George Henry), 1827-1892

Biography:

Kingsley, George Henry (1826–1892), physician and traveller, the fourth of the five children of the Revd Charles Kingsley (1781–1860) of Battramsley House in the New Forest, and his wife, Mary (1787–1873), daughter of Nathan Lucas, was born at Barnack rectory, Barnack, Northamptonshire, on 14 February 1826. Charles Kingsley and Henry Kingsley were his brothers. He was educated in London at King's College School and at St George's Hospital, and in Paris, where he was slightly wounded on the barricades of 1848. His work in combating an outbreak of cholera in Flintshire was commemorated by his brother Charles in the portrait of Tom Thurnall in Two Years Ago. He completed his medical education at Heidelberg, and returned to England about 1850.

Kingsley then became private physician to the marquess of Ailesbury, the duke of Norfolk, the duke of Sutherland, and the first and second earls of Ellesmere. Kingsley also had a keen interest in literature. He produced a translation of Heyse's Four Phases of Love (1857) and A Gossip on the Sutherland Hillside (1861). During his time as physician to the earl of Ellesmere he compiled a catalogue of the Elizabethan drama quartos held in the library at Bridgewater House, and he edited Francis Thynne's Animadversions uppon the Annotacions and Corrections of the Impressions of Chaucer's Workes ... Reprinted in 1598 (1865).

Kingsley married Mary Bailey (d. 1892) in 1860; they had a daughter, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, and a son, Charles. In 1862 ill health had forced Kingsley to take a cruise on HMS St George; this seems to have been the beginning of more than twenty years' almost continuous travel. He made several trips to the Mediterranean, and one to Egypt with the duke of Rutland. Indeed most of his journeys were undertaken as the medical adviser or travelling companion of members of the aristocracy. In 1866 he accompanied Lady Herbert of Lea and her children on a tour of Spain, and in the following year he travelled with Lady Herbert's eldest son, the earl of Pembroke, to the south seas. A book describing their experiences, South Sea Bubbles by the Earl and the Doctor (1872), proved extremely popular.

In 1870 Kingsley set off with Lord Dunraven on a visit to the USA and Canada which was to last five years. During this visit Kingsley, who was a fellow of both the Linnean Society and the Royal Microscopical Society, made many contributions as a naturalist to The Field magazine under the pseudonym of ‘the Doctor’. Natural history apart, he still found time to shoot ‘not only moose in the forest of Arcadia, but almost every other kind of living thing’ (Kingsley, 99). During his visit Kingsley met Buffalo Bill, described as belonging ‘to the school of Charles I, pale, large eyed and dreamy’ (ibid., 135), and treated Rocky Mountain Jim. It seems that only bad weather prevented Kingsley from being with General Custer at the Little Bighorn. After visits to Florida and the southern states in 1888 Kingsley went on to travel even more extensively, with journeys to Newfoundland, Cape Cod, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.

Kingsley hated town life and noise. He also possessed a temper which his daughter described as ‘volcanic but never vindictive’ (Kingsley, 195). This combination made his return to domestic life in England somewhat trying for Kingsley, who ‘loved the bright eyes of danger’ (ibid., 202), and the rest of the household; his daughter had to remove her fighting cocks out of range of his hearing; the maid had to grease the bearing of the kitchen pump and could never sing more than a line and a half of a hymn. His greatest anger was reserved for ‘Mr Gladstone, or any Roman Catholic Priest ... the sight of printed reports of Mr Gladstone's observations or any priestly form would rouse [him] from any depths of study or contemplation into a very pretty temper’ (ibid., 200). Newspapers reporting Gladstone's speeches would regularly be torn to shreds or thrust into the fire.

Kingsley moved from his London house in Southwood Lane, Highgate, to Bexleyheath, Kent, in 1879, and from there to Cambridge, where, after suffering from a bout of rheumatic fever, he died peacefully at his home, 7 Mortimer Road, on 5 February 1892. He was buried at Highgate cemetery in London; his wife died six weeks later.

Thomas Seccombe, rev. Michael Bevan

Sources G. H. Kingsley, Notes on sport and travel, with a memoir by Mary H. Kingsley (1900) · The Athenaeum (13 Feb 1892), 214 · Cambridge Chronicle (12 Feb 1892) · Cambridge Chronicle (19 Feb 1892) · Manchester Guardian (8 Feb 1892) · private information (1892)

Archives BL, letters to Macmillans, Add. MSS 55253–55258

Likenesses photograph, repro. in Kingsley, Notes on sport and travel, frontispiece

Wealth at death £8618 11s. 7d.: administration with will, 9 Aug 1892, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Thomas Seccombe, ‘Kingsley, George Henry (1826–1892)’, rev. Michael Bevan, Oxford Dictionary of National Biogr