Madam How and Lady Why: First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children, by Charles Kingsley (Paperback)
Brand : Wildside Press
- SKU:
- 1434433021
-
A Father to His Son
More than Baum's Oz books, probably on a level with Lewis Carroll's Alice through the Looking-Glass, since childhood I have cherished Kingsley's Water-Babies. In MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY I recognize the same hand, the same mind.
I have never been one to read biographies (except of Gilbert & Sullivan) for their own sake; thus know little of Charles Kingsley except through his own novels -- THE WATER-BABIES, HEREWARD THE WAKE, HYPATIA, WESTWARD, HO! and poems. And now MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY, which is not a piece of fiction, but essays in the form of conversations with a young son, in which the author aims to expound his theory and appreciation of the natural world and how it relates to the spiritual.
Kingsley was a Church of England clergyman at the time things were heating up in the Darwinism vs. the Bible controversy. It seems to me that Kingsley has not been nearly enough noticed for being, in this atmosphere, a clergyman (possibly in the "Muscular Christianity" tradition) who by every indication to be seen in both WATER-BABIES and MADAM HOW was all in favor of Darwin and welcomed everything Science had to teach us about the natural world AND God, both at once. "Madam How" being Science, and "Madam Why" representing the Divine.
Goddess people might like to take another look at THE WATER-BABIES in this light. Allegorical manifestations of the Goddess fairly ramp through that novel by a Christian cleric. MADAM HOW ... serves to cast greater understanding on the mind that gave us Tom the chimney sweep turned water-baby.
I don't always agree with Kingsley. E.g., applying the theodicy problem to why people die in natural disasters, he draws the moral that people must learn better than to live in places prone to such. To which I reply: "Find some spot at once immune from danger of any natural disaster at all, and large enough to accommodate all this planet's population, and then, Reverend, you may have an argument."But at least the problem worried him enough to seek an answer. And, of course, in more than a century and a half Science has discovered itself to have been wrong in some of the things it believed in Kingsley's day. Which would come as no surprise at all to him.
He's an author who deserves to be read as widely as Dickens.