1. Life and literary activity of Charles Kingsley. Historical fiction genre in Literature

The Water-Babies touches upon most of Kingsley's favorite themes: the working conditions of the poor, in this case those of chimney sweeps; education; sanitation and public health; pollution of rivers and streams; and evolutionary theory. In the central character's spiritual regeneration, Kingsley presents a vision of nature as the tool of divine reality, which Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice had taught him underlies the imperfect human world. Viewing nature as governed by a redemptive spirit allowed Kingsley to remain untroubled by Darwinism.
The year 1864 was noteworthy for the publication of The Roman and the Teuton, a historical study which both recalls his novel Hypatia published eleven years earlier and anticipates Hereward the Wake which began its serial appearance in 1865. All three of these works, presented either as fiction or as history, extol bluff Germanic strength at the expense of effete and treacherous Latin civilization. In fact, if one adds to the list Kingsley's earlier portrayal of Spaniards in Westward Ho!, one sees his consistent presentation of Rome's Catholic descendants as treacherous and effeminate and the pagan Germanic people or their English Protestant descendants as honest, trustworthy, and physically strong defenders of truth. For years, therefore, Kingsley had opposed nearly everything Newman and the high-church party at Oxford had advocated. Both Kingsley and Newman had smarted from attacks, Kingsley from the high-church party and Newman from English anti-Catholic Protestants who had distrusted him since before his conversion to Catholicism.
Thus when, in 1864, Kingsley issued an ill-considered broadside in Macmillan's Magazine, asserting that "truth, for its own sake had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy . . . [and] Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage," Newman was offended. An exchange of letters ensued which resulted in Newman's pamphlet Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman: A Correspondence on the Question Whether Dr. Newman Teaches That Truth is No Virtue. Instead of letting the matter drop, Kingsley flailed out in his own pamphlet: "What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?" A Reply to a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Newman. In his pamphlet Kingsley foolishly broadened his charge: not only had Newman made a statement he denied having made and which Kingsley was unable to locate, Newman had also lived a dishonest life. Newman's response was The Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
In 1865 Kingsley published his final novel serially in Good Words; in 1866 it was published in two volumes as Hereward the Wake, "Last of the English". Here, in a heavily researched and footnoted novel, he marks the passing of the Anglo-Saxon heroic age as the last Anglo-Saxon holdout against the Normans succumbs to William the Conqueror. Once again Kingsley admires mythic Germanic-English muscularity in sharp contrast with Continental guile.
Although Kingsley contemplated writing other novels, he never did. Instead, he edited Fraser's Magazine briefly in 1867. In 1869 he resigned his Cambridge professorship, an academic position in which he had never felt comfortable. In 1868 and 1869 he published a series of articles for children; these were collected and issued in 1870 as Madam How and Lady Why: First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children. A tour of the West Indies followed in 1870, producing notes which became At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies in 1871. In 1872 he published Town Geology and became President of the Midland Institute in Birmingham. In the next year he collected a group of prose essays, publishing them as Prose Idylls, New and Old. In 1874 he published Health and Education and made an exhausting six-month tour of the United States. When he returned to England he was worn out. On January 23, 1875, he died.