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

Charles Kingsley's Views on Things

Charles Kingsley never manages to keep his views on anything to himself. If you've read his other books, you will know that, although he was a Christian pastor (and writer and naturalist and professor), he had strong prejudices about. Jews, Roman Catholics (particularly Jesuits), Anabaptists, Irish people, Africans, and natives of any kind (although he didn't think European colonizers should mistreat native people or sell them for slaves). He loved his homeland, his queen, and his Protestant faith, and couldn't see how anybody or anything else could measure up; to be an Englishman was the best thing in the world. However, out of all his books so far that I've read, this one--strangely enough, since its plot hangs so much on religious and international tension--seems, in some ways, less racist. Maybe it's because a lot of the strife is between the Spanish and the English, which seems to be as much political as it is religious or racial. Or maybe it is because--without giving away the ending of the book--some of the hate is eventually acknowledged to be wrong.
However, there are still at least a few places in the book that will make us cringe a bit, or a lot. One general problem is that "the negroes" and "the Indians" are hardly ever given the respect of having actual names, even when they are friendly; there's an obvious distancing. Christianity is presented with a sense that it is owned by the English, a means of civilizing native tribes and making them more English.
There are also parts of the book that may cause offense to tender hearts and young minds--in other words, there is some violence, both what happens to the characters and in the stories they tell; and there is some implied adultery, particularly in the long story that Salvation Yeo tells about his voyage with John Oxenham. His story seems to foreshadow later books by Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad; it's quite dark and disturbing. Year Eights reading the book to themselves may feel just as stranded in that long chapter as Salvation Yeo does in the jungle. Best advice: read through his story quickly, not worrying about all the details of the various attacks and escapes. Some of it does turn out to be important later on, but you can always check back when you get there.