Westward Ho!

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A bestselling novel you’ve probably never heard of created pop culture waves and sparked a mid-Victorian tourist industry. Westward Ho! is full of daring adventures, exciting sea battles, lush landscapes, and romance, but – unlike the novels of Stevenson and Dickens – is mostly forgotten today. Its author, Charles Kingsley, was an Anglican clergyman, amateur historian, and zealous social reformer. Westward Ho! illustrates his passionate engagement with the issues of his time, from evolution and empire to religious practice. This episode explores these Victorian debates as well as the novel’s mythos of Elizabeth seafarers and the Devon coastline. 

Host: Lucy

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Further Reading

Piers J. Hale,  “Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley’s ‘Water Babies,’” Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 551–97. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kyle A. Artelle, “Time to Support Indigenous Science,” Science 383, no. 6680, 2024, p. 243. 

Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!, Scribner & Sons, New York, 1855, Reprinted 1947.  

----. Letter to Charles Darwin, 18 November 1859. 

Julian Lovelock, “The Imperial Story: Rudyard Kipling – Stalky & Co. (1899),” In From Morality to Mayhem: The Fall and Rise of the English School Story, 1st ed. The Lutterworth Press, 2018. 

Maureen Moran, “Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family: Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! And Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe,” In Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, DGO-Digital original, Liverpool University Press, 2007. 

Matthew Nathan, “Some Reminiscences of Miss Mary Kingsley,” Journal of the Royal African Society 7, no. 25, 1907, pp. 28–31.  

Miles Ogborn, Global Lives, Oxford University Press, 2008. 

Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and England’s Catholic Revival, Mercer University Press, 2001. 

Stanwood S. Walker, “‘Backwards and Backwards Ever’: Charles Kingsley’s Racial-Historical Allegory and the Liberal Anglican Revisioning of Britain.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62, no. 3, 2007, pp. 339–79. 

Westward, Ho! via Visit Devon.

C. E. Vulliamy, 1886-1971. (Colwyn Edward), and Fabian Society (Great Britain). “Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism.” Fabian Tract (London,), no. 174, 1914.   

“Westward Ho!” The British Medical Journal 4, no. 5572, 1967, pp. 126–27. 

“Yeo and Selden Families: English Ancestry and Virginia Descents,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 41, no. 1, 1933, pp. 87–93. 

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)