Portrait in Kingston, Introduction, p. v.
"One of the two or three greatest authors for boys in Victorian literature.... From the mid-1850s onward, Kingston produced well over 100 books of adventurous tales for young readers, many with a nautical flavour.... Kingston also wrote up tales of actual heroism and adventure (including a life of Captain Cook, 1871) and popular educational books for young people such as The Boy’s Own Book Of Boats (1860). And he was one of the translators and popularisers of Jules Verne for English readers [in fact, we now know that his wife Agnes Kinloch Kingston, was the translator — see Hamilton and Dixon]. As an editor and proprietor, Kingston conducted Kingston's Magazine For Boys (1859-63) and was a founder contributor to the Boy’s Own Paper in 1879. Some months before his death, he helped launch Union Jack, a magazine subsequently taken over by G.A. Henty." — John Sutherland, p. 357.
"The struggle between stereotypical hero and equally stereotypical villain becomes emblematic of Britain’s noble quest to civilize non-Western societies. Like the boy hero, Britain is brave, hardworking, and only concerned with her duty toward those unpromising natives. In such a formula there is no room for subtlety, introspection, or self-criticism; no one will suggest that British civilization is anything but superior in every respect to the cultures it seeks to supplant." — Claudia Nelson, p. 119
Biographical Material
Links to Related Material
Bibliography
Bassett, Troy J. "Author: William Henry Giles Kingston." At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837—1901. Web.1 August 2025. http://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_author.php?aid=1340
Carey, Hilary. "William Henry Giles Kingston (1814-1880)." Mariners: Race, Religion and Empire in British Ports 1801-1914. Web. 1 August 2025. https://mar.ine.rs/stories/william-henry-giles-kingston-1814-1880/
Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. 1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Corrected ed. 1985.
Drotner, Kristin. English Children and their Magazines, 1751-1945. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988.
Hamilton, J.A. "Kingston, William Henry Giles (1814–1880)." Rev. Diana Dixon. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. 1 August 2025.
Kingston, W.H.G. James Braithwaite, Supercargo. New York: A.C. Armstrong, 1883. HathiTrust, from a copy in the University of Minnesota Library. Web. 1 August 2025.
Nelson,Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and Victorian Children's Fiction, 1857-1917. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Noakes, Richard. "The Boy's Own Paper, 1879-1967." Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. SciPer Project, University of Leeds. [Although Kingston was not a science populariser, this provides useful context and a good bibliography.] Web. 1 August 2025. http://www.sciper.org/browse/BP_desc.html
Shepherd, Andrew. "William Henry Giles Kingston." British Historical Society of Portugal. Newsletter 11 (May 2021). Web. 1 August 2025. https://www.bhsportugal.org/uploads/fotos_artigos/files/W_H_G_Kingston.pdf
Sutherland, John. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. London: Longman, 1988.
Created 1 August 2025