Two Years Ago.

Cambridge: Macmillan and Co, 1857. First edition of the author's classic work, containing some of his most profound passages of descriptive imagery. Octavo, three volumes bound in three quarters morocco, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. In very good condition. Priest, university professor, social reformer, and historian Charles Kingsley was particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men's college, and forming labour cooperatives, which failed, but encouraged later working reforms. A close friend of Charles Darwin, Kingsley became Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge in 1860 and later sat on the 1866 Edward Eyre Defence Committee along with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, John Tyndall, and Alfred Tennyson, where he supported Jamaican Governor Edward Eyre's brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion against the Jamaica Committee. Kingsley's chief asset as a novelist lay in his descriptive faculties: the descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, and of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago. American scenery is vividly and truthfully described, in part stemming from his observations during a lecture tour of the United States that he undertook in 1874.