One article about Charles Kingsley mentions Chitty's book: Kingsley was quite precisely a Victorian, born in June 1819 just nineteen days after the Queen herself, the
oldest of seven children in a
comfortable clerical family. He was Victorian in every other way, too: earnest, superhumanly energetic, passionately
engaged with every social,
religious, and scientific controversy of his time, sure (as we have already seen) of the invincible superiority of the
English over every other
people, and slightly weird. Kingsley is in fact one of those characters who, when you read him and read about him,
leave you wondering whether
perhaps the Victorian English were actually a race of space aliens.

 The weirdness showed up in 1949, when Una Pope-Hennessy, in her biography of Kingsley, reproduced two of the
drawings he made to illustrate
his play, The Saint's Tragedy, which concerns the thirteenth-century St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The drawings
reveal a peculiar blend of
religious and sado-erotic passion. Susan Chitty's 1974 biography went further, reproducing eight of the drawings. One
shows the murder of
Elizabeth's mother, Gertrude of Morania, by Hungarian noblemen: the naked Gertrude is having a flaming brand applied
to her genitals by one
attacker while another rips open her belly with a knife.

 Chitty's book came out at the high summer of the sexual revolution, and excited widespread interest. The
Water-Babies was still well
known, and wits in the competition columns of literary magazines had much sport sexing up well-known passages from the
book:

 When every breast is firm, lad, 

 And all the girls are keen; 

 And all their thighs are warm, lad, 

 &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Etc., etc.

The beast and the monk: A life of Charles Kingsley PDF

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