Alexander William Kinglake
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Alexander William Kinglake (5 August 1809 – 2 January 1891) was an English orientalist travel writer and historian. He was the author of a multi-volume history entitled The Invasion of Crimea: Its Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan, published from 1863 to 1887.
Biography
Kinglake was born near Taunton, Somerset, England, and was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge (earning a B.A. degree in 1832, and an M.A. in 1836).<ref>Template:Acad</ref><ref name="DNB">Template:Cite DNB</ref> In 1837, he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn,<ref name="DNB" /> and went on to build up a thriving legal practice, which, in 1856, he abandoned to devote himself to literature and public life.
His first literary venture was Eothen; or Traces of travel brought home from the East (London: J. Ollivier, 1844), a very popular work of Eastern travel, apparently first published anonymously, in which he described a journey he made about ten years earlier in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, together with his Eton contemporary Lord Pollington.<ref>Introduction to Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, Northwestern University Press, 1 Apr 1997</ref> Elliot Warburton said it evoked "the East itself in vital actual reality" and it was instantly successful.
However, Kinglake's magnum opus was The Invasion of Crimea: Its Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan, in eight volumes, published from 1863 to 1887 by Blackwood in Edinburgh, one of the most effective works of its class. The history, which Geoffrey Bocca describes as a book "by which no intelligent man can fail immediately to be fascinated, no matter to what page he might open it" has been accused of being too favourable to Lord Raglan and unduly hostile to Napoleon III, for whom the author had an extreme aversion.
A Whig, Kinglake was elected at the 1857 general election as one of the two Members of Parliament (MP) for Bridgwater, having unsuccessfully contested the seat in 1852. He was returned at the next two general elections, but the result of the 1868 general election in Bridgwater was voided on petition on 26 February 1869. No by-election was held, and after a Royal Commission found that there had been extensive corruption, the town was disenfranchised in 1870.<ref name="craig1832-1885">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In the late 1880s, he developed cancer of the throat, and he died on 2 January 1891.<ref name="DNB" />
The town of Kinglake in Victoria, Australia,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and the adjacent national park, are named after him.
Notes
References
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- Drabble, M. (ed.) (1983), The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press; p. 534.
External links
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- The Invasion of the Crimea, vol 1 - vol 2 - vol 3 - vol 4 - vol 5 - vol 6 - vol 7 - vol 8 - vol 9
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- 1809 births
- 1891 deaths
- 19th-century English historians
- Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
- British people of the Crimean War
- English travel writers
- Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
- People educated at Eton College
- People from Somerset
- People from Taunton
- UK MPs 1857–1859
- UK MPs 1859–1865
- UK MPs 1865–1868
- UK MPs 1868–1874
- Whig (British political party) MPs for English constituencies