Austin Elliot and The Harveys
Henry Kingsley
Austin Elliot and The Harveys is a combined volume of two novels by Henry Kingsley. Austin Elliot was originally published in 1863, two years after Ravenshoe and during the period when Kingsley was at the height of his powers. The Harveys was published in two volumes in the early 1870s. The combined edition brings both into a single volume for readers wanting the middle and late Kingsley together.
Austin Elliot is the better of the two novels and is one of the strongest things Kingsley wrote after Ravenshoe. The story follows a young Englishman of mixed gentry and middle class background through a sequence of events involving an unhappy childhood, a complicated romantic attachment, an inheritance question, and several long set pieces of country and London life. The character of Austin himself is one of Kingsley’s most developed male protagonists, and the relations between Austin and the various women in the story are handled with more emotional honesty than was usual for Kingsley. The novel was admired by some serious critics of the period as showing Kingsley capable of more than the boisterous adventure fiction his early books had suggested.
The Harveys is more uneven. It is a longer novel about a family across two generations, with a complicated plot involving the Welsh and West Indian connections of the Harvey family, several romantic subplots, and a long inheritance question that ties the various threads together. The opening chapters are good. The later chapters become tangled in the plot machinery and never quite recover. Kingsley was writing under financial pressure in the early 1870s and the strain shows.
The combined volume runs about six hundred pages. For readers who want to see Kingsley at his most accomplished, Austin Elliot is the piece to read. The Harveys is interesting mainly as a sample of his late style and as a sign of what happens to a competent novelist working too fast. The volume pairs naturally with Ravenshoe, the earlier major novel, and with Stretton, also from the same middle period.
