Daily Thoughts

Daily Thoughts is a posthumous devotional anthology drawn from the writings of Charles Kingsley, the Victorian novelist, Anglican clergyman, and social reformer who lived from 1819 to 1875. The book was compiled and arranged by his widow Frances Eliza Grenfell Kingsley after his death and was published in various editions through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is arranged as a daily reading book with a short passage of Kingsley’s work for each day of the year.

The selections are drawn from across Kingsley’s writing, including the major novels, the published sermons, the essays, the lectures on history and natural science, and the private letters. Frances Kingsley had access to her husband’s papers and was able to choose from manuscript material as well as from the published work. The arrangement is loosely thematic across the year, with seasonal passages where appropriate and longer thematic groupings for periods like Lent and Christmas.

The book reflects the wide range of Kingsley’s interests in a way that no single one of his books quite manages on its own. There are passages on natural history, on the meaning of work, on the social responsibilities of the educated, on the religious life, on family relations, on courage and the use of fear, and on many other subjects that Kingsley wrote about at one time or another. The reading anthology form suits his voice unusually well because Kingsley was almost always a writer of strong short paragraphs and direct sharp sentences, even in his long novels and his most ambitious sermons. The passages stand on their own without losing their force.

The book runs to about three hundred and seventy pages, one for each day of the year. For readers who already know Kingsley through his novels, the anthology gives a different sense of the man, less concerned with plot and more focused on the steady ethical and religious vision that ran underneath everything he wrote. For readers new to Kingsley, the daily passages serve as an introduction that can lead naturally outward to the longer works. It pairs naturally with the daily reading anthologies drawn from Phillips Brooks and from George MacDonald, both of which work in similar territory.