Ravenshoe

Ravenshoe is a novel by Henry Kingsley, published in three volumes in 1862. It is generally considered his second best book, after The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, and many readers have actually preferred it. The novel was a substantial success on first publication and kept its readers through the rest of the century. It is the book on which Kingsley’s reputation as a serious novelist has rested.

The story follows Charles Ravenshoe, a young man who has grown up believing himself to be the heir of the Ravenshoe estate on the north Devon coast and who discovers, through a complicated family revelation, that he is in fact not the legitimate heir. The discovery upends his life. He leaves the estate, takes up a series of low employments, eventually enlists as a private in the cavalry, and serves in the Crimean War, including a sequence at the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. He returns to England damaged in body and spirit, and the final volume of the novel works out the various reconciliations and recognitions that bring the story to its end.

The novel has a structure that allows Kingsley to show what he could do across a wide range of social settings. The opening Devon scenes are some of his best country writing, with detailed observation of the coast and the hunting and shooting that fill the lives of the Ravenshoe family. The London chapters during Charles’s period as a groom and a sub clerk are sharp and surprisingly sympathetic to the working class characters Charles meets. The Crimean sequence is one of the most vivid fictional treatments of the war by a contemporary, even though Kingsley had not himself been there.

The book runs to nearly seven hundred pages in most editions and asks a real commitment of the reader. For anyone willing to give it that, Ravenshoe rewards the time with the kind of broad social novel that Kingsley’s brother Charles never quite achieved and that Trollope was doing differently at the same period. It pairs naturally with Geoffry Hamlyn, The Hillyars and the Burtons, and Austin Elliot, which together make up the core of Henry Kingsley’s serious work.