The Harveys; Volume 2

The Harveys, Volume 2 is the second volume of Henry Kingsley’s late novel about an English and West Indian family across two generations, published in the early 1870s. The Harveys was originally issued in two volumes and the second volume continues the long family story from the point where the first volume left off.

The second volume picks up the story of the Harvey children as they reach adulthood and have to make their own choices about marriage, profession, and the inheritance question that has hung over the family from the start of the novel. Kingsley moves the action from the English country setting of the first volume into a wider range of scenes including London, the Welsh borders, and West Indian connections through plantation interests the family has inherited. The complications of the plot multiply, with several romantic subplots, a long crisis around the West Indian property, and a final movement that brings most of the various threads into some kind of resolution.

The writing in this volume is uneven. Kingsley was producing fiction at a rapid pace by this point in his career, partly because of his financial situation and partly because of his own inability to manage his work in a sustained way. The strongest sections are the country house scenes, where he was working in territory he knew well. The West Indian sections suffer from the same problem as his Crimean writing, which is that they are based on reading and conversation rather than on direct experience, and they have a slightly distant quality even when the events are dramatic.

The novel runs about three hundred and fifty pages in this volume. It is best read as part of the full novel, since the second volume cannot really stand on its own. For readers committed to working through the later Kingsley, this volume completes the family story. For readers wanting Kingsley at his best, the better recommendations remain Ravenshoe and The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. The Harveys is interesting mainly as a portrait of a competent writer working past his best period.