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Updated: May 12, 2025
The first and last use Kingsley made of his gold-fields experience is seen in the sketch of mining of the successful sort in the third volume of The Hillyars and the Burtons, but this is so slight that it might have been imagined by a writer who had never handled a shovel or a washing-cradle in his life.
The best known of these is that against the north wall, representing Thomas Lawrence, the father of Sir John, kneeling with folded hands face to face with his wife in the same attitude. Behind them are respectively their three sons and six daughters. This is the monument which Henry Kingsley refers to through the mouth of Joe Burton in his novel "The Hillyars and the Burtons."
It may well be regretted that one who had so keen an eye for all that was best in the social life of the country, at one of its most interesting periods, should not have written a volume or two of reminiscences, but no colonial reader would wish Geoffry Hamlyn or The Hillyars and the Burtons to have been made the vehicle of more descriptive matter than they contain.
If Kingsley wished to repress memories which it would have been against his cheerful nature to perpetuate, he succeeded with singular completeness. Save the technical knowledge of geology shown by Trevittick in The Hillyars and the Burtons, and by the encyclopædic Dr.
On his return in 1858 he devoted himself industriously to literature, and wrote a number of novels of much more than average merit, including Geoffrey Hamlyn , The Hillyars and the Burtons , Ravenshoe , and Austin Elliot . Of these Ravenshoe is generally regarded as the best.
Geoffry Hamlyn and The Hillyars and the Burtons have obvious faults, but in most respects they are the highest, because the least artificial, expression of Kingsley's powers. A consideration of some of their more noticeable qualities will perhaps afford the clearest answer to the question which opens this essay.
The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in Geoffry Hamlyn and of three-fourths of The Hillyars and the Burtons, but to Ravenshoe it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels scarcely ever.
If, as Professor Masson says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist is chiefly judged, Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to depend almost solely on what he accomplished in Geoffry Hamlyn, The Hillyars and the Burtons and Ravenshoe. In the first two of these there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study of character.
He returned to Australia for his subject in The Hillyars and the Burtons, and wrote several other novels before his death in 1876, having been during part of the time a newspaper editor, a newspaper correspondent, and a journalist generally.
He could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian view of 'our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. A comparison of Marcus Clarke's too often quoted description with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth, twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of Geoffry Hamlyn and at the beginning of the third volume of The Hillyars and the Burtons curiously illustrates how far the appreciation of Australian scenery depends upon the point of view of the observer.
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