A. W. Kinglake

By the 1830s, it seemed every traveler returned from the East with a book. Yet among all those accounts, William Tuckwell says, only two still held their readers—and one was Kinglake’s Eothen.

In this biographical study, written while people who knew Alexander William Kinglake could still recall him, William Tuckwell gathers letters, recollections and family stories to find the man behind the celebrated prose. The trail leads from Kinglake’s Scottish ancestry to his childhood in Taunton, where a boy raised on broad, lively learning was sent to schools whose rigid lessons he would remember with bitterness. His devotion to his mother, his early ambitions and his sharp eye for convention all offer clues to the voice that made Eothen endure. What shaped the young Kinglake into the writer readers still followed east?

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