Kinglake was born near
Taunton,
Somerset, England, and was educated at
Eton College and
Trinity College, Cambridge (earning a B.A. degree in 1832, and an M.A. in 1836). In 1837, he was
called to the bar at
Lincoln's Inn,
Elliot Warburton said it evoked "the East itself in vital actual reality" and it was instantly successful. However, Kinglake's
magnum opus was
The Invasion of Crimea: Its Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan, in eight volumes, published from 1863 to 1887 by
Blackwood in
Edinburgh, one of the most effective works of its class. The history, which
Geoffrey Bocca describes as a book "by which no intelligent man can fail immediately to be fascinated, no matter to what page he might open it" has been accused of being too favourable to
Lord Raglan and unduly hostile to
Napoleon III, for whom the author had an extreme aversion. A
Whig, Kinglake was elected at the
1857 general election as one of the two
Members of Parliament (MP) for
Bridgwater, having unsuccessfully contested the seat in
1852. He was returned at the next two general elections, but the result of the
1868 general election in Bridgwater was voided on petition on 26 February 1869. No
by-election was held, and after a
Royal Commission found that there had been extensive corruption, the town was disenfranchised in 1870. In the late 1880s, he developed cancer of the throat, and he died on 2 January 1891. and the adjacent national park, are named after him. ==Notes==