The Heroes

Three Greek stories retold for children by a Victorian clergyman who wanted them kept as heroic and not as lessons: Perseus and the Gorgon, the Argonauts and the fleece, Theseus and the labyrinth. Kingsley wrote them for his own children in 1855, at the same desk where he was writing angry pamphlets about sanitation and the poor. The tone is plain, the violence is not hidden, and generations first met the myths here rather than in Homer. Fifty-one plates of sea and coast by painters including Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frits Thaulow give the voyages of Perseus, Jason and Theseus their salt water horizon.