Full Book Treatment; Overview; Carlyle; Maurice; Yeast; Alton Locke; Two Years Ago; Hypatia; Westward Ho!; Hereward the Wake.
 

Chapman, Raymond.  The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832-1901 (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
Chapman briefly discusses Kingsley’s major social and political novels, Yeast (1848), Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850), Hypatia (1853), and Two Years Ago (1857).  He also mentions The Water Babies (1863) for its treatment of child labor and social justice.  Chapman declares that Kingsley wrote in fiction about some of the topics with which Maurice was dealing in more theological terms.  “From Maurice he learned that the needs of the time could be a pragmatic sanction for Christianity; from Carlyle, how to subordinate reason to emotion.  The combination was, to say the least, a lively one.  Like Samuel Butler, so different in other ways, Kingsley wrote best about those things which he had made into a personal grievance” (135).

Social and Political Novel; Yeast; Alton Locke; Hypatia; Two Years Ago; The Water Babies.
 

Chitty, Susan.  Charles Kingsley’s Landscape (Newton Abbot; North Pomfret, Vt.: David and Charles, 1976).
The first part of this work is essentially a biography of Kingsley with particular focus on the places he lived and visited, especially those in Devon. Most of the second part is an examination of the places, again mainly in Devon, mentioned in his works, particularly Westward Ho!, Two Years Ago, and The Water-Babies.
Overview; Devon; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago; The Water-Babies.
 

Christensen, Allan C.  “Sick Mothers and Daughters: Symptoms of Cultural Disorder in Novels by Manzoni, Dickens, Kingsley, Bulwer-Lytton, James,” RSV: Rivista di Studi Vittoriani Vol. 7, No. 4 (January 1999): 5-32.
Christensen discusses the relationship of mother and daughter in Two Years Ago in the context of  society's "sick cultural system" (6).  “The passionate reunification of mother and daughter thus comes to typify not only the event that will restore health to a particular plague-stricken culture but also the redemption of the human race” (26).

Two Years Ago; Mothers and Daughters; Females; Social and Political Views.
 

Devonshire, M. G.  The English Novel in France: 1830-1870 (New York: Octagon Books, 1967).
Devonshire discusses the reception of Alton Locke, Yeast, Westward Ho!, and Two Years Ago in France during the third quarter of the nineteenth century and provides short extracts from some of the reviews. The French, declares Devonshire, did indeed praise Kingsley for the literary value of the novels, though they objected to the excessive sermonizing.  However, the main interest of the French lay in the novels’ social, political, and historical background and their attitude to reform rather than in the actual stories.

France, Critical Reception in; Alton Locke; Yeast; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago.
 

Dodd, Philip.  “Gender and Cornwall: Charles Kingsley to Daphne du Maurier,”  in K. D. M. Snell (ed.) The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 119-135.
Dodd declares that the West Country in Two Years Ago is a region signifying for Kingsley a “forward-looking, confident masculinity” (125).  Its manly Protestant values complement the muscular Tom Thurnall while the London world is the appropriate place for the effete poet Elsley Vavasour.

Two Years Ago; Cornwall; Devon; Manliness.
 

Gillespie, Jr., Harold R.  “George Eliot’s Tertius Lydgate and Charles Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall,” Notes and Queries Vol XI (n.s.) (June 1964): 226-227.
Gillespie points out that Middlemarch's Tertius Lydgate who is sometimes regarded as fiction's first hero as physician, in fact was predated fourteen years earlier by Two Years Ago's Tom Thurnall.

Two Years Ago; Eliot, George.
 

Goldberg, F. S.  “Kingsley and the Social Problems of His Day,” The Westminster Review Vol. 167 (Jan. 1907): 41-49.
Goldberg provides a rather naive account of Kingsley’s work on behalf of the poor and working classes and considers his views on social problems as expressed in his novels.  Though Kingsley believed that all men are equal in the eyes of God, he was not a socialist.  Rather, while their social conditions must be alleviated, it was right that the working classes should be governed by the upper classes.

Social and Political Views; Yeast; Two Years Ago.
 

Harris, Styron.  “The 'Muscular Novel': Medium of a Victorian Ideal,” Tennessee Philological Bulletin Vol. 27 (1990): 6-13.
Harris discusses the notion of “muscular Christianity”.  It is epitomized in three dominant figures of the novels: Amyas Leigh in Westward Ho!, Tom Thurnall in Two Years Ago, and Hereward in Hereward the Wake.  Harris also discusses Kingsley’s influence on Thomas Hughes and on Hughes’s portrayal of muscular Christianity in his novels Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Scouring of White Horse, and Tom Brown at Oxford.  Both novelists took care to distinguish the muscular Christian from one who is mere muscle and both abhorred the hero of George Alfred Lawrence’s novel Guy Livingstone who personified “muscularity without Christianity or moral considerations”.  Nevertheless, Harris agrees with David Newsome that despite their broader meaning of muscular Christianity, “the muscular novel according to Kingsley and Hughes contributed to the immense vogue of athletics from the late sixties onwards” (11).

Muscular Christianity; Hughes, Thomas; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago; Hereward the Wake.
 

Hartley, Allan John. The Novels of Charles Kingsley: A Christian Social Interpretation (Folkestone: The Hour-Glass Press, 1977).
Hartley in this book-length study interprets Kingsley's novels in the light of the influence of the Christian Social Movement. He contends that Kingsley is unusual in using novels to set forth the message of one whom he, together with many others, viewed as the age's greatest prophet, F. D. Maurice. "The value of Kingsley's novels ultimately lies less in their advocacy of liberality and reform, than in their insistent justification of both on the basis of Christian humanism.  Kingsley's inspiration sprang from Maurice whose reading of the Bible had shown his disciple the meaning, both of Christianity and of history, and the novels proclaim that social improvement had necessarily to proceed within the existing framework of society, which for Kingsley meant a Christian dispensation based on Commandments engraven on tablets of stone and interpreted by sacrificial love.  A minor prophet proclaiming a minor one, Kingsley thus added a new dimension to the novel" (169).

Christian Socialism; Maurice; Religion; Social and Political Views; Novels;  Yeast; Alton Locke; Hypatia; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago; Hereward the Wake.


Horsman, Alan.  “Elizabeth Gaskell and the Kingsleys,” in his The Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990): 256-294.
In his brief examination of Yeast, Alton Locke, Two Years Ago, and The Water-Babies Horsman praises the clarity, the felicity and the exactitude of Kingsley's descriptive passages, qualities that make him "stand out among the minor novelists" (256).  However, he also faults Kingsley for neglecting his novel writing in favor of the pursuit of his religious and educational aims that led him to take "the short cuts of melodrama and allegory" (256).  Horsman also criticizes the didacticism pervading Kingsley's novels though he acknowledges that despite its strong didactic elements The Water-Babies comes closest to a work of the imagination.

Yeast; Alton Locke; Two Years Ago; The Water-Babies; Novels; Didacticism.
 

Muller, Charles H.  “Poetics and Providence in Kingsley’s Two Years Ago,” UNISA English Studies Vol. 17, No. 2 (1979): 29-39.
In this study of the respective roles of art and God in Two Years Ago Muller contends strongly that it was "Kingsley's recognition of Providence's role in his fiction which undermined the value of his art.  It made his art obstrusively didactic. . . . However, it was chiefly because of Kingsley's belief in the poetic - or, rather, religious - licence of Christian art that he considered himself free to obtrude his moral commentary" (38).

Two Years Ago; Art; Religion.
 

Newby, Richard L.  “Wilkie Collins's Man and Wife: Kingsley's Athlete Scouted,” McNeese Review Vol. 26 (1979-80): 47-54.
Newby discusses Wilkie Collins's castigation in his 1869-70 Man and Wife of Kingsley's vaunted athleticism. He provides numerous reasons for Collins's dislike of Kingsley, ranging from the latter's status as a most respectable Establishment figure to Kingsley's denigration of the importance of the intellect. Collins viewed this anti-intellectualism as being closely connected to Kingsley's athleticism especially as advocated in the three novels Hereward the Wake, Two Years Ago, and Westward Ho!.  Man and Wife's propagandizing against athleticism is Collins's retaliation.

Collins, Wilkie; Athleticism; Hereward the Wake, Two Years Ago; Westward Ho!
 

Scott, Patrick.  "Charles Kingsley," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 21.  Victorian Novelists Before 1885. Edited by Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman (Detroit: Gale, 1983): 195-207.
This follows the usual format of the DLB.  A bibliography of Kingsley’s own works is followed by an account of his life interspersed with an analysis of his major writings, in this case his novels.  A short secondary bibliography is appended.  Several illustrations are also provided.  Scott sums up Kingsley the novelist as follows: ‘If Kingsley never wrote a great work or an unflawed masterpiece, he can now, in light of the new biographical evidence, be recognized as a writer of considerable psychological complexity, one who produced searching and imaginative responses to some of the central issues of the late 1840s” (206).

Overview; Novels; Alton Locke; Yeast; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago; Hypatia; Hereward the Wake.
 

Smith, Sheila, and Peter Denman. “Mid-Victorian Novelists,” in Arthur Pollard (ed.) The Victorians (New York: Peter Bedrick, 1987, c. 1970): 239-285.
Smith and Denman survey Kingsley’s novels.  Yeast and Alton Locke are his best.  Yeast was the first novel devoted to the notion that unsanitary conditions and disease existed in the countryside as well as in the towns and cities.  A “courageous” novel, it also provided some indication “of the sexual squalor of the poor” (254, 253).  Though radical views are expressed in the novel, Smith and Denman declare that Kingsley did not believe in democracy.  “In his novels, as in Disraeli’s, the independence of the lower orders must be achieved within the existing class-structure” (255).  Though Alton Locke has powerful scenes, its propaganda takes precedence over the novel and its characters. Though Two Years Ago has some good scenes, it is a “long-winded novel” (260).  Smith and Denman have little positive to say of Hypatia and Westward Ho!, but state that The Water-Babies is Kingsley’s “most attractive book” (260).  “Charles Kingsley is a minor novelist, but in Yeast, Alton Locke and Two Years Ago he helped to extend the novel’s subject matter, and to make it more serious, more concerned with reality.  He saw God, Heaven and Hell in human terms.  This was an asset to him as a novelist, and gave substance to his novels” (261).

Novels; Yeast; Alton Locke; Two Years Ago; Hypatia; Westward Ho!; Social and Political Views.
 

Vance, Norman.  The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Vance devotes two chapters to Kingsley's life, thought, and literary works paying particular attention to themes of the relationship of manliness to religion in his novels.  "Christian manliness was not just an ideal in Kingsley's fiction, it was the basis of his practical work as pastor, teacher and reformer and the essence of his life and experience" (107).

Overview; Yeast; Alton Locke; Hypatia; Westward Ho!; Two Years Ago; Hereward the Wake; Muscular Christianity; Manliness; Newman Controversy.