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

Brantlinger, Patrick, “Bluebooks, the Social Organism, and the Victorian Novel,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts Vol. XIV, No. 4 (Fall 1972): 328-344.
Brantlinger discusses how several early Victorian writers were influenced by parliamentary bluebooks and other official and social investigations.  He briefly refers to the example of Lancelot, hero of Kingsley’s Yeast who immersed himself in a plethora of bluebooks and other reports in his examination of the ‘Condition-of-the-Poor question'.  It was partly though the study of such reports that Lancelot's social conscience was stirred.

Bluebooks; Yeast; Social and Political Novel.
 

Brewer, Elizabeth.  “Morris and the ‘Kingsley Movement',” The Journal of the William Morris Society Vol. IV, No. 2 (Summer 1980): 4-17.
Brewer examines the possible influence Kingsley’s works may have had on Morris.  She believes that it is very difficult to specify categorically that there was a direct influence, though there are many instances where the thought of both men overlapped. She discusses, among others, the attack on celibacy and asceticism in The Saint’s Tragedy and Hypatia; Kingsley’s stress on the importance of the environment in Yeast; the socio-political ideas pervading Alton Locke; Kingsley’s belief in the value of art, an awareness of one's heritage, and the pleasures of rural life to the ordinary working man; the use of the dream device in Alton Locke; the romance as well as the Norse element of Hypatia.

Morris, William; Saint’s Tragedy, The; Hypatia; Alton Locke; Westward Ho!; Yeast; Celibacy; Social and Political Views.
 

Cazamian, Louis.  The Social Novel in England 1830-1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley Trans. Martin Fido (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973; first published in French in 1903).
Cazamian provides a lengthy examination of Kingsley's life and works, focusing on his Christian Socialist activities and, particularly, on how Christian Socialism is represented in his novels, Yeast and Alton Locke.  Cazamian considers Kingsley a "gifted writer" who employs these novels as a "propaganda vehicle" to describe the age's "most vital aims and ideals" (241).

Overview; Social and Political Views; Christian Socialism; Alton Locke; Yeast; Novels.
 

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.
 

Dawson, Carl. "Polemics: Charles Kingsley and Alton Locke," in his Victorian Noon: English Literature in 1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979): 179-202.
Dawson provides an overview of Kingsley’s character, his social and religious views, especially those on Roman Catholicism, and his involvement in and his diverse attitudes towards socialism.  He discusses Alton Locke, “perhaps one of the oddest literary documents of nineteenth-century England” (180), declaring that its recognition in modern times owes something to Kingsley’s treatment being relevant to contemporary Marxist assessments of literature.  “Kingsley articulates the sense of waste in his protagonist’s life; he equates Alton with the social upheavals of his age, setting him against middle-class virtues and assumptions; and he creates in Alton a psychic battle between social activism and pastoral escape”.  In  addition, “Alton Locke could figure in the survey that Georg Lukács, makes of the middling hero in nineteenth-century historical fiction” (201).

Overview; Social and Political Views; Religion; Catholicism; Alton Locke; Yeast.
 

DeLaura, David J.  “The Context of Browning’s Painter Poems: Aesthetics, Polemics, Historics,” PMLA Vol. 95, No. 3 (May 1980): 367-388.
DeLaura contends that the neo-Catholic art thesis of Alexis François Rio as set forth in his 1836 De la poésie chrétienne is essential for an adequate interpretation of Robert Browning’s painter poems of the 1840s and 1850s.  He also discusses how Kingsley was earlier influenced by Rio’s work and argues that Kingsley’s artistic views and his rejection of the Rio thesis constituted an important source for Browning’s artistic ideas.  He examines the passage in Yeast where Kingsley has Barnakill present a Protestant view of art and a repudiation of the Roman Catholic approach to art.  He also discusses Kingsley’s treatment in Alton Locke where he “uses the context of painting to develop the more positive aspect of the new Protestant aesthetic of realism” (377).  Moreover, DeLaura, in his examination of Kingley’s review of Jameson’s 1849 Sacred and Legendary Art, sees his antipathy to Rio’s Catholic view of art to have a strong sexual basis.  In this work his “tone of intense leering and almost scurrilous derision . . . is a measure of how deeply disturbing and threatening Kingsley found the new ‘ascetic’ rewriting of art history” (377).

Browning; Art; Catholicism; Sexuality; Yeast; Alton Locke.
 

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.

Engelhardt, Carol Marie. “Victorian Masculinity and the Virgin Mary,” in Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan, and Sue Morgan (eds.) Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 2000): 44-57.
In this article Engelhardt considers how the understanding of the Virgin Mary of three Victorian clergymen, Kingsley, Edward Pusey and Frederick Faber, was related to their view of contemporary masculine identity and, in particular, how each used the Virgin Mary to define his own masculinity.  Kingsley's dislike of Mary was, as Engelhardy points out, understandable for one who hated Catholicism. However, she also relates his antipathy to the power that Catholics ascribe to Mary.  Kingsley shared the common Victorian view of the domesticity of women and that it was the role of females to inspire men but that they themselves should not aspire to power.  Engelhardt also contends that Kingsley's hostile attitude to Mary was related to fears about his own masculinity.  Early in his life Kingsley himself  had felt a pull towards Catholicism, a religion he later came to view as female-oriented and therefore unmanly. "It was no wonder, then, that Kingsley felt compelled to reject vociferously the most feminine part of this allegedly effeminate religion.  Kingsley was not just denouncing Mary; he was repudiating what he considered to be his own weakness and error in desiring Rome" (47).

Virgin Mary; Manliness; Catholicism; Yeast.

Faber, Richard.  Proper Stations: Class in Victorian Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1971).
Faber discusses Kingsley’s views on class relations focusing in particular on the novels Yeast and Alton Locke.  He also pays especial attention to a comparison and contrast of these views with those of Disraeli.  Because of his belief in a Christian Brotherhood, Kingsley was more genuinely democratic than Disraeli.  He also had less interest than Disraeli in the place of old blood and family.  Both men, however, conscious of social problems pervading the working classes, wished to improve the condition of the people through such intervention as better sanitation, increased church action, and greater involvement of the upper classes.  Still, contends Faber, both men, despite some radical sympathies, were essentially Conservatives, Kingsley becoming more conservative as he aged.  Nevertheless, Kingsley who wished that upper class qualities be more widely disseminated among all classes, was not rigid in his opinions on class, mainly due to his notion of a Christian Brotherhood.  “The ideal of Christian Brotherhood may have encouraged some illusions about existing, or impending, class relations; but it saved Kingsley from the sense of caste that oppressed so many of his contemporaries” (96).

Social and Political Views; Disraeli; Yeast; Alton Locke.
 

Fichter, Joseph H., S. J.  “The Socialism of a Protestant: Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)” in his Roots of Change (New York: Appleton-Century, 1939): 134-156.
Fichter reviews Kingsley’s life and principal works focusing on his social and political thought.  He is balanced in his assessment, pointing out a number of Kingsley’s faults, prejudices, and illogicalities in addition to his good qualities.  With respect to Kingsley’s changing views and specifically to his title of Christian Socialist, Fichter declares that “he was no more thoroughgoing Socialist than he was thoroughgoing Christian” (135).  Fichter briefly reviews Kingsley’s condition of England novels declaring Alton Locke to be “a tremendously effective book” (151) and the autobiographical Yeast to be badly marred by Kingsley’s intense anti-Catholic bigotry.  Fichter concludes that “the work of Charles Kingsley was on the whole a genuine contribution to the improvement of man’s relation with man.  His mistakes were the mistakes of every demagogue to tread the earth, but the hand he had in rousing social interest in English problems more than made up for them” (156).

Overview; Christian Socialism; Social and Political Views; Catholicism; Alton Locke; Yeast.
 

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.
 

Hall, Donald E.  “Kingsley as Negotiator: Class/Gender Discord/Discourse in Yeast and Alton Locke,” in Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 63-83.
Hall stresses the number and the range of scholars' polarized accounts of Kingsley's views on gender issues.  However, he argues that the many diverse and conflicting opinions of this multi-faceted man are "emblematic of an age and process of negotiation . . . . If we view Kingsley as an active negotiator among parties holding radically divergent views, we fully expect to find that his perspectives involve both give and take, both concession and retrenchment" (66-67).  He considers that the tensions and the diversity of Kingsley's views mirror the complexities and confusion of the age.  He goes on to analyze in detail the class, gender, and feminist implications in Yeast and Alton Locke.

Negotiator, Kingsley as; Yeast; Alton Locke; Females.
 

Harris, Wendell V.  “Fiction and Metaphysics in the Nineteenth Century,” in R. G. Collins (ed.) The Novel and its Changing Form (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1972): 59-71.
Harris discusses Yeast and Alton Locke labelling Kingsley together with Disraeli “the most interesting examples of nineteenth-century novelists operating within the transcendental tradition” (62).

Yeast; Alton Locke; Transcendentalism.
 

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.
 

Kettle, Arnold.  “The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel,” in Boris Ford (ed.) From Dickens to Hardy: A Guide to English Literature Vol. 6. 2nd ed. (London: Cassell, 1966; this ed. first published 1963): 169-187.
Yeast, according to Kettle, is a combination of Mrs. Gaskell’s naturalistic style and some of the more mystical and romantic aspects of Disraeli’s.  Though it is often categorized as a religious novel, its social rather than its religious message was responsible for its contemporary objectionable reputation.  Kettle considers Alton Locke to be a better novel than Yeast.  He praises especially its treatment of social problems and the horrendous work conditions suffered by the tailors in their sweat-shops.  Though it is clearly a “propaganda novel”, it is more than that.  “Alton Locke, for all its crudities and ‘dated’ quality, for all its lack of the sort of art and intelligence one associates with those writers conscious of ‘the novel as an art form', can still move us today” (184).

Social and Political Novel; Yeast; Alton Locke; Social and Political Views.
 

Kijinski, John L. “Charles Kingsley's Yeast: Brotherhood and the Condition of England,” VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal Vol. 13 (1985): 97-109.
In his analysis of the novel Yeast Kijinski declares that the novel despite its "bland didacticism" is very representative of the period, the hungry forties.  He argues that the novel also provides a strong insight into a commonly held ideological stance of the time, namely that the growing antipathy between the haves and the have-nots might be improved without force, unions, redistribution of wealth if only all social classes acted sympathetically and humanely in the true belief that everyone is a member of the same common family.
Yeast; Social and Political Novel; Social and Political Views; Catholicism.
 

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 M.  “Blue Books and Victorian Novelists,” The Review of English Studies, New Ser. Vol. XXI (1970): 23-40.
Smith considers the use by Kingsley and Disraeli in Yeast and Sybil respectively of the 1843 Blue book, Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture.  Echoing his brother-in-law Sir Sidney Godolphin Osborne who had supplied evidence for the Report, Kingsley in Yeast rejects the common romantic depiction of the countryside as beautiful and idyllic especially when contrasted with the ugliness and squalor of industrial cities.  Smith also declares that Kingsley in common with other Victorian novelists used the content of Blue books to express ideals and spiritual truths.  In writing of the misery and dreadfulness of rural areas, Kingsley "expressed his belief in man's responsibility for his brother, gave the lie to romantic, idealized descriptions of the countryside, and suggested the way in which the Christian Church can help redeem society" (39).

Yeast; Blue Books; Rural Life; Disraeli.
 

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.
 

Stoddard, Francis Hovey.  The Evolution of the English Novel (London: Macmillan, 1909; first published 1900).
In his examination of the English novel of purpose, Stoddard declares that Yeast and Alton Locke are slighter and less important than Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the problem of slavery being far more serious than the social, industrial and political questions dealt with by Kingsley.  Nevertheless, the latter’s novels were influential in highlighting these questions and in so doing “notably advanced the cause of freedom” in England (174).

Social and Political Novel; Yeast; Alton Locke.

Uffelman, Larry K., and P. G. Scott,  “Kingsley's Serial Novels: Yeast,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter Vol. IX, No. 4 (December 1976): 111-119.
Uffelman and Scott discuss the early publication history of Yeast which first appeared anonymously in six monthly installments in Fraser’s Magazine from July to December 1848 and which was later republished in volume format in 1851.  They pay particular attention to the revisions Kingsley made in the volume text.  In addition to tempering many phrases which might have upset orthodox religious sensibilities, Kingsley also added much anti-Catholic material in the 1851 book, especially in the sub-plot concerning Luke, the Tractarian curate and Lancelot’s cousin.  The other major revision involved expanding the ‘discussion’ element in the last part of the novel where Lancelot meets the prophet Barnakill.  This tilts “the balance of the novel towards the question of religious belief” ( 117).  With respect to the diverse revisions Uffelman and Scott declare that “The new and topical sub-plot devoted to Luke’s conversion to Catholicism made the novel more abstract and theological, as did also the expanded conversation with the prophet in the last chapter.  The minor revisions, however, suggest an interesting slight softening in Kingsley’s attitudes to more orthodox religious earnestness, and show also that Kingsley himself had become aware of some of the unevenness of plot and tone which serial composition had encouraged in his first novel” (118-119).

Yeast; Catholicism; Religion; Publication.
 

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.
 

Wee, C. J. W.-L. "Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a Racially 'Pure' Nation," in Hall, Donald E.  (ed.).  Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 66-88.
Wee discusses how Kingsley used the innovative treatment of the relationship of Christianity to race and cultural history in the novels Alton Locke and Westward Ho! "in a process of national self-definition, through what might be called 'cultural nationalism'." Wee argues that in doing so "Kingsley also reveals the problems surrounding the construction of a pure national-imperial identity based on racial and religious heritage, as he attempted to propagate the potent but unstable image of a masculine, charismatic, and authoritative Englishman who stands as a representative of a resolutely Anglo-Saxon and Protestant nation-empire" (67).

Yeast; Westward Ho!; Manliness; Muscular Christianity; Imperialism;Racial Prejudices; Social and Political Views.
 

Williams, Stanley.  "'Yeast': A Victorian Heresy," North American Review Vol. 212 (November 1920): 697-704.
Williams discusses Yeast, paying particular attention to the novel’s characterization and such themes as antipathy to Roman Catholicism and the espousal of Christian Socialism.  Though he discerns distinct problems with the novel, for example its lack of genus, he praises its pervasive sincerity and Kingsley’s palpable ardor as well as its presentation of important Victorian disputes and movements.  While students of Victorian literature will readily discern the problems of this “potpourri”, “they will understand the Victorians better, and so think their reading worth while” (704).

Yeast; Catholicism; Christian Socialism.