Alderson, David. Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Alderson analyzes how certain nineteenth century writers responded to contemporary debates about gender, religion, and nation. In his treatment of Kingsley and Alton Locke, he discusses how a particularly Anglo-Saxon Christian manliness evolved as a reaction to Catholicism and revolution and became identifiable with British imperial culture. In his later treatment of Kingsley’s polemics against Newman, Alderson stresses that Kingsley’s strong antipathy to Catholicism was largely based on what he felt to be that religion’s effeminacy and asceticism. By implication, Protestantism, the true British religion, was the epitome of manliness. 
Alton Locke; Manliness; Imperialism; Newman; Religion.
 

Amigoni, David.  Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).
Amigoni discusses the framing statement or preface, ‘To the undergraduates of Cambridge,’ that Kingsley added to Alton Locke after his appointment to the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge in 1860.  He points out that Kingsley did not confine the study of history to the examination of sources, the collecting of evidence, and the preparation of impartial and provable claims about the past.  Rather, Kingsley held that modern history is thoroughly focused on the present and what he termed the "‘conditions and opinions of our fellow-countrymen’". As Amigoni states, modern history for Kingsley “is concerned on the one hand with exploring the conditions of life experienced by people living under the social and cultural relations of the present; and on the other hand Modern History is concerned with the ‘opinions’ of these people” (77). 
Alton Locke ; History .
 

Baldwin, Stanley E. Charles Kingsley (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1934).
This is a book length treatment of Kingsley's life and works.  After chapters providing a brief biography, a discussion of the background of the novels, and a consideration of the influence of Carlyle and Maurice, Baldwin devotes separate chapters to each of the novels: Yeast, Alton Locke, Two Years Ago, Hypatia, Westward Ho!, and Hereward the Wake .  Baldwin is measured in his assessment, though he still finds much to praise in Kingsley's diverse literary endeavors. Nevertheless, he considers Kingsley the man as more prominent than his literature.  "Some men's writings are the greatest part of them, and posterity studies their lives through a spirit of curiosity excited by their works.  In a sense this is true of Kingsley, but in a truer sense many are reading Kingsley's literary works because of the indelible impression his personality made upon his fellow men, for whom, in all his activities, he labored.  His life in itself was a poem of deep lyric passion" (194). 
Full Book Treatment ; Overview ; Carlyle ; Maurice ; Yeast; Alton Locke ; Two Years Ago ; Hypatia ; Westward Ho! ; Hereward the Wake .
 

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie.  The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988): 135-150.
Bodenheimer declares that the chaotic nature of Alton Locke is due to the novel's original composition.  It was written during 1849 and 1850 in “unchronological fragments” (135).  Kingsley displays an acute ambivalence throughout the work.  His middle class sensibility fired by class sympathy results in “something like pathology” (137).  “ Alton Locke oscillates wildly between its commitment to the circumstances of working-class life and its yearning for a pastoral world, until it finally collapses into a dream vision that resolves the conflict by changing the meanings of its original terms.  In the process Kingsley inadvertently deconstructs the ideological opposition between social conflict and pastoral harmony, producing versions of pastoral that reveal on the one hand its reliance on aristocratic society and on the other its evolutionary connection with human drives to lust and power” (135). 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views ; Characterization in Novels .
 

Brantlinger, Patrick.  “The Case against Trade Unions in Early Victorian Fiction,” Victorian Studies Vol. XIII, No. 1 (September 1969): 37-52.
Kingsley’s reaction to the Preston Strike of 1853-54 and his views in Alton Locke, according to Brantlinger, reveal his hostility to strikes and trade unions.  The primary problem with trade unions for Kingsley is that “they are competitive rather than cooperative associations” (47). 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views ; Trade Unions .
 

Brantlinger, Patrick.  “Christian Socialism,” in The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977): 129-149.
Brantlinger analyzes the Christian Socialist theme in Alton Locke .  He considers that there is a distinct and paradoxical duality in the novel. Alton personifies the two extremes of, on the one hand, wishing to remain faithful to his working class origins and, on the other, his desire to become one of the middle class.  "Tailor and Poet" like "Christian Socialist" is an oxymoron.  The moral of Alton Locke is not that he should adopt such working class features as Chartism and trade unionism and eschew middle class values, nor is it that he should remain fixed in his working class milieu and never seek to improve himself.  Rather Kingsley wished to point the moral "that a worker should not be ashamed of his status and that he should do whatever he can within legal and Christian boundaries to help the other members of his class" (140). 
Alton Locke ; Christian Socialism .
 

Brantlinger, Patrick.  The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Brantlinger stresses that throughout Alton Locke Kingsley, though recognizing that the working classes are more and more literate, considers that they are not yet adequately advanced to best represent their own interests. Literacy was not in itself sufficient to cure  the social anarchy of the masses. 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views ; Literacy.
 

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 .
 

Brinton, Crane.  English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954; first published 1933).
Brinton provides an overview of Kingsley’s life and his major social and political views.  While his Christian Socialism was by no means a system, Kingsley held that a Christian Socialist society would indeed be hierarchical where each one's place is determined by his moral value as well as democratic in the sense that each one's place has been allotted by God.  Brinton considers that Kingsley’s ideal society was based on older English societies where different social classes “were knit together by habits which were genuine human relationships”.  His “programme is singularly like that of Tory Democracy” (125).  Kingsley’s paternalism did not signify that he rejected competition.  Competition was good but workers must first be members of cooperative associations, an ideal similar to “modern guild Socialism” (126).  While Brinton considers that Kingsley’s achievements were not insignificant, his ideals based on his religious faith could accomplish little to improve the very practical ills of working class and under-privileged society.  “His God, his virtue, his England, made too many promises to the flesh – promises unfulfilled to the common man.  For the uncommon man, his faith was even more inadequate.  Taste and intellect alike recoil from the simplicities of a universe on the pattern of Eversley” (130). 
Social and Political Views ; Alton Locke ; Christian Socialism ; Religion ; Science Evolution ; Democracy ; Capitalism ; Teutons .
 

Byrom, Thomas.  “Introduction” to Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (London: Dent 1970): v-xi.
Byrom considers Alton Locke to be an ambiguous and confusing novel.  Kingsley is ambivalent about violence.  While he clearly sides with Alton and the notion of a fighting working class, he also agrees with the orderly and conservative ideals of an aristocracy enlightened by the Church.  Kingsley is surprising in leaving Catholicism relatively untouched; rather it is the dissenters, especially the Baptists, who receive a harsh criticism.  Also, the Tractarians are criticized as is Transcendentalism which Bryom considers Kingsley failed to understand properly.  Unlike Yeast which suffered from an excessive authorial presence, the autobiographical mode of Alton Locke results in a work more a novel than a tract.  Bryom concludes that Alton Locke, though entertaining, “is only a fitful success.  Reading it is rather like watching a film in which much of the footage is out of focus” (ix).  Though it is primarily to be considered a failure when compared to the works of Dickens, this is instructive.  “Alton Locke was written when English fiction enjoyed its greatest moment, and without it we should have a harder time understanding the achievement of Dickens, who in so many respects shared the conservative, reforming, doubting, bitter, compassionate sensibility of the stuttering Rector of Eversley” (x). 
Alton Locke ; Dissent ; Transcendentalism ; Dickens ; 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 .
 

Childers, Joseph W.  “Alton Locke and the Religion of Chartism,” in Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995): 132-157.
In his analysis of Alton Locke Childers focuses in particular on the relationship between politics and religion. He argues that the spiritual reform advocated, the "religion of Chartism", alleviates the fear of the middle classes of a revolt based on immorality or infidelity, since the reform is strongly linked to the tenets of religion, of Christianity.  However, the advocacy has little social value as long as it remains the subjective view only of Alton.  For real change to be effected, these views must be embraced by a wider public.
Alton Locke ; Religion ; Chartism ; Social and Political Novel.
 

Christensen, Torben.  Origin and History of Christian Socialism 1848-1854  (Aarhus, Denmark: Universitetsforlaget, 1962).
In his study of Christian Socialism Christensen makes frequent mention of Kingsley, focusing in particular on his activities in the Chartist movement and as the author of Alton Locke.
Christian Socialism ; Chartism ; Alton Locke .
 

Cripps, Elizabeth A. "Introduction," Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): vii-xx.
Cripps introduces Alton Locke by considering the context of the troubled Chartist times in which it was both written and set.  She also briefly discusses the novel's publication history, its reception by the critics, and its representation of many of Kingsley's social and political views.  She regrets on literary grounds that Kingsley revised the Cambridge part of the novel.  Praising for the most part the characterization in the novel, Cripps also lauds its graphic depictions. 
Alton Locke ; Chartism ; Social and Political Novel ; Social and Political Views ; Cambridge University ; Characterization in Novels . 
 

Daumas, Phillippe.  “Charles Kingsley's Style in Alton Locke,” Les Langues Modernes Vol. 63 (1969): 169-75.
Daumas argues that due to Kingsley’s conflicting views on Chartism there is a certain mystification in Alton Locke.  Though the novel seems to be an advocacy of Chartism and social reform, the reader when finished understands that it is really an espousal of charity and Christianity.  “Contrary to what one had been led to think, Alton Locke is not a tract in support of socialism, but a vindication of Kingsley’s own conception of Christianity” (169). 
Alton Locke ; Chartism ; Social and Political Views ; Religion .
 

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 .
 

Dottin, Françoise.  “Chartism and Christian Socialism in Alton Locke,” Politics in Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Lille: Centre d'Etudes Victoriennes, U. de Lille, 1974): 31-59.
Dottin discusses Kingsley's social and political views as represented in Alton Locke, especially those relating to Chartism and Christian Socialism, as well as his own practical endeavors in these areas. She concludes that while Kingsley is somewhat difficult to categorize, he is "neither a revolutionary nor a fawning aristocrat", and that he is best described by the two words Christian and socialist (54). 
Alton Locke ; Chartism ; Christian Socialism ; Social and Political Views ; Social and Political Novel .
 

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 .
 

Gallagher, Catherine. “The Tailor Unraveled: The Unaccountable ‘I’ in Kingsley’s Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet” in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 88-110.
Gallagher argues that Kingsley often displays contradictory opinions on free will in his writings. For example, Alton Locke , stressing the complexity of the issue of freedom, reveals more ambivalence about causality than any other industrial novel. "For Kingsley chose a form that expressed his Romantic faith in a free will benevolently reconciled with God-given circumstances; however, his reforming purpose led him to add incongruous elements, suggestions of negative environmental determinism, to that form. The resulting contradiction is neither avoided nor suppressed nor resolved in the narrative, for Kingsley’s form encourages the narrator to review the free will/determinism controversy obsessively throughout the book” (89). 
Alton Locke ; Free Will.
 

Gottlieb, Evan M. "Charles Kingsley, the Romantic Legacy, and the Unmaking of the Working-Class Intellectual," Victorian Literature and Culture (VLC) Vol 29, No. 1 (2001): 51-65.
Gottlieb provides an interpretation of Alton Locke that is dissimilar to many other treatments of the industrial novel in general and Kinglsey's novel in particular.  He argues that Alton Locke and the representation of the working-class poet are "safely apolitical" and in fact serve the interests of the middle classes.  The prevailing views of the narrator and novel succeed, in fact, in espousing middle-class values more than the concerns of the working classes.  "The ideological work of Alton Locke is to reassure its middle-class readers that it is not possible for a working-class person to be an intellectual and remain loyal to his class" (63).  The novel, in short, reassures middle-class readers who may be fearful of a workers' revolution. 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views ; Social and Political Novel ; Romantic Poets ; Political thought, Influences on his . 
 

Graziano, Anne.  “The Death of the Working-Class Hero in Mary Barton and Alton Locke,” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 1999): 135-57.
Graziano discusses the status and especially the death of John Barton and Alton Locke in the novels of Gaskell and Kingsley.  On the one hand, it may appear that the authors’ aversion to extreme working class radicalism have led them to kill off their heroes out of sympathy to higher class loyalties.  However, Graziano argues that a close examination of the structure of the novels reveals a more complicated reason for the demise of Barton and Locke than the authors’ political conservatism. “. . . it is not a turn away from a positive representational status so much as a development of early implications and contradictions that accounts for the heroes’ ‘fall’” (136-7).  The heroes’ failure and deaths “are enacted through the constraining opportunities and conventions of the genre.  And thus the politics of the moment cannot adequately explain why Gaskell and Kingsley begin with potentially viable heroes and end with corpses” (151). 
Alton Locke ; Gaskell  (Mary Barton) ; Characterization in Novels ; Social and Political Views .
 

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 .
 

Haynes, Roslynn D.  “Dream Allegory in Charles Kingsley and Olive Schreiner,” in Kath Filmer (ed.) The Victorian Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in the Mythopoeic Fiction of the Victorian Age (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991): 153-170.
Haynes discusses the “Dreamland” sequence in chapter 36 of Alton Locke .  She declares that carefully and relevantly integrated into the novel, this sequence anticipates Darwin’s work by nine years and reveals a high level of psychological understanding and mythopoeic skill.  She considers that the dream serves several functions: “character analysis, therapeutic experience . . . didactic expression of unanimity between science and religion, and cosmological statement embracing evolution, the myth of the Fall, the Christian doctrine of Redemption through suffering, and sociological parable” (161). 
Alton Locke ; Evolution .
 

Haynes, Roslynn D. "The Multiple Functions of Alton Locke's Dreamland," Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens Vol. 25 (April 1987): 29-37.
Though Haynes considers that Alton Locke has less literary merit than certain other condition of England novels such as Hard Times, Sybil, Felix Holt, and Mrs. Gaskell's industrial novels, she believes that the dreamland sequence in chapter 36 renders it unique and of special interest.  She is particularly impressed with Kingsley's knowledge of the mechanism of dreams.  In addition, she praises Kingsley's presentation in this chapter of evolutionary theories nine years before the publication of Origin of Species as well as what she considers a very sophisticated characterization of Alton himself. 
Alton Locke ; Evolution .
 

Hicks, Granville.  “Literature and Revolution,” The English Journal Vol. XXIV, No. 3 (March 1935): 219-239.
Hicks observes that “Kingsley made Alton Locke a plea for obedience to the church and the crown, attacking the ruthless business men, it is true, but opposing as well Chartist aspirations to working class independence” (228-9). 
Social and Political Views ; Alton Locke ; Capitalism .
 

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.
 

Johnson, Patricia E. Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001).
Johnson briefly considers how Kingsley marginalizes working-class women in Alton Locke . The novel epitomizes how working-class men represent the sole voice and political agent of their class with working-class women being eclipsed in every instance of Alton’s experience. Even Alton’s sexual and emotional attachments are to upper class women. 
Alton Locke ; Working-Class life, Depiction of ; Females
 

Karl, Frederick R.  An Age of Fiction: The Nineteenth Century British Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964): 333-337.
In his treatment of Alton Locke Karl focuses on Kingsley’s social and political views.  Locke comes to believe that the Chartist goals, and all political and social aims, can only be realized if linked to Christianity, a belief earnestly held by Kingsley.  However, Karl declares that Kingsley’s argument turns into the “hollow rhetoric” of those who, fearing radical change, advise prudence (335).  The working classes must wait until others decide it is time for their equality; they must not decide for themselves.  Because of what he considers the weakness of this thesis, Karl believes that Alton Locke has a “flabby intellectual spine”.  While the novel is praised for some excellent scenes, the characters when they think or act appear “platitudinous or intellectually shallow”.  Karl’s conclusion is that Kingsley, despite his compassion for the poor, “has not worn well, but less for the old-fashioned nature of his narrative than for the intellectual assumptions behind the novel” (336). 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views ; Religion ; Characterization in Novels .
 

Keating, P. J.  The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971).
Keating makes numerous references to Kingsley in this work, particularly to Alton Locke.  Keating declares that the depiction of slum life in the episode where Sandy Mackaye takes young Alton on a tour of working-class London is representative of most pre-1880s accounts of slum life in Victorian fiction.  It is all foulness, all horror, with no redeeming vitality, humor or humanity.  Keating contrasts this type of scene with what he declares are the more subtle portrayals of slum life in Dickens.  Though the latter also frequently represents the squalor of slums, he usually depicts their inhabitants as possessing humor and vigor.  He humanizes the slum and, unlike Kingsley, does not accept that the pervasive physical meanness represents the whole of working-class life. 
Alton Locke ; Dickens ; Working-Class life, Depiction of .
 

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 .
 

Lodge, David. “Introduction” to Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet, ed. Herbert Van Thal (London: Cassell, 1967): vii-xviii.
In his introduction to Alton Locke, Lodge declares that while Kingsley shows keen sympathy for the workers' conditions of employment and general social plight, he is also critical of their general modes of reacting against established authority. This was in keeping with the tenor of his ideology for, as he aged, Kingsley abandoned his younger radical views and became increasingly an establishment figure. Still, observes Lodge, Kingsley's effort on behalf of the oppressed and deprived working poor, "of which Alton Locke is an eloquent testimony, reflects most credit upon him, and leaves him least vulnerable to the irony of a more sophisticated and more cynical age than his own" 
Alton Locke ; Christian Socialism ; Social and Political Views ; Chartism .
 

McCausland, Elizabeth D.  “Dirty Little Secrets: Realism and the Real in Victorian Industrial Novels,” The American Journal of Semiotics Vol. 9, Nos. 2-3 (1992): 149-165.
McCausland discusses the role of sewage and its resultant illnesses in Alton Locke.  Sewage or excrement is also a metaphor for the waste produced by the rich after they consume all the surplus value created by the toil of the working classes.  Sewage is “a sign of the suffering of the poor, all that is left of them after the rich have devoured them; this suffering is a result of the very system which claims to be creating a prosperous and civilized England” (158). 
Alton Locke ; Sewage ; Social and Political Views .
 

Menke, Richard. "Cultural Capital and the Scene of Rioting: Male Working-Class Authorship in Alton Locke," Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 28, No. 1 (2000): 87-108.
Menke considers “the protean Locke and the story Kingsley tells about him not as figures of pure writing but as representations of the relationship between the ‘condition of England problem’ and the sphere of cultural production. – specifically, between the social problem of class oppression and what John Guillory, after the French sociologist of culture Pierre Bourdieu, has taught us to call ‘cultural capital’”.  Menke argues that Alton Locke is concerned with a very practical feature of cultural capital: “linguistic access to the correct forms of literary language, institutional access to publication or patronage, material access to the time and tools necessary for writing literature, socio-literary access to the appropriate genres and traditions.”  Menke also contends that “the novel’s treatment of Chartist politics impinges upon its construction of male, working-class authorship as a resolvable analogue and displacement of the problems raised by radical politics” (88). 
Alton Locke ; Chartism ; Cooper, Thomas .
 

Muller, Charles H.  “Alton Locke: Kingsley's Dramatic Sermon,” Unisa English Studies Vol. 14, Nos. 2-3 (1976): 9-20.
Though much of Alton Locke, according to Muller, reads as a political tract and Alton himself is represented through most of the novel as a dangerous agitator, a dramatic change occurs at the end with Alton renouncing his subversive views and embracing religion as a solution.  Kingsley seeing no distinction between the secular and the religious, believed that such desiderata as sanitary reform and social emancipation would come about through spiritual or religious emancipation. Alton Locke may be viewed not primarily as a Chartist novel but as an expression of Kingsley's Christian work on behalf of the poorer classes.  The novel "is really a Christian novel, written in the spirit of his sermons which never failed to emphasize, on the one hand, the Gospel message of the Kingdom of God, and, on the other, personal salvation or reform" (9). 
Alton Locke ; Chartism ; Religion .
 

Noe, Mark D.  “Kingsley's Alton Locke ,” Explicator Vol. 57, No. 1 (Fall 1998): 24-26.
Noe discusses the evolution of the concepts of democrat and democracy throughout Alton Locke.  “He moved from emphasizing the common people to emphasizing an electorate possessed of leaders who were greater than the voters themselves.  It is a democracy set in the still-feudal world of early Industrial Age England, a democracy overlaid on the existing social structure.  Kingsley’s 'moral' at the end of Alton Locke is advice to his reading public to accept a Carlylean rather than a Jeffersonian democracy” (26). 
Alton Locke ; Democracy .
 

Parrish, Geoffrey.  “Kingsley and a Victorian View of Miracles,” Faith and Freedom Vol. 38, No. 114, Part 3 (Autumn 1985): 151-157.
Parrish examines Kingsley’s view of miracles as expressed in Alton Locke .  It is probable that it is Kingsley’s own view that Dean Winstay expresses, namely that science and revealed religion, though separate, are complementary sources of knowledge, each enjoying its own sphere of competence.  Parrish makes three points concerning Kingsley’s opinion on miracles.  “There must be a theistic interpretation of the universe, there must be a belief in the Incarnation, and from these two there comes the conviction that if Jesus is what Christians believe him to be, he can do what others cannot, because he knows what the laws of nature really are” (156). 
Miracles ; Alton Locke ; Religion ; Science .
 

Raban, Jonathan.  “Mr. Kingsley & Master Locke,” New Statesman Vol. 81 (7 May, 1971): 643-644.
Raban strongly criticizes Kingsley's depiction of the working classes in Alton Locke, maintaining that his view of them, in common with that of many contemporary members of the genteel classes, tended towards the voyeuristic, indecent, and sexual.  Raban also observes that the ending of this novel is among the worst in English fiction. 
Alton Locke ; Working-Class Life, Depiction of .
 

Rauch, Alan. "The Tailor Transformed: Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke" in his Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and 'The March of Intellect' (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001): 164-189.
Rauch argues that Kingsley intended Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet , as its name suggests, to be a novel that harmonized quite disparate themes and ideas. A staunch believer himself in the truths of religion and science and their ultimate integration, he hoped that Alton Locke's readers would also accept their reconciliation and their worth when blended as a pathway to absolute truth.  However, Rauch considers that the novel failed in this goal and that Kingsley's passionate attempt to reconcile religion and science did not satisfy and did not convince.  While Alton's own "transformation" uses language taken from science and a purpose taken from religion, neither are credible. "Because of its attempt to deal with all controversies single-handedly, Alton Locke is, in fact, a polemic and thus lacks the kind of intriguing suggestiveness that is so characteristic of" novels by Jane Webb Loudon, Mary Shelley, and Charlotte Brontë that succeed in linking "science with tradition without invoking religion itself" (189). 
Alton Locke ; Science ; Religion ; Social and Political Views ; Change, Notion of .
 

Rauch, Alan. "The Tailor Transformed: Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke and the Notion of Change," Studies in the Novel Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer 1993): 196-213.
Rauch considers Kingsley's belief that science and religion are compatible and that the study of the former could only serve to support the teachings of faith.  Both are truth seeking activities.  Kingsley also found suggestive the parallels between transformations in the natural worlds and transformations in the spiritual spheres. It is a parallel, declares Rauch, that Kingsley adapted for the character of Alton in Alton Locke .  Kingsley is drawing on the progressive transformation of forms in the natural world when he depicts the gradual change of Alton from an atheist and political agitator to a Christian with a much moderated political reform agenda. 
Science ; Religion ; Change, Notion of ; Darwin ; Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views .
 

Raven, Rev. Canon C. E.  “Charles Kingsley,” The Listener Vol. 11, No. 283 (13 June, 1934) 1007-1008.
Though holding that Alton Locke is clearly a work of propaganda, Raven praises it for its scene painting, its descriptions of landscape, atmosphere, sights, sounds and smells.  He declares that the best work of Kingsley, a passionate lover of nature, was as an interpreter of recent scientific discoveries in terms of Christianity.  “. . . he was almost the only Churchman of his time to realise that science and the scientific method were accomplishing a revolution in human thought, and that unless the Church recognised this it would be unfit to commend its message to the world” (1008). 
Alton Locke ; Science ; Evolution ; Religion .
 

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 .
 

Stitt, Megan Perigoe. Metaphors of Change in the Language of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Scott, Gaskell, and Kingsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
During the nineteenth century the study of language and linguistic analysis shared with geology certain metaphors for describing change and theories of progress. This book analyses how Kingsley, Walter Scott, and Elizabeth Gaskell treated language and particularly dialect in their novels. From textual study of the novels and an analysis of the language of contemporary science, Stitt explores how different genres affected the Victorian age’s use of metaphor and its frequently conflicting theories of progress. 
Geology ; Science ; Change, Notion of ; Progress ; Language ; Alton Locke ; Westward Ho! ; Hereward the Wake .
 

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 .
 

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 .
 

Vernon, Sally.  “Trouble Up at t’Mill: The Rise and Decline of the Factory Play in the 1830s and 1840s,” Victorian Studies Vol. XX, No. 2 (Winter 1977): 117-139.
Vernon declares that Kingsley found objectionable the popular dramatists who catered to working class tastes and abhorred, as he reveals in Alton Locke , such popular theaters as the Victoria Theatre.  However, many of these playwrights in their melodramas wrote about such working class problems as poverty, social discord, industrial conflict, appalling factory conditions, themes dealt with by Kingsley himself in his novels.  “The result during the 1830s and 1840s was a small but significant body of plays dealing explicitly with factory conditions, and in some cases delineating those conditions with a stark realism that compares well with and complements the rather different approach of the industrial novelists of the 1840s” (118). 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views ; Factory Play .
 

Vooys, Sijna de. The Psychological Element in the English Sociological Novel of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Haskell House, 1966).
De Vooys provides a brief examination of Alton Locke focusing in particular on Locke’s characterization. He concludes that “In Alton Locke’s character we can trace Kingsley’s belief that the workers should associate themselves, not in envy of their privileged brothers, but in the spirit of Love, to find beauty in Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, not by assistance from without, but by the help of the Spirit working in each.” 
Alton Locke.
 

Williams, A. R. "Alton Locke by Charles Kingsley (1850)," East London Papers Vol. 13 (Summer 1970): 36-40.
Williams counts Kingsley among those Victorian writers who sought to reveal in their works society’s evils to indifferent and oblivious middle and upper classes.  In particular, Alton Locke is important for “historians of London’s East End because it portrays vividly and, as far as one can tell, reliably, the conditions of the sweated tailors of this district in the middle of the nineteenth century” (37).  Williams sees Kingsley as more than just a depicter of societal problems.  As a solution Kingsley advocated three prongs of attack: the masses’ self-improvement through education, organization in trade unions, and governmental reform. 
Social and Political Novel ; Alton Locke ; Social and Political Views .
 

Williams, Raymond.  Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977; first published 1958).
Williams in his brief examination of the “extremely discursive” Alton Locke praises much of the background depiction of the novel.  He stresses the importance of the work’s conclusion.  While Chartism and the plight of the workers are treated sympathetically throughout, the true solution to life’s problems resides in the acceptance of God.  Williams also points to the novel’s preface where Kingsley argues that “The regeneration of society . . . will meanwhile proceed under the leadership of a truly enlightened aristocracy.  It will be a movement towards democracy, but not to that ‘tyranny of numbers’ of which the dangers have been seen in the United States” (112). 
Alton Locke ; Social and Political Novel ; Chartism .