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.
Blue
Books ; Yeast
; Social
and Political Novel .
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
.
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