Charles Kingsley: The 20th Century Critical Heritage


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Capitalism
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.
 

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.
 

Reboul, Marc.  “Charles Kingsley: The Rector in the City,” in Jean-Paul Hulin and Pierre Coustillas (eds.) Victorian Writers and the City (Lille: Publications de l'Université de Lille III, 1979): 41-72.
Reboul argues that Kingsley influenced by the Romantics and Neo-Platonic thought had come to regard contemporary city life to be the opposite of the Divine.  This view was reinforced by such experiences as the Bristol Riots of 1831, the 1849 cholera epidemic in London’s East End districts of Bermondsey and Jacob’s Island, and the appalling working conditions endured by tailors and others in London’s sweat shops.  Kingsley’s solution to the evils of city life involved an elimination of man’s exploitation of man and a Christianization and a humanization of the excesses of capitalism.  Above all, Kingsley, turning in his later years into an optimistic town-planner, viewed thorough sanitation reform as the vehicle that would rebuild cities in the image of God’s kingdom on earth.  Increasingly Kingsley believed “that man was now in a position to conquer and civilise Nature, to master his environment, and to lay the foundations of a new society, in which cities would no longer appear as diseased patches soiling the purity of the landscape, but as nuclei of organisation shining with all the brightness of their regenerated state” (62).
Christian Socialism; Sanitation; Capitalism; Town-planning.

 
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