Notion of Change
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.
 

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.