Novels; Social and Political Novel; Crimean War.
 

Baker, Joseph Ellis.  The Novel and the Oxford Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932): 88-100.
Baker argues that Kingsley’s hostility to the Oxford Movement was based on a quite different view concerning the nature of man.  Whereas the Oxford Movement held that man's nature was essentially sinful, Kingsley, “of the school of Rousseau”, believed that it was essentially good (88).  Baker reviews the novels of this “pugnacious Protestant” for anti-Catholic sentiments (99).  “Though Kingsley’s pictures of Tractarians are so obviously prejudiced that it is hardly necessary to correct them, his comments help to reveal the core of his own vigorous mind, and the setting of the Oxford Movement within the framework of other mid-century ideas” (100).

Oxford Movement (Tractarianism); Novels; Catholicism; Religion.
 

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.
 

Conacher, W. M.  “Charles Kingsley,” Queen’s Quarterly Vol. 45 (1938): 503-511.
Conacher presents a sketch of Kingsley’s life and works.  He praises the characterization in Hereward the Wake; it surpasses that of Bulwer Lytton’s Harold and that of Scott’s Ivanhoe.  While he criticizes Kingsley’s anti-Catholic treatment in Westward Ho! as being mere bigotry and not based on proper historical facts, he admires the novel’s color and romance.  Though Hypatia has matter for a masterpiece, “haste, over-enthusiasm, and lack of artistry have spoiled it” (509). Alton Locke is modern in its sympathy for the working classes and its political views, while Yeast, though the work of a young author, is praised for its “generous feeling” (510).  Kingsley, according to Conacher, “railed at John Bull in life and in letters and was essentially in the end John Bull himself” (511).

Overview; Novels; Religion; Catholicism.
 

Dawson, W. J.  "Charles Kingsley," in The Makers of English Fiction. 2nd ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1905): 179-190.
In this overview of Kingsley's life and works Dawson assigns Kingsley a high place in the secondary order of novelists, declaring that his failure to attain the highest rank is due to his versatility. While Dawson considers that none of his novels were as fine as The Cloister and the Hearth or Lorna Doone, he deems that Kingsley exerted a greater influence on his age than either Reade or Blackmoore, "an influence subtle and peculiar, based in part on personality, in part on the nature of his message" (179).

Overview; Novels.
 

Elton, Oliver.  A Survey of English Literature 1830-1880.  2 Vols. (London: Edward Arnold, 1932; first published 1920) Vol. II: 309-316.
Elton presents a broad overview of Kingsley’s life and works. Yeast is not really a novel but “a kind of pamphlet-fantasy” in which the authorial commentary renders Kingsley himself the most distinct character (310).  However, the work reveals promise of the future novelist.  The true power of Alton Locke lies in its pictures rather than its ideas. Hypatia is praised for its drama and the passion and action of the story. Westward Ho!, more “a saga than a novel with a plot” (311), is lauded for its action, its enthusiasm, and its fine scene painting.  Though Two Years Ago has excessive moralizing, “Kingsley is himself again whenever he gets back to landscape or to narrative” (312). Hereward the Wake suffers from a surfeit of the professor and a paucity of the artist. The Heroes receives high praise for its style, its descriptions, its appeal to children.  Elton also lauds Kingsley’s “fervid picturesqueness” in a number of his shorter works, particularly his naturalist depictions in At Last.  The Water-Babies though popular “is a good book badly spoilt” (314).  Elton commends Kingsley’s poetic power, particularly his lyric and narrative poems.  “He is one of the few poets of the time who make us wish cordially that he had written more” (315).

Overview; Novels; Poetry.
 

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.
 

Lord, Walter Frewen.  “The Kingsleys,” in his The Mirror of the Century (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1906): 188-203.
Lord discusses the life and work of the two brothers Henry and Charles Kingsley, focusing on their novels.  “As regards the work of Charles Kingsley, we shall have to say that over-emphasis destroyed the artistic effect that he would fain have produced.  A not dissimilar lack of finish is perceptible in the work of Henry Kingsley, owing to his eagerness to produce.  A little more mental concentration in the case of both; a little more deliberation in the case of Charles, and a little more earnestness in the case of Henry, and the world of letters would have been enriched by two great artists.  As it is – proxime accesserunt” (202).

Overview; Novels; Kingsley, Henry.
 

Maison, Margaret M.  The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Victorian Novel  (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961).
Maison considers Kingsley’s religious and spiritual thought as represented in his novels.  She declares that matters of the soul tend to be well overshadowed in these works by stories of adventure, by depictions of physical activity, by scenes of daring and so on.  However, one pervasive religious theme in Kingsley’s novels is the spiritual development of the characters through strong physical activity.  She contends that one of Kingsley’s most dominant beliefs is that man’s soul necessarily suffers from long exposure to dire physical conditions.  It was as important a duty of the parson, Kingsley believed, to care for social, economic, and political reform as to cater to more spiritual elements.  “Thus might Kingsley answer any critic likely to accuse him of preferring sanitation to meditation” (127).  Maison also briefly considers Kingsley’s desire to reconcile religion with science.

Religion; Manliness; Science; Novels.
 

Marmo, Macario.  The Social Novel of Charles Kingsley (Salerno: Di Giacomo, 1937).
In this book length study of Kingsley’s life, personality, views, and works Marmo focuses in particular on the art as well as the social implications of Kingsley’s social novels.  He concludes that Kingsley the man was more significant than his poetry and novels.  His very diverse deeds and objectives were greater than the art of his literary works.  Above all, Marmo contends, Kingsley was a vehement opponent of democracy as well as of rampant laissez-faire competition.  In summing up Marmo declares “But now that this selfish democratic system has reached its crisis and civilization is centering again round Rome, we must recognize in Kingsley an ideal Pioneer;  for Charles Kingsley denounced the foul competitive system at the time of its birth, and remained all his life the assertor of the Collectivist Ideal and the monitor of Co-operation as the one remedy for unbridled competition” (114).

Overview; Full Book Treatment; Novels.
 

Melville, Lewis.  "Charles Kingsley," in his Victorian Novelists (London: Archibald Constable, 1906): 106-124.
Melville reviews Kingsley’s life and works.  He praises some of  Kingsley’s shorter poems though considering that his poetry in general is not up to the standard of his romances.  Yeast is more a pamphlet than a novel and is spoiled by Kingsley’s dissertations on his own views.  Though the story of Alton Locke is slight, the novel’s characterization is superior to that of Yeast.  Melville praises Hypatia for its “brilliant and forcible picture of life”, for its fine characterization, and its good planning.  It is, however, “sometimes stagey, and often melodramatic, and not infrequently grandiloquent” (114, 118).  Westward Ho! is Kingsley’s most successful novel though it does not quite reach the level of Hypatia.  Melville singles out Kingsley’s command of language and his scene-painting.  “. . . it is this power of description that distinguishes him above his contemporaries, with the exception, perhaps of Disraeli; indeed, places him in this respect above all writers since Scott, and even Scott’s landscape does not always seem so spontaneous” (124).

Overview; Novels; Poetry; Characterization in Novels.
 

Muller, Charles H.  “The Standard Victorian Novel of Charles Kingsley and Its Relevance Today,” Communiqué  Vol. 5, No. 2 (1980): 37-46.
Kingsley's novels, according to Muller, typify three major traits of many Victorion novels: they are didactic; they are frequently sensational; they have impossibly resourceful heroes.  Though Muller finds many good points in Kingsley's novels, he considers that his art no longer has much relevance: "it is too subjective, too blatantly polemical or 'preachy', and unrealistic with its melodramatic or 'heroic' tradition" (45).

Novels.
 

Price, J. B.  “Charles Reade and Charles Kingsley,”Contemporary Review  Vol. 183 (Jan/June 1953): 161-166.
Price considers that with respect to literary merit Kingsley’s romances are better than his humanitarian novels.  Still, the latter “certainly exhibit his fine social sympathies, and both Yeast and Alton Locke are excellent sermons” (163).  Price praises the conception of Hypatia, declaring that “the life, realism, and pictorial brilliancy of the scenes give it a power rare in an historical novel”.  Westward Ho! “is more mature, and more carefully written” (164).  Price also lauds the dramatic element in Kingsley’s works.

Overview; Novels.
 

Sampson, George.  The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941).
Sampson provides a brief account of Kingsley’s life and principal works of literature.  Neither Yeast nor Alton Locke are very successful novels “and even as pamphlets they are vague, unvital and inconclusive” (780).  Hypatia is the best conceived and constructed novel. Westward Ho!, his most successful novel, “is an excellent tale of its kind” (781).  Though Two Years Ago has some vivid episodes, it fails to hold attention.  Hereward the Wake has vigor and freshness but has never been popular due to the story’s remoteness.  Both The Heroes and The Water-Babies “deserve their success” (781).

Overview; Novels.
 

Sanders, Andrew. “Last of the English: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake,” The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840-1880 (New York : St. Martin's, 1979): 149-167.
Sanders considers that Kingsley's historical novels, despite their obvious inadequacies, are not, in Henry James's terminology, "amateurish." In particular, he praises Hereward the Wake's action, its characterization, and its presentation of a strange medieval period. Sanders also argues that some of this novel's themes, particularly the divine mission of the Teutons, had been anticipated by Kingsley in his 1860 Cambridge lectures, The Roman and the Teuton.  Above all, the novel epitomizes Kingsley's categoric belief that England's Germanic background played a primary role in the nation's historical development. "It is also central to an appreciation of Kingsley's work as an historical novelist, for in it he attempts to examine the concept of a national hero and to relate heroism to national experience" (165).

Hereward the Wake; Novels; The Roman and the Teuton; Teutons; Anglo-Saxons; History. 
 

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.
 

Scott, P. G. “Kingsley as Novelist,” Theology Vol. LXXVIII, No. 655 (January 1975): 8-15.
Scott argues that it is mistaken for modern critics to focus exclusively on the propaganda element in  Kingsley's novels, namely that they are fictional vehicles utilized to propagate such doctrines as Christian Socialism and muscular Christianity.  Such thinking, declares Scott, neglects the important imaginative quality of the novels, even of the more propagandistic and moralistic ones. Rather, "Re-read after a hundred years, they seem less Victorian documents than Victorian dreams" (9).

Novels.
 
 

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.
 

Stang, Richard.  The Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
Stang refers to Kingsley frequently in this work. For example, he mentions George Meredith's criticism of Kingsley's excessive hortatory approach in Two Years Ago, George Eliot's similar condemnation of his didacticism and moralizing in Westward Ho!, the National Review's 1860 very severe treatment of his general novelist style and art, Blackwood's branding of Yeast as immoral. Stang also discusses Kingsley's belief that the novel should include long explanatory passages in order to educate less intelligent readers.

Novels; Reception of Kingsley's Works; Didacticism.
 

Uffelman, Larry K. Charles Kingsley (Boston: Twayne, 1979).
In this book length study Uffelman focuses on Kingsley's literary achievement.  Chapter I provides an overview in which Kingsley's works are presented chronologically.  In subsequent chapters they are grouped thematically.  Uffelman declares that Kingsley, though a writer of some attractive lyrics and ballads, was a minor poet.  His main claim was as a novelist.  Though much of what he wrote was literature with a purpose, Uffelman considers "that the impact of that literature is due not so much to its purpose as to its presentation" (136).

Overview; Full Book Treatment; Novels; Poetry.
 

Ward, A. W. and A. R. Waller (eds.). The Cambridge History of English Literature Vol. XIII, Part II  (New York, Putnam’s Sons, 1917): 392-410.
This is an overview of Kingsley's life and works with particular focus on his novels.  Kingsley's strong imagination and vivid descriptive style are singled out for especial praise.

Overview; Social and Political Views; Novels.
 

Weygandt, Cornelius.  A Century of the English Novel, Being a Consideration of the Place in English Literature of the Long Story, Together with an Estimate of its Writers from the Heyday of Scott to the Death of Conrad (New York: Century, 1925): 165-168.
In his short treatment of Kingsley the novelist, Weygandt declares that Westward Ho! is his best known novel and praises both Hypatia and Hereward the Wake, the latter being his “most unified and most completely realized story” (167).  On the other hand, both Yeast and Alton Locke are “amateurish and crude” (167) while Two Years Ago he dismisses as “an unassimilated hodge-podge of adventure and Christian Socialism and American Slavery and satire of English conventions” (167).  Weygandt is generally critical of Kingsley’s depiction of character especially the lack of life in his women: “they are a boy’s women rather than a man’s” (168).

Novels.
 

Wijesinha, Rajiva.  The Androgynous Trollope: Attitudes to Women Amongst Early Victorian Novelists (University Press of America, 1982).
From a study of his novels Wijesinha concludes that Kingsley held that woman's primary role was to attach herself to a man and to serve him.  Woman was made for man.  Man was to guide and control, woman was an instrument.

Females; Novels.