Charles Kingsley: The 20th Century Critical Heritage

 
Home Brief Biography Works by Kingsley Secondary Works by Author Secondary Works by Subject Secondary Works by Date

Anti-Semitism
Mendelson, Alan. “Two Glimpses of Philo in Modern English Literature: Works by Charles Kingsley and Francis Warner,”  The Studia Philonica Annual: Studies in Hellenistic Judaism Vol. III (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991): 328-343.
Mendelson examines the treatment of Philo and his views in Kingsley’s historical novel Hypatia and in his series of lectures Alexandria and Her Schools delivered at Edinburgh’s Philosophical Institution in 1854. Mendelson’s analysis also extends to Kingsley’s treatment of the Jews and Judaism. Both of the latter, writes Mendelson, are dealt with in very pejorative terms, with Kingsley consistently displaying anti-Jewish rancour and bigotry.
Hypatia Philo Anti-semitism
 

Prickett, Stephen.  “Purging Christianity of its Semitic Origins: Kingsley, Arnold and the Bible,” in Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (eds.). Rethinking Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan, 2000): 63-79.
Prickett examines the role of pagan civilization and the Church in Hypatia .  Kingsley is favorable to neither.  Rather, his theory of history leads him to admire the Teutonic races who are civilization’s future.  The Catholicism of fourth-century Alexandria is as doomed as the pagan world it supplanted.  It is merely a proto-Christianity that is “saved only by the presence within it of certain forward-looking characters who dimly foreshadow, as it were, the coming age of Teutonic Protestantism a thousand years in the future” (68-9). 
Hypatia ; Religion ; Racial Prejudices ; Anti-semitism ; Arnold, Matthew .