Baker, William J.  “Charles Kingsley on the Crimean War: A Study In Chauvinism.”  Southern Humanities Review Vol. IV, No. 3 (Summer 1970): 247-256.
Baker notes that the Crimean War was occurring while Kingsley was writing Westward Ho!, a war to which he refers over and over in this novel. Numerous aspects of this later war were similar, he believed, in many respects to the earlier war with Spain.  The chauvinism he consistently displayed during the Crimean War fostered as well as reflected the chauvinism of his contemporaries.  Moreover, Kingsley, who never fought in a war, had a romantic “boy-like fantasy” view of war (254).  While in many ways, declares Baker, he was liberal, compassionate, a free-thinking cleric, a supporter of the poor, an advocate for social reform, a critic of the discriminatory class system, “his liberal sensitivity stopped at the northern edge of the English Channel”.  He combined in a contradictory stance “an insightful concern for his country's social problems alongside an uncritical bellicosity toward national foes” (255). 
Westward Ho! ; Crimean War ; War ; Chauvinism ; Social and Political Views .

Swenson, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005.
In this work Swenson examines the complex cultural intersections between women and medicine in Victorian fiction and wider society. She considers the roles of Grace Harvey and Valencia St. Just, two Eng-ish Crimean War nurses, in the novel Two Years Ago. Kingsley stresses that the nurse’s role is as much moral as medical. Moreover, despite the wartime bravery displayed by his nurses, Kingsley insists that they must ultimately bend to the conventionality of the Victorian marriage. Though Grace was a medical and religious heroine she must be redefined domestically as wife, the proper role of a Victorian woman. Swenson also highlights Kingsley’s forceful social criticism in Two Years Ago where he lays the blame for pervasive disease and unsanitary problems across all classes.
Two Years Ago; Sanitation; Nurses; Crimean War.