Charles Kingsley: The 20th Century Critical Heritage

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George Eliot
Fasick, Laura. "No Higher Love: Clerical Domesticity in Kingsley and Eliot." Victorian Newsletter Vol. 48, No. 100 (2001): 1-5.
Fasick argues that two writers as different as Kingsley, an ordained Anglican minister, and George Eliot, an agnostic, domesticated clergymen in their fictional representation of them. Both writers, accepting the Victorian stress on the domesticity of religion, transferred the priest’s most important realm of action from public reform to that of domestic virtue. Moreover, Kingsley and Eliot underscore the priest’s romantic and sexual life, especially when fulfilled in marriage and parenthood, as an important aspect of his human and moral development. Such development can never be enhanced by celibacy.

Catholicism ; Religion ; Sexuality ; George Eliot ; Celibacy .


Gillespie, Jr., Harold R.  “George Eliot’s Tertius Lydgate and Charles Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall,” Notes and Queries Vol XI (n.s.) (June 1964): 226-227.

Gillespie points out that Middlemarch's Tertius Lydgate who is sometimes regarded as fiction's first hero as physician, in fact was predated fourteen years earlier by Two Years Ago's Tom Thurnall.

Two Years Ago ; Eliot, George .
 

Myer, Valerie Grosvenor.  "Charles Kingsley's Hypatia: A Seminal Novel," Notes and Queries Vol. 39, No. 2 (June 1992): 179-180.
Myer writes that Dickens and Eliot were influenced by Hypatia and that there are echoes of incidents in this novel in their own Great Expectations and Daniel Deronda respectively.

Dickens ; Eliot, George .