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| Mukherjee, Pablo. “Nimrods: Hunting, Authority, Identity.” The
Modern Language Review 100, no 4 (October 2005): 923-939. Mukherjee discusses Kingsley’s treatment of hunting and game-keeping and their relationship to evolving social authority in his novel Yeast. The hero Lancelot Smith is initially depicted as a man whose education owes far more to sports and hunting than to book learning. His manliness promoted by hunting would come to typify Victorian imperial authority. However, Lancelot’s education develops as he learns more from the gamekeeper Tregarva about the rural poverty and human suffering on the land on which he hunts and which he has hitherto blindly considered picturesque. Tregarva humanizes the hunting countryside for Lancelot. “Lancelot’s education as one of the British elite, that had begun with a spontaneous appreciation of the hunt as a knitter of physical and moral fibre, is completed only after the gamekeeper implants in him a particular code of social, paternalist responsibility that in turn constructs the idealized vision of order” (928). Yeast; Hunting; Rural Life; Education. Smith, Sheila M. “Blue Books and Victorian Novelists,” The Review of English Studies, New Ser. Vol. XXI (1970): 23-40. Smith considers the use by Kingsley and Disraeli in Yeast and Sybil respectively of the 1843 Blue book, Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture. Echoing his brother-in-law Sir Sidney Godolphin Osborne who had supplied evidence for the Report, Kingsley in Yeast rejects the common romantic depiction of the countryside as beautiful and idyllic especially when contrasted with the ugliness and squalor of industrial cities. Smith also declares that Kingsley in common with other Victorian novelists used the content of Blue books to express ideals and spiritual truths. In writing of the misery and dreadfulness of rural areas, Kingsley "expressed his belief in man's responsibility for his brother, gave the lie to romantic, idealized descriptions of the countryside, and suggested the way in which the Christian Church can help redeem society" (39). Yeast; Blue Books; Rural Life; Disraeli.
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