Reboul, Marc. “Charles Kingsley: The Rector
in the City,” in Jean-Paul Hulin and Pierre Coustillas (eds.) Victorian
Writers and the City (Lille: Publications de l'Université de
Lille III, 1979): 41-72.
Reboul argues that Kingsley influenced by the Romantics and Neo-Platonic
thought had come to regard contemporary city life to be the opposite of
the Divine. This view was reinforced by such experiences as the Bristol
Riots of 1831, the 1849 cholera epidemic in London’s East End districts
of Bermondsey and Jacob’s Island, and the appalling working conditions
endured by tailors and others in London’s sweat shops. Kingsley’s
solution to the evils of city life involved an elimination of man’s exploitation
of man and a Christianization and a humanization of the excesses of capitalism.
Above all, Kingsley, turning in his later years into an optimistic town-planner,
viewed thorough sanitation reform as the vehicle that would rebuild cities
in the image of God’s kingdom on earth. Increasingly Kingsley believed
“that man was now in a position to conquer and civilise Nature, to master
his environment, and to lay the foundations of a new society, in which
cities would no longer appear as diseased patches soiling the purity of
the landscape, but as nuclei of organisation shining with all the brightness
of their regenerated state” (62).
Christian
Socialism; Sanitation;
Capitalism;
Town-planning. |
