Charles Kingsley

Abstract

This chapter considers the conflict-laden work of Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was an avid follower of scientific developments. In 1842 he urged one of his correspondents to ‘study medicine [… I am studying it’. In the social novels Yeast (1848), Alton Locke (1850), and Two Years Ago (1857), we see the fruits of these labours, particularly in how the languages and methods of biology offer Kingsley a means of challenging views of starvation as an inevitable, necessary evil. In his portrayals of radical characters, Kingsley discusses how scientific ideas precluded the political appropriation of starvation as a means to beat the well-to-do. Famous for locking horns with John Henry Newman on the abstract question of what constitutes truth, Kingsley argues a case for seeing topics like the physiology of hunger not as a symbol of providentialist or radical thinking, but as the means of creating a more intelligent understanding of poverty.