In trumpet-tones he said that the message of Christ was Freedom, that all systems of society which favour the accumulation of capital in a few hands or which oust the masses from the soil are contrary to the kingdom of God. He besought the poor not to judge the church by its diseases. Let the clergy be as tyrannical, luxurious, bigoted, ignorant, careless as they may, the Bible proclaims freedom to the poor, baptism proclaims the equality of all men, the Lord’s Supper proclaims their brotherhood, not as a dim and distant possibility but as an absolute and eternal right. It is God’s will that the degraded masses shall share in the soil and wealth and civilisation and government of England. — Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 359
Kingsley's Political Positions
- The Political Effects of Kingsley’s Sermon on the Church and the Working Classes
- Kingsley & Politics for the People, the Christian Socialist Paper
- Against Centralization — the Example of Pre- and Post-Revolutionary France
- Anglo-American shopkeepers & farmers compared to those living under the Bureaucratic Regimes of the Continent
- “Very unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress” — Kingsley’s political aesthetics
- Kingsley on Protecting England from Physical Degeneration — Sanitation, Education, and Evolution
Miscellaneous
- Charles Kingsley’s Commitment to Social Reform
- Kingsley, Millar, Chadwick on Poverty and Epidemics
- Kingsley’s Defence of Rousseau and the Philosophes
- Kingsley on the French Revolution: “That purifying fire was needed”
- Kingsley and Chartism
- Why England never had an Ancien Regime
- Kingsley's attack on poverty
- Victorian Political History (sitemap)
- Kingsley's muscular Christian heroes, "national conceit," and British imperialsm
- Carlyle, the worship of strength, and Kingsley's later racism
- Race and Religion in the Victorian Age: Charles Kingsley, Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rising
- Kingsley and Doyle's The Lost World in the context of Darwinism, imperialism, and South Anerican history
- British Empire (sitemap)
- The Crimean War
Church Politics
- Broad Church Anglicanism
- Kingsley's Muscular Christianity (needed)
- Kingsley's attack on John Henry Newman
- Purging Christianity of Its Semitic Origins: Arnold, Kingsley, and the Bible
Selected Bibliography
Baker, William J. "Charles Kingsley on the Crimean War: A Study in Chauvinism." Southern Humanities Review 1970.
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard UP, 1977.
Chadwick, Owen. The Victorian Church. London: Adam & Charles Black. 1966.
Hawley, John C., S.J. "Responses to Charles Kingsley's Attack on Political Economy Victorian Periodicals Review. 1986 (19/4) 131-137.
Kovacevic, Ivanka. "Charles Kingsley's Imperialism and the Victorian Frame of Mind." Filoloski Pregled 1975 (3-4) 55-72.
Last modified 31 May 2020