ABSTRACT
One measure of Charles Kingsley’s energy is that his collected works run to twenty-eight volumes. Several of them are collections of sermons, but some are poems, literary criticism, historical essays, popular science, and, in particular, a clutch of novels which were sold in torrential numbers. Kingsley’s father was a clergyman from a family of soldiers and country gentry. His mother was the daughter of Judge Lucas of Barbados ‘and in old age the tales which he could tell of the old war days on the Spanish main, and his stories of the wonders of tropical nature, became the delight of his grandson’s boyhood’. The tract which Kingsley wrote for The Christian Socialist was entitled ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’. It contained a vivid account of what unrestricted competition was doing to drive down the wages of East End tailors, forcing them to live in insanitary conditions.
