'Mak a style for yoursel, laddie; ye're na mair Scots hind than ye are Lincolnshire laird: sae gang yer ain gate and leave them to gang theirs; and just mak a gran', brode, simple, Saxon style for yoursel.' (99)

Was Charles Kingsley a two-hit wonder? The more I read the more I wonder. The Water-Babies was good, and I appreciated Two Years Ago, but none of the other novels I've read by him have done much for me. Or anything really. There's fertile ground in Alton Locke, a first-person narrative of a cockney tailor's ascent to poetry and political revolution, but like Hypatia, so much of it is boring tedium where nothing happens.

He does meet a man of science, though, the Dean of a Cambridge college, who both wants to teach Locke science and to experiment on him scientifically. I like that he says, "the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way" (167)-- never was the project of the scientist in the scientist novel so clearly expressed; the man of science is a microcosm for science, and the novel is a microcosm of the universe. But though it might apply to scientist novels, Alton Locke is not one, and thus have little to recommend itself to me, and honestly, it has little going for it for others, too.

(I do like Kingsley's political stirrings, especially the Chartist Scot quoted above, but there's just so much other stuff that's just not interesting.)

Theme: a young artist born to enslaved working class breaks through, maturing and learning true meaning of freedom-482?
Character development par excellence (Alton Locke)
An older woman (Elanor) befriends him (as a patron-friend, with rebuke), but he was too foolish to notice, esp since he was infatuated with a younger, beautiful shallow woman (Lillian), until he matured 402, 443, 464
Notable characters
Political climax 450
In Christ 454!

3639. Alton Locke Tailor and Poet An Autobiography Volume I, by Charles Kingsley (read 23 Oct 2002) When I read Kingsley's Westward Ho! (on Mar 25, 1963) I disliked the author so I resolved never to read anything more by him. But when I read Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton recently the introduction mentioned Kingsley's first novel and implied it was worth reading. The novel tells of a very poor boy and the awful conditions in which he lives and works. This volume was slow-moving and not very interesting and the entirely gratuitous anti-Catholic bigotry which Kingsley displayed frequently is annoying.

3640. Alton Locke Tailor and Poet An Autobiography Volume II, by Charles Kingsley (read 25 Oct2002) Since I finish what I start, ordinarily, I read volume two. This is a pitifully poor work, and a chore to read. Alton Locke dies at the end of the book. I can detect no merit in the novel, and I suppose no one but someone doing a study of Kingsley ever reads it today. Except me. (: ( )