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18.5

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
THE BEQUEST OF

THEODORE JEWETT EASTMAN

1931

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PREFATORY MEMOIR.

THE tract appended to this preface has been chosen to accom pany this reprint of Alton Locke in order to illustrate, from an other side, a distinct period in the life of Charles Kingsley, which stands out very much by itself. It may be taken roughly to have extended from 1848 to 1856. It has been thought that they require a preface, and I have undertaken to write it, as one of the few survivors of those who were most intimately associated with the author at the time to which the work refers.

No easy task; for, look at them from what point we will, these years must be allowed to cover an anxious and critical time in modern English history; but, above all, in the history of the working classes. In the first of them the Chartist agitation came to a head and burst, and was followed by the great movement towards association, which, developing in two directions and by two distinct methods-represented respectively by the amalgamated Trades Unions, and Co-operative Societies has in the intervening years entirely changed the conditions of the labor question in England, and the relations of the working to the upper and middle classes. It is with this, the social and industrial side of the history of those years, that we are mainly concerned here. Charles Kingsley has left other and more important writings of those years. But these are beside our purpose, which is to give some such slight sketch of him as may be possible within the limits of a preface, in the character in which he was first widely known, as the most outspoken and powerful of those who took the side of the laboring classes, at a critical time-the crisis, in a word, when they abandoned their old political weapons, for the more potent one of union and association, which has since carried them so far.

To no one of all those to whom his memory is very dear can this seem a superfluous task, for no writer was ever more misunderstood or better abused at the time, and after the lapse of almost a quarter of a century the misunderstanding would seem still to hold its ground. For through all the many notices of him which appeared after his death in last January, there ran the same apologetic tone as to this part of his life's work. While generally, and as a rule cordially recognizing his merits as an author and a man, the writers seem to agree in passing lightly over this ground. When it was touched it was in a tone of apology, sometimes

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