Yeast: a Problem

Yeast, A Problem is a novel by Charles Kingsley, first serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1848 and published in book form in 1851. It is one of his earliest novels and one of the most directly polemical of his fictions. The title gives some sense of the book’s character. Yeast is meant to suggest fermentation, the working out of new ideas in old containers, and the problem of the subtitle is the broad condition of English social and religious life in the late 1840s.

The story follows Lancelot Smith, a young English country gentleman, through his religious doubts, his developing social conscience, and his various encounters with characters who represent the major positions in the cultural arguments of the time. There is Tregarva, a thoughtful gamekeeper who has read more than his employer expects. There is Vavasour, a young man who has gone over to Rome. There is Argemone, a young woman of strong religious feelings whose tragic fate gives the novel its emotional weight. The plot is loose and the novel is more interested in the arguments its characters have with each other than in any tightly developed story.

Kingsley was writing in the immediate aftermath of the agricultural depressions of the late 1840s and at the height of the Chartist movement, and the novel takes seriously the question of how a Christian Englishman should respond to the visible misery of the rural working class. There are extended descriptions of agricultural poverty, of the moral effects of bad housing and bad work, and of the failures of both the established church and the new political movements to address what Kingsley saw as the central social problems. The Christian Socialist position that Kingsley would develop more fully in Alton Locke is already present here in early form.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and is uneven as fiction but valuable as a document of mid Victorian religious and social thought. For readers interested in the Christian Socialist movement and in the religious controversies of the 1840s, this is essential reading. It pairs naturally with Alton Locke, his more famous novel of the same period, and with the broader Christian Socialist writings of F D Maurice, Kingsley’s friend and theological mentor.