Charles Kingsley is one of those prolific second-rank Victorian writers whose works have in recent years been undergoing marked reappraisal. Kingsley himself is a fascinating, because representative, Victorian figure with wide-ranging interests in religion, philosophy, politics, social reform, urban conditions, poetry, fiction, literary criticism, history, and two different branches of science. His books--over sixty of them in all--reflect this awesome diversity, and his six novels have most commonly been read simply as propaganda for his ideas; in Louis Cazamian's revealing phrase, Kingsley "gives a definitive view of the most vital aims and ideals of his time, under the guise of fiction." Kingsley's "social problem" novels, especially Alton Locke (1850), still have an academic reputation because they present the Christian Socialist interpretation of the central issues of the 1840s. His later historical novels and his children's books, especially The Water-Babies (1863), have often been read as more educationally oriented versions of...