The hard winter and general distress of the year 1848 nearly provoked another rising, and in his novel entitled Yeast Kingsley pictures the ‘condition of England’ question as it appeared to one who knew it from the seamy side.  Especially did he blame the Church, which, he said, offered a religion for “Jacob, the smooth man,” and was not suited for “poor Esau.”  This was indeed most true as regards the agricultural classes, where the want was felt of a real religion which should gain a hold upon a population which year by year was fast drifting loose from all ties of morality and Christianity.

The peasantry, once the mainstay of England and now trodden down and neglected, cannot rise alone and without help from those above them.  “What right have we to keep them down? . . .  What right have we to say that they shall know no higher recreation than the hogs, because, forsooth, if we raised them they might refuse to work—­for us?  Are we to fix how far their minds may be developed?  Has not God fixed it for us, when He gave them the same passions, talents, tastes, as our own?”

The farm labourer, unlike his brothers in the North, had no spirit left to strike.  His sole enjoyment—­such as it was—­consisted in recalling “’the glorious times before the war . . . when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than were hands.’

“‘I say, vather,’ drawled out some one, ’they say there’s a sight more money in England now than there was afore the war-time.’

“‘Ees, booy,’ said the old man, ‘but it’s got into too few hands.’”

The system of ‘sweating’ among the London tailors had grown to such an extent that Kingsley was determined, if possible, to put an end to it, and with this purpose in view he wrote Cheap Clothes and Nasty.

The Government itself, he declares, does nothing to prevent sweating; the workmen declare that “Government contract work is the worst of all, and the starved-out and sweated-out tailor’s last resource . . . there are more clergymen among the customers than any other class; and often we have to work at home upon the Sunday at their clothes in order to get a living.”

He followed this up with Alton Locke, dealing especially with the life and conditions of work of the journeymen tailors, and the Chartist riots.  Both sides receive some hard knocks, for Kingsley was a born fighter, and his courage and fearlessness won him many friends, even among the most violent of the Chartists.

The character of Alton Locke was probably drawn from life, and was intended to be William Lovett, at one time a leader in the Chartist ranks.  After a long fight with poverty, when he frequently went without a meal in order to save the money necessary for his education, he rose to a position of some influence.  He was one of the first to propose that museums and public galleries should be opened on Sundays, for he declared that most of the intemperance and vice was owing to the want of wholesome and rational recreation.  He insisted that it was necessary to create a moral, sober, and thinking working-class in order to enable them to carry through the reforms for which they were struggling.  Disgust with the violent methods of many of his associates caused him at last to withdraw from their ranks.