Alton Locke

File:Alton Locke 1st ed.jpg

First edition title page

Alton Locke is an 1850 novel, by Charles Kingsley, written in sympathy with the Chartist movement, in which Carlyle is introduced as one of the personages.

Overview

In this novel, Kingsley set out to expose the social injustice suffered by workers in the clothing trade and the trials and tribulations of agricultural labourers. It also gives an insight into the Chartist campaign with which Kingsley was involved in the 1840s.

Plot

Alton Locke is the story of a young tailor-boy who has instincts and aspirations beyond the normal expectations of his working-class background. He is intensely patriotic and has ambitions to be a poet. In the course of the narrative, Alton Locke loves and struggles in vain.

Physically, he is a weak man, but is able to encompass all the best emotions, along with vain longings, wild hopes, and a righteous indignation at the plight of his contemporaries. He joins the Chartist movement because he can find no better vehicle by which to improve the lot of the working class, experiencing a sense of devastation at its apparent failure. Utterly broken in spirit, Alton Locke sails for America to seek a new life there; however, he barely reaches the shore of the New World before he dies.

References

• Childers, Joseph W. (1995). "Alton Locke and the Religion of Chartism." In: Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 132–57.
• O'Gorman, F. J. (2020). "‘To Amuse Merely as a Novel': Alton Locke (1850) and Literary Pleasure." In: J. Conlin & J. M. I. Klaver, eds., Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy. London: Routledge, pp. 55–71.
• Harris, Daniel (2016). "Politics for the Polyps," Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. LXXI, No. 1, pp. 64–88.
• Hughes, Thomas (1893). "Prefatory Memoir." In: Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan & Co., pp. ix–lxi.
• Kwong, Lucas (2015). "Killing Alton: The Politics of Spiritual Autobiography in Alton Locke," Religion & Literature, Vol. XLVII, No. 1, pp. 123–42.
• Menke, Richard (2000). "Cultural Capital and the Scene of Rioting: Male Working-Class Authorship in 'Alton Locke'," Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, pp. 87–108.
• Moore, Ben (2017). "Becoming-evolutionary?: Animal Transformations in Kingsley’s Alton Locke", Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens.
• Rauch, Alan (1993). "The Tailor Transformed: Kingsley's 'Alton Locke' and the Notion of Change," Studies in The Novel, Vol. XXV, No. 2, pp. 196–213.
• Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence (2013). "Extinction and Progress in Charles Kingsley's "Alton Locke" (1850)," Worldviews, Vol. XVII, No. 3, pp. 239–65.

External links

• Alton Locke at Internet Archive