Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet
By Charles Kingsley
- Release Date: 2012-06-19
- Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Description
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 labour 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 labouring 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.
