Analysis of Charles Kingsley’s Yeast: A Problem

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 21, 2025

Charles Kingsley’s thesis novel Yeast: A Problem first ran serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in 1848. Kingsley incorporates vivid and distressing detail of poverty among England’s rural population to emphasize his themes of anti-Catholicism and sanitary reform. He also suggests that the sewage that ends up in rivers should be used as fertilizer for crops, stressing society’s lax attitude toward the environment that all must share.

In his preface to the first edition, he wrote with concern, “the more thoughtful are wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism.” He judged “Epicureanism” the most evil ill, because “it looks at first sight most like an angel of light.”

The novel’s protagonist, Lancelot Smith, is a member of the upper class who has “read Byron and Shelley” and devoured “Bulwer[-Lytton],” whom he left “for old ballads and romances, and Mr. Carlyle’s reviews; was next alternatively chivalry-mad, and Germany-mad; was now reading hard at physical science,” all in the hopes of becoming a great man. Kingsley stresses the irony of Lancelot’s consumption of the best written, which leads to no change in his ideals, or lack thereof.

As the plot progresses, Lancelot’s master teacher turns out to be Paul Tregarva, an uneducated Dissenter who possesses a sharp intelligence. Lancelot will eventually learn that while “it was a fine thing to be ‘superior,’ gentleman-like,” his class will itself suffer for having ignored the suffering of the lower classes, as the physical filth they long ignore will spread disease and death among them. Of one such victim, Honoria Lavington, the narrator notes she is “beautiful no more; the victim of some mysterious and agonizing disease, about which the physicians agree on one point only—that it is hopeless.”

Lancelot at first has admiration only for men like Lord Minchampstead, who has no alms for the poor, takes advantage of the workers, enforces all Poor Laws, and hires London workers instead of locals, although he does establish an industrial school. Lancelot will finally turn away from his “morbid vanity” only through love for Argemone. She is tricked into a nunnery, however, due to “the rickety old windmill of sham-Popery which” she had “taken for a real giant,” dashing Lancelot’s hopes for marriage.

He is later convinced he must change, destroying his possessions and vowing to touch no money that comes “from a system of which I cannot approve.” The detailed scenes of death and degradation sickened many readers, and Argemone’s own death makes her a sad victim of a romantic and naive outlook on life. Kingsley leaves “Lancelot’s history unfinished,” suggesting he represents the future of England.

Like many authors of his day, Kingsley produced novels of conscience, all designed to bolster various reform movements. In his preface to the fourth edition of Yeast, he expressed his approval of improved conditions, noting, “the labourers, during the last ten years, are altogether better off” and “more and more” he finds “swearing banished from the hunting-field, foul songs from the universities, drunkenness and gambling from the barracks.”

Young men have learned to do “their duty as Englishmen,” have altered their “tone toward the middle classes,” and learned to use the term “snob” in its true sense, “(thanks very much to Mr. Thackeray).” While heavily overwritten with hyperbole perhaps offensive to 21st-century readers, Yeast: A Problem remains pure Kingsley material.