ondon 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.

Kingsley looked up to Carlyle as his master, to whom he owed more
than to any other man. "Of the general effect," he said, "which his
works had upon me, I shall say nothing: it was the same as they have
had, thank God, on thousands of my class and every other."

When, finally, violent methods proved of no avail and the Chartist
party dissolved, the democratic movement took a fresh lease of life.
As Carlyle had already pointed out, the question of the people was
a 'knife and fork' question--that is to say, so long as taxes were
levied upon the necessities of life, the poorer classes, who could
least of all afford to pay, would become poorer.

Sir Robert Peel was the first to remove this injustice, by
substituting a tax upon income for the hundred and one taxes which
had pressed s