Yeast: A Problem (1848) was the first novel by the Victorian social and religious controversialist Charles Kingsley.Themes and sources Motivated by his strong convictions as a Christian Socialist Kingsley wrote Yeast as an attack on Roman Catholicism and the Oxford Movement, on celibacy, the game laws, bad landlords and bad sanitation, and on the whole social system insofar as it kept England's agricultural labourer class in poverty.The title was intended to suggest the "ferment of new ideas."Yeast was influenced by the works of the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, and by Henry Brooke's novel The...