Charles Kingsley(1819-1875)
Novelist and historian, son of a clergyman, was born in Holne Vicarage near, Dartmoor, but spent most of his childhood at Barnack in the Fen country, and Clovelly in Devonshire; he was educated at King’s Coll., London, and Cambridge. He took law studies and, in 1844, became rector of Eversley, Hampshire. A year later he published The Saints’ Tragedy, a drama, in which the heroine is St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Two novels followed, Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850), dealing with social questions such as the agricultural labouring class and the town worker respectively. He had become so deeply interested in these questions that, together with with F. D. Maurice and others, began writing in defence of the schemes of social amelioration, which they supported under the name of Christian socialism, releasing a number of tracts and articles under the signature of “Parson Lot.” In 1853 Hypatia appeared: here the conflict of the early Christians with the Greek philosophy of Alexandria is carefully depicted; in 1855, it was followed by Westward Ho, perhaps his most popular work; in 1857 by Two Years Ago, and in 1866 by Hereward the Wake. At Last (1870).
His taste for natural history found expression in Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (1855), and other works. The Water Babies is a story addressed to children written to inspire love and reverence of Nature.
In 1860 Kingsley was appointed to the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, and held it until 1869. The immediate literary fruit was Roman and Teuton (1864). In the same year he was involved in a controversy with J. H. Newman, which brought to the publication of his Apologia. Kingsley, at that time already Canon of Chester, became Canon of Westminster in 1873. Always highly nervous tempered, his over-exertion caused frequent and bad failures of health, and he died in 1875. Though strongly combative, he was a man of singularly noble character. His type of religion, cheerful and robust, was described as “muscular Christianity.” Strenuous and eager, he was not either a profoundly learned, or very impartial historian, yet all his writings are marked by a bracing and manly atmosphere, intense sympathy, and great descriptive power.
From Biographical Dictionary of English Literature - the Everyman Edition of 1910

links: - Kingsley: an overview