Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was an English clergyman, novelist and reformer. Rector of Eversley in Hampshire for most of his life, he was also professor of modern history at Cambridge, a canon of Westminster and a chaplain to the queen. In the 1840s he joined the Christian Socialist movement, and his early novels Yeast and Alton Locke took up the condition of farm laborers and tailors. His later fiction includes Hypatia, set in fifth-century Alexandria, the Elizabethan adventure Westward Ho!, Hereward the Wake and The Water-Babies, a fairy tale for his youngest son. A keen naturalist and admirer of Darwin, he quarreled famously with Newman.