Kingsley

Life
Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian, novelist and poet. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men's college, and forming labour cooperatives that failed, but led to the working reforms of the progressive era. He was a friend and correspondent of Charles Darwin. In 1860, he became Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, and in 1861 a private tutor to the Prince of Wales. Kingsley's interest in history is shown in several of his writings, including The Heroes (1856), a children's book about Greek mythology, and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia (1853), Hereward the Wake (1865) and Westward Ho! (1855). Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho! led to the founding of a village by the same name (the only place name in England with an exclamation mark).

He was sympathetic to the idea of evolution and was one of the first to welcome Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. He had been sent an advance review copy and in his response of 18 November 1859 (four days before the book went on sale) stated that he had "long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species. Kingsley sat on the 1866 Edward Eyre Defence Committee along with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, John Tyndall, and Alfred Tennyson, where he supported Jamaican Governor Edward Eyre's brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion against the Jamaica Committee. Kingsley coined the term pteridomania (a mania for decorative ferns) in his 1855 book Glaucus,

In 1869 Kingsley resigned his Cambridge professorship and 1870–1873 served as a canon of Chester Cathedral.

Works
The abundance of visible geology led Charles Kingsley, while a canon at Chester cathedral, to give a series of lectures for the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art (he was a founder member). In 1872 he produced a book: “Town Geology” about what can be seen of geology without having to tramp round Wales like Darwin.