Charles Kingsley  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 with Charles Darwin. He was also the uncle of the traveller and scientist Mary Kingsley. Kingsley was born in Holne, Devon, the elder of two sons of the Reverend Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary Lucas Kingsley. His brother Henry Kingsley and his sister Charlotte Chanter also became writers. He spent his childhood in Clovelly, Devon, where his father was Curate in 1826–1832 and Rector in 1832–1836, and at Barnack, Northamptonshire. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Helston Grammar School before studying at King's College London and the University of Cambridge. Charles entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1838, and graduated in 1842. He chose to pursue a ministry in the church. From 1844, he was Rector of Eversley in Hampshire. In 1859 he was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria. In 1860, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. In 1861 he became a private tutor to the Prince of Wales. In 1869 Kingsley resigned his Cambridge professorship and 1870–1873 served as a canon of Chester Cathedral. While in Chester he founded the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art, which played a major part in the establishment of the Grosvenor Museum. In 1872 he accepted the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute and became its 19th President. In 1873 he was made a canon of Westminster Abbey. Kingsley died in 1875 and was buried in St Mary's Churchyard, Eversley, Hampshire. 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. One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley, became known as a novelist under the pseudonym "Lucas Malet". Kingsley's life, written by his widow in 1877, was entitled "Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life".