It is as the author of
The Water-Babies; A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863), and to a lesser extent
Westward Ho! (1855) and
The Heroes (1855), that Kingsley has gone down in history.
Charles Kingsley was born on 12 June 1819 at Holne Vicarage near Dartmoor, Devonshire. His father, Charles, though reared to be a country gentleman, had taken Holy Orders because of the financial mismanagement of his inheritance. Kingsley's mother, Mary, more worldly and practical than his father, was born in the West Indies and came from a line of Barbadian sugar-plantation owners. During a short stay at a small preparatory school in Clifton, Kingsley witnessed the bloody 1831 Reform Bill riots in Bristol, which influenced his later social and political thought. Though there was talk of his going to Eton, in 1832 he was sent to Helston Grammar School in Cornwall, where the Reverend Derwent Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's son, was headmaster.
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