Heroes eBook

Charles Kingsley was born in 1819 in a small village in Devon, England. He worked as an Anglican priest, university professor, historian, and novelist. The son of an Anglican priest, he studied at King's College London and Cambridge University, where he later became a history professor. In 1861, he was appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.
In the 1850s, after participating in the Chartist demonstrations of 1848, he joined the Christian Socialist Movement, where he fought for better living conditions for the working class. In 1855, he published... Glaucus, the first popular science book written for children. He accepted the evolutionary theories of Darwin, of whom he was a friend, seeing no contradiction between religion and science, unlike most clergymen of the time. In 1869, he abandoned his university career, becoming a canon of Chester Cathedral between 1870 and 1873, and later of Westminster Abbey. He died in 1875, a victim of pneumonia.
Of the 28 works he published, his historical novels stand out. Hypatia (1853), Westward Ho! (1855) and Hereward the Wake (1866); the fiction of social intervention Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850); and children's books The Heroes (1856) and The Water Babies (1863).