Charles Kingsley's childhood was spent in Clovelly, Devon, where his father was curate in 1826–1832 and rector in 1832–1836,[1] and at Barnack, Northamptonshire.

While there, he founded the Chester Society for Natural Science, Literature and Art, which was prominent in the establishment of the Grosvenor Museum.

[5] 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.

[10] 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!

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.

"[13] Darwin added an edited version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating, "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.

The story mentions the main protagonists in the scientific debate over human origins, rearranging his earlier satire as the "great hippopotamus test".

American scenery is vividly and truthfully described, in part stemming from his observations during a lecture tour of the United States that he undertook in 1874 and reported to his wife, Francis Eliza Grenfell Kingsley.

His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children.

Kingsley was highly critical of Roman Catholicism and his argument in print with John Henry Newman, accusing him of untruthfulness and deceit, prompted the latter to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

Kingsley coined the term pteridomania (meaning "a craze for ferns") in his 1855 book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore.

Mixing mythology and Christianity, he blended Protestantism as it was practised at the time with the Old Norse religion, saying that the Church of England was "wonderfully and mysteriously fitted for the souls of a free Norse-Saxon race".