Charles Wicksteed was born in Shrewsbury; his father was a manufacturer and his mother was descended from the great dissenting preacher Philip Henry (1631–1707).
[1] Charles Wicksteed's first appointment as a minister was to the so-called Ancient Chapel at Toxteth, then on the edge of the rapidly industrialising port city of Liverpool.
To celebrate the end of the First World War, his factory purportedly removed a number of central heating pipes from its premises and used them to build swings for children, creating the first commercial playground.
For ten years they jointly edited the Prospective Review , " the influential voice of the ‘new school’ of English Unitarianism, as against the older tradition of eighteenth-century Priestleyanism"[11] They "were central figures in the adoption of neo-Gothic architecture" in the new chapels that were being built - what is now called Dissenting Gothic.
His cousin by marriage Joseph Lupton, later president[14] of the training college for Dissenting ministers, joined with him in being "ardent admirers" of the campaigner William Lloyd Garrison,[15] who advocated immediate, not gradual, abolition.
Ill health led to an early retirement from Leeds in 1854, and Wicksteed spent some years farming in Wales, during which time he wrote a history of Mill Hill Chapel.
His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, by the American historian of Britain R. K. Webb, calls Wicksteed "an erudite and thoughtful man and a popular and important preacher".