Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was an English clergyman, novelist and naturalist, for most of his life rector of Eversley in Hampshire. A leading voice of the Christian Socialist movement in the 1840s and 1850s, he wrote the novels Alton Locke (1850), Hypatia (1853) and Westward Ho! (1855), and the children's classic The Water-Babies (1863). He was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge from 1860 to 1869, a chaplain to Queen Victoria and later a canon of Westminster. He wrote The Heroes for his own children, Rose, Maurice and Mary.
“The stories are not all true, of course, nor half of them; you are not simple enough to fancy that; but the meaning of them is true, and true for ever, and that is—Do right, and God will help you.”
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
