Charles Alexander Johns

Charles Alexander Johns (1811–1874) was a 19th-century British botanist and educator who was the author of a long series of popular books on natural history.

Charles Alexander Johns was born on 31 December 1811 in Plymouth, England, one of eight surviving children of Henry Incledon Johns, a banker and poet, and Maria (Boone) Johns. Two of his sisters, Emily and Julia, would prove to be exceptionally talented botanical artists. An economic crisis in 1825 forced the closure of the bank where Johns's father Henry worked, throwing him out of a job and causing hardship for the family. Henry Johns then went to work as a teacher at the Grammar School in Helston, Cornwall, which Charles Johns himself subsequently attended.

Johns's father encouraged his interest in natural history from an early age, and he aimed for a career in the church, following an established pattern in Britain of "parson naturalists." One of his early teachers was a local silversmith and amateur botanist, George Banks, who published a study of English botany in 1823. Johns was, however, largely self-taught as a botanist.

In 1830, Johns's father suffered a stroke that led to failing health, creating further economic uncertainy for the family and indefinitely deferring Johns's plans for going to university. Instead, he took up a post as assistant master at the Helston Grammar School. He remained for four years, working under headmaster Derwent Coleridge, who was a son of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One of his pupils was the future novelist Charles Kingsley, who would later praise him as one of his country's "most acute and persevering botanists."

In 1836, Johns was finally able to leave teaching long enough to pursue studies at Trinity College, Dublin. He obtained his degree in 1839 and then embarked on a trip to the Holy Land. This led to his first completed book, Flora Sacra (1840), a volume of inspirational poetry interspersed with illustrations of dried plants with religious significance.

Johns married in 1843 and returned to Helston Grammar School as headmaster for four years. He was ordained a priest in 1848 and took up the first of several posts as a vicar.

In the 1850s and '60s, Johns established two schools: the first was Callipers Hall at Chipperfield in 1855. He established Winton House in Winchester, a private school for boys, in 1863.

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