Charles Blachford Mansfield

Charles Blachford Mansfield (8 May 1819 – 26 February 1855) was a British chemist and author.

He was born on 8 May 1819 at Rowner, Hampshire, where his father, John Mansfield, was rector; his mother was Winifred, eldest daughter of Robert Pope Blachford of Osborne House, Isle of Wight. He was educated first at a private school at Twyford, Hampshire, and then at Winchester College. At age his health broke down, and he passed a year with a private tutor in the country. On 23 November 1836 he entered his name at Clare Hall, Cambridge, but did not begin residence till October. With to frequent absences from ill-health, he did not graduate B.A. till 1846 (M.A. 1849).

Mansfield read widely, and gathered friends round him: with Charles Kingsley, a contemporary at Cambridge, he formed a lifelong friendship. While still at Cambridge he attended medical classes at St. George's Hospital; but when he settled in London in 1846 he concentrated on chemistry. In 1848, after completing a course at the Royal College of Chemistry, he undertook, at August Wilhelm Hofmann's request, a series of experiments leading to the extraction of benzole from coal-tar, important for the dye industry. He patented his inventions, but others reaped the profits.

In the Chartist crisis of 1848-9 Mansfield joined Frederick Denison Maurice, Kingsley, and others in their efforts at social reform among the workmen of London; and in the cholera year helped to provide pure water for districts like Bermondsey, where every drop was sewage-tainted. In the winter of 1851–2 he delivered at the Royal Institution a course of lectures on the chemistry of the metals, with an attempted classification.

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