Charles Wicksteed

Charles Wicksteed (1810–1885) was a Unitarian minister, part of the tradition of English Dissenters.

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). He was educated at Shrewsbury School, where he was taught by its headmaster, the classical scholar Samuel Butler. From there, with financial assistance from Dr. Williams's Trust, he went on to the University of Glasgow, graduating in 1831. He was following in the footsteps of his brilliant elder brother, but tragedy struck when Joseph Hartley Wicksteed drowned in a swimming accident in Scotland.

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. In 1835 he took over the ministry at Mill Hill Chapel, at the very centre of Leeds and remained there for almost twenty years. Associated with the chapel were prominent merchants, industrialists, and politicians such as the Lupton family. The chapel became known punningly as "the mayors' nest", as so many mayors and later lord mayors belonged to it. During Wicksteed's tenure this included Darnton Lupton (1844) and Francis Garbutt (1847).

The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, a learned society founded in 1819 and which established the city's museum, drew many of its supporters from the chapel. "There was a careful consciousness of middle-class identity and independence...which combined easily with the utilitarian and scientific interests" of the Mill Hill congregation. Wicksteed served as president of the "Phil & Lit" from 1851-1854.

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