Kingsley was the fourth of five children of the Reverend Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary; he was born at Barnack, Northamptonshire on 14 February 1826. Charles Kingsley and the novelist Henry Kingsley were his brothers, and the writer Charlotte Chanter was his sister. He was educated at King's College School, London, at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated M.D. in 1846, and in Paris, where he was slightly wounded during the barricades of 1848. Later in 1848 his activity in combating the outbreak of cholera in England was commemorated by his brother Charles in the portrait of Tom Thurnall in "Two Years Ago".