As Herbert Spencer himself reported in his autobiography, he was born on 27 April 1820 in the Midlands town of Derby, seventeen years before the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the philosophical values of which he came to personify. His early education was at a progressive school in the town run by his father, George Spencer, who served as secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society, a club for gentlemen founded in 1783 by Erasmus Darwin. His limited formal education was completed by his clergyman uncle Thomas Spencer, who taught him sufficient mathematics, physics, and Latin to enable him to work for a short period as a schoolmaster before turning his hand to, first, civil engineering during the railway boom of the 1830s, and subsequently journalism and editorial work for the free trade journal The Economist. His formative years were spent, therefore, in a region which was one of the most important foci of the Industrial Revolution, where men such as Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood had already made invention fashionable and profitable in the successful transformation of Britain into a modern industrialised society.

The otherwise self-taught Spencer is linked inextricably with the notion of evolution. This term had, and to an extent still has, a variety of meanings, depending upon the context and the time of its use. Evolution could refer, for example, to the opening of a flower's petals or changes in embryonic development, as well as having more specific military, mathematical, and philosophical meanings. Erasmus Darwin – as noted, the grandfather of Charles – referred to ‘sudden evolution’ in his 1789 work The Botanic Garden. However, as a consequence of the emergence of an industrialised society and the rapid dissemination of scientific ideas in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, the notion of evolution shifted gradually, acquiring its almost exclusive relationship with change and progress.