William Henry Hicks was baptized on February 12, 1817, in Portsmouth, England.

He was an educator. He studied at the London training school of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, graduating about 1839. He then taught at Bowyer School, Clapham, London, before joining the evangelical Colonial Church and School Society, formed in 1851 to maintain Anglican parochial schools in British North America. In 1853, he arrived in Montreal, Quebec, and founded a normal school at St. George’s Church. The school soon relocated to a building on Rue Bonaventure. He disapproved of the use of monitors and he advocated mixed schools. In 1856, he helped organize the Lower Canada Teachers’ Association. The success of Hicks’s school earned him an invitation to make it the nucleus of the recently established McGill Normal School. He accepted, and the new school opened its doors on March 3, 1857. The principal of McGill College, John William Dawson became principal of the normal school, and Hicks was given the chair of English literature. Hicks lectured on education throughout the province, was inspector of model schools under the Colonial Church and School Society, and contributed to the Journal of Education for Lower Canada (Montreal) from 1857 to 1879. In 1864, he was elected a vice-president of the Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers. In 1870, he became the principal of McGill Normal School.

In 1843, he married Isabella Barrow (1823- ). He died on August 7, 1899, in Montreal, Quebec.