author
Charles Hannan
1863–1922
A Scottish novelist and playwright, he moved easily between popular fiction and the stage, writing everything from historical adventures to unusual speculative tales. His work offers a glimpse of late Victorian and Edwardian storytelling at its most energetic and varied.
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About the author
Born in Glasgow in 1863, Charles Hannan — legally Robert Charles Hannan — was educated at Edinburgh Collegiate School and Glasgow University. Before becoming known as a writer, he worked in his father's East India and China merchant firm and traveled widely, experiences that seem to have fed the settings and atmosphere of his fiction.
Hannan wrote both novels and plays, building a career that crossed several kinds of popular writing. He produced adventure fiction, stage works, and at least a couple of early speculative novels, including The Betrothal of James and Thuka of the Moon. He is also associated with A Cigarette Maker's Romance, one of his better-known theatrical works.
He died in London in January 1922. Though he is not widely remembered today, bibliographic and literary reference sources still note him as a versatile Scottish author whose work linked commercial fiction, theatre, and early imaginative literature.