H. Onslow (Henry Onslow) Curling

Very little biographical information about H. Onslow Curling is easy to confirm from widely available sources, but he is consistently identified in library and public-domain records as Henry Onslow Curling, a 19th-century British author, and his best-known surviving work is Hints on the Use and Handling of Firearms Generally, and the Revolver in Particular.

That book presents him as Lieut. H. Onslow Curling, suggesting a military background, and its practical emphasis fits that identity: the writing is direct, instructional, and concerned with the safe, competent use of weapons rather than literary display. Today he is remembered less as a man of letters than as a specialist writer whose work preserves a slice of late Victorian thinking about firearms, training, and discipline.

Because reliable modern biographical material on him is scarce, it is safest to view Curling as an obscure but interesting period author whose reputation rests mainly on this focused manual and the public-domain afterlife it has gained through digital libraries.