Henry Curling

Born in 1803, Henry Curling served as a captain in the 52nd Regiment of Foot before building a career as a novelist. He published a long list of fiction, including The Soldier of Fortune, John of England, Frank Beresford, and Shakespeare, a Romance, and he died in Kensington on February 10, 1864.

Curling is especially remembered for Recollections of Rifleman Harris (1848), a book based on the memories of Benjamin Harris of the 95th Rifles. By shaping those recollections into a readable narrative, he helped save an important eyewitness account of military life during the Peninsular War.

His background as an officer gave much of his writing a practical feel, and his career sits at an interesting meeting point between popular Victorian fiction and military history. Even when his novels are less well known today, his work still offers a window into 19th-century tastes and the way Britain remembered its wars.