William Henry Stacpoole

Born in Dublin in 1846, William Henry Stacpoole was the son of William Church Stacpoole and Charlotte Augusta Mountjoy. Reference works identify him as an Irish-born writer, and also note that he was the elder brother of novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole.

His fiction appeared in the late 1880s and 1890s and included Herr Richter's Strange Experiment, F. R. S. and Other Stories, A Strange Prison and Other Stories, The Three Boots, and The Teleporon and Other Stories. Modern genre references especially remember him for Herr Richter's Strange Experiment, a novel with an identity-exchange device at its center, which gives his work a small but interesting place in early speculative fiction.

Some of his writing has remained accessible through later reprints and public-domain editions, including Farewell on Project Gutenberg. Reliable biographical sources on him are fairly brief, but they consistently place his life between 1846 and 1914 and portray him as a lesser-known author whose work crossed over between mainstream Victorian storytelling and imaginative fiction.