Webber, Charles Wilkins
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1819-1856) US journalist and author, mostly of nonfantastic adventure tales, the closest to the Gothic Western being perhaps "Jack Long; Or, the Shot in the Eye" (in Tales of the Southern Border coll 1853), where the eponymous marksman with uncanny accuracy shoots each of his ten tormentors in the eye. Webber is of some sf interest for Yieger's Cabinet: Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial Softdown, and her Friends of the "New Light" (1853), an anti-feminist roman à clef tale, the first novel to feature a female Vampire (see Feminism; Women in SF). The target of the Satire, Mary Gove Nichols (1810-1884), was a prominent early feminist. Webber, who had been obsessed with her daughter in real life, treats Nichols's sexual frankness, both as an author and as an advocate of women's rights, as a form a literal blood-taking. [JC]
Charles Wilkins Webber
born Russellville, Kentucky: 28 May 1819
died Nicaragua: 11 April 1856
works (highly selected)
- Tales of the Southern Border (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lippincott, Grambo and Company, 1853) [coll: hb/nonpictorial]
- Yieger's Cabinet: Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial Softdown, and her Friends of the "New Light" (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Lippincott, Grambo and Company, 1853) [hb/nonpictorial]
links
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