- Works by Charles Whistler at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Charles Whistler at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Works by or about Charles Whistler at Internet Archive
The Reverend Charles Watts Whistler MRCS, LSA, (14 November 1856 – 10 June 1913) was an English writer of historical fiction, who set his work between 600 and 1100 CE, usually based on early Saxon chronicles, Norse or Danish sagas and archaeological discoveries.
Charles Watts Whistler was the oldest son of the Rev. Rose Fuller Whistler, Vicar of Ashburnham in Sussex, a Vice President of the Sussex Archaeological Society, and later Rector of Elton, Huntingdonshire, to which cure Charles Watts Whistler would succeed. The family descended from the Sussex branch of the Thames Valley family of Whistler, as did Rex Whistler and his brother the glass engraver Sir Laurence Whistler.[1]
Whistler was educated at Merchant Taylors School, London and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before studying medicine at St Thomas's Hospital, London, and becoming a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. After practising as a surgeon (like his maternal grandfather James Watts, MRCS, of Battle, Sussex), he was ordained deacon in 1884 and priest in 1885. He then served successively as curate of Woolton, Liverpool (1884–1885), Chaplain of the Fishermen's Chapel, Hastings (1885–1888), Vicar of All Saints' Church, Theddlethorpe, Lincolnshire (1888–1894), Rector of Elton, Huntingdonshire (1894–1895), Vicar of Stockland Bristol, Somerset (1895–1909), and finally Rector of Cheselbourne, Dorset (1909–1913).
Whistler was married on 3 March 1886 to Georgiana Rosalie Shapter Strange, daughter of William James Stevenson Strange, a master wool-dyer by then retired. His brother Alfred James Whistler married Georgiana's sister Mary Maud Strange. The two women's brother, W. R. P. Strange, had been Vicar of Stockland before Whistler.
Whistler's interest in the history of England before the Norman Conquest appears in his prolific work as a historical novelist. His works were popular in their day, but the archaism of language he adopted makes them less accessible to modern readers.
