Charlotte Eliza Lawson Riddell, better known as Mrs. J. H. Riddell, was a prominent and influential Irish-born writer during the Victorian era. She wrote 56 books, novels, and short tales, and in the 1860s, she co-owned and edited St. James's Magazine, a well-known literary newspaper in London. Riddell was born Charlotte Eliza Lawson Cowan on September 30, 1832, in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland, as the youngest daughter of James Cowan of Carrickfergus, High Sheriff of the County of Antrim, and Ellen Kilshaw of Liverpool, England. She moved to London with her mother in the winter of 1855, four years after her father's death. The next year, her mother died. In 1857, she married Joseph Hadley Riddell, a civil engineer from Staffordshire who lived in London. They moved to St John's Lodge between Harringay and West Green in the mid-1860s and left in 1873 when the neighborhood developed. There were no children from the marriage. Her first novel, The Moors and the Fens, debuted in 1858. She published it under the alias F. G. Trafford, which she only dropped for her actual name in 1864. Novels and stories followed quickly, and between 1858 and 1902, she published thirty volumes.
