Magazine work and journeys abroad
Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne grew up in a clergyman’s family and attended Bradford Grammar School before studying natural sciences at Clare College, Cambridge. After graduating in 1887 he went to London and earned his living by writing for the popular press. Among his less expected assignments was an advice column under the name Aunt Ermyntrude.
Extensive travel followed, including work aboard ships and a journey on the Congo River. Captain Kettle emerged from his magazine fiction and became a recurring character after Alfred Harmsworth encouraged him to develop the captain’s adventures. Hyne also published as Weatherby Chesney. Sources disagree over his birth year: Oxford’s national biography gives 1865, while other references give 1866. He died in 1944.
An invented history of Atlantis
The Lost Continent was serialised in 1899 and appeared in revised book form in 1900. The Harper & Brothers copy held here is dated 1908. A modern cave exploration frames the discovery of an ancient narrative, giving the invented account an apparent material route into the present. That discovery is part of the fiction.
The story follows Deucalion through conflicts between imperial power, priesthood and personal obligation. Phorenice and Zaemon make competing claims to divine authority. Hyne’s account of the civilisation’s destruction also carries the gendered assumptions of its period, associating political corruption with the figure of a sexually threatening queen. His Atlantis is both a setting for adventure and a stage on which authority, desire and catastrophe become inseparable.
