Charles Rowcroft (died 1856) was a British novelist about whom little public information survives. One work is held under his name, Vandiemenin maa, and he is also recorded as the author of Colonial Stories, which drew on early Australian life. Judging from the available material, he belongs among nineteenth-century British novelists who set their fiction in colonial settings, focusing on early settler society and the conditions of life in a newly opened environment; his writings offer some reference value for later readers seeking a picture of colonial Australia. Because biographical details are so sparse, his education, career, and the full range of his writing cannot be reliably established, and scholarly discussion of him and his work remains limited, with researchers relying mainly on the texts themselves and scattered bibliographic records.
