Charles Dickens

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Standard Name: Dickens, Charles
Birth Name: Charles John Huffam Dickens
Indexed Name: Charles Dickens
Pseudonym: Boz
Pseudonym: Timothy Sparks
A prolific novelist, journalist, and editor of periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round, CD crucially shaped Victorian fiction both by developing it as a dialogical, multi-plotted, and socially aware form and by his innovations in publishing serially. As a novelist he worked across a range of genres, including the bildungsroman, picaresque, Newgate, sensation and detective fiction, and usually with satiric or socially critical force. He was loved by readers for his humour, grotesquerie, action, and vigour. An influential public figure and phenomenally successful lecturer during his lifetime, his work continues to be central to popular understandings of nineteenth-century England, and in particular London.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Birth Daisy Ashford
Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (who wrote as DA ) was born at Elm Lodge in Petersham, Surrey, a house once inhabited by Dickens and now the home of her paternal grandmother and her aunt...
Birth Celia Moss
CM was born at Portsea, a waterfront area of Portsmouth in Hampshire (where Charles Dickens had been born a few years before her), the fourth in a family of twelve children.
“Jewish Encyclopedia”. JewishEncyclopedia.com.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Cultural formation Mary Angela Dickens
MAD was born into a large English family of writers and artists headed by her grandfather Charles Dickens . Accounts of her life document her close relationships with several generations of paternal and maternal family...
Cultural formation Adelaide Procter
AP may have converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism by this date; certainly she had by 1851.
Sources conflict on the date of AP 's conversion, most of them dating it in 1851. Bessie Rayner Parkes
death Mary Angela Dickens
MAD died in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, exactly 136 years after her grandfather Charles Dickens was born.
Christodoulou, Glenn A. “The Grave of Mary Angela Dickens Rediscovered”. The Dickensian, Vol.
109
, No. 489, pp. 42-43.
42
Education Viola Meynell
After leaving school at sixteen, VM read widely on her own, especially English authors: George Eliot , Dickens , George Meredith , Arnold Bennett , John Galsworthy , and Thomas Hardy .
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen.
61, 65
Education Anita Brookner
AB 's father urged her to read Dickens , for the purpose of understanding what the English were like, and also of understanding the unfairness of things.
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
5
She began reading Dickens at the age...
Education Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW 's family encouraged her in the regular pursuits of a young, middle-class Victorian woman. From her father she inherited an enthusiasm for poetry—she especially liked Shakespeare , Coleridge , and Whitman —and she read...
Education Frances Isabella Duberly
After her mother died she was sent to a boarding school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (which she later remembered, perhaps snobbishly, for the lack of good company). By one means or the other she...
Education Louisa May Alcott
LMA frequently attended lectures in Boston, and was present for the speeches of both William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens . Though she adored Dickens's writings, she judged him in person to be an...
Education Emma Marshall
At a very early age Emma Martin could recite See'st thou my home is where yon woods are waving by Felicia Hemans .
Marshall, Beatrice. Emma Marshall. Seeley.
8
After leaving school she continued to study music with Dr Zacariah or Zechariah Buck
Education Sarah Grand
There she read authors such as Dickens , Scott , and Thackeray .
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
253
She took advantage of the cultivated atmosphere in which she grew up, and yet later judged that she had been neither...
Education Doris Lessing
Before attending school and after she left, Doris educated herself by reading. Her parents possessed copies of the classics, like Scott , Dickens , and Kipling . She read widely in the nineteenth century—her favourites...
Education Agatha Christie
By the time Agatha was born, Clara Miller believed that girls ought not to learn to read before the age of eight. Defiantly, Agatha taught herself to read at five. She eagerly devoured Lewis Carroll
Education Maya Angelou
Marguerite Johnson had already become a voracious reader, both of Black writers and of canonical dead white males. Shakespeare , she wrote later, was my first white love.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Heinemann New Windmill Series.
12
She also enjoyed and respected...

Timeline

February 1778: Franz Anton Mesmer, inventor of animal magnetism,...

Building item

February 1778

Franz Anton Mesmer , inventor of animal magnetism, arrived in Paris to promote his theory.

15 February 1791: The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of...

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15 February 1791

The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of novelist Anna Maria Bennett ) gave a highly successful recitation at Covent Garden Theatre of William Collins 's Ode on the Passions.

3 June 1829: Publisher Henry Colburn went into partnership...

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3 June 1829

Publisher Henry Colburn went into partnership with Richard Bentley (1794 - ­1871) (who, in order to do this, had just dissolved the partnership between himself and his brother Samuel Bentley as printers).

1830: William Bradbury and Frederick Mullet Evans...

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1830

William Bradbury and Frederick Mullet Evans went into partnership and established the publishing firm of Bradbury and Evans in London.

4 February 1832: Robert and William Chambers began publishing...

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4 February 1832

Robert and William Chambers began publishing the weeklyChambers's EdinburghJournal.

1833: Edward Lloyd, trained as a stenographer at...

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1833

Edward Lloyd , trained as a stenographer at a Mechanics Institute, established his own publishing firm with the appearance of Lloyd's Stenography, written, published, and promoted by himself.

January 1835: John Macrone established his own publishing...

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January 1835

John Macrone established his own publishing business at 3 St James Street, London.

4 November 1836: Richard Bentley (1794-1871) signed an agreement...

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4 November 1836

Richard Bentley (1794-1871) signed an agreement with Dickens to edit his new monthly periodical, Bentley's Miscellany.

3 May 1841: The London Library, established by Thomas...

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3 May 1841

The London Library , established by Thomas Carlyle with Harriet Martineau , Dickens , Thackeray , and others, first opened its doors.

March 1843: The Society of British Authors was forme...

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March 1843

1844: The Ragged School Union was founded and began...

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1844

The Ragged School Union was founded and began opening schools in the slums of great cities.

1851: Johann and Bertha Ronge established at Hampstead...

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1851

Johann and Bertha Ronge established at Hampstead the first kindergarten in England, a school designed to foster physical and mental development in young children.

2 September 1852: The Manchester Free Library, the first major...

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2 September 1852

The Manchester Free Library , the first major British public lending library, opened in Manchester.

28 August 1857: The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, also...

National or international item

28 August 1857

The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, also known as the Divorce Act, made divorce more readily available, but on unequal grounds for women and men.

4 June 1859: Household Words merged with Charles Dickens's...

Writing climate item

4 June 1859

Household Words merged with Charles Dickens 's new periodical All the Year Round.

Texts

Dickens, Charles, and John Leech. A Christmas Carol. Chapman and Hall, 1843.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1859.
Dickens, Charles et al. “An Introduction”. Legends and Lyrics, Fifteenth, George Bell and Sons, 1874, p. xi - xxxi.
Dickens, Charles, editor. Bentley’s Miscellany. R. Bentley.
Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. Bleak House. Bradbury and Evans, 1853.
Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. David Copperfield. Bradbury and Evans, 1850.
Dickens, Charles, editor. Household Words. Bradbury and Evans.
Lohrli, Anne, and Charles Dickens. Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859. University of Toronto Press, 1973.
Procter, Adelaide et al. Legends and Lyrics. Bell and Daldy, 1866.
Procter, Adelaide, and Charles Dickens. Legends and Lyrics. George Bell and Sons, 1874.
Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. Little Dorrit. Bradbury and Evans, 1857.
Dickens, Charles, and George Cruikshank. Oliver Twist. R. Bentley, 1838.
Dickens, Charles, and Marcus Stone. Our Mutual Friend. Chapman and Hall, 1865.
Dickens, Charles, and George Cruikshank. Sketches by Boz. J. Macrone, 1836.
Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Editors House, Madeline and Graham Storey, Clarendon Press, 2002.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Chapman and Hall, 1839.
Dickens, Charles, and Luke Fildes. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chapman and Hall, 1870.
Dickens, Charles et al. The Old Curiosity Shop. Chapman and Hall, 1841.
Dickens, Charles et al. The Pickwick Papers. Chapman and Hall, 1837.
Procter, Adelaide, and Charles Dickens. The Poems of Adelaide A. Procter. James R. Osgood, 1873.