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 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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
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, 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, 2002.
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, 1992.
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 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 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 Sarah Grand
There she read authors such as Dickens , Scott , and Thackeray .
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Heilmann, AnnEditor , Routledge, 2000.
253
She took advantage of the cultivated atmosphere in which she grew up, and yet later judged that she had been neither...
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, 1900.
8
After leaving school she continued to study music with Dr Zacariah or Zechariah Buck
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, 1995.
12
She also enjoyed and respected...
Education L. M. Montgomery
LMM attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
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...

Timeline

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 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 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 went into partnership and established the publishing firm of Bradbury and Evans in London.
4 February 1832
Robert and William Chambers began publishing the weeklyChambers's EdinburghJournal.
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 business at 3 St James Street, London.
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 Carlyle with Harriet Martineau , Dickens , Thackeray , and others, first opened its doors.
March 1843
The Society of British Authors was formed.
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 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 British public lending library, opened in Manchester.
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 new periodical All the Year Round.