Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Although her letters were still unpublished at the time, Charles Dickens
quoted an extract from one of them in Household Words in May 1854, attributing it to an English Protestant lady.
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research.
166: 272
Residence
Alice Meynell
Describing the situation at the Thompsons' Italian villa, Dickens
writes: Coming upon them unawares, I found T[hompson] with a pointed beard, smoking a great German pipe, in a pair of slippers; the two little girls...
Residence
Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS
saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens
and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown.
103
she...
Residence
E. M. Delafield
Charles Dickens
used to live in a house across the street.
McCullen, Maurice. E. M. Delafield. Twayne.
10
Many creative artists lived in this neighbourhood, with its focal point of St George the Martyr, Queen's Square. The area was distinct...
Residence
Rumer Godden
Though she still found it hard to write in the country, RG
called this the happiest house we have had.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan.
170
Three years later she suddenly moved again; she missed London, and felt her elder...
Residence
Mary Angela Dickens
When MAD
was nearly eight years old, her father purchased Gad's Hill Place in Kent, the last home of his own father Charles Dickens
(who had died two months before this), for £8,647 at...
Textual Features
Frances Browne
This is often mistaken for FB
's own autobiography, but it is in fact a novel, narrated in the form of an autobiography by a boy named Frederick (alternately Frederic) Favoursham. Beginning My Share of...
Stowe
's introduction praises CET
's works as a safe and desirable acquisition in every christian [sic] and family library in our country.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Dodd, p. v - vii.
vii
She compares CET
's descriptions of factory life to those of...
Textual Features
Harriette Wilson
The book itself opens with an image presenting HW
's writing as showmanship: Lions and Tigers just arrived for the coronation. Walk in ladies and gentlemen. . . . Only six francs, to see all...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jenkins
This little book (with no notes or index) opens on an echo of Jenkins's fuller work on Austen, with a tribute to the mid eighteenth century as a time of brilliant flowering in the English...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a...
Textual Features
Janet Hamilton
The vigour and originality of her voice on women's issues requires greater recognition, ranging as it does from the satiric Crinoline, to Contrasted Scenes from Real Life which juxtaposes the earthly lot of Lady Emily Hay
Textual Features
Pamela Hansford Johnson
These novels reflect PHJ
's political commitment and the urgent ideological spirit of the later thirties. Their plots set out to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the apparently separated social classes—as do those of Dickens
—by...
Textual Features
Sarah Harriet Burney
These letters show her to be a rewarding, informal, up-to-the-minute literary critic. She kept remarkably up to date on the topic of women's writing, showing herself consistently receptive to new styles and new ideas. She...
