Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charles Dickens
-
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.
Waters argues that MEB
ought not to be condemned for clichés that she herself helped to establish. Rather we should examine them and the genre of the detective or sensation novel as an index of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Sykes
The comic character-drawing in this book may have been an influence on Dickens
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Despite its sensational plot and purple prose, MEB
's first attempt at infusing a touch of poetry and the subjective into her writing through character painting
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
161
does result in greater character development than in...
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Bird
She used her royalties to buy boats for impoverished Scottish fishermen.
Kaye, Evelyn. Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer. Blue Penguin Publications.
29-30
There were literary precedents for the kind of book IB
created on her return to England. Frances Trollope
had published in 1832 her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson
, including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Angela Thirkell
The protagonist is a young married woman up from the country to see the coronation. AT
said the characters were all [her] own invention, but she included among them Dickens
's Miss Flite from Bleak...
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
303-4
Literary responses
Charlotte Maria Tucker
Critic J. S. Bratton
calls this book the kind of perversion of well-loved stories which Dickens
and others found so reprehensible. She nevertheless maintains that Tucker tells the tales with some zest.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm.
Dickens
's daughter Kate
recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB
's novels, and George Moore
liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Literary responses
Margaret Drabble
The British Book News review likened this book, as a state-of-the-nation novel, to Dickens
's Hard Times. The review concluded: If this is not one of Margaret Drabble's best-balanced books, it presents a powerful...
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
Dickens
in his preface praised AP
highly—not for poetry but for humility. His celebration of her modest opinion of her own achievement implied that other women had exaggerated ideas about theirs. AP, he said, never...
Literary responses
Anne Marsh
The Athenæum, which had reported favourably after its peep at the first instalment of Mount Sorel,