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
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.
75
Margaret Cutt
Literary responses Anne Marsh
The Athenæum, which had reported favourably after its peep at the first instalment of Mount Sorel,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
897 (1845):14
gave the task of reviewing the complete work to Henry Fothergill Chorley . He felt...
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 Jane Gardam
JG continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
JG 's father's response to her Booker short-listing...
Literary responses Caroline Norton
This novel went quickly through four editions, but the reviewers found it immoral. The heroine's behaviour was roundly censured, and so was the painful and repulsive picture of society in general. Again CN defended herself...
Literary responses Harriett Jay
This novel fared badly at the hands of the Academy, which called it far from dull . . . even bright and easy, but fatally lack[ing] the strength and freshness we naturally expect from...
Literary responses Margaret Oliphant
Both Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
12
MO was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott (Grace Greenwood) that...
Literary responses Queen Victoria
Despite her book's popularity, when Victoria entered the arena of public writing, some Victorians criticized her prose style. After receiving copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, sent by...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
The Athenæum's Henry Fothergill Chorley said that we have met with few pictures of life among the working classes at once so forcible and so fair as Mary Barton.
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge.
62
He compared the...
Literary responses Ethel Lilian Voynich
Overall, however, The Gadfly was a success to a degree that not one of ELV 's subsequent novels could achieve.
Garlick, Barbara. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Editor Mitchell, Sally, Garland Publishing, Inc., p. 837.
837
She did not learn about its popularity in Europe, especially in the Soviet Union...
Literary responses Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott , George Eliot , and Charles Dickens ), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson paid this novel the compliment of a three-column Athenæum review. He predicted eventual success as a novelist for its author, even though he found grave faults in her present production. ABE ...
Literary responses Lucy Walford
The journal likened the development of character in Walford's Mr Druitt to that of Dickens 's John Jarndyce, in Bleak House. It also thought the ending to be one of LW 's best: she...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
This prompted Dickens to proclaim there never was such a wrong-headed woman born—such a vain one—or such a Humbug.
Webb, Robert Kiefer. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. Columbia University Press.
347
The Athenæum reviewed the pamphlet harshly as an offence against taste and modesty, chastising HM

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