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.
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
Literary responses
George Eliot
This work drew her first published review in the Times, which was highly appreciative and noted that the fictions were now claimed by Mr. George Eliot—a name unknown to us.
Carroll, David, editor. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Barnes and Noble.
61
The Saturday Review...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Dickens
, editor of Household Words, judged her a reliable contributor, good for anything, although he acknowledged that her reputation for sexual explicitness might do the journal damage.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Dickens
described EG
's The Heart of John Middleton (December 1850) as a story of extraordinary power, worked out with a vigour and truthfulness that very few people could reach.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
253
Miller, Anita, and Elizabeth Gaskell. “Preface and Chronology”. My Lady Ludlow, Academy Chicago, pp. 7-10.
9
Literary responses
Eliza Meteyard
In February 1862, Sharpe's London Magazine reviewed The Lady Herbert's Gentlewomen positively, noting that EM
's talents were better suited to a series of shorter pieces than a sustained narrative. It compared her favourably with...
Literary responses
Patricia Wentworth
The Gazette awarded PW
a prize of 250 guineas for her work.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, remarked that the Dickens
of A Tale of Two Cities had...
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
303-4
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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
Ethel Wilson
The two stories share an epigraph from Charles Dickens
' Bleak House: Now, my young friends, [said Mr. Chadband] what is this Terewth. . . firstly (in a spirit of love) what is the...
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...
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
Ellen Wood
Charles Wood
states that Mildred Arkell seeks to address the hopelessness that fell upon so many when the ports were opened:
Wood, C. W. Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood. R. Bentley and Son.
45
a reference to Wood's family's financial loss which followed from the changes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
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...
