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.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett.
149
Charles Dickens
reported the story that her attack of madness culminated in her walking down her own street in Edinburgh, not only stark mad but stark naked...
Health
Adelaide Procter
Dickens
, in his introduction to Legends and Lyrics, initiated the view that AP
had shortened her life as a result of her conviction that her life must not be dreamed away, and that...
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
MB
met Charles Dickens
; they became friends, and she subsequently acted in some of his private theatricals.
Rigby, Elizabeth. Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake. Editor Smith, Charles Eastlake, AMS Press.
2: 299
Lochhead, Marion C. Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake. John Murray.
89-100
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Preface and Memoirs”. Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, edited by Charles Eastlake Smith, J. Murray, p. Various pages.
1: 225, 257
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Gaskell
In May 1849 EG
attended a lavish dinner given by Charles Dickens
to celebrate the publication of David Copperfield; Jane Welsh Carlyle
, also in attendance, acidly noted that Gaskell was a natural unassuming...
Friends, Associates
Anna Maria Hall
One of AMH
's closest friends was the actress Helen Faucit
, later Lady Martin. Though socially conservative in her attitudes, she was apparently more ready than her husband to achieve friendly relations with those...
Friends, Associates
Frances Eleanor Trollope
In addition to her supportive professional relationship with her husband, FET
was also close to other writers such as Charles Dickens
, her brother-in-law Anthony Trollope
, her mother-in-law Frances Trollope
, and George Eliot
LSC
made many friends in England, notably including the baronet and politician Sir Francis Burdett
, his wife Lady Burdett
(born Sophia Coutts, member of a famous banking family), and their youngest daughter, who later...
Friends, Associates
Frances Trollope
FT
spent Christmas 1837 with her two remaining sons and one daughter in Hadley. She was visited by, amongst others, her Viennese friend Baron Charles Hügel
.
Trollope, Frances Eleanor. Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria. AMS Press.
I: 290
The holidays were greatly enjoyed...
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
According to Dickens
's biographer Peter Ackroyd
, he followed up his initial meeting with MB
by sending her cousinan extravagant missive of love about her . . . complete with a heart and...
Friends, Associates
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton