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.
It was probably Mary A. Marzials
' anthology Gems of English Poetry which made poetry the only lesson the Knoxes disliked. Winifred felt that Hemans
's boy on the burning deck cut a poor figure...
Education
Daisy Ashford
DA
's mother, Emma
, was an avid reader, and an unconventional amateur writer whose verses included brisk lines, slang, and knockabout humour.
Malcomson, R. M. Daisy Ashford: Her Life. Chatto & Windus.
53
She inscribed books that she gave away as gifts...
Education
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Elizabeth read early and voraciously, polishing off Anna Maria Hall
's three-volume Marian when she was only seven. By nine she was reading Scott
and Dickens
. One of the family servants introduced her...
Alice Jane Taylor (later AU
) was a strong-willed child who set her own agenda. She later remembered a trial of wills, at the age of two, with her godmother, which ended not in her...
Education
Berta Ruck
BR
's early education took place at home, where she learned to read at the age of three and a half, and was encouraged in her passion for reading.
Ruck, Berta. A Story-Teller Tells the Truth. Hutchinson.
35-40
Her father saw to it...
Education
Isabella Banks
Her education was supplemented both by a good home library and by her parents' wide cultural circle. She led a lively social life in Manchester, attending Anti-Corn Law League bazaars, and soirées at the Manchester Athenæum
Education
John Strange Winter
After this she completed her education at home. Although even in this context she says, I was not well educated, for I never would learn,
Bainton, George, editor. The Art of Authorship. J. Clarke.
24
she also described herself as having always been from...
Education
Susan Hill
Although not a Catholic, she went to a convent school in Scarborough, where she set out to enlighten her school friends (who thought babies were grown from a packet in hospital, like plants from...
Education
Marie Belloc Lowndes
One of the earliest books that Marie could remember was Pierre et Pierrette, a celebrated little text written by her grandmother Belloc
to improve the education of French village children. She grew up conscious...
death
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
died in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, exactly 136 years after her grandfather Charles Dickens
was born.
Christodoulou, Glenn A. “The Grave of Mary Angela Dickens Rediscovered”. The Dickensian, Vol.
109
, No. 489, pp. 42-43.
42
Cultural formation
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
was born into a large English family of writers and artists headed by her grandfather Charles Dickens
. Accounts of her life document her close relationships with several generations of paternal and maternal family...
Cultural formation
Adelaide Procter
AP
may have converted to Roman Catholicism
from Anglicanism by this date; certainly she had by 1851.
Sources conflict on the date of AP
's conversion, most of them dating it in 1851. Bessie Rayner Parkes
Birth
Daisy Ashford
Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (who wrote as DA
) was born at Elm Lodge in Petersham, Surrey, a house once inhabited by Dickens
and now the home of her paternal grandmother and her aunt...
Birth
Celia Moss
CM
was born at Portsea, a waterfront area of Portsmouth in Hampshire (where Charles Dickens
had been born a few years before her), the fourth in a family of twelve children.
“Jewish Encyclopedia”. JewishEncyclopedia.com.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
