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.
This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a...
Textual Features
Sarah Harriet Burney
These letters show her to be a rewarding, informal, up-to-the-minute literary critic. She kept remarkably up to date on the topic of women's writing, showing herself consistently receptive to new styles and new ideas. She...
Textual Features
E. Nesbit
At the opening of The Treasure Seekers the narrator, Oswald Bastable, says he will not reveal which child is telling the story; yet already he is dropping unmistakable hints that it is himself. Oswald wavers...
Textual Features
Mary Angela Dickens
In his preface, Father Galton
remarks on MAD
's specific connection to her grandfather Charles Dickens
and their shared sensibilities: The author is the happy owner of one of the great names in our literature...
Textual Features
Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jenkins
This little book (with no notes or index) opens on an echo of Jenkins's fuller work on Austen, with a tribute to the mid eighteenth century as a time of brilliant flowering in the English...
Textual Features
Lady Margaret Sackville
Austen
, she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens
or Thackeray
.
Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, 1912, p. ix - xvi.
xi
This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS
was pursuing...
Textual Features
James Malcolm Rymer
JMR
's study of mainstream novelists like Dickens
is apparent in Ada, in his borrowing from texts like Oliver Twist. Ada is an orphan who, like Oliver, captivates the reader in her quest...
Textual Features
Janet Hamilton
The vigour and originality of her voice on women's issues requires greater recognition, ranging as it does from the satiric Crinoline, to Contrasted Scenes from Real Life which juxtaposes the earthly lot of Lady Emily Hay
Residence
E. M. Delafield
Charles Dickens
used to live in a house across the street.
McCullen, Maurice. E. M. Delafield. Twayne, 1985.
10
Many creative artists lived in this neighbourhood, with its focal point of St George the Martyr, Queen's Square. The area was distinct...
Residence
Mary Angela Dickens
When MAD
was nearly eight years old, her father purchased Gad's Hill Place in Kent, the last home of his own father Charles Dickens
(who had died two months before this), for £8,647 at...
Residence
Rumer Godden
Though she still found it hard to write in the country, RG
called this the happiest house we have had.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan, 1989.
170
Three years later she suddenly moved again; she missed London, and felt her elder...
Residence
Alice Meynell
Describing the situation at the Thompsons' Italian villa, Dickens
writes: Coming upon them unawares, I found T[hompson] with a pointed beard, smoking a great German pipe, in a pair of slippers; the two little girls...
Residence
Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS
saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens
and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown, 1997.
