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.
HM
's connection with Dickens
's Household Words deteriorated from late 1849. First he placed her analysis of the position of women after his own assertion that women's function was to dress well and look...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Her pamphlet was an attack on a recent series of pieces by Henry Morley
in Household Words on the dangers of unfenced machinery, and the unworkability of the related factory acts legislation. HM
also attacked...
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Meteyard
The style is frequently Dickens
ian, and as in The Pickwick Papers the action is itinerant and the characters frequently caricatures of vice. R. W. Lightbown
, editor of the 1970 edition of EM
's...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Alice Meynell
AM
's mother, Christiana Weller
(later Thompson), was born in 1825. A concert pianist and painter, she met her husband, then a widower, at a Liverpool Mechanics' Institute
reception in 1844. They were married on...
In the summer of 1852 Elizabeth and Alice Thompson (later AM
) began their education under their father's instruction. Recording her daughters' lessons, Christiana Thompson writes, Dear little angels do their writing . ....
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...
Occupation
Alice Meynell
As well as reading her own poetry, she lectured about the transition of English poetry from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, and on Charlotte Brontë
and Dickens
. She earned the lowly sum...
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen.
61, 65
Occupation
Edna St Vincent Millay
ESVM
now cast around for work, possibly on stage. She sent out poems to magazines, often fruitlessly. She earned a little by acting with the Provincetown Players
from December 1917, building on her long experience...
Fictionalization
Anna Miller
ALM evidently possessed the kind of personality or manner that moved others to caricature her. She is mentioned in the dedication of Richard Brinsley Sheridan
's The School for Scandal, and it has been...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
