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.
Although her letters were still unpublished at the time, Charles Dickens
quoted an extract from one of them in Household Words in May 1854, attributing it to an English Protestant lady.
qtd. in
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research, 1996.
166: 272
Literary responses
Caroline Norton
This novel went quickly through four editions, but the reviewers found it immoral. The heroine's behaviour was roundly censured, and so was the painful and repulsive picture of society in general. Again CN
defended herself...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles
COCE
headed her book with two lines from Thomas Campion
: Alas, poor book . . . go spread thy papery wings. / Thy lightness cannot help or hurt my fame.
qtd. in
O’Conor Eccles, Charlotte. Modern Men. Leadenhall Press, 1887.
prelims
She walks a...
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
Both Charlotte Brontë
and Charles Dickens
mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
12
MO
was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott
(Grace Greenwood) that...
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
225
in Miss Marjoribanks. MO
responded, I have a weakness for Lucilla, and to bring a sudden change upon her character and break her down...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Paston
At the beginning of the play, the generation gap is marked by Dickens
's Old Curiosity Shop: while the parents dissolve in tears, their daughter cries out with embarrassment, Silly old Dickens again! You...
Education
Winifred Peck
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...
Textual Production
Jean Plaidy
JP
had begun writing some years before this first publication.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, 4 July 1991, pp. 23-4.
23
During the 1930s she produced nine long novels, in which she tried to emulate her literary heroes (theBrontësEmily Brontë
, George Eliot
,...
Intertextuality and Influence
C. E. Plumptre
CEP
takes an unconventional critical approach in applying her theory of causation to a lengthy analysis of literature. She concludes that it is when depicting the subtler operations of the human mind that George Eliot
Fictionalization
Adelaide Procter
Gregory also argues that Dickens
took a condescending jab at AP
in his reference in The Haunted House (in All the Year Round's 1859 Christmas number) to a Belinda Bates who goes in...
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
Dickens
in his preface praised AP
highly—not for poetry but for humility. His celebration of her modest opinion of her own achievement implied that other women had exaggerated ideas about theirs. AP, he said, never...
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
Publishing
Adelaide Procter
The year after AP
's death, a posthumous edition of her Legends and Lyrics brought together both previous volumes in the form of an illustrated Christmas gift book, dated 1866, with a preface by Dickens
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...
