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.
FMD
published fiction in magazines launched with his brother. The first of his major novels, Zapiski iz podpol'ia (Notes from Underground), appeared in 1864. That year marked his descent into poverty but also...
Publishing
Harriet Downing
Dickens
published two of HD
's stories (Three Notches in the Devil's Tail and The Man with the Club Foot) in Bentley's Miscellany as by the Author of Reminiscences of a Monthly Nurse...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Downing
HD
's obituary credited her with a large circle of friends, literary and otherwise, for whom she was always ready to perform helpful services such as finding a publisher for an author or a gallery...
Literary responses
Margaret Drabble
The British Book News review likened this book, as a state-of-the-nation novel, to Dickens
's Hard Times. The review concluded: If this is not one of Margaret Drabble's best-balanced books, it presents a powerful...
Education
Frances Isabella Duberly
After her mother died she was sent to a boarding school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (which she later remembered, perhaps snobbishly, for the lack of good company). By one means or the other she...
Textual Production
Frances Isabella Duberly
Selina was to have a free hand about printing this letter in as many papers as she liked, but preferably including the Daily News (the paper of Charles Dickens
and Harriet Martineau
) or the Herald.
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
, as the author of Rienzi, published his two-volume occult novel A Strange Story. It was first commissioned by his friend Charles Dickens
for the magazine All the Year Round.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
21
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
1790 (15 February 1862): 219-21
Friends, Associates
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton
His international travel and family ties to England's literary scene ensured him a wide social circle. He knew Charles Dickens
, John Forster
, and Frances Mary Peard
. While living in Florence, he became...
Literary responses
Amelia B. Edwards
John Cordy Jeaffreson
paid this novel the compliment of a three-column Athenæum review. He predicted eventual success as a novelist for its author, even though he found grave faults in her present production. ABE
...
Literary responses
George Eliot
This work drew her first published review in the Times, which was highly appreciative and noted that the fictions were now claimed by Mr. George Eliot—a name unknown to us.
Carroll, David, editor. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Barnes and Noble.
61
The Saturday Review...
Publishing
George Eliot
GE
was already at work on her next novel when Adam Bede was published. For the first time, this novel set her at the centre of a kind of bidding war in the book trade....
Friends, Associates
George Eliot
In summer 1859 GE
met and became friendly with Richard Congreve
, a Comtean philosopher, and his wife Maria
(whose father, a doctor, had attended Eliot's father in his last illness). She became a close...
Author summary
Sarah Stickney Ellis
The prolific SSE
, author of thirty-four books, was the most popular writer of Victorian conduct literature. Her four advice books addressed women in the burgeoning middle class; she also wrote novels, poems, and didactic...
