Charles Dickens

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Charlotte Yonge
CY published her novel as the author of The Heir of Redclyffe. Le Fanu's Uncle Silas is sometimes called the first murder mystery, and, as Battiscombe notes, Yonge wrote her contribution to this genre...
Reception Charlotte Yonge
This was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Two years after it appeared it was the favourite choice of young officers in hospital during the Crimean War. A guardsman confessed that...
Intertextuality and Influence Emma Jane Worboise
Each chapter begins with a religious epigraph. This novel recounts the story of the attractive nineteen-year-old bride, Lilian Grey, who makes a marriage above her social class with the aristocratic Basil Hope.
Worboise, Emma Jane. The Wife’s Trials; Married Life; Husbands and Wives. Garland.
Wife's Trials: 1-3, 9
Education Virginia Woolf
Between 1 January and 30 June 1897, her reading included but was not limited to the following: Charlotte Brontë , Lady Barlow (a commentator on Charles Darwin ), Dinah Mulock Craik , George Eliot ,...
Intertextuality and Influence Ellen Wood
Charles Wood states that Mildred Arkell seeks to address the hopelessness that fell upon so many when the ports were opened:
Wood, C. W. Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood. R. Bentley and Son.
45
a reference to Wood's family's financial loss which followed from the changes...
Reception Ellen Wood
At the time of her death, EW remained a highly popular writer: her works were translated into many languages, and by 1895 their sale in Australia was said to have exceeded that of Dickens ...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Ethel Wilson
The two stories share an epigraph from Charles Dickens ' Bleak House: Now, my young friends, [said Mr. Chadband] what is this Terewth. . . firstly (in a spirit of love) what is the...
Textual Features Harriette Wilson
The book itself opens with an image presenting HW 's writing as showmanship: Lions and Tigers just arrived for the coronation. Walk in ladies and gentlemen. . . . Only six francs, to see all...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Rebecca West
This series of essays grapples with the relation of the human will to religious and civil authority, as illustrated in various masterpieces of Western literature.
British Book News. British Council.
(1958): 739
RW considers Shakespeare , Henry Fielding (Tom...
Literary responses Patricia Wentworth
The Gazette awarded PW a prize of 250 guineas for her work.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77
Marie Belloc Lowndes , reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, remarked that the Dickens of A Tale of Two Cities had...
Education Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW 's family encouraged her in the regular pursuits of a young, middle-class Victorian woman. From her father she inherited an enthusiasm for poetry—she especially liked Shakespeare , Coleridge , and Whitman —and she read...
Intertextuality and Influence Evelyn Waugh
In this novel titled from T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land, Waugh traces Tony Last, like others of his protagonists, from materially and socially comfortable but spiritually arid life in England, out...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Waters
The novel begins under the sign of Dickens as one of its two narrator-heroines, then known as Susan Trinder, remembers being taken to see Oliver Twist on stage as a small child, and her terror...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Waters
SW puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...

Timeline

February 1778: Franz Anton Mesmer, inventor of animal magnetism,...

Building item

February 1778

Franz Anton Mesmer , inventor of animal magnetism, arrived in Paris to promote his theory.

15 February 1791: The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of...

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15 February 1791

The actress Harriet Pye Esten (daughter of novelist Anna Maria Bennett ) gave a highly successful recitation at Covent Garden Theatre of William Collins 's Ode on the Passions.

3 June 1829: Publisher Henry Colburn went into partnership...

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3 June 1829

Publisher Henry Colburn went into partnership with Richard Bentley (1794 - ­1871) (who, in order to do this, had just dissolved the partnership between himself and his brother Samuel Bentley as printers).

1830: William Bradbury and Frederick Mullet Evans...

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1830

William Bradbury and Frederick Mullet Evans went into partnership and established the publishing firm of Bradbury and Evans in London.

4 February 1832: Robert and William Chambers began publishing...

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4 February 1832

Robert and William Chambers began publishing the weeklyChambers's EdinburghJournal.

1833: Edward Lloyd, trained as a stenographer at...

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1833

Edward Lloyd , trained as a stenographer at a Mechanics Institute, established his own publishing firm with the appearance of Lloyd's Stenography, written, published, and promoted by himself.

January 1835: John Macrone established his own publishing...

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January 1835

John Macrone established his own publishing business at 3 St James Street, London.

4 November 1836: Richard Bentley (1794-1871) signed an agreement...

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4 November 1836

Richard Bentley (1794-1871) signed an agreement with Dickens to edit his new monthly periodical, Bentley's Miscellany.

3 May 1841: The London Library, established by Thomas...

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3 May 1841

The London Library , established by Thomas Carlyle with Harriet Martineau , Dickens , Thackeray , and others, first opened its doors.

March 1843: The Society of British Authors was forme...

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March 1843

The Society of British Authors was formed.

1844: The Ragged School Union was founded and began...

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1844

The Ragged School Union was founded and began opening schools in the slums of great cities.

1851: Johann and Bertha Ronge established at Hampstead...

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1851

Johann and Bertha Ronge established at Hampstead the first kindergarten in England, a school designed to foster physical and mental development in young children.

2 September 1852: The Manchester Free Library, the first major...

Building item

2 September 1852

The Manchester Free Library , the first major British public lending library, opened in Manchester.

28 August 1857: The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, also...

National or international item

28 August 1857

The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, also known as the Divorce Act, made divorce more readily available, but on unequal grounds for women and men.

4 June 1859: Household Words merged with Charles Dickens's...

Writing climate item

4 June 1859

Household Words merged with Charles Dickens 's new periodical All the Year Round.

Texts

Dickens, Charles, and John Leech. A Christmas Carol. Chapman and Hall, 1843.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1859.
Dickens, Charles et al. “An Introduction”. Legends and Lyrics, Fifteenth, George Bell and Sons, 1874, p. xi - xxxi.
Dickens, Charles, editor. Bentley’s Miscellany. R. Bentley.
Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. Bleak House. Bradbury and Evans, 1853.
Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. David Copperfield. Bradbury and Evans, 1850.
Dickens, Charles, editor. Household Words. Bradbury and Evans.
Lohrli, Anne, and Charles Dickens. Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859. University of Toronto Press, 1973.
Procter, Adelaide et al. Legends and Lyrics. Bell and Daldy, 1866.
Procter, Adelaide, and Charles Dickens. Legends and Lyrics. George Bell and Sons, 1874.
Dickens, Charles, and Hablot Knight Browne. Little Dorrit. Bradbury and Evans, 1857.
Dickens, Charles, and George Cruikshank. Oliver Twist. R. Bentley, 1838.
Dickens, Charles, and Marcus Stone. Our Mutual Friend. Chapman and Hall, 1865.
Dickens, Charles, and George Cruikshank. Sketches by Boz. J. Macrone, 1836.
Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Editors House, Madeline and Graham Storey, Clarendon Press, 2002.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Chapman and Hall, 1839.
Dickens, Charles, and Luke Fildes. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chapman and Hall, 1870.
Dickens, Charles et al. The Old Curiosity Shop. Chapman and Hall, 1841.
Dickens, Charles et al. The Pickwick Papers. Chapman and Hall, 1837.
Procter, Adelaide, and Charles Dickens. The Poems of Adelaide A. Procter. James R. Osgood, 1873.