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.
MEB
was encouraged to write from an early age, particularly by her mother. She would later recall how when she was eight and had just learned to write, her godfather bought her a beautiful brand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
recalled the publisher's desire for a blend of the human interest and genial humour of Dickens
with the plot-weaving of G. W. M. Reynolds
.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth et al. “My First Novel”. The Trail of the Serpent, edited by Chris Willis and Chris Willis, Modern Library, pp. 415-27.
422
She indeed opens with a Dickensian flourish, conjuring...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Waters argues that MEB
ought not to be condemned for clichés that she herself helped to establish. Rather we should examine them and the genre of the detective or sensation novel as an index of...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
His article, Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, which covered seven novels she had published since 1862, made a famous personal attack in asserting that her work evidenced familiarity with a very low type of female...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Despite its sensational plot and purple prose, MEB
's first attempt at infusing a touch of poetry and the subjective into her writing through character painting
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
161
does result in greater character development than in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson
, including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Dickens
's daughter Kate
recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB
's novels, and George Moore
liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
MB
met Charles Dickens
; they became friends, and she subsequently acted in some of his private theatricals.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins.
576
Publishing
Mary Boyle
Dickens
published in Household Words a story by MB
which he entitled My Mahogany Friend.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray.
11-12
MB
's sister Caroline was the one to bear the nickname The Hon, not Mary as Dickens
thought.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
According to Dickens
's biographer Peter Ackroyd
, he followed up his initial meeting with MB
by sending her cousinan extravagant missive of love about her . . . complete with a heart and...
Occupation
Dorothy Boulger
Dorothy Havers (later DB
) worked at All The Year Round (which, since the death of Charles Dickens
, was under the editorship of his son and namesake).
Who Was Who. A. and C. Black.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Isa Blagden
Poems also includes IB
's ten-stanza tribute to Charles Dickens
, whom she reveres as a second Shakespeare and as England's crowning sheaf . . . A priceless harvest claimed by God.
Blagden, Isa, and Alfred Austin. Poems. William Blackwood and Sons.
134, 136
Alluding...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Bird
She used her royalties to buy boats for impoverished Scottish fishermen.
Kaye, Evelyn. Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer. Blue Penguin Publications.
29-30
There were literary precedents for the kind of book IB
created on her return to England. Frances Trollope
had published in 1832 her...
Publishing
Matilda Betham-Edwards
MBE
very nearly became forever a poet instead of a prose writer, when Dickens
accepted a poem of hers entitled The Golden Bee (describing a real-life shipwreck), and printed it in All the Year Round.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Reminiscences. G. Redway, p. vi, 354 pp.
