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.
Geraldine Jewsbury
, reviewing this book for the Athenæum early the next year, was not exactly encouraging. She guessed the author's gender correctly, and judged the novel a pale imitation of Charlotte Brontë
's Jane...
Textual Production
Matilda Betham-Edwards
She herself says the poem appeared in Household Words, but apparently she misremembered, since the oldDictionary of National Biography explicitly contradicted her. Dickens paid her five pounds for it. Five pounds for the...
Travel
Arnold Bennett
AB
landed in New York City to hit a version of the American lecture tour circuit; his publisher, George Doran
, claimed that no other visitor from Europe had had such a welcome since Dickens
.
Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett: A Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
186
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Barker
MAB
's discussion of schools leads her into an account of a visit made by the Norwegian missionary, Bishop Schreuder
, to a later Zulu chief, Cetshwayo
, taken from a blue-book or government report...
Occupation
Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
Pastimes at The Hoo included fox-hunting and an annual race-meeting, but also private theatricals (like those of Bulwer-Lytton at nearby Knebworth), for which BBBD
both wrote and performed. She also joined with Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Education
Isabella Banks
Her education was supplemented both by a good home library and by her parents' wide cultural circle. She led a lively social life in Manchester, attending Anti-Corn Law League bazaars, and soirées at the Manchester Athenæum
Textual Production
Beryl Bainbridge
She later said the non-realism of this tale had dissatisfied her. She acknowledged the influence on it of Dickens
and Robert Louis Stevenson
, and then judged that the best bits . . . have...
Birth
Daisy Ashford
Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (who wrote as DA
) was born at Elm Lodge in Petersham, Surrey, a house once inhabited by Dickens
and now the home of her paternal grandmother and her aunt...
Education
Daisy Ashford
DA
's mother, Emma
, was an avid reader, and an unconventional amateur writer whose verses included brisk lines, slang, and knockabout humour.
Malcomson, R. M. Daisy Ashford: Her Life. Chatto & Windus.
53
She inscribed books that she gave away as gifts...
Education
Maya Angelou
Marguerite Johnson had already become a voracious reader, both of Black writers and of canonical dead white males. Shakespeare
, she wrote later, was my first white love.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Heinemann New Windmill Series.
12
She also enjoyed and respected...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maya Angelou
On the glamorous idea of touring with a show in Europe, MA
writes that her images of London came from Dickens
and Winston Churchill
, her images of Paris from Guy de Maupassant
, and...
Friends, Associates
Hans Christian Andersen
HCA
dedicated his book A Poet's Day Dreams to Charles Dickens
, whom he visited in 1857. He also, while visiting England, stayed with William
and Mary Howitt
at The Elms, Lower Clapton. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Education
Louisa May Alcott
LMA
frequently attended lectures in Boston, and was present for the speeches of both William Makepeace Thackeray
and Charles Dickens
. Though she adored Dickens's writings, she judged him in person to be an...
Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa, editors. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. Henry Holt and Company.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press.
The Concise Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1985. Oxford University Press.
Textual Features
Joan Aiken
Dickens
, whose novels JA
and her sister heard their mother reading aloud when they were children, is a shaping influence on these works: their teeming characters (with names like Miss Slighcarp and in later...
