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.
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...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Jane Gardam
JG
continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
JG
's father's response to her Booker short-listing...
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...
Literary Setting
E. Nesbit
This book shows the influence of Dickens
in its use of disguise, its elaborate plot and wide range of settings (all known at first hand to EN
, including Derbyshire, where she had been...
Literary Setting
Julia Frankau
This melodramatic story pits evil woman against ideal woman, while its male characters are more mixed. JF
remains in control of her melodramatic plot and sometimes deliberately purple style: she succeeds in her business of...
Material Conditions of Writing
Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD
's grandfather
and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
Material Conditions of Writing
Iris Murdoch
Though she was a contented only child, IM
said that the impulse to create imaginary siblings was the thing that first inspired her to write. In her teens she was a leading contributor to the...
Occupation
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET
), her sisters Maria
and Ellen
, and her mother Frances
, performed with Dickens
in Wilkie Collins
's The Frozen Deep, which opened at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins.
786-8, 790
Occupation
Mary Cowden Clarke
A production of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Charles Dickens
's Amateur Company
opened at the Haymarket Theatre
, with MCC
as Mistress Quickly, wearing Elizabethan costume she had made herself.
Clarke, Mary Cowden. My Long Life. Dodd, Mead.
136-7
Occupation
Sarah Harriet Burney
SHB
held her most glamorous and successful governess position, with the family of Lord Crewe (who also employed the parents of Charles Dickens
as butler and housekeeper).
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press.
xlvii, xlix
Allen, Michael. “Frances Anne Crewe”. Burney Letter, Vol.
12
, No. 2, pp. 9-10.
9
Occupation
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Their time performing in The Frozen Deep marks the beginning of the relationship between the Ternans and Dickens
.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins.
775, 786-8
The Ternan sisters (and possibly their mother) also acted with the Charles Kean Company
Occupation
Berta Ruck
She said she got this assignment by accident: Someone had blundered and confused her with her cousin Barnard Darwin
, who was also a novelist. She was relieved to find, when she was somewhere in...
