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.
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.
205
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
Strained in her relationship with Dickens
, and despite not entirely easy relations with Thackeray
, EG
placed Curious if True in the first issue of Thackeray's new Cornhill Magazine in February 1860.
Some pressure...
Publishing
Monica Dickens
She had one further piece of good fortune in meeting with Compton Mackenzie
(whose grandfather had been friends with Charles Dickens), who read her book in proof, tidied up a few loose utterances, and did...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
She again came into conflict with Dickens
, who against her wishes inserted the word dark in the title, stressing the melodrama rather than the mundane in the story of murder and paternal possessiveness in...
Publishing
Adelaide Procter
In 1843 AP
contributed her first published poem, Ministering Angels, to Heath's Book of Beauty. She also published a few pieces in the Cornhill Magazine and Good Words, and a number in...
Publishing
Mary Howitt
MH
received from Charles Dickens
a letter asking her to consider writing for his new journal, Household Words; she contributed a number of articles to it.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
190
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...
Publishing
Adelaide Procter
In spring 1853, AP
submitted a poem under the pseudonym of Mary Berwick to her family friend Charles Dickens
, as editor of Household Words. It was accepted, and she became a regular contributor...
Publishing
Hesba Stretton
HS
's first publication (under her birth name of Sarah Smith) was the short story The Lucky Leg in Charles Dickens
's Household Words.
It has been generally said that HS
's sister Elizabeth
Publishing
Wilkie Collins
Perhaps anticipating its success, the novel was simultaneously serialised in both England (in Dickens'sAll the Year Round) and the US (in Harper's Weekly).
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Publishing
Hesba Stretton
Though he did not accept all of her contributions, Dickens
was very encouraging of Stretton's writing. In 1859, the year of her first writing for him, he asked her to contribute to the first Christmas...
Publishing
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Marguerite Blessington
agreed to write a society gossip column for Dickens
's Daily News (launched on 21 January).
Molloy, Joseph Fitzgerald. The Most Gorgeous Lady Blessington. Downey.
410
Publishing
Hesba Stretton
From HS
's detailed Log Books, the scholar Jacqueline S. Bratton
has managed to reconstruct much of her early years of journalism. Bratton says these typify relations between mid-century magazines and obscure writers.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. “Hesba Stretton’s Journalism”. Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol.
12
, pp. 60-70.
60
Publishing
Caroline Chisholm
Household Words included in its opening issue A Bundle of Emigrant's Letters, the first in a series of articles CC
and Charles Dickens
jointly authored to promote the Family Colonisation Loan Society
.
Kiddle, Margaret, and Sir Douglas Copland. Caroline Chisholm. Melbourne University Press.
142
Publishing
Eliza Cook
EC
contributed to other publications than her own, including Charles Dickens
's Daily News.
