Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
One of the earliest books that Marie could remember was Pierre et Pierrette, a celebrated little text written by her grandmother Belloc
to improve the education of French village children. She grew up conscious...
Education
Rosemary Sutcliff
Rosemary's mother was probably her most important teacher. She told her stories which, no matter how outlandish and fantastic, the very young Rosemary accepted as literal truth; she later imparted all kinds of varied information...
Education
Alice Meynell
In the summer of 1852 Elizabeth and Alice Thompson (later AM
) began their education under their father's instruction. Recording her daughters' lessons, Christiana Thompson writes, Dear little angels do their writing . ....
Education
Alice Munro
AM
has mentioned two texts in particular as early influences: Andersen
's The Little Mermaid (whose ending upset her so much that she made up an alternative happy ending) and Dickens
's A Child's History...
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...
Education
Margaret Forster
MF
loved Carlisle Girls' High School in a way that made my love of all school from the beginning seem a feeble thing—although she quickly realised her deficiencies, like not having heard of Dickens
Education
Elma Napier
In spite of the fact that her family did not value literature as much as games, and that her mother had specific ideas about what girls should read, EN
devoured every book she could get...
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen.
61, 65
Education
Alison Uttley
Alice Jane Taylor (later AU
) was a strong-willed child who set her own agenda. She later remembered a trial of wills, at the age of two, with her godmother, which ended not in her...
Education
Anita Brookner
AB
's father urged her to read Dickens
, for the purpose of understanding what the English were like, and also of understanding the unfairness of things.
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
5
She began reading Dickens at the age...
Education
Frances Isabella Duberly
After her mother died she was sent to a boarding school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (which she later remembered, perhaps snobbishly, for the lack of good company). By one means or the other she...
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...
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...
Education
Emma Marshall
At a very early age Emma Martin could recite See'st thou my home is where yon woods are waving by Felicia Hemans
.
