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.
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.
FET
had a wonderful singing voice. Later in her life, with the financial assistance of Charles Dickens
and Anthony Trollope
, she travelled to Florence to study singing; her mother...
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
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Dickens
, by now a long-standing friend of the Ternans, introduced FET
to the Trollopes; she had admired Theodosia Trollope, Bice's mother, for her talents in music and poetry. She was also extremely fond
Stebbins, Lucy Poate, and Richard Poate Stebbins. The Trollopes. The Chronicle of a Writing Family. Columbia University Press.
234
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Dickens
, on the other hand, though fond of both the Trollopes and the Ternans, apparently confided that he did not in the least care for Fanny, whom he judged, with evident misgivings, to be...
Textual Features
Charlotte Maria Tucker
This, one of her most lively and engaging children's books, features a main character named Ratto, who wanders through the world from London to Russia, eventually joining up with a rat-hero named Whiskerandos.
This...
Literary responses
Charlotte Maria Tucker
Critic J. S. Bratton
calls this book the kind of perversion of well-loved stories which Dickens
and others found so reprehensible. She nevertheless maintains that Tucker tells the tales with some zest.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm.
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...
politics
Queen Victoria
Charles Dickens
, while recognizing the value that appeal to the crown could have for an author's socio-economic position and prestige, also felt that his power to create representations which would reflect and shape the...
Textual Production
Queen Victoria
Initially, Victoria was unreceptive to the idea of widespread publication of her journal extracts, arguing (according to Helps in his Editor's Preface) that she had no skill whatever in authorship; that these were, for the...
Literary responses
Queen Victoria
Despite her book's popularity, when Victoria entered the arena of public writing, some Victorians criticized her prose style. After receiving copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, sent by...
Literary responses
Ethel Lilian Voynich
Overall, however, The Gadfly was a success to a degree that not one of ELV
's subsequent novels could achieve.
Garlick, Barbara. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Editor Mitchell, Sally, Garland Publishing, Inc., p. 837.
837
She did not learn about its popularity in Europe, especially in the Soviet Union...
Literary responses
Lucy Walford
The journal likened the development of character in Walford's Mr Druitt to that of Dickens
's John Jarndyce, in Bleak House. It also thought the ending to be one of LW
's best: she...
Reception
Lucy Walford
In 1887 Coventry Patmore
said of LW
that her depictions of contemporary life far surpassed those of Dickens
, Thackeray
, Trollope
, Eliot
, and Gaskell
, declaring her work to be equalled only...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alice Walker
The opening words of the title are quoted from June Jordan
. The opening words of the text, more surprisingly, come from Dickens
: It is the worst of times. It is the best of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Augusta Ward
The contemporary story features a self-educated working-class intellectual and freethinker whose characterisation draws on many strands of thought of the day. Drawn after the model of self-made men such as Daniel Macmillan
, William Lovett
