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.
LMM
attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College
in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Their mother educated the sisters.
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, 1990.
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...
Education
Susan Hill
Although not a Catholic, she went to a convent school in Scarborough, where she set out to enlighten her school friends (who thought babies were grown from a packet in hospital, like plants from...
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
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.
qtd. in
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan, 1992.
5
She began reading Dickens at the age...
Education
Berta Ruck
BR
's early education took place at home, where she learned to read at the age of three and a half, and was encouraged in her passion for reading.
Ruck, Berta. A Story-Teller Tells the Truth. Hutchinson, 1935.
35-40
Her father saw to it...
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
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 old dandy.
qtd. in
Stern, Madeleine B., and Louisa May Alcott. “Introduction”. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Joel Myerson et al., Little, Brown, 1989, pp. 3-39.
MAD
died in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, exactly 136 years after her grandfather Charles Dickens
was born.
Christodoulou, Glenn A. “The Grave of Mary Angela Dickens Rediscovered”. The Dickensian, Vol.
109
, No. 489, 1 Mar.–31 May 2013, pp. 42-43.
42
Cultural formation
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
was born into a large English family of writers and artists headed by her grandfather Charles Dickens
. Accounts of her life document her close relationships with several generations of paternal and maternal family...
Cultural formation
Adelaide Procter
AP
may have converted to Roman Catholicism
from Anglicanism by this date; certainly she had by 1851.
Sources conflict on the date of AP
's conversion, most of them dating it in 1851. Bessie Rayner Parkes
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...
