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.
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
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...
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...
MAD
attended the last public reading by her grandfather Charles Dickens
, held at St James's Hall, London three months before he died. He performed excerpts from A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers at the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Berta Ruck
Her Welsh grandmother, born Mary Anne Mathews
, whom she called Nain, had kept a youthful journal, some of which BR
prints.
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
In 1867, the year after their marriage, FET
and her husband separated for a while. They publicly said little of their troubles; they may have had disagreements over the scandal surrounding Ellen Ternan
and Charles Dickens
Family and Intimate relationships
Marie Corelli
MC
's stepfather—and possible biological father or grandfather—Charles MacKay (born 1814), was a writer and editor. Among the periodicals he worked for were the Morning Chronicle, alongside Charles Dickens
; the Daily Telegraph...
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray, 1902.
11-12
MB
's sister Caroline was the one to bear the nickname The Hon, not Mary as Dickens
thought.
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.
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
Elizabeth's father, Mary Angela's other grandfather, Frederick Mullet Evans, co-founded the printing firm Bradbury and Evans
, whose innovative use of a steam-driven rotary press brought it clients including the Illustrated London News and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Alice Meynell
AM
's mother, Christiana Weller
(later Thompson), was born in 1825. A concert pianist and painter, she met her husband, then a widower, at a Liverpool Mechanics' Institute
reception in 1844. They were married on...
EF
's father, Benjamin Leopold Farjeon
, grew up in a poor, orthodox, Jewish household in the East End of London. At thirteen he was working as an errand-boy for a Christian newspaper, avidly...
