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.
One of AMH
's closest friends was the actress Helen Faucit
, later Lady Martin. Though socially conservative in her attitudes, she was apparently more ready than her husband to achieve friendly relations with those...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Ada Byron
AAB
remained close friends with Mary Somerville's family, and particularly with her eldest son by her first marriage, Woronzow Greig
, for the rest of her life. Somerville not only fostered Ada's mathematical aptitude, but...
Friends, Associates
Catherine Crowe
CC
had already become a friend of Sydney Smith
and his family. In Edinburgh she became friendly with members of various intellectual circles, including astronomer John Pringle Nichol
, chemist Samuel Brown
, artist David Scott
Through the theological writer Dr Robert Herbert Brabant
(an early admirer of George Eliot), Lynn at this time met Walter Savage Landor
, whom she had long admired, and with whom she became close friends...
Friends, Associates
Jane Welsh Carlyle
JWC
attended a dinner party given by Charles Dickens
; she felt it to be ostentatious.
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell, 1986.
203-4
Friends, Associates
Wilkie Collins
WC
first met Charles Dickens
in 1851 when he acted in one of Dickens's amateur theatricals. It was an important relationship for Collins, and the two collaborated on a number of works. The Woman in...
Friends, Associates
Jane Welsh Carlyle
As his fame grew, Thomas was increasingly invited to the homes of London's political and intellectual elite, while Jane moved in her own social circle, which included Charles Dickens
, John Forster
, Giuseppe Mazzini
HD
's obituary credited her with a large circle of friends, literary and otherwise, for whom she was always ready to perform helpful services such as finding a publisher for an author or a gallery...
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
26
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.
