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.
Charles Dickens
met GS
; he declared in a letter that she had [n]othing of the blue-stocking about her.
Jordan, Ruth. George Sand: A Biographical Portrait. Taplinger, 1976.
294-5
Textual Features
Lady Margaret Sackville
Austen
, she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens
or Thackeray
.
Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, 1912, p. ix - xvi.
xi
This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS
was pursuing...
Textual Features
James Malcolm Rymer
JMR
's study of mainstream novelists like Dickens
is apparent in Ada, in his borrowing from texts like Oliver Twist. Ada is an orphan who, like Oliver, captivates the reader in her quest...
Reception
James Malcolm Rymer
Where Dickens
's Oliver remains well known to modern-day readers, JMR
's Ada, who is virtually unknown today, is hailed by Anglo as having once been probably the most famous of all penny fictions heroines...
Textual Features
Carol Rumens
Her title comes from the opinion (propounded in the closing sequence, On the Spectrum) that people characterized by varying degrees and kinds of what is popularly called autism have a particular affinity with animals...
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.
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...
Occupation
Berta Ruck
She said she got this assignment by accident: Someone had blundered and confused her with her cousin Barnard Darwin
, who was also a novelist. She was relieved to find, when she was somewhere in...
She ranges through much of literary history, paying attention to figures such as Anna Seward
and Mrs John Taylor
(mother of Sarah Austin
) as well as men like Charles Dickens
. Among her non-literary...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Her influence on Virginia Woolf
is incalculable. ATR
was a model from within the Stephen family of an independent and money-earning woman writer. Her prose, in particular the impressionistic imagery and associative diction of her...
Rigby, Elizabeth. Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake. Editor Smith, Charles Eastlake, AMS Press, 1975, 2 vols.
2: 299
Lochhead, Marion C. Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake. John Murray, 1961.
89-100
Rigby, Elizabeth. “Preface and Memoirs”. Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, edited by Charles Eastlake Smith, J. Murray, 1895, p. Various pages.
1: 225, 257
Textual Features
Charlotte Riddell
This evidently very saleable story followed the recipe laid down by Dickens
in A Christmas Carol in 1843, for a haunting which works a positive moral transformation. Hertford O'Donnell fell out with his parents as...
