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.
In May 1849 EG
attended a lavish dinner given by Charles Dickens
to celebrate the publication of David Copperfield; Jane Welsh Carlyle
, also in attendance, acidly noted that Gaskell was a natural unassuming...
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
Friends, Associates
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton first Baron Lytton
In summer 1859 GE
met and became friendly with Richard Congreve
, a Comtean philosopher, and his wife Maria
(whose father, a doctor, had attended Eliot's father in his last illness). She became a close...
LSC
made many friends in England, notably including the baronet and politician Sir Francis Burdett
, his wife Lady Burdett
(born Sophia Coutts, member of a famous banking family), and their youngest daughter, who later...
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
According to Dickens
's biographer Peter Ackroyd
, he followed up his initial meeting with MB
by sending her cousinan extravagant missive of love about her . . . complete with a heart and...
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
Mary Cowden Clarke
In addition to meeting Dickens
as a result of her theatrical activities, MCC
and her husband met William Hazlitt
through a shared duty of theatre reviewing, and she became friends with Mary Howitt
, and...
Friends, Associates
William Makepeace Thackeray
WMT
was close to both of his surviving daughters, and was particularly proud when Anne
's first publication, the article Little Scholars, which appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine. He was a sociable...
Friends, Associates
Frances Trollope
FT
spent Christmas 1837 with her two remaining sons and one daughter in Hadley. She was visited by, amongst others, her Viennese friend Baron Charles Hügel
.
Trollope, Frances Eleanor. Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria. AMS Press, 1975, 2 vols.
I: 290
The holidays were greatly enjoyed...
Health
Augusta Ada Byron
Eventually Ada required heavy doses of laudanum to lessen the pain of her lengthy decline.
Woolley, Benjamin. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter. Macmillan, 1999.
353-5
On 19 August 1852 her friend Charles Dickens
complied with her wish that he should visit her deathbed to...
Health
Adelaide Procter
Dickens
, in his introduction to Legends and Lyrics, initiated the view that AP
had shortened her life as a result of her conviction that her life must not be dreamed away, and that...
