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.
Amongst her close friends FSH
counted the novelist and journalist Edmund Yates
, who (she recalled in one of her Lady's Letters) introduced her to Charles Dickens
. Her relationship with Yates, which was...
Friends, Associates
Fanny Aikin Kortright
She was a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(whom she never met, but of whose wife and family she remained a faithful friend and correspondent after Hawthorne's death), Bulwer Lytton
, and Charles Kingsley
(all of...
Friends, Associates
Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
To her many friends and visitors Lady Blessington soon added the exiled Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte
, John Forster
, and in the early 1840s, Charles Dickens
.
Molloy, Joseph Fitzgerald. The Most Gorgeous Lady Blessington. 4th ed., Downey, 1896.
340-1, 376, 419-0
After Louis Napoleon's escape...
Friends, Associates
Hans Christian Andersen
HCA
dedicated his book A Poet's Day Dreams to Charles Dickens
, whom he visited in 1857. He also, while visiting England, stayed with William
and Mary Howitt
at The Elms, Lower Clapton. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In addition to her supportive professional relationship with her husband, FET
was also close to other writers such as Charles Dickens
, her brother-in-law Anthony Trollope
, her mother-in-law Frances Trollope
, and George Eliot
Friends, Associates
Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton first Earl Lytton
His international travel and family ties to England's literary scene ensured him a wide social circle. He knew Charles Dickens
, John Forster
, and Frances Mary Peard
. While living in Florence, he became...
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
MB
met Charles Dickens
; they became friends, and she subsequently acted in some of his private theatricals.
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
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...
