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.
DMC
's work reached immense numbers of people. It was a staple of Mudie
's and other circulating libraries
. Her work was swiftly published in the US, and she had numerous titles (novels and...
Reception
Lucy Walford
In 1887 Coventry Patmore
said of LW
that her depictions of contemporary life far surpassed those of Dickens
, Thackeray
, Trollope
, Eliot
, and Gaskell
, declaring her work to be equalled only...
Reception
Charlotte Yonge
This was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Two years after it appeared it was the favourite choice of young officers in hospital during the Crimean War. A guardsman confessed that...
Reception
Matilda Betham-Edwards
Geraldine Jewsbury
, reviewing this book for the Athenæum early the next year, was not exactly encouraging. She guessed the author's gender correctly, and judged the novel a pale imitation of Charlotte Brontë
's Jane...
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...
Reception
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Charles Dickens
had at one time noted FET
's literary talent,
Stebbins, Lucy Poate, and Richard Poate Stebbins. The Trollopes. The Chronicle of a Writing Family. Columbia University Press.
235
and he serialised Mabel's Progress in 1867 in All The Year Round.
Lucy Sussex names Fanny Fern
, George Augustus Sala
, and Charles Dickens
, as well as MF
's Australian contemporary Marcus Clarke
, as influences on her non-fiction writing. Sussex calls her tone vital...
Reception
Wilkie Collins
The popularity of The Woman in White prompted many stage adaptations. (Collins's version ran at the Olympic Theatre
, Wych Street, London, where his earlier plays The Lighthouse, The Red Vial, and...
Reception
E. Nesbit
EN
's books for children brought her extensive fan-mail from readers. She was conscientious about answering them, often in long letters discussing some moral problem such as the attempt to control one's temper. Some of...
Reception
Frances Trollope
FT
's was not the first anti-child labour novel, and apart from being attacked as a red-hot revolutionary by Sydney Morgan she was also accused of imitating Oliver Twist.
Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio University Press.
172
Her first-hand knowledge, however...
Reception
Florence Nightingale
Although her letters were still unpublished at the time, Charles Dickens
quoted an extract from one of them in Household Words in May 1854, attributing it to an English Protestant lady.
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research.
166: 272
Reception
Catherine Marsh
Among the many sources of praise for this book, most notable is The Lady's Newspaper, which acknowledged: We often hear discussions as to the true mission of woman, and there are not wanting complaints...
Reception
Sarah Grand
Reviewers in the Independent and The Bookman disliked this novel. The Bookman called it vulgar, and worse than vulgar.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
518
Arnold Bennett
, in Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1891), was equally...
Reception
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Along with The Wrongs of Woman, Helen Fleetwood is the best known title in CET
's extensive oeuvre. It is often included in critical discussions of Victorian industrial fiction, along with Gaskell
's Mary...
