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.
EG
's shorter fiction was a mainstay of periodicals edited by Charles Dickens
: first Household Words and then its successor, All the Year Round. His magazines also provided outlets for her longer works...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
The relationship was not always a happy one. Before EG
had any direct contact with Dickens
she was miffed by his failure to acknowledge the copy of Mary Barton she had her publishers send him...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Dickens
described EG
's The Heart of John Middleton (December 1850) as a story of extraordinary power, worked out with a vigour and truthfulness that very few people could reach.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
253
Miller, Anita, and Elizabeth Gaskell. “Preface and Chronology”. My Lady Ludlow, Academy Chicago, 1995, pp. 7-10.
9
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
The story's ending led to conflict with Dickens
, who apparently wanted to offer readers a more rationalist interpretation of the events narrated. When Gaskell demurred he pulled out all the stops: I have no...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
A recurring theme in Cranford is the resistance to change of this insular group—who are convinced, for instance, that robberies must be perpetrated by strangers and that a Signor Brunoni, who turns out to...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
She was paid £300 for the serial form of the book, £50 more than initially promised. This, her first serialised novel, produced fierce arguments with Dickens
over everything from the overall length to the conclusions...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
In keeping with the policies of Household Words and All the Year Round, EG
's short fiction continued to appear there anonymously. She earned significant income from it, for Dickens
paid her at least...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
Residence
Rumer Godden
Though she still found it hard to write in the country, RG
called this the happiest house we have had.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan, 1989.
170
Three years later she suddenly moved again; she missed London, and felt her elder...
In an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Cecil lists a number of people who might, if they could only work together, revolutionize the country.
qtd. in
Farrell, John P. “Toward a New History of Fiction: The Wolff Collection and the Example of Mrs. Gore”. The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol.
37
, 1986, pp. 28-37.
36
The names he mentions include actual...
Education
Sarah Grand
There she read authors such as Dickens
, Scott
, and Thackeray
.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge, 2000.
253
She took advantage of the cultivated atmosphere in which she grew up, and yet later judged that she had been neither...
Reception
Sarah Grand
Reviewers in the Independent and The Bookman disliked this novel. The Bookman called it vulgar, and worse than vulgar.
qtd. in
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge, 2000.
518
Arnold Bennett
, in Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1891), was equally...
Friends, Associates
Anna Maria Hall
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Maria Hall
The book provides a harsh critique of English boarding schools. Its account of school life may be autobiographical.
Keane, Maureen. Mrs. S.C. Hall: A Literary Biography. Colin Smythe, 1997.
110
In a footnote AMH
refers to Dickens
's Nicholas Nickleby: It may be necessary to...
