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.
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...
Textual Production
Florence Marryat
In a book entitled Tom Tiddler's Ground, FM
gave an account of her American tour of a couple of years before.
The title Tom Tiddler's Ground had been used by Dickens
for a tale...
Textual Production
Lucas Malet
In late 1887, bearing the date of 1888, appeared LM
's illustrated book Little Peter. A Christmas Morality. She supplied an introduction to Dickens
's Dombey and Son for the Waverley edition of his...
She was named Ada after the beautiful and idealistic Ada of Dickens
's Bleak House.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co., 1904.
4
Nickname: Ellie
This family nickname was another literary reference: to The Wide Wide World...
Literary responses
Edna Lyall
In 1912 Virginia Woolf
, reviewing a book about Dickens, remarked how in country inns on a wet weekend the walker frustrated by the weather would find on the single bookshelf just two authors: Dickens
Education
Marie Belloc Lowndes
One of the earliest books that Marie could remember was Pierre et Pierrette, a celebrated little text written by her grandmother Belloc
to improve the education of French village children. She grew up conscious...
Eliza Lynn
, later Linton, sold the family home at Gadshill to Charles Dickens
after her father died.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
58
Textual Production
Eliza Lynn Linton
ELL
's My Literary Life appeared posthumously, edited by Beatrice Harraden
: titled thus on the title-page and spine, it is in the half-title and elsewhere called Reminiscences of Dickens
, Thackeray
, George Eliot
Friends, Associates
Eliza Lynn Linton
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...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Dickens
, editor of Household Words, judged her a reliable contributor, good for anything, although he acknowledged that her reputation for sexual explicitness might do the journal damage.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
