Charles Dickens

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Occupation Algernon Charles Swinburne
Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866. This highly controversial collection, following closely on the heels of two successful plays, firmly established his literary reputation. He published an illustrated book of literary criticism, William Blake ...
Occupation Alice Meynell
As well as reading her own poetry, she lectured about the transition of English poetry from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, and on Charlotte Brontë and Dickens . She earned the lowly sum...
Occupation Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
Pastimes at The Hoo included fox-hunting and an annual race-meeting, but also private theatricals (like those of Bulwer-Lytton at nearby Knebworth), for which BBBD both wrote and performed. She also joined with Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Occupation Richard Hengist Horne
Reports such as Horne's also provided writers of protest literature such as Benjamin Disraeli , Charles Dickens , and Elizabeth Gaskell with material which they incorporated into their fiction. Elizabeth Barrett 's The Cry of...
Occupation Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
FMD published fiction in magazines launched with his brother. The first of his major novels, Zapiski iz podpol'ia (Notes from Underground), appeared in 1864. That year marked his descent into poverty but also...
Material Conditions of Writing Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD 's grandfather and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
Material Conditions of Writing Iris Murdoch
Though she was a contented only child, IM said that the impulse to create imaginary siblings was the thing that first inspired her to write. In her teens she was a leading contributor to the...
Literary Setting Julia Frankau
This melodramatic story pits evil woman against ideal woman, while its male characters are more mixed. JF remains in control of her melodramatic plot and sometimes deliberately purple style: she succeeds in her business of...
Literary Setting E. Nesbit
This book shows the influence of Dickens in its use of disguise, its elaborate plot and wide range of settings (all known at first hand to EN , including Derbyshire, where she had been...
Literary responses Charlotte Maria Tucker
Critic J. S. Bratton calls this book the kind of perversion of well-loved stories which Dickens and others found so reprehensible. She nevertheless maintains that Tucker tells the tales with some zest.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm.
75
Margaret Cutt
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Dickens 's daughter Kate recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB 's novels, and George Moore liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Literary responses Anne Marsh
The Athenæum, which had reported favourably after its peep at the first instalment of Mount Sorel,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
897 (1845):14
gave the task of reviewing the complete work to Henry Fothergill Chorley . He felt...
Literary responses Margaret Drabble
The British Book News review likened this book, as a state-of-the-nation novel, to Dickens 's Hard Times. The review concluded: If this is not one of Margaret Drabble's best-balanced books, it presents a powerful...
Literary responses Adelaide Procter
Dickens in his preface praised AP highly—not for poetry but for humility. His celebration of her modest opinion of her own achievement implied that other women had exaggerated ideas about theirs. AP, he said, never...
Literary responses Jane Gardam
JG continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
JG 's father's response to her Booker short-listing...

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