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.
In February 1862, Sharpe's London Magazine reviewed The Lady Herbert's Gentlewomen positively, noting that EM
's talents were better suited to a series of shorter pieces than a sustained narrative. It compared her favourably with...
Literary responses
Lucy Walford
The journal likened the development of character in Walford's Mr Druitt to that of Dickens
's John Jarndyce, in Bleak House. It also thought the ending to be one of LW
's best: she...
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
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
His article, Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, which covered seven novels she had published since 1862, made a famous personal attack in asserting that her work evidenced familiarity with a very low type of female...
Literary responses
May Laffan
In 1883 The Cabinet of Irish Literature declared that ML
exposed the shams and narrownesses that deface the society of Ireland, and that her writings . . . mark unquestionably a new era in...
Literary responses
Wilkie Collins
Critical reception was mixed. While Dickens
wrote that the story contains admirable writing,
Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford University Press.
14
many critics found its discussion of sexualityrevolting.
Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford University Press.
14
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...
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...
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
Edna St Vincent Millay
ESVM
now cast around for work, possibly on stage. She sent out poems to magazines, often fruitlessly. She earned a little by acting with the Provincetown Players
from December 1917, building on her long experience...
Occupation
Dorothy Boulger
Dorothy Havers (later DB
) worked at All The Year Round (which, since the death of Charles Dickens
, was under the editorship of his son and namesake).
Who Was Who. A. and C. Black.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Occupation
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET
), her sisters Maria
and Ellen
, and her mother Frances
, performed with Dickens
in Wilkie Collins
's The Frozen Deep, which opened at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins.
786-8, 790
Occupation
Mary Cowden Clarke
A production of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Charles Dickens
's Amateur Company
opened at the Haymarket Theatre
, with MCC
as Mistress Quickly, wearing Elizabethan costume she had made herself.
