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.
After her mother died she was sent to a boarding school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (which she later remembered, perhaps snobbishly, for the lack of good company). By one means or the other she...
Education
Louisa May Alcott
LMA
frequently attended lectures in Boston, and was present for the speeches of both William Makepeace Thackeray
and Charles Dickens
. Though she adored Dickens's writings, she judged him in person to be an...
Education
Rosemary Sutcliff
Rosemary's mother was probably her most important teacher. She told her stories which, no matter how outlandish and fantastic, the very young Rosemary accepted as literal truth; she later imparted all kinds of varied information...
Education
Emma Marshall
At a very early age Emma Martin could recite See'st thou my home is where yon woods are waving by Felicia Hemans
.
There she read authors such as Dickens
, Scott
, and Thackeray
.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 1. Editor Heilmann, Ann, Routledge.
253
She took advantage of the cultivated atmosphere in which she grew up, and yet later judged that she had been neither...
Family and Intimate relationships
Marie Corelli
MC
's stepfather—and possible biological father or grandfather—Charles MacKay (born 1814), was a writer and editor. Among the periodicals he worked for were the Morning Chronicle, alongside Charles Dickens
; the Daily Telegraph...
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray.
11-12
MB
's sister Caroline was the one to bear the nickname The Hon, not Mary as Dickens
thought.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
Elizabeth's father, Mary Angela's other grandfather, Frederick Mullet Evans, co-founded the printing firm Bradbury and Evans
, whose innovative use of a steam-driven rotary press brought it clients including the Illustrated London News and...
Family and Intimate relationships
Berta Ruck
Her Welsh grandmother, born Mary Anne Mathews
, whom she called Nain, had kept a youthful journal, some of which BR
prints.
AM
's mother, Christiana Weller
(later Thompson), was born in 1825. A concert pianist and painter, she met her husband, then a widower, at a Liverpool Mechanics' Institute
reception in 1844. They were married on...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
FET
and her two sisters, Maria and Ellen or Nelly, were close to their mother and to each other, and were considered well-behaved and dutiful. All three performed on stage together when the girls were...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eleanor Farjeon
EF
's father, Benjamin Leopold Farjeon
, grew up in a poor, orthodox, Jewish household in the East End of London. At thirteen he was working as an errand-boy for a Christian newspaper, avidly...
MD
was a great-grand-daughter of the novelist Charles Dickens
.
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Dickens
, on the other hand, though fond of both the Trollopes and the Ternans, apparently confided that he did not in the least care for Fanny, whom he judged, with evident misgivings, to be...
