Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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...
Friends, Associates
Louisa Stuart Costello
LSC
made many friends in England, notably including the baronet and politician Sir Francis Burdett
, his wife Lady Burdett
(born Sophia Coutts, member of a famous banking family), and their youngest daughter, who later...
Friends, Associates
Mary Boyle
According to Dickens
's biographer Peter Ackroyd
, he followed up his initial meeting with MB
by sending her cousinan extravagant missive of love about her . . . complete with a heart and...
Friends, Associates
Mary Cowden Clarke
In addition to meeting Dickens
as a result of her theatrical activities, MCC
and her husband met William Hazlitt
through a shared duty of theatre reviewing, and she became friends with Mary Howitt
, and...
AAB
remained close friends with Mary Somerville's family, and particularly with her eldest son by her first marriage, Woronzow Greig
, for the rest of her life. Somerville not only fostered Ada's mathematical aptitude, but...
Friends, Associates
Fanny Aikin Kortright
She was a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne
(whom she never met, but of whose wife and family she remained a faithful friend and correspondent after Hawthorne's death), Bulwer Lytton
, and Charles Kingsley
(all of...
CC
had already become a friend of Sydney Smith
and his family. In Edinburgh she became friendly with members of various intellectual circles, including astronomer John Pringle Nichol
, chemist Samuel Brown
, artist David Scott
Friends, Associates
Frances Sarah Hoey
Amongst her close friends FSH
counted the novelist and journalist Edmund Yates
, who (she recalled in one of her Lady's Letters) introduced her to Charles Dickens
. Her relationship with Yates, which was...
Friends, Associates
Jane Welsh Carlyle
JWC
attended a dinner party given by Charles Dickens
; she felt it to be ostentatious.
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Friends, Associates
Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, first Earl Lytton
His international travel and family ties to England's literary scene ensured him a wide social circle. He knew Charles Dickens
, John Forster
, and Frances Mary Peard
. While living in Florence, he became...
Friends, Associates
Frances Eleanor Trollope
In addition to her supportive professional relationship with her husband, FET
was also close to other writers such as Charles Dickens
, her brother-in-law Anthony Trollope
, her mother-in-law Frances Trollope
, and George Eliot
Friends, Associates
Jane Welsh Carlyle
As his fame grew, Thomas was increasingly invited to the homes of London's political and intellectual elite, while Jane moved in her own social circle, which included Charles Dickens
, John Forster
, Giuseppe Mazzini