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.
Head-and-shoulders daguerrotype of Charles Dickens by Jeremiah Gurney of New York City, 1867-8. Dickens has a goatee beard, moustache, and hair combed forward on each side of his bald patch.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Frances Browne
This is often mistaken for FB 's own autobiography, but it is in fact a novel, narrated in the form of an autobiography by a boy named Frederick (alternately Frederic) Favoursham. Beginning My Share of...
Textual Features Zadie Smith
Her subjects include George Eliot 's Middlemarch, Zora Neale Hurston , Franz Kafka , Vonnegut and Salinger as cult figures, Roland Barthes and Vladimir Nabokov (pitted against each other as attacker and booster of...
Textual Features Harriette Wilson
The book itself opens with an image presenting HW 's writing as showmanship: Lions and Tigers just arrived for the coronation. Walk in ladies and gentlemen. . . . Only six francs, to see all...
Textual Features Charlotte Riddell
This evidently very saleable story followed the recipe laid down by Dickens in A Christmas Carol in 1843, for a haunting which works a positive moral transformation. Hertford O'Donnell fell out with his parents as...
Textual Features Charlotte Maria Tucker
This, one of her most lively and engaging children's books, features a main character named Ratto, who wanders through the world from London to Russia, eventually joining up with a rat-hero named Whiskerandos.
This...
Textual Features Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Stowe 's introduction praises CET 's works as a safe and desirable acquisition in every christian [sic] and family library in our country.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Dodd, 1845, p. v - vii.
vii
She compares CET 's descriptions of factory life to those of...
Textual Features Dinah Mulock Craik
This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a...
Textual Features Sarah Harriet Burney
These letters show her to be a rewarding, informal, up-to-the-minute literary critic. She kept remarkably up to date on the topic of women's writing, showing herself consistently receptive to new styles and new ideas. She...
Textual Features Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Textual Features Mary Angela Dickens
In his preface, Father Galton remarks on MAD 's specific connection to her grandfather Charles Dickens and their shared sensibilities: The author is the happy owner of one of the great names in our literature...
Textual Features Elizabeth Jenkins
This little book (with no notes or index) opens on an echo of Jenkins's fuller work on Austen, with a tribute to the mid eighteenth century as a time of brilliant flowering in the English...
Textual Features Lady Margaret Sackville
Austen , she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens or Thackeray .
Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, 1912, p. ix - xvi.
xi
This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS was pursuing...
Textual Features Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
Textual Features James Malcolm Rymer
JMR 's study of mainstream novelists like Dickens is apparent in Ada, in his borrowing from texts like Oliver Twist. Ada is an orphan who, like Oliver, captivates the reader in her quest...
Textual Features Janet Hamilton
The vigour and originality of her voice on women's issues requires greater recognition, ranging as it does from the satiric Crinoline, to Contrasted Scenes from Real Life which juxtaposes the earthly lot of Lady Emily Hay

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