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
Family and Intimate relationships Alice Meynell
AM 's father was Thomas James Thompson , an illegitimate son of a British man, James Thompson , and a Creole woman, Mary Edwards . (Her ethnic roots remain unknown; it is certain she had...
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...
Fictionalization Adelaide Procter
Gregory also argues that Dickens took a condescending jab at AP in his reference in The Haunted House (in All the Year Round's 1859 Christmas number) to a Belinda Bates who goes in...
Fictionalization Anna Miller
ALM evidently possessed the kind of personality or manner that moved others to caricature her. She is mentioned in the dedication of Richard Brinsley Sheridan 's The School for Scandal, and it has been...
Fictionalization Hannah More
The death of such a revered character produced an instant backlash. Thomas de Quincey (who had visited HM unwillingly as a young man) attacked both her literary works and her character in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine...
Friends, Associates John Forster
JF was well connected in literary circles. He counted Elizabeth Gaskell , Lady Blessington , Jane Welsh Carlyle , Charles Dickens , Edward Bulwer Lytton and Leigh Hunt among his intimates.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1985.
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 Harriet Downing
HD 's obituary credited her with a large circle of friends, literary and otherwise, for whom she was always ready to perform helpful services such as finding a publisher for an author or a gallery...
Friends, Associates Georgiana Chatterton
In Italy GC met one of her closest friends, Helen Selina Blackwood , Caroline Norton 's elder sister.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
26
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, 1990.
Back in England, she met and liked Walter Savage Landor .
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
37
She moved and entertained...
Friends, Associates Caroline Chisholm
Charles Dickens paid a visit to CC at her house in Islington.
Kiddle, Margaret, and Sir Douglas Copland. Caroline Chisholm. 2nd ed., Melbourne University Press, 1957.
140
Friends, Associates William Harrison Ainsworth
At his home in Kensal Green he hosted many Victorian literary lions including Charles Dickens , William Makepeace Thackeray , Douglas Jerrold , William Wordsworth , and illustrator and collaborator George Cruikshank .
Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa, editors. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
The Concise Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1985. Oxford University Press, 1992, 3 vols.
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 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...
Friends, Associates Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
To her many friends and visitors Lady Blessington soon added the exiled Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte , John Forster , and in the early 1840s, Charles Dickens .
Molloy, Joseph Fitzgerald. The Most Gorgeous Lady Blessington. 4th ed., Downey, 1896.
340-1, 376, 419-0
After Louis Napoleon's escape...
Friends, Associates Hans Christian Andersen
HCA dedicated his book A Poet's Day Dreams to Charles Dickens , whom he visited in 1857. He also, while visiting England, stayed with William and Mary Howitt at The Elms, Lower Clapton. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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