Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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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 an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Cecil lists a number of people who might, if they could only work together, revolutionize the country.
qtd. in
Farrell, John P. “Toward a New History of Fiction: The Wolff Collection and the Example of Mrs. Gore”. The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol.
The protagonist is a young married woman up from the country to see the coronation. AT
said the characters were all [her] own invention, but she included among them Dickens
's Miss Flite from Bleak...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
was encouraged to write from an early age, particularly by her mother. She would later recall how when she was eight and had just learned to write, her godfather bought her a beautiful brand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Trollope
Though FT
continues to be viewed as a caustic, prejudiced critic of unfamiliar social manners, as well as a snobbish middle-class Englishwoman eager to attack those she perceived to be beneath her, her travel journals...
Intertextuality and Influence
Josephine Butler
JB
's Appeal to the Women of America recounts the history of her involvement with the repeal campaign, as well as her reasons for shifting the focus of her energies from the campaign seeking higher...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Sykes
The comic character-drawing in this book may have been an influence on Dickens
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Barker
MAB
's discussion of schools leads her into an account of a visit made by the Norwegian missionary, Bishop Schreuder
, to a later Zulu chief, Cetshwayo
, taken from a blue-book or government report...
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
Anna Maria Hall
Dickens
, however, wrote in April 1844 to congratulate her on another periodical article (something on governesses in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal). He felt that she had provided an immense relief among the typical contributions...
Literary responses
Caroline Norton
This novel went quickly through four editions, but the reviewers found it immoral. The heroine's behaviour was roundly censured, and so was the painful and repulsive picture of society in general. Again CN
defended herself...
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
Both Charlotte Brontë
and Charles Dickens
mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
12
MO
was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott
(Grace Greenwood) that...
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, 1998.
14
many critics found its discussion of sexualityrevolting.
Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford University Press, 1998.
