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
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
Dickens described EG 's The Heart of John Middleton (December 1850) as a story of extraordinary power, worked out with a vigour and truthfulness that very few people could reach.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
253
Miller, Anita, and Elizabeth Gaskell. “Preface and Chronology”. My Lady Ludlow, Academy Chicago, 1995, pp. 7-10.
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Literary responses Edna Lyall
In 1912 Virginia Woolf , reviewing a book about Dickens, remarked how in country inns on a wet weekend the walker frustrated by the weather would find on the single bookshelf just two authors: Dickens
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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 Anne Marsh
The Athenæum, which had reported favourably after its peep at the first instalment of Mount Sorel,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
897 (1845):14
gave the task of reviewing the complete work to Henry Fothergill Chorley . He felt...
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.
14
Literary responses Lucy Walford
The journal likened the development of character in Walford's Mr Druitt to that of Dickens 's John Jarndyce, in Bleak House. It also thought the ending to be one of LW 's best: she...
Literary responses Adelaide Procter
Dickens in his preface praised AP highly—not for poetry but for humility. His celebration of her modest opinion of her own achievement implied that other women had exaggerated ideas about theirs. AP, he said, never...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Dickens 's daughter Kate recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB 's novels, and George Moore liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Literary responses Margaret Drabble
The British Book News review likened this book, as a state-of-the-nation novel, to Dickens 's Hard Times. The review concluded: If this is not one of Margaret Drabble's best-balanced books, it presents a powerful...
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 Ethel Lilian Voynich
Overall, however, The Gadfly was a success to a degree that not one of ELV 's subsequent novels could achieve.
Garlick, Barbara. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Editor Mitchell, Sally, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988, p. 837.
837
She did not learn about its popularity in Europe, especially in the Soviet Union...
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.
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MO was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott (Grace Greenwood) that...
Literary responses Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott , George Eliot , and Charles Dickens ), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses May Laffan
In 1883 The Cabinet of Irish Literature declared that ML exposed the shams and narrownesses that deface the society of Ireland, and that her writings . . . mark unquestionably a new era in...

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