Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
MD
was a great-grand-daughter of the novelist Charles Dickens
.
Publishing
Monica Dickens
She had one further piece of good fortune in meeting with Compton Mackenzie
(whose grandfather had been friends with Charles Dickens), who read her book in proof, tidied up a few loose utterances, and did...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
attended the last public reading by her grandfather Charles Dickens
, held at St James's Hall, London three months before he died. He performed excerpts from A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers at the...
Residence
Mary Angela Dickens
When MAD
was nearly eight years old, her father purchased Gad's Hill Place in Kent, the last home of his own father Charles Dickens
(who had died two months before this), for £8,647 at...
death
Mary Angela Dickens
MAD
died in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, exactly 136 years after her grandfather Charles Dickens
was born.
Christodoulou, Glenn A. “The Grave of Mary Angela Dickens Rediscovered”. The Dickensian, Vol.
109
, No. 489, 1 Mar.–31 May 2013, pp. 42-43.
42
Occupation
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
FMD
published fiction in magazines launched with his brother. The first of his major novels, Zapiski iz podpol'ia (Notes from Underground), appeared in 1864. That year marked his descent into poverty but also...
Publishing
Harriet Downing
Dickens
published two of HD
's stories (Three Notches in the Devil's Tail and The Man with the Club Foot) in Bentley's Miscellany as by the Author of Reminiscences of a Monthly Nurse...
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...
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...
Textual Production
Frances Isabella Duberly
Selina was to have a free hand about printing this letter in as many papers as she liked, but preferably including the Daily News (the paper of Charles Dickens
and Harriet Martineau
) or the Herald.
Education
Frances Isabella Duberly
After her mother died she was sent to a boarding school at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (which she later remembered, perhaps snobbishly, for the lack of good company). By one means or the other she...
John Cordy Jeaffreson
paid this novel the compliment of a three-column Athenæum review. He predicted eventual success as a novelist for its author, even though he found grave faults in her present production. ABE
...
Friends, Associates
George Eliot
In summer 1859 GE
met and became friendly with Richard Congreve
, a Comtean philosopher, and his wife Maria
(whose father, a doctor, had attended Eliot's father in his last illness). She became a close...
Literary responses
George Eliot
This work drew her first published review in the Times, which was highly appreciative and noted that the fictions were now claimed by Mr. George Eliot—a name unknown to us.
qtd. in
Carroll, David, editor. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Barnes and Noble, 1971.
