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.
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Dickens
, editor of Household Words, judged her a reliable contributor, good for anything, although he acknowledged that her reputation for sexual explicitness might do the journal damage.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
This prompted Dickens
to proclaim there never was such a wrong-headed woman born—such a vain one—or such a Humbug.
Webb, Robert Kiefer. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. Columbia University Press, 1960.
347
The Athenæum reviewed the pamphlet harshly as an offence against taste and modesty, chastising HM
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
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
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 Setting
Julia Frankau
This melodramatic story pits evil woman against ideal woman, while its male characters are more mixed. JF
remains in control of her melodramatic plot and sometimes deliberately purple style: she succeeds in her business of...
Literary Setting
E. Nesbit
This book shows the influence of Dickens
in its use of disguise, its elaborate plot and wide range of settings (all known at first hand to EN
, including Derbyshire, where she had been...
Material Conditions of Writing
Iris Murdoch
Though she was a contented only child, IM
said that the impulse to create imaginary siblings was the thing that first inspired her to write. In her teens she was a leading contributor to the...
Material Conditions of Writing
Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD
's grandfather
and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
names
Edna Lyall
BirthName: Ada Ellen Bayly
She was named Ada after the beautiful and idealistic Ada of Dickens
's Bleak House.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co., 1904.
4
Nickname: Ellie
This family nickname was another literary reference: to The Wide Wide World...
Occupation
Dorothy Boulger
Dorothy Havers (later DB
) worked at All The Year Round (which, since the death of Charles Dickens
, was under the editorship of his son and namesake).
Who Was Who. A. and C. Black, 1897–2025, Many volumes.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Occupation
Richard Hengist Horne
Reports such as Horne's also provided writers of protest literature such as Benjamin Disraeli
, Charles Dickens
, and Elizabeth Gaskell
with material which they incorporated into their fiction. Elizabeth Barrett
's The Cry of...
Occupation
Mary Cowden Clarke
A production of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Charles Dickens
's Amateur Company
opened at the Haymarket Theatre
, with MCC
as Mistress Quickly, wearing Elizabethan costume she had made herself.
Clarke, Mary Cowden. My Long Life. Dodd, Mead, 1896.
136-7
Occupation
Alice Meynell
As well as reading her own poetry, she lectured about the transition of English poetry from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, and on Charlotte Brontë
and Dickens
. She earned the lowly sum...
