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.
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
Edna St Vincent Millay
ESVM
now cast around for work, possibly on stage. She sent out poems to magazines, often fruitlessly. She earned a little by acting with the Provincetown Players
from December 1917, building on her long experience...
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
Sarah Harriet Burney
SHB
held her most glamorous and successful governess position, with the family of Lord Crewe (who also employed the parents of Charles Dickens
as butler and housekeeper).
Burney, Sarah Harriet. “Editor’s Introduction”. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, edited by Lorna J. Clark, Georgia University Press, 1997.
xlvii, xlix
Allen, Michael. “Frances Anne Crewe”. Burney Letter, Vol.
12
, No. 2, 1 Sept.–30 Nov. 2006, pp. 9-10.
9
Occupation
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866. This highly controversial collection, following closely on the heels of two successful plays, firmly established his literary reputation. He published an illustrated book of literary criticism, William Blake
...
Occupation
Frances Eleanor Trollope
Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET
), her sisters Maria
and Ellen
, and her mother Frances
, performed with Dickens
in Wilkie Collins
's The Frozen Deep, which opened at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins, 1990.
786-8, 790
Occupation
Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Pastimes at The Hoo included fox-hunting and an annual race-meeting, but also private theatricals (like those of Bulwer-Lytton at nearby Knebworth), for which BBBD
both wrote and performed. She also joined with Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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...
Performance of text
Elizabeth Inchbald
It was published at Dublin in 1789, and held the stage well during the early nineteenth century: October-November 1824 saw two rival productions at different theatres. Dickens
directed the production of a much-revised version in...
Gleadle, Kathryn. The Early Feminists. Macmillan, 1995.
141
Scholar Kathryn Gleadle
calls this radical unitarian club a unique, feminist experiment in adult...
politics
Queen Victoria
Charles Dickens
, while recognizing the value that appeal to the crown could have for an author's socio-economic position and prestige, also felt that his power to create representations which would reflect and shape the...
Author summary
Mary Angela Dickens
Between the late 1880s and mid-1920s MAD
produced writing that was, like her life, shaped by her relationships with family members and her roles in the literary venues they established. Her body of work is...
Author summary
Sarah Stickney Ellis
The prolific SSE
, author of thirty-four books, was the most popular writer of Victorian conduct literature. Her four advice books addressed women in the burgeoning middle class; she also wrote novels, poems, and didactic...
Author summary
Wilkie Collins
Best remembered for his sensational fiction of the 1860s, WC
was, in the course of his forty-year writing career, the author of many ingeniously-plotted novels, as well as a writer of plays (some in collaboration...
