Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
The year after AP
's death, a posthumous edition of her Legends and Lyrics brought together both previous volumes in the form of an illustrated Christmas gift book, dated 1866, with a preface by Dickens
Publishing
Harriet Martineau
HM
's connection with Dickens
's Household Words deteriorated from late 1849. First he placed her analysis of the position of women after his own assertion that women's function was to dress well and look...
Publishing
Caroline Clive
The name of the protagonist or hero is one CC
had herself used as a pseudonym. Her title-page has an epigraph from Sidney Smith
's letters: How little we know of what passes in each...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
The story's ending led to conflict with Dickens
, who apparently wanted to offer readers a more rationalist interpretation of the events narrated. When Gaskell demurred he pulled out all the stops: I have no...
Publishing
Matilda Betham-Edwards
MBE
very nearly became forever a poet instead of a prose writer, when Dickens
accepted a poem of hers entitled The Golden Bee (describing a real-life shipwreck), and printed it in All the Year Round.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Reminiscences. G. Redway, 1898, p. vi, 354 pp.
205
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...
Publishing
Hesba Stretton
HS
's first publication (under her birth name of Sarah Smith) was the short story The Lucky Leg in Charles Dickens
's Household Words.
It has been generally said that HS
's sister Elizabeth
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
She was paid £300 for the serial form of the book, £50 more than initially promised. This, her first serialised novel, produced fierce arguments with Dickens
over everything from the overall length to the conclusions...
Publishing
Adelaide Procter
In 1843 AP
contributed her first published poem, Ministering Angels, to Heath's Book of Beauty. She also published a few pieces in the Cornhill Magazine and Good Words, and a number in...
Publishing
Eliza Lynn Linton
Also in 1854, Dickens
published her Rights and Wrongs of Women in Household Words, which Deborah T. Meem
characterises as antifeminist, while she says a later article, Marriage Gaolers (also published in Household Words...
Publishing
Hesba Stretton
Though he did not accept all of her contributions, Dickens
was very encouraging of Stretton's writing. In 1859, the year of her first writing for him, he asked her to contribute to the first Christmas...
Publishing
Elizabeth Gaskell
In keeping with the policies of Household Words and All the Year Round, EG
's short fiction continued to appear there anonymously. She earned significant income from it, for Dickens
paid her at least...
Publishing
Adelaide Procter
In spring 1853, AP
submitted a poem under the pseudonym of Mary Berwick to her family friend Charles Dickens
, as editor of Household Words. It was accepted, and she became a regular contributor...
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...
Publishing
Hesba Stretton
From HS
's detailed Log Books, the scholar Jacqueline S. Bratton
has managed to reconstruct much of her early years of journalism. Bratton says these typify relations between mid-century magazines and obscure writers.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. “Hesba Stretton’s Journalism”. Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol.
