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.
Along with The Wrongs of Woman, Helen Fleetwood is the best known title in CET
's extensive oeuvre. It is often included in critical discussions of Victorian industrial fiction, along with Gaskell
's Mary...
Residence
Alice Meynell
Describing the situation at the Thompsons' Italian villa, Dickens
writes: Coming upon them unawares, I found T[hompson] with a pointed beard, smoking a great German pipe, in a pair of slippers; the two little girls...
Residence
Gillian Slovo
Her grandmother and elder sister travelled separately; her father, already in England, had been waiting on tenterhooks for their arrival. GS
saw England through the old-world lens of Charles Dickens
and Jane Austen;
Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. Little, Brown, 1997.
103
she...
Residence
E. M. Delafield
Charles Dickens
used to live in a house across the street.
McCullen, Maurice. E. M. Delafield. Twayne, 1985.
10
Many creative artists lived in this neighbourhood, with its focal point of St George the Martyr, Queen's Square. The area was distinct...
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...
Residence
Rumer Godden
Though she still found it hard to write in the country, RG
called this the happiest house we have had.
Godden, Rumer. A House with Four Rooms. Macmillan, 1989.
170
Three years later she suddenly moved again; she missed London, and felt her elder...
Textual Features
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Stowe
's introduction praises CET
's works as a safe and desirable acquisition in every christian [sic] and family library in our country.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Dodd, 1845, p. v - vii.
vii
She compares CET
's descriptions of factory life to those of...
Textual Features
Charlotte Riddell
This evidently very saleable story followed the recipe laid down by Dickens
in A Christmas Carol in 1843, for a haunting which works a positive moral transformation. Hertford O'Donnell fell out with his parents as...
Textual Features
Charlotte Maria Tucker
This, one of her most lively and engaging children's books, features a main character named Ratto, who wanders through the world from London to Russia, eventually joining up with a rat-hero named Whiskerandos.
This...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a...
Textual Features
Sarah Harriet Burney
These letters show her to be a rewarding, informal, up-to-the-minute literary critic. She kept remarkably up to date on the topic of women's writing, showing herself consistently receptive to new styles and new ideas. She...
Textual Features
E. Nesbit
At the opening of The Treasure Seekers the narrator, Oswald Bastable, says he will not reveal which child is telling the story; yet already he is dropping unmistakable hints that it is himself. Oswald wavers...
Textual Features
Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Textual Features
Mary Angela Dickens
In his preface, Father Galton
remarks on MAD
's specific connection to her grandfather Charles Dickens
and their shared sensibilities: The author is the happy owner of one of the great names in our literature...
