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.
In 1887 Coventry Patmore
said of LW
that her depictions of contemporary life far surpassed those of Dickens
, Thackeray
, Trollope
, Eliot
, and Gaskell
, declaring her work to be equalled only...
Reception
Mary Fortune
Lucy Sussex names Fanny Fern
, George Augustus Sala
, and Charles Dickens
, as well as MF
's Australian contemporary Marcus Clarke
, as influences on her non-fiction writing. Sussex calls her tone vital...
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...
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
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
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...
Textual Features
Frances Sarah Hoey
Miriam finds local gossip that Florence is attempting to entrap her father ludicrous, and describes it as a comic parallel to Vanity Fair, with Florence not as Becky Sharp but as Amelia having to...
This is often mistaken for FB
's own autobiography, but it is in fact a novel, narrated in the form of an autobiography by a boy named Frederick (alternately Frederic) Favoursham. Beginning My Share of...
Textual Features
Harriette Wilson
The book itself opens with an image presenting HW
's writing as showmanship: Lions and Tigers just arrived for the coronation. Walk in ladies and gentlemen. . . . Only six francs, to see all...
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
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
Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM
begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
