Charles Dickens

07 February 1812 - 09 June 1870

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.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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	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...
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	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	Elizabeth Jenkins	This little book (with no notes or index) opens on an echo of Jenkins's fuller work on Austen, with a tribute to the mid eighteenth century as a time of brilliant flowering in the English...
Textual Features	Lady Margaret Sackville	Austen , she says, was the first really modern novelist . . . more modern in a sense than Dickens or Thackeray . Austen, Jane. “Introduction”. Jane Austen, edited by Lady Margaret Sackville, Herbert & Daniel, 1912, p. ix - xvi. xi This publication, together with the anthology, suggests that LMS was pursuing...
Textual Features	James Malcolm Rymer	JMR 's study of mainstream novelists like Dickens is apparent in Ada, in his borrowing from texts like Oliver Twist. Ada is an orphan who, like Oliver, captivates the reader in her quest...
Textual Features	Janet Hamilton	The vigour and originality of her voice on women's issues requires greater recognition, ranging as it does from the satiric Crinoline, to Contrasted Scenes from Real Life which juxtaposes the earthly lot of Lady Emily Hay
Textual Features	Pamela Hansford Johnson	These novels reflect PHJ 's political commitment and the urgent ideological spirit of the later thirties. Their plots set out to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the apparently separated social classes—as do those of Dickens —by...
Textual Features	Carol Rumens	Her title comes from the opinion (propounded in the closing sequence, On the Spectrum) that people characterized by varying degrees and kinds of what is popularly called autism have a particular affinity with animals...
Textual Features	Pamela Hansford Johnson	The tone of this novel and its sequels is savagely satirical. It partakes in the venerable tradition of burlesquing the affectations of the literary world, but for PHJ it was something entirely new. The eponymous...
Textual Features	Joan Aiken	Dickens , whose novels JA and her sister heard their mother reading aloud when they were children, is a shaping influence on these works: their teeming characters (with names like Miss Slighcarp and in later...
Textual Features	Margaret Forster	The novel, entitled Green Dusk for Dreams, drew on her own experience as an au pair girl in Bordeaux. At different times she called it Dickens ian “Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC. 271 and Balzac ian. The protagonist...
Textual Features	Anita Brookner	The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
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...

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