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.
Charles Dickens
met GS
; he declared in a letter that she had [n]othing of the blue-stocking about her.
Jordan, Ruth. George Sand: A Biographical Portrait. Taplinger, 1976.
294-5
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 Production
Evelyn Sharp
In a prefatory note ES
explains that the experiences used in the book, including the six story-sketches, are all based on actuality: she credits Dickens
with purveying a better understanding of children than modern psychologists...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Poverty even forced her to sell her books: a thousand volumes, in English and French (partly, perhaps, to prevent their falling into her husband's hands). After his death she received some income from the estate...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
In the capacity of the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor, AS
delivered four lectures to students of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford
. Considering her stated dislike of lecturing from her days at Strathclyde
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Smythies
This opens on Christmas Eve, with London under snow, looking like the great sinner that she is, doing penance, as she ought to do, in a white sheet,
Smythies, Harriet. Left to Themselves. Hurst and Blackett, 1863, 3 vols.
1: 3
with two poverty-stricken boys of...
Literary responses
Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott
, George Eliot
, and Charles Dickens
), it nonetheless has...
Travel
Harriet Beecher Stowe
She was received by Dickens
, Lady Byron
, Anna Jameson
, the Lord Mayor of London, and various members of the nobility.
Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford University Press, 1994.
233, 234
Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Twayne, 1989.
44-5
The working-class Scots poet Janet Hamilton
's tribute to...
Textual Production
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Though HBS
was internationally recognized for her written works she was not, unlike many other contemporary literary figures, a frequent lecturer. While Dickens
, Samuel Clemens
(who published as Mark Twain), Julia Ward Howe
...
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
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
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.
