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.
Boyle, Mary. Mary Boyle. Her Book. Editor Boyle, Sir Courtenay Edmund, E. P. Dutton; John Murray, 1902.
11-12
MB
's sister Caroline was the one to bear the nickname The Hon, not Mary as Dickens
thought.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Angela Dickens
Elizabeth's father, Mary Angela's other grandfather, Frederick Mullet Evans, co-founded the printing firm Bradbury and Evans
, whose innovative use of a steam-driven rotary press brought it clients including the Illustrated London News and...
Fictionalization
Hannah More
The death of such a revered character produced an instant backlash. Thomas de Quincey
(who had visited HM
unwillingly as a young man) attacked both her literary works and her character in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine...
Fictionalization
Adelaide Procter
Gregory also argues that Dickens
took a condescending jab at AP
in his reference in The Haunted House (in All the Year Round's 1859 Christmas number) to a Belinda Bates who goes in...
Fictionalization
Anna Miller
ALM evidently possessed the kind of personality or manner that moved others to caricature her. She is mentioned in the dedication of Richard Brinsley Sheridan
's The School for Scandal, and it has been...
Friends, Associates
Mary Cowden Clarke
In addition to meeting Dickens
as a result of her theatrical activities, MCC
and her husband met William Hazlitt
through a shared duty of theatre reviewing, and she became friends with Mary Howitt
, and...
Friends, Associates
William Makepeace Thackeray
WMT
was close to both of his surviving daughters, and was particularly proud when Anne
's first publication, the article Little Scholars, which appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine. He was a sociable...
Friends, Associates
Frances Trollope
FT
spent Christmas 1837 with her two remaining sons and one daughter in Hadley. She was visited by, amongst others, her Viennese friend Baron Charles Hügel
.
Trollope, Frances Eleanor. Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III to Victoria. AMS Press, 1975, 2 vols.
I: 290
The holidays were greatly enjoyed...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Ada Byron
AAB
remained close friends with Mary Somerville's family, and particularly with her eldest son by her first marriage, Woronzow Greig
, for the rest of her life. Somerville not only fostered Ada's mathematical aptitude, but...
Friends, Associates
George Sand
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.
One of AMH
's closest friends was the actress Helen Faucit
, later Lady Martin. Though socially conservative in her attitudes, she was apparently more ready than her husband to achieve friendly relations with those...
Through the theological writer Dr Robert Herbert Brabant
(an early admirer of George Eliot), Lynn at this time met Walter Savage Landor
, whom she had long admired, and with whom she became close friends...
Friends, Associates
Catherine Crowe
CC
had already become a friend of Sydney Smith
and his family. In Edinburgh she became friendly with members of various intellectual circles, including astronomer John Pringle Nichol
, chemist Samuel Brown
, artist David Scott
