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.
MC
's stepfather—and possible biological father or grandfather—Charles MacKay (born 1814), was a writer and editor. Among the periodicals he worked for were the Morning Chronicle, alongside Charles Dickens
; the Daily Telegraph...
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.
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...
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
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...
According to Dickens
's biographer Peter Ackroyd
, he followed up his initial meeting with MB
by sending her cousinan extravagant missive of love about her . . . complete with a heart and...
In summer 1859 GE
met and became friendly with Richard Congreve
, a Comtean philosopher, and his wife Maria
(whose father, a doctor, had attended Eliot's father in his last illness). She became a close...
LSC
made many friends in England, notably including the baronet and politician Sir Francis Burdett
, his wife Lady Burdett
(born Sophia Coutts, member of a famous banking family), and their youngest daughter, who later...
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
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
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...
