Charles Dickens

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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.
Head-and-shoulders daguerrotype of Charles Dickens by Jeremiah Gurney of New York City, 1867-8. Dickens has a goatee beard, moustache, and hair combed forward on each side of his bald patch.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
294-5
Friends, Associates Adelaide Procter
AP 's parents entertained a circle of well-known literary personages, including Leigh Hunt , William Hazlitt , Thomas Moore , Wordsworth , Tennyson , Longfellow , and Henry James . Intimates of the household included...
Friends, Associates Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton first Earl Lytton
His international travel and family ties to England's literary scene ensured him a wide social circle. He knew Charles Dickens , John Forster , and Frances Mary Peard . While living in Florence, he became...
Friends, Associates Anna Maria Hall
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...
Friends, Associates Sarah Orne Jewett
SOJ had a broad social circle. She belonged to an artistic community of women that included Celia Thaxter and Louise Guiney , and counted Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose funeral she and Annie Fields attended in...
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
Friends, Associates Jane Welsh Carlyle
JWC attended a dinner party given by Charles Dickens ; she felt it to be ostentatious.
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell, 1986.
203-4
Friends, Associates Jane Welsh Carlyle
As his fame grew, Thomas was increasingly invited to the homes of London's political and intellectual elite, while Jane moved in her own social circle, which included Charles Dickens , John Forster , Giuseppe Mazzini
Friends, Associates Wilkie Collins
WC first met Charles Dickens in 1851 when he acted in one of Dickens's amateur theatricals. It was an important relationship for Collins, and the two collaborated on a number of works. The Woman in...
Friends, Associates John Forster
JF was well connected in literary circles. He counted Elizabeth Gaskell , Lady Blessington , Jane Welsh Carlyle , Charles Dickens , Edward Bulwer Lytton and Leigh Hunt among his intimates.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1985.
Friends, Associates Georgiana Chatterton
In Italy GC met one of her closest friends, Helen Selina Blackwood , Caroline Norton 's elder sister.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
26
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.
Back in England, she met and liked Walter Savage Landor .
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
37
She moved and entertained...
Friends, Associates Harriet Downing
HD 's obituary credited her with a large circle of friends, literary and otherwise, for whom she was always ready to perform helpful services such as finding a publisher for an author or a gallery...
Friends, Associates Caroline Chisholm
Charles Dickens paid a visit to CC at her house in Islington.
Kiddle, Margaret, and Sir Douglas Copland. Caroline Chisholm. 2nd ed., Melbourne University Press, 1957.
140
Friends, Associates William Harrison Ainsworth
At his home in Kensal Green he hosted many Victorian literary lions including Charles Dickens , William Makepeace Thackeray , Douglas Jerrold , William Wordsworth , and illustrator and collaborator George Cruikshank .
Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa, editors. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
The Concise Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1985. Oxford University Press, 1992, 3 vols.

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