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.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
149
Charles Dickens
reported the story that her attack of madness culminated in her walking down her own street in Edinburgh, not only stark mad but stark naked...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
Her pamphlet was an attack on a recent series of pieces by Henry Morley
in Household Words on the dangers of unfenced machinery, and the unworkability of the related factory acts legislation. HM
also attacked...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catherine Gore
In an extraordinary passage near the end of the book, Cecil lists a number of people who might, if they could only work together, revolutionize the country.
qtd. in
Farrell, John P. “Toward a New History of Fiction: The Wolff Collection and the Example of Mrs. Gore”. The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, Vol.
37
, 1986, pp. 28-37.
36
The names he mentions include actual...
Intertextuality and Influence
Angela Thirkell
The protagonist is a young married woman up from the country to see the coronation. AT
said the characters were all [her] own invention, but she included among them Dickens
's Miss Flite from Bleak...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Anne Barker
MAB
's discussion of schools leads her into an account of a visit made by the Norwegian missionary, Bishop Schreuder
, to a later Zulu chief, Cetshwayo
, taken from a blue-book or government report...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
was encouraged to write from an early age, particularly by her mother. She would later recall how when she was eight and had just learned to write, her godfather bought her a beautiful brand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Trollope
Though FT
continues to be viewed as a caustic, prejudiced critic of unfamiliar social manners, as well as a snobbish middle-class Englishwoman eager to attack those she perceived to be beneath her, her travel journals...
Intertextuality and Influence
Eliza Meteyard
The style is frequently Dickens
ian, and as in The Pickwick Papers the action is itinerant and the characters frequently caricatures of vice. R. W. Lightbown
, editor of the 1970 edition of EM
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Josephine Butler
JB
's Appeal to the Women of America recounts the history of her involvement with the repeal campaign, as well as her reasons for shifting the focus of her energies from the campaign seeking higher...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henrietta Sykes
The comic character-drawing in this book may have been an influence on Dickens
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Georgiana Craik
In correspondence Dickens
noted that GC
's imitation of me is too glaring—I never saw anything so curious. She takes the very words in which Esther [Summerson] speaks, without seeming to know it.
qtd. in
Lohrli, Anne, and Charles Dickens. Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859. University of Toronto Press, 1973.
243
One...
Intertextuality and Influence
Evelyn Waugh
In this novel titled from T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land, Waugh traces Tony Last, like others of his protagonists, from materially and socially comfortable but spiritually arid life in England, out...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
recalled the publisher's desire for a blend of the human interest and genial humour of Dickens
with the plot-weaving of G. W. M. Reynolds
.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth et al. “My First Novel”. The Trail of the Serpent, edited by Chris Willis and Chris Willis, Modern Library, 2003, pp. 415-27.
422
She indeed opens with a Dickensian flourish, conjuring...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
The novel begins under the sign of Dickens
as one of its two narrator-heroines, then known as Susan Trinder, remembers being taken to see Oliver Twist on stage as a small child, and her terror...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Waters argues that MEB
ought not to be condemned for clichés that she herself helped to establish. Rather we should examine them and the genre of the detective or sensation novel as an index of...
