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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Eleanor Farjeon
EF 's father, Benjamin Leopold Farjeon , grew up in a poor, orthodox, Jewish household in the East End of London. At thirteen he was working as an errand-boy for a Christian newspaper, avidly...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elaine Feinstein
Subjects of poems here include Dickens , Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Siegfried Sassoon , Anna Akhmatova , Bella Akhmadulina , Billie Holliday , and Raymond Chandler . In Betrayal, a reply to Shakespeare
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. Oxford University Press.
Education Margaret Forster
MF loved Carlisle Girls' High School in a way that made my love of all school from the beginning seem a feeble thing—although she quickly realised her deficiencies, like not having heard of Dickens
Textual Features Margaret Forster
The novel, entitled Green Dusk for Dreams, drew on her own experience as an au pair girl in Bordeaux. At different times she called it Dickens ian
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
and Balzac ian. The protagonist...
Reception Mary Fortune
Lucy Sussex names Fanny Fern , George Augustus Sala , and Charles Dickens , as well as MF 's Australian contemporary Marcus Clarke , as influences on her non-fiction writing. Sussex calls her tone vital...
Literary Setting Julia Frankau
This melodramatic story pits evil woman against ideal woman, while its male characters are more mixed. JF remains in control of her melodramatic plot and sometimes deliberately purple style: she succeeds in her business of...
Literary responses Jane Gardam
JG continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
JG 's father's response to her Booker short-listing...
Publishing Elizabeth Gaskell
In keeping with the policies of Household Words and All the Year Round, EG 's short fiction continued to appear there anonymously. She earned significant income from it, for Dickens paid her at least...
Publishing Elizabeth Gaskell
Strained in her relationship with Dickens , and despite not entirely easy relations with Thackeray , EG placed Curious if True in the first issue of Thackeray's new Cornhill Magazine in February 1860.
Some pressure...
Publishing Elizabeth Gaskell
She again came into conflict with Dickens , who against her wishes inserted the word dark in the title, stressing the melodrama rather than the mundane in the story of murder and paternal possessiveness in...
Leisure and Society Elizabeth Gaskell
EG attended the opening of the Manchester Free Library , the first major, free public lending library in England, at which speakers included Charles Dickens , Edward Bulwer Lytton and William Makepeace Thackeray .
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber.
303-4
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Gaskell
In May 1849 EG attended a lavish dinner given by Charles Dickens to celebrate the publication of David Copperfield; Jane Welsh Carlyle , also in attendance, acidly noted that Gaskell was a natural unassuming...
Literary responses Elizabeth Gaskell
The Athenæum's Henry Fothergill Chorley said that we have met with few pictures of life among the working classes at once so forcible and so fair as Mary Barton.
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge.
62
He compared the...
Publishing Elizabeth Gaskell
EG 's shorter fiction was a mainstay of periodicals edited by Charles Dickens : first Household Words and then its successor, All the Year Round. His magazines also provided outlets for her longer works...

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