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
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Maria Hall
The book provides a harsh critique of English boarding schools. Its account of school life may be autobiographical.
Keane, Maureen. Mrs. S.C. Hall: A Literary Biography. Colin Smythe, 1997.
110
In a footnote AMH refers to Dickens 's Nicholas Nickleby: It may be necessary to...
Intertextuality and Influence Agnes Maule Machar
Roland Graeme, Knight incorporates wide-ranging allusions to figures such as Goethe , Dickens , Browning , Ruskin , Thoreau , Tennyson , Carlyle , and Handel . Critic Carole Gerson compares it to earlier nineteenth-century...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Gaskell
A recurring theme in Cranford is the resistance to change of this insular group—who are convinced, for instance, that robberies must be perpetrated by strangers and that a Signor Brunoni, who turns out to...
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Waters
SW puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Despite its sensational plot and purple prose, MEB 's first attempt at infusing a touch of poetry and the subjective into her writing through character painting
qtd. in
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979.
161
does result in greater character development than in...
Intertextuality and Influence Isabella Bird
She used her royalties to buy boats for impoverished Scottish fishermen.
Kaye, Evelyn. Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer. Blue Penguin Publications, 1994.
29-30
There were literary precedents for the kind of book IB created on her return to England. Frances Trollope had published in 1832 her...
Intertextuality and Influence Alice Walker
The opening words of the title are quoted from June Jordan . The opening words of the text, more surprisingly, come from Dickens : It is the worst of times. It is the best of...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB infused a touch of poetry more literally by frequent allusion to works by Tennyson , including Mariana, The Deserted House, and The Lotos-Eaters. Her trademark use of other authors' texts as...
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, 1993.
303-4
Literary responses Lucy Walford
The journal likened the development of character in Walford's Mr Druitt to that of Dickens 's John Jarndyce, in Bleak House. It also thought the ending to be one of LW 's best: she...
Literary responses Adelaide Procter
Dickens in his preface praised AP highly—not for poetry but for humility. His celebration of her modest opinion of her own achievement implied that other women had exaggerated ideas about theirs. AP, he said, never...
Literary responses Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Dickens 's daughter Kate recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB 's novels, and George Moore liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Literary responses Caroline Norton
This novel went quickly through four editions, but the reviewers found it immoral. The heroine's behaviour was roundly censured, and so was the painful and repulsive picture of society in general. Again CN defended herself...
Literary responses Margaret Drabble
The British Book News review likened this book, as a state-of-the-nation novel, to Dickens 's Hard Times. The review concluded: If this is not one of Margaret Drabble's best-balanced books, it presents a powerful...
Literary responses Margaret Oliphant
Both Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
12
MO was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott (Grace Greenwood) that...

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