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.
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
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
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
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
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...
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
303-4
Literary responses
Harriet Martineau
This prompted Dickens
to proclaim there never was such a wrong-headed woman born—such a vain one—or such a Humbug.
Webb, Robert Kiefer. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. Columbia University Press, 1960.
347
The Athenæum reviewed the pamphlet harshly as an offence against taste and modesty, chastising HM
Literary responses
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
His article, Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, which covered seven novels she had published since 1862, made a famous personal attack in asserting that her work evidenced familiarity with a very low type of female...
Literary responses
Anna Maria Hall
Dickens
, however, wrote in April 1844 to congratulate her on another periodical article (something on governesses in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal). He felt that she had provided an immense relief among the typical contributions...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Dickens
, editor of Household Words, judged her a reliable contributor, good for anything, although he acknowledged that her reputation for sexual explicitness might do the journal damage.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Literary responses
Eliza Meteyard
In February 1862, Sharpe's London Magazine reviewed The Lady Herbert's Gentlewomen positively, noting that EM
's talents were better suited to a series of shorter pieces than a sustained narrative. It compared her favourably with...
