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.
Charles Wood
states that Mildred Arkell seeks to address the hopelessness that fell upon so many when the ports were opened:
Wood, C. W. Memorials of Mrs. Henry Wood. Third, R. Bentley and Son, 1895.
45
a reference to Wood's family's financial loss which followed from the changes...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Paston
At the beginning of the play, the generation gap is marked by Dickens
's Old Curiosity Shop: while the parents dissolve in tears, their daughter cries out with embarrassment, Silly old Dickens again! You...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles
COCE
headed her book with two lines from Thomas Campion
: Alas, poor book . . . go spread thy papery wings. / Thy lightness cannot help or hurt my fame.
qtd. in
O’Conor Eccles, Charlotte. Modern Men. Leadenhall Press, 1887.
prelims
She walks a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Mozley
These attractive essays in belles lettres employ a relaxed, personal speaking voice (which does not, however, reveal its gender), which puts forward literary opinions with casual confidence. Many essays (like Samuel Johnson
's before them)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maya Angelou
On the glamorous idea of touring with a show in Europe, MA
writes that her images of London came from Dickens
and Winston Churchill
, her images of Paris from Guy de Maupassant
, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Her influence on Virginia Woolf
is incalculable. ATR
was a model from within the Stephen family of an independent and money-earning woman writer. Her prose, in particular the impressionistic imagery and associative diction of her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
In the capacity of the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor, AS
delivered four lectures to students of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford
. Considering her stated dislike of lecturing from her days at Strathclyde
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
303-4
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.
qtd. in
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1991.
62
He compared the...
Literary responses
Charlotte Maria Tucker
Critic J. S. Bratton
calls this book the kind of perversion of well-loved stories which Dickens
and others found so reprehensible. She nevertheless maintains that Tucker tells the tales with some zest.
Bratton, Jacqueline S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm, 1981.
This work drew her first published review in the Times, which was highly appreciative and noted that the fictions were now claimed by Mr. George Eliot—a name unknown to us.
qtd. in
Carroll, David, editor. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Barnes and Noble, 1971.
61
The Saturday Review...
Literary responses
Patricia Wentworth
The Gazette awarded PW
a prize of 250 guineas for her work.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, remarked that the Dickens
of A Tale of Two Cities had...
Literary responses
Harriett Jay
This novel fared badly at the hands of the Academy, which called it far from dull . . . even bright and easy, but fatally lack[ing] the strength and freshness we naturally expect from...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
Dickens
described EG
's The Heart of John Middleton (December 1850) as a story of extraordinary power, worked out with a vigour and truthfulness that very few people could reach.
Uglow, Jennifer S. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. Faber and Faber, 1993.
253
Miller, Anita, and Elizabeth Gaskell. “Preface and Chronology”. My Lady Ludlow, Academy Chicago, 1995, pp. 7-10.
