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.
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Q. D. Leavis
Responding to recent charges that Brontë
's novel is stylistically flawed, incoherent in intention, and excessively melodramatic and violent, QDL
argues that the text, although not a seamless work of art, belongs, along with Tolstoy
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Vernon Lee
In her first essay, Lee offers a summary analysis of the English novelistic tradition. Judging them especially, though not entirely, on their treatments of morality, she evaluates writers including Jane Austen
, Maria Edgeworth
,...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Rebecca West
This series of essays grapples with the relation of the human will to religious and civil authority, as illustrated in various masterpieces of Western literature.
She reflects on her experiences at Gad's Hill Place, the last home of her grandfather Charles Dickens
, which became her own immediate family's home for several years. The first-person essay contains MD's fragmented...
The subplot of Blue Belles features a current literary sensation, whose overnight success secures him in the course of a single month 376 invitations to dinner, 120 requests for personal inscriptions, 70 for autographs, and...
The contemporary story features a self-educated working-class intellectual and freethinker whose characterisation draws on many strands of thought of the day. Drawn after the model of self-made men such as Daniel Macmillan
, William Lovett
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Isa Blagden
Poems also includes IB
's ten-stanza tribute to Charles Dickens
, whom she reveres as a second Shakespeare and as England's crowning sheaf . . . A priceless harvest claimed by God.
Blagden, Isa, and Alfred Austin. Poems. William Blackwood and Sons, 1873.
134, 136
Alluding...
Travel
Arnold Bennett
AB
landed in New York City to hit a version of the American lecture tour circuit; his publisher, George Doran
, claimed that no other visitor from Europe had had such a welcome since Dickens
.
Drabble, Margaret. Arnold Bennett: A Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.
186
Travel
Harriet Beecher Stowe
She was received by Dickens
, Lady Byron
, Anna Jameson
, the Lord Mayor of London, and various members of the nobility.
Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford University Press, 1994.
233, 234
Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Twayne, 1989.
44-5
The working-class Scots poet Janet Hamilton
's tribute to...
Wealth and Poverty
Charlotte Smith
Poverty even forced her to sell her books: a thousand volumes, in English and French (partly, perhaps, to prevent their falling into her husband's hands). After his death she received some income from the estate...
Wealth and Poverty
Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn
, later Linton, sold the family home at Gadshill to Charles Dickens
after her father died.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
