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
Friends, Associates Jane Welsh Carlyle
JWC attended a dinner party given by Charles Dickens ; she felt it to be ostentatious.
Surtees, Virginia. Jane Welsh Carlyle. Michael Russell, 1986.
203-4
Friends, Associates Jane Welsh Carlyle
As his fame grew, Thomas was increasingly invited to the homes of London's political and intellectual elite, while Jane moved in her own social circle, which included Charles Dickens , John Forster , Giuseppe Mazzini
Friends, Associates Wilkie Collins
WC first met Charles Dickens in 1851 when he acted in one of Dickens's amateur theatricals. It was an important relationship for Collins, and the two collaborated on a number of works. The Woman in...
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. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1985.
Friends, Associates Georgiana Chatterton
In Italy GC met one of her closest friends, Helen Selina Blackwood , Caroline Norton 's elder sister.
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
26
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Back in England, she met and liked Walter Savage Landor .
Dering, Edward Heneage, and Georgiana Chatterton. Memoirs of Georgiana, Lady Chatterton. Hurst and Blackett, 1878.
37
She moved and entertained...
Friends, Associates Harriet Downing
HD 's obituary credited her with a large circle of friends, literary and otherwise, for whom she was always ready to perform helpful services such as finding a publisher for an author or a gallery...
Friends, Associates Caroline Chisholm
Charles Dickens paid a visit to CC at her house in Islington.
Kiddle, Margaret, and Sir Douglas Copland. Caroline Chisholm. 2nd ed., Melbourne University Press, 1957.
140
Friends, Associates William Harrison Ainsworth
At his home in Kensal Green he hosted many Victorian literary lions including Charles Dickens , William Makepeace Thackeray , Douglas Jerrold , William Wordsworth , and illustrator and collaborator George Cruikshank .
Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa, editors. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
The Concise Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1985. Oxford University Press, 1992, 3 vols.
Friends, Associates Fanny Aikin Kortright
She was a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne (whom she never met, but of whose wife and family she remained a faithful friend and correspondent after Hawthorne's death), Bulwer Lytton , and Charles Kingsley (all of...
Friends, Associates Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
To her many friends and visitors Lady Blessington soon added the exiled Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte , John Forster , and in the early 1840s, Charles Dickens .
Molloy, Joseph Fitzgerald. The Most Gorgeous Lady Blessington. 4th ed., Downey, 1896.
340-1, 376, 419-0
After Louis Napoleon's escape...
Friends, Associates Frances Sarah Hoey
Amongst her close friends FSH counted the novelist and journalist Edmund Yates , who (she recalled in one of her Lady's Letters) introduced her to Charles Dickens . Her relationship with Yates, which was...
Friends, Associates Hans Christian Andersen
HCA dedicated his book A Poet's Day Dreams to Charles Dickens , whom he visited in 1857. He also, while visiting England, stayed with William and Mary Howitt at The Elms, Lower Clapton. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Friends, Associates Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Her father's closest friends were from the literary elite: the ProctersAnne Procter and the CarlylesJane Welsh Carlyle . ATR was friends with Dickens 's daughters, particularly Kate Dickens .
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1981.
30-1, 45
George Smith was from the 1840s a...
Health Augusta Ada Byron
Eventually Ada required heavy doses of laudanum to lessen the pain of her lengthy decline.
Woolley, Benjamin. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter. Macmillan, 1999.
353-5
On 19 August 1852 her friend Charles Dickens complied with her wish that he should visit her deathbed to...
Health Adelaide Procter
Dickens , in his introduction to Legends and Lyrics, initiated the view that AP had shortened her life as a result of her conviction that her life must not be dreamed away, and that...

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