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.
Waters argues that MEB
ought not to be condemned for clichés that she herself helped to establish. Rather we should examine them and the genre of the detective or sensation novel as an index of...
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
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
Eliza Meteyard
The style is frequently Dickens
ian, and as in The Pickwick Papers the action is itinerant and the characters frequently caricatures of vice. R. W. Lightbown
, editor of the 1970 edition of EM
's...
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...
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
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
Edna Lyall
In 1912 Virginia Woolf
, reviewing a book about Dickens, remarked how in country inns on a wet weekend the walker frustrated by the weather would find on the single bookshelf just two authors: Dickens
Literary responses
Ethel Lilian Voynich
Overall, however, The Gadfly was a success to a degree that not one of ELV
's subsequent novels could achieve.
Garlick, Barbara. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Editor Mitchell, Sally, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988, p. 837.
837
She did not learn about its popularity in Europe, especially in the Soviet Union...
