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.
Both Charlotte Brontë
and Charles Dickens
mentioned the appearance of this novel in their letters.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
12
MO
was so incensed by condescending praise from the US author Sara Jane Lippincott
(Grace Greenwood) that...
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.
9
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
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
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
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
Wilkie Collins
Critical reception was mixed. While Dickens
wrote that the story contains admirable writing,
Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford University Press, 1998.
14
many critics found its discussion of sexualityrevolting.
Gasson, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide. Oxford University Press, 1998.
14
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...
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
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...
