Dickens' Women

Product Information

Harriet lives with John and the two inherit James' fortune and donate it, anonymously, to Mr Dombey.

Dickens and the Image of Women on JSTOR Charles Dickens and the Image of Women on JSTOR

Ternan and her three daughters, pay court to Nelly, and demand that his children and friends toe the line about his relationship with her—or be eternally banished.

I know it was a good squeeze, because, being very plump, whenever she made any little exertion after she was dressed, some of the buttons on the back of her gown flew off. Jarndyce, John An unwilling party in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, guardian of Richard Carstone, Ada Clare, and Esther Summerson; owner of Bleak House in the novel of that name. Harthouse, James A Parliamentary candidate visiting Coketown, he befriends Tom Gradgrind in an attempt to seduce his sister, Louisa, who is in an unhappy marriage to Bounderby.

The Women Around Dickens – Charles Dickens Museum

Gargery, Mrs Joe is Pip's sister, who at "more than twenty years older" cares for Pip after the death of their parents in Great Expectations. Pardiggle, Felix is Mrs Pardiggle's fourth son who is forced to participate in all her causes in Bleak House. Barnacle family, The Controls the Circumlocution Office, where everything goes round in circles, and nothing ever gets done. His heroines, including Flora Finching, Dora Spenlow and Rosa Budd – described in The Mystery of Edwin Drood as “wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish” – are often infuriating to read now. They are schoolteachers, governesses, midwives, landladies, dressmakers, factory workers, laundresses, hairdressers, dancers, and of course middle-class homemakers managing their female servants, of whom there were a million in 1860s England—and many of them were younger than 15.

Here, Tomalin offers little new about Nelly, who lived till 1914, but she does give the inamorata her proper place in a crucial segment of Dickens’s full history.

Top 10 books by Charles Dickens - The Guardian Top 10 books by Charles Dickens - The Guardian

Badger's wife Laura talks incessantly about her two former husbands, Captain Swosser and Professor Dingo, in Bleak House. Dilber, Mrs Scrooge's charwoman who sells his bed linen and curtains to Old Joe when Scrooge is shown shadows of the future by the Ghost of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol. She had not been with us more than a year (I remember her being newly out of mourning at the time it struck me), when I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good. I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow.

Pocket, Matthew Matthew Pocket is Miss Havisham's cousin, who warned her that Compeyson was using her for her money, and then fell out of her favor. This season, feel your best in a new lingerie set or keep up your fitness with our activewear range. Pleasant is an unlicensed pawnbroker, she later overcomes her dislike of Mr Venus's occupation and agrees to marry him in Our Mutual Friend. There were so many fascinating women in Dickens’s life: the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who shocked society with her engagement, at 39, to a fiance who was 17 years her junior and her godson; the anti-slavery campaigner and educationalist Elizabeth Jesser Reid; and the author Elizabeth Gaskell, who Dickens tracked down in 1848 despite her writing anonymously.