Dickens And The Daughter Of The House

Feminist criticism has not been kind to Charles Dickens. The characters George Orwell referred to as 'legless angels' - Little Nell, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson and others - have been conjured as evidence of Dickens' inability to create 'real' women. Critics wishing to rescue him have turned to the dark, angry women - Nancy, Lady Dedlock, Miss Wade - who disrupt the calm surface of some of Dickens' novels. In this book Hilary M. Schor argues that the role of the good daughter is interwoven with that of her angry double in Dickens' fiction, and is the centre of narrative authority in the Dickens' novel. As the good daughters must leave their father's house and enter the world of the marketplace, they transform and rewrite the stories they are empowered to tell. The daughter's uncertain legal status and her power of narrative gave Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.

Examines the role of 'legless angels' (George Orwell), 'angry women' and 'good daughters' in Dicken's narratives.

The daughter in Dickens' fiction is considered not as an emblem of tranquil domesticity and the hearth-fire, but as a bearer of cultural values - and as a potentially disruptive force. The daughter's secret inheritance, her 'portion', is to give Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.

"An account of Charles Dickens' work with destitute girls and young women in mid-eighteenth century London. With support from the millionairess Angela Burdett Coutts, he established a 'safe' house for young women in Shepherd's Bush where they were taken from lives of prostitution and crime and trained for useful employment."--Borders website.

A study of Dickens, his family life & especially the lives of his children as they went out on their own in adulthood. Greatest attention is paid to his child Kate, the "daughter" of the title. Illus.

Katey Dickens was a nineteenth-century artist and socialite, and the beautiful daughter of Charles Dickens. In this illuminating biography, Lucinda Hawksley, herself Dickens's great-great-great-granddaughter, recreates the life of an extraordinarily determined girl who defied Victorian convention to live and love as an independent woman. Blessed with a privileged upbringing in an family that moved between London, France, Switzerland and Italy, Katey pursued her love of painting, acted in her father's plays, modelled for John Everett Millais and, as the daughter of the most famous writer of the time, enjoyed a high profile in Victorian society. Yet she refused to be eclipsed by her father and fought to establish herself as an artist in her own right. Family life in the Dickens household was turbulent and the unhappy atmosphere that followed the eventual breakdown of her parents' marriage drove Katey to marry young. Her first husband was the chronically ailing Charlie Collins, brother of the famous author Wilkie Collins, and theirs was a sexless but otherwise companionable union, while Katey threw herself into a passionate and very un-Victorian affair with celebrated artist Val Prinsep. After Charlie's untimely demise, the widowed Katey married the handsome Italian artist Carlo Perugini, with whom she had fallen deeply in love. Despite the happiness she finally found in her second marriage, Katey often suffered from deep depression, particularly following the death of her beloved father and of her baby. But she remained active, pursuing her career as a painter, championing Charles Dickens's works, and befriending such eminent figures as J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw. Katey Perugini lived to be almost ninety and her artistic prestige, which flourished during her lifetime, still persists to this day. Author of the acclaimed LIZZIE SIDDAL: THE TRAGEDY OF A PRE-RAPHAELITE SUPERMODEL, Linda Hawksley has delved deep into her own family history to research this fascinating new biography, which intimately remembers the life of a supremely independent Victorian woman.