1851 - A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World
by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
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Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2022
368 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer - immersing us in one year of his life - from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice.
The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming.
The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens's London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him and forever alter Britain's relationship with the world. Fully illustrated, and brimming with fascinating details about the larger-than-life man who wrote Bleak House, this is the closest look yet at one of the greatest literary personalities ever to have lived.
"Douglas-Fairhurst, English literature professor at the University of Oxford, takes an unusual and entertaining approach to biography in this look at a single, monumental year in the life of Charles Dickens...Douglas-Fairhurst brings Victorian England to vivid life...A ceaselessly surprising study of Dickens and the era in which he lived, this will be a treat for literature lovers." - Publishers Weekly
"George Orwell wrote that 'the outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the unnecessary detail.' In this sense, Douglas-Fairhurst's history is positively Dickensian. His own words in response to Orwell's quote are an apt mirror: Like Dickens' novels, this book is the work of 'an overflowing imagination that piled ideas on top of each other with a generosity that could be overwhelming.' An untethered literary history that reaches great heights." - Kirkus Reviews
"Douglas-Fairhurst is a shrewd, amusing and original guide....[he] gives you fascinating facts...[and] a brisk and brilliant analysis of Bleak House." - The Times (UK)
"Douglas-Fairhurst's…immersive book echoes the experimental form of the novel, blending stories, sub-plots and telling details to bring to life a complex moment in the life of a city and one of its greatest writers." - Financial Times (UK)
"In The Turning Point, Douglas-Fairhurst sees the events of 1851 as the 'central hinge' in Dickens's life...Douglas-Fairhurst calls his new book a 'slow biography.' Instead of speeding through his subject's life from birth to death, like the manic flickering of a silent film, he stops the clock at a single frame...Douglas-Fairhurst's research is impeccable, and The Turning Point is interwoven with many curious facts and people." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Clever and witty, packed with fiercely academic research and erudite analysis, but written in featherlight, elegant prose." - Natalie Haynes, national best selling author of A Thousand Ships
This information about The Turning Point was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Magdalen College. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland, which was short-listed for the Costa Biography Award and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He writes regularly for publications including the Times (London), the Guardian, TLS, and the Spectator. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on TV adaptations of Jane Eyre, Emma, and Great Expectations, the BBC drama series Dickensian, and the feature film Enola Holmes. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford, England.
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