The Turning Point by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The Turning Point: 1851 – A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Knopf, 2022

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Dickens scholar with a theory. If that sentence doesn’t terrify you, his new book The Turning Point: 1851 – A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World is doubtless something you’ll find interesting. Keyhole histories like this, looking at one thin slice of a famous person’s life, books like Bill Goldstein’s The World Broke in Two or James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, can often combine the best elements of biography and monograph. 

Douglas-Fairhurst’s book certainly does that, and the year he asserts changed both Dickens and the world is 1851. It’s not 1807, the year England abolished slavery; it’s not 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne; it’s not 1848, the famous year of revolutions in Europe; it’s neither 1832, 1867, or 1884, all years of major Reform bills that fundamentally altered the shape of English life. No, the year he has in mind is 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. 

It was a momentous year for Charles Dickens, without doubt. In that year, within the space of a single month, he lost both his father and daughter Dora. He also moved house in November of that year, to Tavistock House, where he would the following year write Bleak House, which Douglas-Fairhurst refers to not only as “the greatest fictional experiment” of the author’s career but also “a signpost towards the future,” the inaugural attempt by Dickens to “reassemble Britain on the page – as he pieced together fragments of contemporary life to reflect the world his readers knew, while at the same time offering them a model of the fairer, kinder world they could enjoy if they accepted the need for reform.” 

All of which might be true, but it’s got precious little to do with Anno Domini 1851. Douglas-Fairhurst does a very readable, very energetic job narrating all the day-by-day things going on in the great author’s life during that year – a full-length biography of Dickens by this biographer would be a thing to behold – but he scarcely even seems to remember his titular theory, much less substantiate it. 

The crux seems to be, as mentioned, the Great Exhibition, a cultural show for which the arresting Crystal Palace was built for a marveling populace. It’s a very interesting subject in its own right, but seems to get Douglas-Fairhurst a bit over-excited. “No matter how much the country’s prosperity was accompanied by – or even built on – lives of grinding poverty, the Crystal Palace became famous as a structure that had allowed Britain to transform itself into the leading industrial economy in the world,” he writes. “It was the national equivalent of Clark Kent entering a phone booth and exiting as Superman.”

This is nonsense, of course. Sometimes a Crystal Palace is just a Crystal Palace. Dickens’s extensive personal and professional correspondence all throughout the year 1851 demonstrate pretty clearly that he gave the Great Exhibition just about the same passing interest that most Londoners did. It was a publicity stunt, not a cultural watershed. 

But if it didn’t particularly fire the imagination of Charles DIckens, it clearly does fire the imagination of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and that’s fortunate for readers; this book reminds is – in a way so few books about the man do – how infinitely interesting Dickens was, how oddly elusive for such an attention-seeker, how multifaceted despite his constant bustling. The Turning Point won’t convince many readers that Charles Dickens – much less the world – was changed in 1851, but it’ll convince them of something maybe more important: that more Dickens books by Douglas-Fairhurst will always be welcome.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.