Ten years ago, Oxford professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst published an account of Charles Dickens’s youth and early life called Becoming Dickens. His new book on the Victorian writer, Turning Point, is less a conventional life than, to quote the author, a “slow biography.” By that he means “an attempt to slow a life down until it returns to something closer to the texture of ordinary experience.”
The turning point of the title is the Great Exhibition of 1851 held at Hyde Park, which, he argues, transformed the art of Dickens and his contemporaries.
By the end of 1850, Dickens had already published Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield and “established himself in the public mind as something more than just another writer.” He was immensely influential on popular culture: “So far it had generated theatrical adaptations, songs, catchphrases, and even items of merchandise like Pickwick pastries.” Dickens, says Douglas-Fairhurst, “had become one of the few writers known by members of the public who couldn’t even read.”
The Great Exhibition was seen as a vindication of Britain’s industrial power. Dickens was sceptical about its benefits. At first, he decided “to let his house for six months,” after visiting Hyde Park in December 1850. He wanted to get away from the distraction of the looming festival to focus on more pressing issues, such as “political reform and social justice.”
Nevertheless, visiting the exhibition exposed Dickens to the economic and social fissures of his society. He had already chronicled the nation’s grinding poverty, but the Great Exhibition showcased outstanding innovations in art and industry. The experience made Dickens write in a different way: starting with Bleak House (1853), he took on the state-of-the-nation novel that examined England “in relentless close-up: north and south, city and country, rich and poor.”
Turning Point is a perceptive and enjoyable account of how deeply enmeshed Dickens’s art was with the shifting cultural landscape of mid-Victorian England; it illustrates why he was the emblematic novelist of the age.
