The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst John Batchelor The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. London: Cape. 2021. 355 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1–78733–070–2. This is an extraordinarily clever book. For a reader who is completely new to Dickens, the whole story of his relationship with his age is set out in a full and comprehensible form. David Copperfield is a mirror of Charles Dickens. The 'CD' of Dickens's initials are a reversal of David's initials. His history is the history of the whole of Victorian society taking 1850 as its midpoint. 1850 was a triumphal central year in Victorian culture, the year of Dickens's 'story of my own life', of Tennyson's great autobiographical elegy 'In Memoriam', and also of the first publication of Wordsworth's masterpiece, The Prelude. The 'turning point' of this book's title also is a physical structure, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, opened 1 May 1851, which for this study embodies the material success of the British Empire at its most affluent and resplendent. By 1851, this little island, with its industries, [End Page 614] its navies, and its command of much of the underdeveloped world, was arguably the most powerful civilization that the world had ever seen. Dickens was at the heart of it. Dickens's personal life story had been one of steady social advancement, and the British class system provided the spine of many of his plots. Pip in Great Expectations lives the dream of many a young, ambitious, and socially disadvantaged man of the period. At the same time, his story shows, shockingly, that sudden and unexpected access to great wealth can be a disastrous social evil. The plotting of this novel, with its elaborate network of hidden relationships, displays another of Dickens's leading preoccupations. Hidden relationships form a network which sustains the plot of several of Dickens's masterpieces, and this is particularly true of Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. In his writing life, Dickens was both harnessing the energies of the previous century that drove the Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and development as practised by Fielding, and following the bigger and broader traditions of narrative which drove Don Quixote. The novels which centre on the life of a single figure, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, are themselves phenomenal ragbags of narrative, packed with incidents all of which are part of a significant pattern. Bleak House does more than that, and this book shows that its tumult of incident disappointed and mystified some of its first readers. The fog which dominates some of the early narrative is presented in a sequence of verbal fragments which refuse to form discrete sentences. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst unpicks Dickens's prose here and in so doing demonstrates that a new kind of narrative writing has been evolved. He throws in the fascinating information that the working notes for this were scrappy and fugitive, 'written on pale blue paper, often only a handful of key words for each chapter' (p. 244). In the printed text, main verbs 'have disappeared, to be replaced by participles that describe people sitting jostling, slipping and sliding, but without any sense of purpose or direction' (p. 246). In this novel, Dickens's prose 'is crushed into meaningless fragments that can be swept up and reused' (p. 246). It is as though we are being presented with 'the raw, unshaped stuff of experience before it has been tidied up and repackaged into a story' (p. 247). This book brings out the ruthless drive for absolute control which was a key feature both of Dickens's life and of his success. When his daughter called him a 'very wicked man' she was not referring only to his absolutism within his own family circle but also to the overwhelming drive to power and social ascendancy which he displayed in most aspects of his creative and of his personal life. His 'collaborative' publications were in effect dictatorships. His need to have everything in his imagined world forming a...