THE TURNING POINT

A chronicle of Victorian London and the events that sparked the genesis of Bleak House.

In 1851, six months before Charles Dickens began writing Bleak House, the Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park, inviting visitors from around the world to marvel at British feats of invention and industry. Not only a symbol of the Victorian Age, the exhibition was emblematic of broadened connectivity throughout the world. Dickens was moved: He considered the state of the working class and saw 1851 “as an opportunity for the country to do things differently.” With estimable research and prose as electric as a newly laid telegraph, Oxford English professor Douglas-Fairhurst presents this pivotal year in Dickens’ life as London’s sociopolitical machinations kindled in him a “growing sense of a serious social mission.” The author explains that his book could be considered a “microhistory” or a “slow biography,” but it bursts at the seams, ballooned by his passion for historical context. Readers should be ready to cover a wide swath of the Dickens chronology with an eager guide. For example, October saw the publication of a recipe book Dickens compiled with his wife. Douglas-Fairhurst expounds on this curious moment with a quick dive through Dickens’ marital relationship over the years, all of which is buffeted by an excited jaunt through supper scenes in Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and more. Later, a close, academic reading of Bleak House’s opening pages is a welcome change of pace. 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.