The Turning Point

A Year that Changed Dickens and the World

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:2nd Sep '21

£25.00

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The Turning Point cover

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 PICK IN THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN*

From the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice comes a major new biography of Charles Dickens, tracing the year that would transform his life and times.

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's also a turbulent time 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.

'A startling and exciting writer' A. S. BYATT, SPECTATOR

This tremendous book dazzles and delights... it's full of discoveries. A glorious book; revealing and unravelling Charles Dickens before our very eyes, melding his life and his work, using scholarship, wit and passion - a triumph. * Miriam Margolyes *
This immersive biography, by the author of the Costa-shortlisted The Story of Alice, had me hooked...published in a sumptuous package, with illustrations throughout. * The Bookseller, Editor’s Choice *
Clever and witty, packed with fiercely academic research and erudite analysis, but written in featherlight, elegant prose. -- Natalie Haynes
The Turning Point...builds incrementally towards Bleak House...[and] makes for a very satisfying finale... Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has taken pains of his own and this wonderfully entertaining book is the result. -- Anthony Quinn * Observer *
Douglas-Fairhurst is a shrewd, amusing and original guide... [he] gives you fascinating facts... [and] a brisk and brilliant analysis of Bleak House. -- Laura Freeman * The Times *
[The Turning Point] hums with the intellectual life of the day. -- Rose Shepherd * Saga Magazine *
Taking his cue from that novel [Bleak House], Douglas-Fairhurst uses a fascinating range of interconnected sources, side-plots and telling details to dramatise the complex social and imaginative web out of which it came...He gives us history not as grand narrative or teleology but as total immersion and multiplicity. As such, Douglas-Fairhurst invites us to feel what it felt like to be Dickens in 1851. -- Lucasta Miller * Financial Times *
A fascinating biography that ultimately brings fresh insight to the life of Charles Dickens and his work as a novelist. -- Tom Williams * Spectator *
Sparklingly informative * Guardian *
The 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. -- Tomiwa Owolade * Prospect *

ISBN: 9781787330702

Dimensions: 240mm x 162mm x 34mm

Weight: 691g

368 pages