The Turning Point
1851, a Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World
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The Turning Point
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Narrated by:
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Philip Stevens
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Written by:
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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
About this listen
A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer - immersing us in one year of his life - from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice.
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 is also a turbulent year 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. 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.
©2022 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (P)2022 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Times, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, The Spectator
"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.’ . . . it bursts at the seams, ballooned by [Douglas-Fairhurst’s] passion for historical context.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Douglas-Fairhurst (Becoming Dickens) takes an unusual and entertaining approach to biography in this look at a single, monumental year in the life of Charles Dickens. By zeroing in on 1851, a year in which London was going through revolutions in ‘industry and transport’ and the year of the Great Exhibition, which showed England’s grandiose goals of ‘ushering in a new era of global harmony,” Douglas-Fairhurst aims to depict his subject with ‘something closer to the texture of ordinary experience.’ . . . [He] brings Victorian England to vivid life, recounting Dickens’s commute through a smoke-drenched London and Prince Albert’s closing of the Great Exhibition in October, and makes a convincing case that the year was pivotal in the writer’s life. A ceaselessly surprising study of Dickens and the era in which he lived, this will be a treat for literature lovers.”—Publishers Weekly
"Robert Douglas-Fairhurst makes the case that this was the year that made Dickens. Boz could certainly bustle. We find him editing a journal, staging a play, co-writing a cookbook, walking 20 miles in a day and instructing fallen women in the virtues of truthfulness, industry, temperance and punctuality. A fascinating portrait of the author and his accelerating times."—The Times (UK)