Jason Furman's Reviews > The Turning Point: A Year in the Life of Charles Dickens

When you read about Charles Dickens’ life it is striking how much he did other than write his novels. He edited journals, starred and produced in amateur theatricals, did readings, engaged in charitable works, and much much more. After a frenzied start to his writing career (e.g., the writing and publication of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist overlapped), he could go years at time without even working on a novel. It is tempting to wonder whether all of this was time well spent when he only produced 15 novels, much less than the similarly energetic and peripatetic but more focused on writing Honoré de Balzac. The amateur theatricals were, presumably, entertaining for the few hundred people who were involved or saw them but the time could have been used to build on the permanent legacy that Charles Dickens created for humanity.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point helps to partially answer this question by providing a detailed biography of a single year in Dickens' life: 1851. It is an interesting choice because Dickens published nothing of note that year (just some articles in his journal Household Words and much of A Child's History of England). None of the dramatic events of his life (e.g., meeting Ellen Ternan) happened that year, beyond the death of his father, and the year does not even appear in some chronologies of the major events of Dickens’ life and career.

Douglas-Fairhurst, however, chooses this year because Dickens wrote the first several chapters of Bleak House towards the end of 1851 with serial publication starting in March 1852. Bleak House is my favorite Dickens novel and widely considered the beginning of a new darker more complex phase of his writing. By putting the year 1851 under a microscope it is interesting to come across various serendipitous events or thoughts that eventually get reworked into the novel.

Douglas-Fairhurst does not write retroactively, he doesn’t start out to say let’s find everything that led to Bleak House. Instead he writes prospectively, talking about a minute series of events, some of which end up mattering for Dickens’ writing but most of which h do not. In a way, that helps address the question I began with.

I would not recommend this book for newcomers to Dickens. You don’t need much knowledge of his writing (although if you haven’t read Bleak House it would be hard to find this interesting), but there are much better biographies of his entire life or of another turning point year, the one in which he wrote A Christmas Carol, of even Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. But if you’re a big Dickens fan you’ll want to read this one too.