There have been some dramas in Charles and Catherine Dickens’s home life that yr. Eighteen fifty-one noticed the dying of Dickens’s father, an occasion that raised ambivalent feelings within the son; he had remained loyal and supportive of the outdated man regardless of having brutally caricatured him as Mr. Micawber in “David Copperfield.” A child daughter, Dora, additionally died. Most giant households at the moment misplaced one or two youngsters, however this was nonetheless a trauma for each dad and mom. And in 1851 the household moved into a big home in Bloomsbury — a transfer, and an intensive renovation, whose minutest element Charles oversaw with obsessive consideration.
Within the lifetime of the British nation, 1851 was most notable for the Nice Exhibition of the Works of Trade of All Nations, held within the monumental Crystal Palace that Paxton had erected in Hyde Park for the aim. Prince Albert, the organizer of the exhibition, idealized this show of scientific and technological achievement as a step towards the inevitable “realization of the unity of mankind,” however not everybody noticed it this manner; William Morris, appalled by what he interpreted because the crass materialism of the spectacle, vomited into the bushes. Within the New Yr’s version of Family Phrases Dickens requested whether or not the nation shouldn’t as a substitute be uniting for one more form of exhibition — “a terrific show of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by a gradual contemplation of all eyes, and regular union of all hearts and arms, set proper!”
As soon as the exhibition had opened, Douglas-Fairhurst admits, Dickens made solely “scanty” references to it in letters, expressing a obscure disapprobation: “I’ve at all times had an instinctive feeling towards the exhibition, of a faint, inexplicable type.” But Douglas-Fairhurst focuses “The Turning Level” insistently on the exhibition and its which means to Dickens, constructing a connection between the exhibition and the novel he would start serializing in March of the next yr, “Bleak Home,” that may solely be known as tenuous. “What a novel like ‘Bleak Home’ might do was to rework this confusion” of the exhibition “into one thing extra coherent. Simultaneous occasions might be became sequences; the babble of a crowd might be concentrated into conversations between identifiable people; the seemingly random occasions of life might be rearranged right into a plot. And in doing this Dickens wouldn’t solely alter the route of his personal profession as a novelist, he would change the way forward for the novel.”
This actually is mindless, and neither does Douglas-Fairhurst’s different main declare, that with “Bleak Home” Dickens launched a brand new theme — additionally, one way or the other, influenced by the exhibition — that everybody and the whole lot is related collectively in an enormous community. That is true of “Bleak Home,” however additionally it is true of different novels. Douglas-Fairhurst follows the critic Lionel Stevenson’s judgment that Dickens’s “darkish” novels started with “Bleak Home,” however absolutely that could be a query of diploma reasonably than high quality; “David Copperfield,” accomplished in 1850, had been fairly darkish, as had “Dombey and Son” (1846-48). Even manner again in 1837 “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s second novel, had been darkish, with only some characters (and of these not probably the most memorable) reaching glad endings.
Douglas-Fairhurst writes elegantly if diffusely, and has clearly spent many hours trawling among the many ephemera of the interval. Most of this has turned up solely pointless particulars, though there are a number of gold nuggets — the scrapbook stored in the course of the beginner theatricals by the Duke of Devonshire, for instance. The issue is that Douglas-Fairhurst’s rivalry that 1851 was a particular turning level in Dickens’s life is under no circumstances persuasive. And his e book tells us little or no we don’t already find out about Dickens from earlier biographies.