There have been some dramas in Charles and Catherine Dickens’s home life that yr. Eighteen fifty-one noticed the loss of life of Dickens’s father, an occasion that raised ambivalent feelings within the son; he had remained loyal and supportive of the previous man regardless of having brutally caricatured him as Mr. Micawber in “David Copperfield.” A child daughter, Dora, additionally died. Most massive households at the moment misplaced one or two kids, 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 in depth 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 huge 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 12 months’s version of Family Phrases Dickens requested whether or not the nation mustn’t as an alternative be uniting for an additional type of exhibition — “an amazing show of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by a gentle 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 in opposition to the exhibition, of a faint, inexplicable kind.” 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 referred to 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, someway, influenced by the exhibition — that everybody and the whole lot is related collectively in an unlimited community. That is true of “Bleak Home,” however it is usually true of different novels. Douglas-Fairhurst follows the critic Lionel Stevenson’s judgment that Dickens’s “darkish” novels started with “Bleak Home,” however certainly that could be a query of diploma quite than high quality; “David Copperfield,” accomplished in 1850, had been fairly darkish, as had “Dombey and Son” (1846-48). Even method again in 1837 “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s second novel, had been darkish, with just a few characters (and of these not probably the most memorable) attaining blissful 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 just a few gold nuggets — the scrapbook saved through the newbie 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.
