The Year That Transformed Dickens (or Did It?)

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 previous 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 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 one more type of exhibition — “an awesome show of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by a gentle contemplation of all eyes, and regular union of all hearts and palms, set proper!”

As soon as the exhibition had opened, Douglas-Fairhurst admits, Dickens made solely “scanty” references to it in letters, expressing a imprecise disapprobation: “I’ve at all times had an instinctive feeling towards the exhibition, of a faint, inexplicable kind.” But Douglas-Fairhurst focuses “The Turning Level” insistently on the exhibition and its that 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’ may do was to remodel this confusion” of the exhibition “into one thing extra coherent. Simultaneous occasions may very well be was sequences; the babble of a crowd may very well be concentrated into conversations between identifiable people; the seemingly random occasions of life may very well be rearranged right into a plot. And in doing this Dickens wouldn’t solely alter the course of his personal profession as a novelist, he would change the way forward for the novel.”

This actually is unnecessary, 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 every part is linked collectively in an unlimited community. That is true of “Bleak Home,” however it’s also 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 may be a query of diploma somewhat than high quality; “David Copperfield,” accomplished in 1850, had been fairly darkish, as had “Dombey and Son” (1846-48). Even approach again in 1837 “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’s second novel, had been darkish, with just a few characters (and of these not essentially 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 couple of gold nuggets — the scrapbook saved in the course of the novice theatricals by the Duke of Devonshire, for instance. The issue is that Douglas-Fairhurst’s competition that 1851 was a particular turning level in Dickens’s life is under no circumstances persuasive. And his ebook tells us little or no we don’t already find out about Dickens from earlier biographies.