San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Was 1851 a pivotal year for Charles Dickens?
In ‘Turning Point,’ Robert Douglas-fairhurst makes claims that he can’t quite back up
In the very title of his latest book on Victorian literature, Robert Douglasfairhurst makes a claim that he is then obliged to substantiate: “The Turning Point: 1851 — A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World.”
The world? No doubt 1851 changed the world, but then every year changes the world, and 1851 has no more right to that distinction than 1815, or 1848, or 1861, or 1870. It seems to me that I’ve read several books just in the last year or so that have contained a subtitle about the something-or-other that changed the world, so perhaps it is time to retire that one.
The year that changed Charles Dickens? That is a nicer question, and Douglasfairhurst, an Oxford professor and fellow of Magdalen College who has published previous books on Dickens and Lewis Carroll, should have the chops to answer it, if it is answerable.
What was special about 1851? Dickens would turn 39 that year, and was at the height of his career as a “novelist, playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist, amateur conjurer, hypnotist.”
Editing and writing for his magazine Household Words, which he had launched only a year previously, would have been a full-time job for anyone else, but he was involved in several other projects as well as thinking about his next novel.
He was trying, with the help of Edward Bulwer-lytton, to establish a “Guild of Literature and Art” that would function as a mutual aid society for authors. To raise money for this endeavor, the two writers were organizing an amateur theatrical production to present benefit performances. Bulwer-lytton would write the main drama, Dickens a farcical afterpiece; Wilkie Collins was pressed into service as an actor, and the architect Joseph Paxton had agreed to build the stage in Devonshire House, the grand London seat of the Duke of Devonshire.
Dickens also continued to be closely involved with Urania Cottage, the home he and the philanthropist Angela Burdettcoutts had created for “fallen women,” in which the girls were trained in the domestic arts before being sent back into the world — preferably to the colonies — to start respectable lives. He had also become fascinated by the activities of London’s new Detective Police, and followed one Inspector Field on his nightly beat, writing about the adventure for Household Words.
There were some dramas in Charles and Catherine Dickens’ domestic life that year. The year 1851 saw the death of Dickens’ father, an event that raised ambivalent emotions in the son; he had remained loyal and supportive of the old man despite having brutally caricatured him as Mr. Micawber in “David Copperfield.” A baby daughter, Dora, also died. Most large families at that time lost one or two children, but this was still a trauma for both parents. And in 1851, the family moved into a large house in Bloomsbury — a move, and an extensive renovation, whose minutest detail Charles oversaw with obsessive attention.
In the life of the British nation, 1851 was most notable for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in the enormous Crystal Palace that Paxton had erected in Hyde Park for the purpose. Prince Albert, the organizer of the exhibition, idealized this display of scientific and technological achievement as a step toward the inevitable “realization of the unity of mankind,” but not everyone saw it this way. In the New Year’s edition of Household Words, Dickens asked whether the nation should not instead be uniting for another sort of exhibition — “a great display of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by a steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all hearts and hands, set right!”
In “The Turning Point,” Douglas-fairhurst focuses insistently on the exhibition and its meaning to Dickens, building a connection between the exhibition and the novel he would begin serializing in March of the following year, “Bleak House,” that can only be called tenuous.
“What a novel like ‘Bleak House’ could do was to transform this confusion” of the exhibition “into something more coherent. Simultaneous events could be turned into sequences; the babble of a crowd could be concentrated into conversations between identifiable individuals; the seemingly random events of life could be rearranged into a plot. And in doing this Dickens would not only alter the direction of his own career as a novelist, he would change the future of the novel.”
This really makes no sense, and neither does Douglasfairhurst’s other major claim, that with “Bleak House,” Dickens introduced a new theme — also, somehow, influenced by the exhibition — that everyone and everything is connected together in a vast network. This is true of “Bleak House,” but it is also true of other novels.
Douglas-fairhurst follows the critic Lionel Stevenson’s judgment that Dickens’ “dark” novels began with “Bleak House,” but surely that is a question of degree rather than quality; “David Copperfield,” completed in 1850, had been pretty dark, as had “Dombey and Son” (1846-48).
Even way back in 1837, “Oliver Twist,” Dickens’ second novel, had been dark, with only a few characters (and of those not the most memorable) achieving happy endings.
Douglas-fairhurst writes elegantly if diffusely, and has clearly spent many hours trawling among the ephemera of the period. Most of this has turned up only unnecessary details, although there are a few gold nuggets — the scrapbook kept during the amateur theatricals by the Duke of Devonshire, for example. The problem is that Douglasfairhurst’s contention that 1851 was a special turning point in Dickens’ life is in no way persuasive. And his book tells us very little we don’t already know about Dickens from previous biographies.
As a novelist, Dickens was beyond praise. But — as this book demonstrates once again — he was not the nicest guy in the world. Not that anyone should expect a major novelist to be a nice guy, but Dickens posed as one; he very deliberately created a persona, then proceeded to act it out in a frenetic manner.
“He looked at all things and people dramatically,” one friend remembered. “He assigned to all of us characters; and in his company we could not help playing our parts.”
Dickens was a bad father and a worse husband; he was also a control freak of the deepest dye. The “dark” novels came out of his own darkness as much as they derived from that of the fallen world he saw everywhere around him: His dark characters strike our souls, while those who represent sweetness and light we are apt to forget.
If 1851 marked any kind of turning point for Dickens, it would seem to have had little to do with the Great Exhibition and everything to do with the onset of middle age, disillusionment, the dawning realization that he could not mold his children as he molded his fictional characters, that he could not love his wife, and that the world, in spite of the “progress” he professed faith in, would not improve.