50 The New York ReviewBeing Dickens
Michael Gorra
The Turning Point:
1851— A Year That Changed
Charles Dickens and the World
by Robert Douglas- Fairhurst.
Knopf, 357 pp., $30.00I never tire of its nine hundred pages, of
reading it, teaching it, talking about it.
“London. Michaelmas term lately over,
and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lin-
coln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November
weather,” with the streets full of the
horse droppings that the Victorians
euphemistically called mud, and the
chimney smoke perpetually “lowering
down,” as if the city were snowing soot.
Those are the opening sentences of
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–
1853); read them aloud and try to stop
yourself from going on. “Dogs, undistin-
guishable in mire. Horses, scarcely bet-
ter; splashed to their very blinkers,” and
pedestrians slipping and sliding around
them as the shit in the streets goes on
“accumulating at compound interest.”
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river,”
and down it too, flowing and rolling
and creeping, and in speaking those
lines your voice turns foghorn, with the
word booming out onomatopoeically.
Fog. It gets into your throat, it makes
you wheeze, and it pinches your toes.
So Dickens says, on this day when the
sun seems to have died, and the haggard
glow of gaslight can barely brighten the
mist. Mist? No, nor fog either, really.
It’s what we now call smog, that’s the
real London particular, a greenish- gray
pea soup; smoke and fog together, the
deadly combination of river vapors and
soft coal.
Only the novel’s own eerie light can
pierce it, with a voice as implacable as
the weather itself; a voice like that of
an unforgiving God. Dickens loads his
prose with gerunds, a series of on going
unfinished actions; he writes in the
present tense and no single sentence in
these opening paragraphs is grammati-
cally complete. Fragments only, though
with subordinate clauses and preposi-
tional phrases. Everything moves but
nothing goes anywhere, a furious sta-
sis in which the novel’s very language
suggests the interminable lawsuit on
which its plot depends. But finally he
gives us a verb, at the start of the fourth
paragraph: “The raw afternoon is raw-
est, and the dense fog is densest....” Is.
These things are, this city is what it is,
and woe to anyone who might hope to
change it.
Except for Dickens himself. He
won’t let go of that prosecutorial voice,
but after two relentless chapters he
switches out of it and into a register
that is in every way its opposite. “I have
a great deal of difficulty in beginning to
write my portion of these pages”: so we
read at the start of chapter 3, halfway
through the first of the novel’s twenty
monthly serial installments. Those
words belong to a young woman named
Esther Summerson, who speaks to us
in the first person and the past tense,
and the rest of the book will alternate
between her voice and the brooding
third- person, present- tense narration
of its opening pages.
Dickens isn’t usually celebrated for
his technical innovations, but Bleak
House is one of the greatest examplesof successful experimentation in the
language. His earlier novels had at
times used the present tense for local
effect, a way to ratchet up a sense of
immediacy, but neither he nor any-
one else had ever before relied on it
so fully. And then there’s the fact that
the narrative is split, multi voiced in a
way that’s familiar to us now because
Dickens made it so: split into two equal
and competing parts, with neither of
them framing or controlling the other.
The book begins in one voice and it
ends in Esther’s, but they never fuse;
their dialectic finds no synthesis. Nor
will Esther ever appear in those impe-
rious third- person chapters, and we’re
not told just how she knows that her
tale is but a “portion of these pages.”
In that one line she seems more aware
of the book’s other narrator than he—
inevitably he— ever is of her, but part of
the genius of Bleak House lies in its re-
fusal to provide answers, its willingness
to let the smoke blow through its own
cracks and fissures. Esther tells us that
her mind quickens when her affection
is engaged, as it is by everyone around
her, and she stands for her creator as
an exemplum of kindness and love. But
not even she can make the world that
Bleak House gives us seem whole.Robert Douglas- Fairhurst teaches
English literature at Oxford and is the
author of Becoming Dickens: The In-
vention of a Novelist (2011), in which
he traced the first years of the writer’s
career, from his initial sketches in jour-
nals now remembered only becausehe wrote for them to the publication
of Oliver Twist (1837–1839). Dickens
had just turned twenty- seven when that
novel ended its serial run, but he didn’t
need its success to make him famous.
The loosely crocheted comedy of The
Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) had al-
ready done that, and for a while Dick-
ens was at work on both books at once,
switching between them in order to
produce his monthly chunk of each. It
all happened with a terrible speed, and
Becoming Dickens itself has something
thrilling about it. It’s an origin story, in
which we watch the hero discover his
vocation and his powers— powers that
had reached their peak in 1851, the
year that Douglas- Fairhurst identifies
as “the turning point.”
That year ended with the start of
Dickens’s work on Bleak House. Its first
monthly part appeared in March 1852,
and it was indeed a turning point in his
career, a moment when his ambitions
seemed to leap. He was never just an en-
tertainer, but he was also the only one
of the great Victorians to publish all his
novels in serial form. His early books
had often seemed improvised, their
incidents invented against a deadline,
and at times the whole suffered from
the sheer vivacity of its separate pieces.
Dickens only started to make detailed
preparatory notes with Dombey and
Son (1846–1848), defining his plot and
his characters in advance, and working
out how to distribute the novel’s events
across the thirty- two pages of its regu-
lar monthly parts.
But Bleak House did something
more. In writing it Dickens found alanguage, a set of totalizing metaphors
and images— the fog, the courts— that
allowed him to pull an apparently dispa-
rate set of characters together into a pic-
ture of his society as a whole. It was the
darkest book he had yet written, as well
as the most closely wrought, and it set a
pattern for the rest of his career: a model
for the similarly encyclopedic Little Dor-
rit (1855–1857) and Our Mutual Friend
(1864–1865), the one controlled by the
image of a debtors’ prison and the other
by the flow of the Thames itself.
Still, a better title for Douglas-
Fairhurst’s new book might play off his
old one: Being Dickens. That is really
what it’s about. There’s little here about
the writing of Bleak House, and the
hours the novelist spent with a pen in
his hand are essentially irrecoverable.
He said almost nothing in his letters
about the new book in the months be-
fore he began it, and little more once he
had, though in May 1852 he did write
to a friend that its fourth installment
was “rather a stunner”; the hyperbole
is characteristic of the man who called
himself the “Inimitable.”
The novel’s composition went
smoothly, and Dickens met most of his
deadlines without difficulty, pressed
only by an installment that included a
murder; in places his revisions make
the manuscript almost illegible, but he
was never at a loss for what should come
next. Yet we do know that he tried to fin-
ish each installment in just two to three
weeks of hard work, which left the rest
of the month for the business— the
performance— of being himself. That’s
where Douglas- Fairhurst really excels,
and why 1851 is such a good year for
him to have chosen. It’s not only smack
i n the m idd le of both the w r iter’s ca reer
and the century itself; it’s also a year in
which Dickens wrote very little fiction
at all, when his entire life seems to have
been spent in public.How did the novelist pass his days?
When did he get up, what did he eat
for breakfast, and how long did he
stay at his desk? What, above all, was
it like to be him? Dickens always had
secrets, but at this point most of them
lay back in his childhood, when his
jovial, improvident father landed in
debtors’ prison and the twelve- year-
old boy had to go to work, sticking
labels on jars of shoe polish. Almost
nobody knew about that, for Dickens
hid his private self behind a tremen-
dous charisma. He was a superb actor
and a skilled amateur magician, and
he had so much nervous energy that at
times he needed to walk himself stu-
pid by marching fifteen or twenty miles
through the night.
His life is thoroughly documented,
and The Turning Point rests on a gen-
erously acknowledged substratum of
documentary research, above all on
the twelve- volume Pilgrim Edition
of his surviving letters.^1 We know
the facts— bacon every morning, andCharles Dickens; illustration by Jeffrey Fisher(^1) The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited
by Madeline House, Graham Storey,
Kathleen Tillotson, and others (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1965–2002).
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