54 The New York Reviewat his desk from ten until two— but
Douglas- Fairhurst admits that try-
ing to pin him down is “like grabbing
hold of a handful of smoke.” Dickens
once compared a swollen body he saw
in the Paris morgue to a heap of “over-
ripe figs.” Where did that image come
from? How did he invent it? His prose
is so grotesque and yet so comic, so
consistently surprising, that I find his
inner life impossible to imagine. He’s
rarely subtle, and yet the quirks and
contours of his imagination make
Henry James look simple.
“So much of what a life includes
inevitably falls between the cracks,”
no matter how much we know, and in
consequence Douglas- Fairhurst has
decided to imagine “a different kind of
biography,” not a chronol-
ogy but a portrait of a par-
ticular man at a particular
time. In this The Turning
Point differs from the
two major Dickens biog-
raphies of the past twenty
years. Michael Slater as-
sembled the definitive edi-
tion of his journalism, and
then drew on his own un-
rivaled knowledge of pri-
mary sources to present a
scholarly life of the work-
ing writer.^2 It’s utterly re-
liable, but a bit of a dry
crust, more consulted than
read. Claire Tomalin’s ver-
sion is characteristically
vivid and brisk; it gets the
man but says little about
the work.^3 Neither is completely sat-
isfying, and probably the Dickens ar-
chive is by now too big to be adequately
represented in a single volume.
The odd thing, then, is that the slice
of experience Douglas- Fairhurst offers
seems a workable compromise between
the books of his immediate predeces-
sors. Most biographies “speed up the
events of their subjects’ lives... years
pass in pages.” The Turning Point is
in contrast an exercise in “slow biog-
raphy.” It restricts its scope in order
to give a minutely detailed account of
a single but definitive moment, drop-
ping the pace “until it returns to some-
thing closer to the texture of ordinary
experience.”
Still, such a purposefully narrow
study stands as a late stage in literary
scholarship. It depends on the cradle-
to- grave biographies from which it de-
parts. The book that The Turning Point
most recalls is James Shapiro’s A Year
in the Life of William Shakespeare:
1599 (2005), always remembering that
we know far more about the one writer
than the other. Shapiro made up for
the gaps in our knowledge by telling
us not only about Shakespeare’s plays
but also about everything else that was
happening in England that year, from
the winter weather to yet another in-
vasion of Ireland. Douglas- Fairhurst’s
book tries something similar, but in
places falls short. It succeeds with an
account of the Great Exhibition of
1851, the first of the World’s Fairs, held
in a magnificent greenhouse— a “Crys-tal Palace”— erected in Hyde Park.
Dickens was ambivalent about it, but
the show’s bouncing confident belief
in Progress still consumed his interest.
Yet Douglas- Fairhurst doesn’t fully
earn his subtitle, and his narrative has
more than a few loose ends, bits of news
that he never quite makes relevant. One
of them is an account of a new book
that was published in England in 1851,
under the title The Whale. Melville’s
Moby-Dick was indeed published that
year, but at the time it made virtually no
impression on Dickens or anyone else.Dickens did two big things in the
year before his turning point. One was
finishing the semi- autobiographicalDavid Copperfield (1849–1850), which
he later described as his “favourite
child” among all his books. The other
was starting a weekly magazine called
Household Words. The novel has left a
bigger memory, but in its time the mag-
azine was the more important. He had
always wanted a voice and an influence
beyond his fiction alone, and it gave
him a chance to speak directly about
the issues that mattered to him, to
touch on what he described as “all so-
cial evils, and all home affections and
associations.” He took half the mag-
azine’s profits, along with a generous
salary and payment for his own con-
tributions on top of that. But the only
capital Dickens put into the project was
his talent. Its risks were borne by his
regular publishers, the firm of Brad-
bury and Evans, who wanted to keep
their star happy and had the capacity
to make it work. For they were printers
as well as publishers. They owned their
own presses, as other houses did not,
and could save by using them; they had
a distribution network, and they also
knew how to advertise.
Household Words sold for two pence,
with a weekly circulation of about
38,000 copies, and within a few weeks
was firmly in the black. The magazine
ran some notable fiction, including
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
(1854–1855), along with humorous
sketches and crusading pieces on sub-
jects like city sanitation and the gap
between rich and poor. Its articles were
published anonymously, though Dick-
ens himself wrote a fair portion of its
twenty- four double- columned pages,
and imposed his own voice and vision
upon the rest. Many of its pieces were
devoted to showing how the different
pieces of Victorian society worked—
the post office, say, or a candle factory,
or London’s newly professionalized po-
lice force. In one essay the novelist fol-lowed one of the city’s first detectives
at night as he worked his way through
some of its worst slums; it was wet and
the streetlights were blurred by the
rain, “as if we saw them through tears.”
Household Words was an immediate
success, and Douglas- Fairhurst begins
Dickens’s year with it. It is January 25,
1851, a warmish winter Saturday, and
though the novelist has a “stinking
cold” he nevertheless decides, as he
steps through “his bright green front
door,” to walk the two miles from his
house to the magazine’s offices in Wel-
lington Street, between Covent Garden
and the Strand. He was living then,
with his wife and nine children, in a
house just south of Regent’s Park, and
there were several routes he could take.
But for Douglas-
Fairhurst the particular
path doesn’t matter as
much as the fact that, no
matter which way he went,
the novelist would have
walked through streets
and scenes that he had
already described in his
fiction. “London was
becoming Dickensian,”
Douglas- Fairhurst writes,
and that conceit allows
him to take a panoptic
view of the city: its theaters
and street musicians, the
“bill- stickers” who slapped
advertising posters on
“every square foot of ex-
ternal space,” the urban
renewal that had driven
new streets through some of the city’s
poorest neighborhoods without provid-
ing anywhere for their displaced inhab-
itants to go. He touches on the other
writers with whom Dickens shared
the metropolis: the bombastic Thomas
Carlyle and a young woman from the
provinces who would soon call herself
George Eliot. Then the novelist reaches
his office, and The Turning Point intro-
duces us to the men he worked with.There’s a good bit of biographical
sleight of hand going on here. Douglas-
Fairhurst uses a seasonal calendar to or-
ganize his narrative— winter to spring
and on to winter again, to a December
in which the novelist is fully engaged by
his new book. The result is a skillfully
cast illusion of dailiness, in which time
passes and yet also stands still, with
the seasons providing a narrative spine
on which Douglas- Fairhurst can hang
essayistic accounts of Dickens’s char-
acteristic interests and pastimes. Some
of them were professional, Household
Words above all, and there was his
growing anger at England’s sclerotic
legal system, in which a civil suit might
languish for decades. A few Chancery
cases went on until the estate at issue
was entirely consumed by court costs,
as happens with the fictional Jarndyce
v. Jarndyce in Bleak House.
Some of Dickens’s interests were
philanthropic, yet the energy he threw
into them amounted to a full- time job.
He helped administer Urania Cottage,
a halfway house for “fallen women,”
prostitutes, and petty thieves who
wanted to change their lives. He ran an
amateur theatrical company, in whose
expensively mounted productions
other writers often took roles. In 1851
he used it to raise money for indigent
authors, putting on a show at the Lon-
don house of the Duke of Devonshire,an elderly bachelor who was delighted
to meet one of his favorite novelists.
Some of these concerns and activities
can be pegged to particular dates: a letter
that spring, for example, about a young
woman who wouldn’t accept the cot-
tage’s rules. But most of them were on-
going, and Douglas- Fairhurst has had to
decide just where in his story to put them.
Many of the articles Dickens commis-
sioned for Household Words left their
impression on the new book. Some cru-
cial scenes drew on a piece from April
1850 that described London’s cemeter-
ies as so “closely- packed” with the dead
that the disease- laden “exhalations
of putrefaction always vitiate the air.”
The following February another arti-
cle presented the Thames as covered
by a thick scum of sewage, dead dogs,
and rotting vegetables. And one of
Bleak House’s most memorable char-
acters, the illiterate crossing sweeper
Jo, had his origins in a bit of testimony
recorded in the magazine’s monthly
supplement; a crossing sweeper being
a boy with a broom who, in hopes of a
tip, would sweep the pedestrian’s path
clean. Such a boy named George Ruby
had been called to give evidence in an
assault case and told the court that he
didn’t know what prayers were, or God,
though he had heard of the devil; the
article used the boy’s ignorance to un-
derline the moral cost of poverty.
Finding new biographical ground
with a figure like Dickens is usually a
matter of emphasis, and after read-
ing Douglas- Fairhurst’s account of
Household Words I’m convinced that
the magazine was so utterly central
to Dickens’s sense of himself that we
wouldn’t have had any of his later and
larger novels without it. The weekly was
a great omnium- gatherum, and those
books depend on what he learned as
its editor, on his ever- growing sense of
London’s, of England’s, sheer complex-
ity. He couldn’t always make the differ-
ent pieces fit together; no one could. But
that’s what he spent the second half of his
career— he died in 1870 — trying to do.
Dickens first mentioned his new
novel in a letter in February 1851, writ-
ing that he felt the initial “shadows of
a new story hovering in a ghostly way
about me.” It was months before he
could begin, however, for he was con-
sumed first by his theatricals and then
by house hunting. The lease on his Re-
gent’s Park house was up, and in the
fall he moved his family to a larger
and grander structure in Bloomsbury,
supervising its furnishing and decora-
tion with the obsessive skill of a pro-
fessional, even as he began to feel the
“wild necessity” to write. In November
he told his publishers to advertise the
novel’s first installment for March 1852,
and when the book was finally done he
wrote in its preface that he had never
before had so many readers.Bleak House is about inheritance.
Other things too, but inheritance first,
insofar as it begins with a quarrel over
a will. A great Chancery lawsuit has
locked up the money of four families at
least, and also allowed a bit of London
real estate to fall into ruin for lack of
a responsible landlord— an area that’s
now a slum called Tom- All- Alone’s.
But money isn’t the only thing one
can inherit. Esther Summerson is an
illegitimate child. She lives under an
alias and is told by an aunt that she
has inherited her unknown mother’sDickens and other writers putting together a Christmas edition of
Household Words, the weekly magazine he founded in 1850(^2) The Dent Uniform Edition of Dick-
ens’ Journalism, 4 volumes (Ohio State
University Press, 1994–2000).
(^3) Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (Yale
University Press, 2009); Claire Toma-
lin, Charles Dickens: A Life (Penguin
Press, 2011).
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