The Turning Point: 1851--A Year That Changed Charles Dickens and the World

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Mar 2022 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Philip Stevens

About this audiobook

A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer—immersing us in one year of his life—from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice.

The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and artistic innovations rub shoulders with political unrest, poverty, and disease. It is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives and develops a new form of writing that will reveal just how interconnected the world is becoming. 
 
The Turning Point transports us into the foggy streets of Dickens's London, closely following the twists and turns of a year that would come to define him and forever alter Britain's relationship with the world. Brimming with fascinating details about the larger-than-life man who wrote Bleak House, this is the closest look yet at one of the greatest literary personalities ever to have lived.

About the author

ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST is a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Magdalen College. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland, which was short-listed for the Costa Biography Award and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He writes regularly for publications including The Times (London), The Guardian, TLS, and The Spectator. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on TV adaptations of Jane Eyre, Emma, and Great Expectations, the BBC drama series Dickensian, and the feature film Enola Holmes. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Oxford, England.