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literary lives claudia fitzherbert It Was a Bleak Time The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ( Jonathan Cape 368pp £25) ‘I don’t say “there’s nothing in it” – there’s too much,’ remarked the 39-year-old Charles Dickens of the Great Exhibition in July 1851. This was after months of watching Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace take shape in Hyde Park, and discussing the pros and cons and likely results of the project in the pages of Household Words, the weekly magazine that he part-owned, part-wrote and completely edited. The exhibition opened in May and stayed open until October. By July the visitor numbers had already exceeded expectations and the exhibition had been hailed as a huge success. And yet how unsurprising to discover that discerning visitors took a dimmish view. John Ruskin was dismayed and William Morris was sick in the bushes; the Carlyles were mocking and Dickens was ambivalent. He sometimes praised the Crystal Palace in public speeches, describing it as an ‘enduring temple … to the energy, the talent, and the resources of Englishmen’, yet in private he admitted to an ‘instinctive feeling’ against it ‘of a faint, inexplicable sort’. The Turning Point is in many ways a companion volume to Robert DouglasFairhurst’s 2011 book, Becoming Dickens, which depicted the young Dickens at work as a reporter, lawyer’s clerk, actor and stage manager, and showed how all this fed into the making of The Pickwick Papers, the immediate success of which settled Dickens into the role of novelist. The novel that was starting to take shape towards the end of 1851 was Bleak House. Douglas-Fairhurst sees it as a turning point both in Dickens’s career – it was the first of what has been called his ‘dark’ novels, in which the state of the nation is examined in relentless close-up – and in the history of the novel. The two withholding narrators, the broken-backed grammar of the novel’s opening passages, the present tense, and the huge unanswered questions about the connections between people, places, physical phenomena and corrupt institutions were all strands in Dickens’s determination to gather together the babble and confusion of the nation in 1851, exemplified by the too-muchness of the Great Exhibition, and to transform it into ‘something more coherent’. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster described Bleak House as ‘too real to be pleasant’; Douglas-Fairhurst has no doubt that it is his greatest achievement, although his case is more stated than made. It is one of the many pleasures of this book Dickens in 1852: tale of two temperaments that the literary biographer’s gallop through the writer’s works is replaced by immersion in one teeming text. Towards the end of the book there is a close reading of the first four chapters of Bleak House that is likely to beguile even the fiercest of lit-crit refuseniks. Douglas-Fairhurst lays out so much of the world as filtered through articles in Household Words in the months before Dickens sat down to write Bleak House that, when at last we see the novelist feeling his way through the implacable November weather and ‘laying down sentences like traps’, the atmosphere is more that of thriller than textbook. Bleak House is full of death, which may be explained by the double whammy of bereavement suffered by Dickens in the spring of 1851. His father’s death was followed within a fortnight by that of his eight-month-old daughter, Dora, after a sudden convulsion. Douglas-Fairhurst describes Dickens, who doted on babies, as ‘bewildered by grief ’. But it is the letter that the novelist sat down to write to his wife, Catherine (away from London, taking the water cure at Malvern), which really interests Douglas-Fairhurst: He began by telling her that Dora had been taken ill: ‘I will not deceive you. I think her very ill.’ In the next paragraph he edged closer towards the truth without committing to it just yet: ‘There is nothing in her appearance but perfect rest. You would suppose her quietly asleep.’ Not until the final paragraph did he raise the possibility that Dora’s rest might never be broken, telling Catherine that ‘if – if – when you come, I should even have to say to you “our little baby is dead”, you are to do your duty to [our other children], and to shew yourself worthy of the great trust you hold in them’. Clearly, Dickens was trying to break the news of Dora’s death as gradually as he could. Still, Douglas-Fairhurst describes this as ‘one of the strangest letters he ever wrote. For “if – if –” was more than just a kindly thought experiment. It was a two-word summary of the storytelling impulse itself.’ The letter is indeed fascinating and a good example of the rewards of what the author has described as ‘slow biography’. When I reread the relevant chapter in Claire Tomalin’s 2011 life of Dickens, I found this strangest of letters didn’t get a look in. Douglas-Fairhurst has written far too elegant a book to mention everything of importance that happened in Dickens’s life in 1851. He doesn’t mention the threat to stable domestic relations in the Dickens household that came when Dickens’s friend Augustus Egg proposed marriage to his wife’s sister Georgina Hogarth. Hogarth was 24-years-old and a great favourite with her brother-in-law, who prized her housekeeping skills above those of his exhausted-by-childbearing wife. After some hesitation, Hogarth said no to Egg; six years later she remained loyal to Dickens when he embarked on a secret affair with an Literary Review | september 2021 6
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literary lives eighteen-year-old actress and cast off the mother of his ten children. Why does The Turning Point not linger on the possible part played by Dickens in Hogarth’s rejection of Egg? Perhaps because Douglas-Fairhurst’s earlier book covered Dickens’s love for the first of Catherine’s younger sisters to live in the household, Mary Hogarth, and her early death. If you lower a net into any period of Dickens’s adult life, common themes will emerge. There are always campaigns and charities and journals and theatrical projects demanding his attention, a Hogarth sister in the wings, a baby on the go and a novel on the cook. But Douglas-Fairhurst is looking to catch his elusive quarry on the turn. The closer you look, his argument runs, the more unfamiliar appear the ingredients that went into Bleak House. Within two months of Dora’s death, Catherine Dickens was pregnant with her tenth child. Douglas-Fairhurst detects a note of jokey despair in Dickens’s claim after the birth the following year that ‘divine intervention alone could prevent his wife from becoming pregnant’. But he dismissed the various forms of contraception available as ‘unreliable as well as unpleasant, and highly unlikely to be used by a respectable married couple’. Highly unlikely? What about withdrawal? Time was when Peter Ackroyd and other acclaimed biographers dismissed as unthinkable the idea that Nelly Ternan was the novelist’s mistress. I am not suggesting here that Dickens did use contraception. My argument is with the failure of Dickens’s biographers to ask why not. He always said he didn’t want a large family and he was a rotten father to his seven sons, whom he treated as failures before they had a chance to prove otherwise, with the unsurprising result that most of them did indeed grow into pale shadows who tried and failed to make sense of their famous father. His two surviving daughters fared better and saw straighter: ‘My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man,’ wrote one. ‘He did not care a damn what happened to any of us.’ And yet The Turning Point, like all biographical studies of Dickens, contains numerous instances of the trouble he took to improve the lives of relative strangers. I am reminded of that minor character in Bleak House who has become a byword for charity not beginning at home: Mrs Jellyby, c’est lui. allan massie A Convivial Chap Led Easily Astray The Sins of G K Chesterton By Richard Ingrams (Harbour Books 292pp £20) The title of this book is a surprise. Chesterton’s admirers have regarded him as a saintly figure; indeed he has been proposed for canonisation. Even those, like Bernard Shaw and H G Wells, who engaged in fierce argument with him regarded him with affection. He was a master of paradox whose sincerity was nevertheless rarely questioned. Orwell’s complaint that everything Chesterton wrote was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Catholic Church was nonsense, and not only because he didn’t convert until 1922, when he was fortyeight, by which time he had, as Richard Ingrams observes, written his best books. It would be truer, though still an exaggeration, to say that everything he wrote was intended to demonstrate the good sense of the ordinary man. He might well, like a certain Tory politician today, have said we have had enough of experts. Gilbert Chesterton, a middle-class Londoner who was educated at St Paul’s and the Slade School of Fine Art, was essentially a journalist of a type rare today. He wrote intellectually challenging essays for newspapers that occupied the now deserted middle ground between the qualities and the tabloids. In his best years, between 1900 and 1912, his main outlet was the Daily News, a Liberal newspaper owned by the teetotal Quaker Cadbury family. Chesterton himself, a lover of beer and wine and the Fleet Street pubs, probably shocked some of the paper’s Nonconformist readers while delighting others. The paper’s outstanding editor, A G Gardiner, adored him. 14–30 August Live, Online + On-demand edbookfest.co.uk september 2021 | Literary Review 7

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literary lives claudia fitzherbert

It Was a Bleak Time The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World

By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

( Jonathan Cape 368pp £25)

‘I don’t say “there’s nothing in it” – there’s too much,’ remarked the 39-year-old Charles Dickens of the Great Exhibition in July 1851. This was after months of watching Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace take shape in Hyde Park, and discussing the pros and cons and likely results of the project in the pages of Household Words, the weekly magazine that he part-owned, part-wrote and completely edited. The exhibition opened in May and stayed open until October. By July the visitor numbers had already exceeded expectations and the exhibition had been hailed as a huge success. And yet how unsurprising to discover that discerning visitors took a dimmish view. John Ruskin was dismayed and William Morris was sick in the bushes; the Carlyles were mocking and Dickens was ambivalent. He sometimes praised the Crystal Palace in public speeches, describing it as an ‘enduring temple … to the energy, the talent, and the resources of Englishmen’, yet in private he admitted to an ‘instinctive feeling’ against it ‘of a faint, inexplicable sort’.

The Turning Point is in many ways a companion volume to Robert DouglasFairhurst’s 2011 book, Becoming Dickens, which depicted the young Dickens at work as a reporter, lawyer’s clerk, actor and stage manager, and showed how all this fed into the making of The Pickwick Papers, the immediate success of which settled Dickens into the role of novelist. The novel that was starting to take shape towards the end of 1851 was Bleak House. Douglas-Fairhurst sees it as a turning point both in Dickens’s career – it was the first of what has been called his ‘dark’ novels, in which the state of the nation is examined in relentless close-up – and in the history of the novel. The two withholding narrators, the broken-backed grammar of the novel’s opening passages, the present tense, and the huge unanswered questions about the connections between people, places, physical phenomena and corrupt institutions were all strands in Dickens’s determination to gather together the babble and confusion of the nation in 1851, exemplified by the too-muchness of the Great Exhibition, and to transform it into ‘something more coherent’. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster described Bleak House as ‘too real to be pleasant’; Douglas-Fairhurst has no doubt that it is his greatest achievement, although his case is more stated than made. It is one of the many pleasures of this book

Dickens in 1852: tale of two temperaments that the literary biographer’s gallop through the writer’s works is replaced by immersion in one teeming text. Towards the end of the book there is a close reading of the first four chapters of Bleak House that is likely to beguile even the fiercest of lit-crit refuseniks. Douglas-Fairhurst lays out so much of the world as filtered through articles in Household Words in the months before Dickens sat down to write Bleak House that, when at last we see the novelist feeling his way through the implacable November weather and ‘laying down sentences like traps’, the atmosphere is more that of thriller than textbook.

Bleak House is full of death, which may be explained by the double whammy of bereavement suffered by Dickens in the spring of 1851. His father’s death was followed within a fortnight by that of his eight-month-old daughter, Dora, after a sudden convulsion. Douglas-Fairhurst describes Dickens, who doted on babies, as ‘bewildered by grief ’. But it is the letter that the novelist sat down to write to his wife, Catherine (away from London, taking the water cure at Malvern), which really interests Douglas-Fairhurst:

He began by telling her that Dora had been taken ill: ‘I will not deceive you. I think her very ill.’ In the next paragraph he edged closer towards the truth without committing to it just yet: ‘There is nothing in her appearance but perfect rest. You would suppose her quietly asleep.’ Not until the final paragraph did he raise the possibility that Dora’s rest might never be broken, telling Catherine that ‘if – if – when you come, I should even have to say to you “our little baby is dead”, you are to do your duty to [our other children], and to shew yourself worthy of the great trust you hold in them’.

Clearly, Dickens was trying to break the news of Dora’s death as gradually as he could. Still, Douglas-Fairhurst describes this as ‘one of the strangest letters he ever wrote. For “if – if –” was more than just a kindly thought experiment. It was a two-word summary of the storytelling impulse itself.’ The letter is indeed fascinating and a good example of the rewards of what the author has described as ‘slow biography’. When I reread the relevant chapter in Claire Tomalin’s 2011 life of Dickens, I found this strangest of letters didn’t get a look in.

Douglas-Fairhurst has written far too elegant a book to mention everything of importance that happened in Dickens’s life in 1851. He doesn’t mention the threat to stable domestic relations in the Dickens household that came when Dickens’s friend Augustus Egg proposed marriage to his wife’s sister Georgina Hogarth. Hogarth was 24-years-old and a great favourite with her brother-in-law, who prized her housekeeping skills above those of his exhausted-by-childbearing wife. After some hesitation, Hogarth said no to Egg; six years later she remained loyal to Dickens when he embarked on a secret affair with an

Literary Review | september 2021 6

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