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Start giftingThe Turning Point
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
A major new biography of Charles Dickens, tracing the year that would transform his life and times
*BY 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's also a turbulent time 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. Fully illustrated, and 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.
'It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens' NEW STATESMAN
'A startling and exciting writer' A. S. BYATT, SPECTATOR
© Robert Douglas-Fairhurst 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
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 shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, and The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. He writes regularly for publications including The Times, Guardian, TLS and 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, 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.