Book of the week: Broken Heartlands by Sebastian Payne

Boris Johnson poses with workers during a visit to Wilton Engineering Services as part of his general election campaign, pictured in November 2019 in Middlesbrough, England

(Image credit: Frank Augstein - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

By The Week Staff

last updated 1 October 2021

The Great Exhibition of 1851 is often seen as a pivotal moment in British history, when the country fully made the shift to modernity, said Lucasta Miller in the FT. But according to the literary scholar Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the year was also a “turning point” for Charles Dickens: he argues in this absorbing book that it was when the great Victorian novelist, then in his late 30s, made his defining “creative leap”.

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Until then, he’d been known as a “jaunty boulevardier who told linear stories of jeopardy and redemption about children”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. But towards the end of the year, he embarked on Bleak House, which would establish him as “one of the great social documentarians of the 19th century”. In this “sparklingly informative book”, Douglas-Fairhurst explores Dickens’s deepening engagement with society, and his expanding artistic vision.