Poor Mrs Dickens! A N WILSON
Jonathan Cape £20
The 1851 census was taken on 30th March. This latest book by one of our most beguiling Victorian scholars is by way of being a census of Britain at the time of the Great Exhibition, 170 years ago, seen through the prism of the greatest English imagination of the time.
This momentous year found Dickens starting to write Bleak House. In both cases, we feel there is a turning point.
With the erection of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,, with its two unreliable narrators, many readers have felt that the of Dickens changed, and that the modern novel has arrived.
