Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: The Turning Point

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: A tale of one city . . . and the year that changed not just Charles Dickens but London, too

IN 1851, London was a city of dense and persistent fog, of foul acrid smells and, for a large swathe of the population, of extreme poverty and deprivation.

The capital was also a place of vibrant energy and opportunity and a growing sense of its own importance.

One topic dominated conversation that year: the opening of the Great Exhibition, masterminded by Prince Albert to highlight Britain’s dominant position in the industrial world.

Through this pulsing, crowded and malodorous city strode Charles Dickens, the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. By the age of 38, he had already written eight hugely successful novels including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and yet, for all his professional success, his private life was about to enter choppy waters.

This engrossing book subtitled The Year That Changed Dickens And The World, shows how, by 1851, Dickens was more than just a novelist. He was also “one of the busiest men in London… playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist.”

Much of Dickens’s boundless energy was inspired by the city. Although he called it “vile” and would sometimes go to quieter places like Broadstairs in Kent to write, he couldn’t bear to be away too long either, saying: “A day in London sets me up again and starts me.”

TWO

DICKENS was a father of nine in 1851, apparently a rather semi-detached one. His relationship with his shy and sweet-natured wife, Kate, was increasingly shaky. After giving birth to so many children in the space of 13 years she was, hardly surprisingly, permanently exhausted, and often depressed.

That spring, the family suffered a double blow. Two weeks after the death of Dickens’s father John, their youngest child, eight-month-old Dora, died suddenly after suffering convulsions. Dickens was overwhelmed with grief and deeply anxious about breaking the news to his fragile wife, who was undergoing a rest cure in Malvern.

Whilst he wrote sympathetically and lovingly to Kate, he remarked to a friend that this shock might even do her good: a chilling foreshadowing of his later attempt, when their marriage broke down, to have Kate sent to a mental asylum.

The death of Dora did nothing to slow down Dickens’s prodigious work output and, like most Londoners, he was intrigued by the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” which opened in May in Hyde Park. The huge glass building itself was a source of wonder, the brainchild of Joseph Paxton.

The atmosphere before the opening of the Great Exhibition sounds like that of London before the 2012 Olympics – intense excitement, and dread that it would go horribly wrong.

When it was finally opened by Queen Victoria, the Crystal Palace was revealed to be crammed with 133,000 exhibits including the enormous Koh-i-Noor diamond, a steam-powered envelope-making machine, collapsible pianos, and a can of boiled mutton, designed to be taken on a polar exhibition.

Dickens’s work was also represented, with statues of two of his most famous characters: Oliver Twist and Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop. However, they couldn’t compete with the popularity of the exciting new flushing toilets in the “retiring rooms”. Eager visitors paid a penny to use them, giving rise to the adage “to spend a penny”.

Not everyone was entranced by it, including Dickens. He grumbled that “I don’t say ‘there’s nothing in it’ – there’s too much.” The future textile designer, 17-year-old William Morris, was so appalled by the vulgarity of it all that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

But the Great Exhibition was a triumph and crowds poured in from all over Britain. The profits from it went towards the purchase of 87 acres of land in South Kensington. It was here where the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History and Science Museums, Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall were built. Above all, it was the event that cemented Britain’s position as the world’s leading industrial economy.

THREE

AS IT wound down, Dickens was edging towards writing a new book, Bleak House.

With its twisty plot, pointed social commentary and not one but two unreliable narrators, Bleak House was, says Douglas-Fairhurst, “the greatest fictional experiment of his career.” It was one of the earliest examples of a detective story.

The book is full of nuggets. 1851 was the first-time young women were recorded wearing trousers (or “bloomers”) – in Harrogate of all places. It was also the first-time terms such as “carbohydrate”, “police state” and “science fiction” were widely used.

Although the author focuses on just one year of the writer’s life, Charles Dickens comes over as a deeply complex character: warm, generous, and compassionate yet also overbearing, pompous and selfish. His life was so crammed with incident that you could argue that almost any year was some sort of turning point for him. But that is a very minor quibble about a splendidly enjoyable book.

– The Turning Point by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Cape, 368pp

. Appendage

– Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s title begs several questions, for there were many turning points in Dickens’s life. The first came in 1824 when his father was incarcerated in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Dickens’s mother and younger siblings moved in with his father, but Dickens, aged 12, was sent to work among, as he recalled, “common labouring boys” in Warren’s blacking warehouse. It was a humiliation he never forgot or forgave, and the dilapidated, rat-infested warehouse came back to him in nightmares all his life. As a junior clerk in a law firm he was crazy about the theatre and yearned to be an actor.
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Afghanistan, Art, Arts, Britain

Afghanistan cartoon & sketch

– Credit image and artwork: Paul Thomas

Afghanistan sketch

NOW that the Taliban have retaken Afghanistan without encountering any serious resistance, they’ve embarked on a public relations offensive. We are being asked to believe in Taliban 2.0, a new caring, sharing, cuddly version. Out go stonings and beheadings, in come women’s rights. Having once banned singing and dancing, the mullahs are now embracing fun. Photos have emerged of Taliban fighters driving dodgems, with their rifles on the passenger seat, and frolicking on a merry-go-round.

Ride a painted pony . . .

There was another snap of a Taliban warrior working out in a gym – with a rocket launcher over his shoulder. Feel the burn! So despite reports that they’ve already started murdering Afghans who collaborated with the Americans and British, and dragged girls as young as 12 from their homes to be forcibly ‘married’, the Taliban want the world to think they’ve reformed. The soft-headed Hard Left, particularly in Britain, are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If you swallow that moonshine, you’re a better man than I am.

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Politics, Society, United States

The failure in Afghanistan has been a military and political disaster

AFGHANISTAN

LET’S be in no doubt. The UK’s latest Afghan war – the fourth since 1839 – has ended in abject failure. The shameful retreat was down to a bungled withdrawal of US forces by Joe Biden, who’s lacklustre approach leaves his leadership open to criticism of weakness and inadequacy. What extraordinary and pitiful scenes the world has witnessed in recent days: bodies falling from the sky, the Taliban cheering in Kabul and the mighty America humbled. The Taliban on the ground is operating akin to the Nazis as they go door-to-door in neighbourhoods seeking retribution against those that supported the West. There is a growing sense of unease, and rightly too, as the West awaits what might come next.

Britain scuttled out at the same time, the prime minister telling MPs on the day of Mr Biden’s announcement that there can be no military victory in Afghanistan. What a shameful assessment given all that has been sacrificed in terms of blood and treasure plundered. The world is witnessing the extent of the military and political catastrophe after twenty years of miscalculation and misadventure.  

The UK is currently driven by a desire to stay close to the US. But America is a superpower, able to shrug off defeats and move on. The blow of losing Kabul is felt more deeply in Britain shorn itself of substantial global influence. And, yet, this has led the UK to take Washington’s lead in military affairs. In Afghanistan, the US judgment that a combination of special forces, local proxies and air power would wipe out domestic resistance to a military occupation was flawed. The Afghan security forces that NATO trained were exposed as a shell and collapsed at a time when it was most needed. In 20 years of relentless fighting, more than 170,000 Afghans have lost their lives. The death toll continues to rise as the barbarism of the Taliban metes out savage reprisals against local Afghans and interpreters who helped western intelligence services and the British Army in a quest for democracy and more moderate living. In June, almost 1,000 Afghans were killed in the simmering civil war. A few weeks later half the country was under Taliban control.

Western politicians prefer to tell a story of progress in Afghanistan. But that could all be unravelled now the Taliban are in control. Since 2001, the US has spent nearly $145bn (£106bn) trying to rebuild Afghanistan. By 2019, the average Afghan student received four years of schooling (twenty years ago it was just two). As prosperity was building, Afghans were known to have lived healthier and longer lives and the country is certainly wealthier than it was in 2001. But as many will soon realise the state can only function with international aid. Aid funds three-quarters of total public expenditure.

Elections were held in Afghanistan but the institutions that support democracy were not allowed to take root. One elected president, Hamid Karzai, fell out with the Americans so badly he threatened to join the Taliban himself. The other, Ashraf Ghani, fled as the Taliban advanced. Almost every other Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. A western-made “liberal democracy” has fallen into the hands of religious fanatics with close links to al-Qaeda. It must be clear by now that nations cannot be hustled at the barrel of an American gun into the postmodern age, especially when they have not been allowed to come to terms with modernity.

In Afghanistan, the battle for hearts and minds was lost long ago. Without hearts and minds, one cannot obtain intelligence, and without intelligence, the insurgents will remain undefeated.

The Royal United Services Institute, a security thinktank, describes the outcome in Afghanistan as “strategically worse than the situation prior to the 9/11 attacks – a Taliban state, with terror groups already baked into it, with nowhere else to turn for major support other than Beijing”.

The collapse of the Taliban in 2001 encouraged the US to adopt a similar strategy in Iraq and Libya. After 20 years of disastrous results, British ministers should reach for a new approach. After all, relations between London and Washington have historically never been entirely unconditional. Yet, whilst the government speaks of creating new special forces regiments and naval “littoral strike groups” for international interventions, Britain needs to learn its own history. It used to station military forces around the world to maintain its empire. It should think again before doing so for someone else.

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