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Music Learn more at PMI.com slash progress. Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editorate of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Robert Douglas Verhurst,

whose new book is The Turning Point, A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. I hope this is right. Robert, welcome. Now you've written about Dickens' young life before. What made you

return to his midlife? Because this book kind of covers

1851, essentially, doesn't it? Yeah, that's right. It's, I mean, in some ways, this is the start

of Dickens's midlife crisis, which goes on for quite a long time. But it's also the nation's

midlife crisis as well. It's not just

because it's the pivot of the year, historically, a pit of the century historically. It's also

because it's the year of the great exhibition. It's the year that Britain announces itself to the

world as the great industrial powerhouse. It's the time when Britain sort of invites people from abroad,

but also is sending people out from Britain overseas. That happens in real life, but it also

happens through information technology. It's the year the first telegraph cable is laid across

the channel, for instance. So for that reason, I wanted to explore it as a kind of pivot that links the great novelist

of the age and the age itself, given that the phrase Dickensian and Victorian are often

seen as almost synonymous.

It's going back to something I touched on

in my earlier book, Becoming Dickens. I suppose in the sense that what interests me in life

writing is all the clutter and loose ends and mess of real life that biography

...