Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Helen Simpson discuss Dickens at Christmas

Dickensondesk.jpg

Features

The Vintage Podcast: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Helen Simpson discuss Dickens at Christmas

A Life in Pieces

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is the best book I have read about multiple sclerosis, and that is because it is about so much more... It is simply a beautiful piece of writing.

A pitch-perfect memoir: stylish, erudite, touchingly honest and darkly funny.

Jacqueline Wilson, author of The Story of Tracy Beaker

An outstanding feat of bravery and brio... A buoyantly written, piercingly perceptive book.

A beautiful and devastating portrayal of a life-changing diagnosis... It is what the best writing should be: a book that will stay with you for life.

Natalie Haynes, author of A Thousand Ships

The writing is all elegance and wit.

The Times, *2023's Top 50 Non-Fiction Books*

An account of living with multiple sclerosis that is both deeply literary and painfully honest as it charts his journey into ill health.

Heartening and unexpectedly gripping... An immensely powerful book... It persuasively builds the case for the ability of stories to offer hope and solace; to help us become ourselves, over and over, even in extremis.

Written by an entertaining storyteller and offers a rare insight into a situation that few people will have to face, but that it does us good to contemplate.

While this book deals with distress, physical pain and uncertainty, its wry humour and lightness of touch make it anything but a misery memoir... Superb.

Douglas-Fairhurst has written a memoir that is not miserable. It's funny and raw... Magical: pages speed by, fuelled by the author's formidable intellect.

Level-headed and informative... What Douglas-Fairhurst gives us isn't just the story of an illness but a story about the importance of stories.

A brilliant account of one man's tilted world following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

A complex, tender meditation on art, family and resistance.

For all its grim subject the book is an unexpected delight.

A richly textured and syncopated book, alternately erudite and irreverent.

Metamorphosis is told in such blackly comic style that you can't help chuckling.

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, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, The Story of Alice, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, and Metamorphosis. He writes regularly for publications including The Times, the Literary Review and the 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 both of the Enola Holmes feature films for Netflix. He has judged the Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize, and in 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A darkly comic and moving memoir on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor. 
 
‘A book that will stay with you for life’ 
NATALIE HAYNES 
 
‘The best book about multiple sclerosis’ 
THE TIMES 
 
We all have trapdoors in our lives. Sometimes we jump off just in time... But sometimes we are unlucky. My own trapdoor was hidden in the consulting room of an Oxford neurologist. 
 
When the trapdoor opened for Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, he plummeted into a world of MRI scans, a disobedient body and the crushing unpredictability of a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. But, as he explores in Metamorphosis, his fall also did something else. It took him deep into his own mind: his hopes, his fears, his loves and losses, and the books that would sustain, inform and nourish him as his life began to transform in ways he could never have imagined. 
 
‘A pitch-perfect memoir… touchingly honest and darkly funny’ 
JACQUELINE WILSON 
 
‘An outstanding feat… Riveting’ 
SUNDAY TIMES

A Year that Changed Dickens and the World

The Turning Point

This tremendous book dazzles and delights... it's full of discoveries. A glorious book; revealing and unravelling Charles Dickens before our very eyes, melding his life and his work, using scholarship, wit and passion - a triumph.

This immersive biography, by the author of the Costa-shortlisted The Story of Alice, had me hooked... published in a sumptuous package, with illustrations throughout.

Clever and witty, packed with fiercely academic research and erudite analysis, but written in featherlight, elegant prose.

The Turning Point...builds incrementally towards Bleak House...[and] makes for a very satisfying finale... Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has taken pains of his own and this wonderfully entertaining book is the result.

Douglas-Fairhurst is a shrewd, amusing and original guide... [he] gives you fascinating facts... [and] a brisk and brilliant analysis of Bleak House.

[The Turning Point] is beautifully written and packed with wonders and insight and I shall definitely be rereading it before the year is out. Moreover, by the author's holding the magnifying glass aloft and allowing the sun to focus on one spot, 1851, the leaf catches flame.

[The Turning Point] hums with the intellectual life of the day.

Taking his cue from that novel [Bleak House], Douglas-Fairhurst uses a fascinating range of interconnected sources, side-plots and telling details to dramatise the complex social and imaginative web out of which it came...He gives us history not as grand narrative or teleology but as total immersion and multiplicity. As such, Douglas-Fairhurst invites us to feel what it felt like to be Dickens in 1851.

A fascinating biography that ultimately brings fresh insight to the life of Charles Dickens and his work as a novelist.

The Turning Point is a perceptive and enjoyable account of how deeply enmeshed Dickens's art was with the shifting cultural landscape of mid-Victorian England; it illustrates why he was the emblematic novelist of the age.

Douglas-Fairhurst's... immersive book echoes the experimental form of the novel, blending stories, sub-plots and telling details to bring to life a complex moment in the life of a city and one of its greatest writers.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst pulls off an extraordinary trick of immersive history, taking a single year in Charles Dickens's life, 1851, and placing the personal story of one of the most extraordinary writers ever to have lived within his social and cultural context

It's amazing how eruditely Robert Douglas-Fairhurst manages to illuminate our history through a microscopic focus on one brief period.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His books include The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World, 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 was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. 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 and 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.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
 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 life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and early signs that his marriage is falling apart. But this year will become the turning point in Dickens's career, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives. 
 
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. 
 
'Sparklingly informative' Guardian 
 
'Wonderfully entertaining' Observer 
 
'It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens' New Statesman

Lewis Carroll and The Secret History of Wonderland

The Story of Alice

The definitive biography of Lewis Carroll, his child-muse Alice Liddell, and the creation of Alice in Wonderland 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD

It is the ultimate book about Alice - comprehensive and scholarly, but so delightfully and elegantly written that it's a true work of literature

The Story of Alice is the best book on the myriad enigmas of Carroll’s heart-breaking wonderland I have ever read

Superb…toweringly the best of the dozens of books on Carroll which I have read

Douglas-Fairhurst is a startling and exciting writer

This accomplished book provides ample inspiration for readers to return to Wonderland

Different times, and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst makes a sure-footed guide in unraveling them…intriguing

A fascinating telling of a great mystery story

It did for me what any good critical work should do: it sent me back to Alice for the first time in over 40 years

[A] scholarly, playful and richly entertaining study

The Story of Alice takes us, full throttle, back to the unalloyed passion of reading. This is what it is like to open a book, and to wonder

A sparkling, highly readable and erudite study

The Story of Alice is much more than its coy title. It is the story of several Alices… Above all it is the story of Lewis Carroll

Douglas-Fairhurst provides the best readings of the Alice books I have come across… It returns the reader to the books, and in doing so performs an inestimable service to the author, his inspiration and legions of readers

Superb...you feel a wise critic and a master biographer telling the story of an unfolding literary imagination

[Douglas-Fairhurst’s] astute and subtle commentary illumines the world of Lewis Carroll and Alice, with all its attributes and attitudes. Scholarly, engrossing and comprehensive, The Story of Alice, like Alice itself, raises the spirits while extolling ambiguity and unpredictability

A delicate and no doubt definitive summing up of Alice studies to date

The Story of Alice belongs with the best books ever written in the field of Carrollian studies

A richly satisfying study of a children’s classic, perceptive and enlightening in equal measure

He gets us far closer than we have ever been to the act of alchemy by which a shy and creepy Oxford don turned a pert little girl into an enduring heroine of children’s literature

This masterly biography peels back the often mysterious and absorbing layers of the lives of the writer and his child muse.

A readable and engaging insight into an iconic book and ambiguous author.

In this pleasantly-meandering biography, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst takes us on a voyage of discovery into the lives of…Lewis Carroll, and his child-muse Alice Liddell, and argues for the return of innocence to their relationship.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
 
This is the secret history of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 
 
Wonderland is part of our cultural heritage. But beneath the fairy tale lies the complex history of the author and his subject. Charles Dodgson was a quiet academic but his second self, Lewis Carroll, was a storyteller, innovator and avid collector of ‘child-friends’. Carroll’s imagination was to give Alice Liddell, his 'dream-child', a fictional alter ego that would never let her grow up. 
 
This is a biography that beautifully unravels the magic of Alice. It is a history of love and loss, innocence and ambiguity. It is the story of one man’s need to make a Wonderland in a changing world.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Reading Look Closer is akin to wandering through an art gallery with an expert on painterly detail by your side: you see familiar shapes afresh and are introduced to new artists along the way

Absorbing, inspiring, open-hearted and welcoming, Look Closer is the best book about reading I have read for a very, very long time. Brilliantly clever without being even remotely academical or scholarly in its manner, this funny, warm and all-embracing book is for anyone and everyone

A welcome intervention in the alarming decline of literacy . . . Douglas-Fairhurst is like that one teacher we had at school who, despite the years, was still hopelessly in love with their subject

A glittering gem of a book. This is a prism through which other books can be read more sharply, more meaningfully. I will be buying it for everyone I know who loves books

Look Closer . . . might be the book finally to get someone young (or old) off their smartphone. It digs away at literary classics of all sorts to find out why and how they work

Look Closer is a masterclass in how to make academic writing fun, stuffed with erudite anecdotes about authors whom we rarely think of as three-dimensional characters… A must read

I can’t recall reading a book that made me so immediately want to dive straight into a library… This is a wonderful book, packed with detail and knowledge but also intuition, warmth and infectious enthusiasm

Look Closer is a love letter to the energising thrill of literature, and the bracing challenge of it too

A delightful and much needed paean, in our attention-deficit era, to the pleasures of close and slow reading

A lively book that seeks to enthuse us to read more deeply, more thoughtfully

How to Get More Out of Reading

As an English literature professor, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has delighted in sharing his love of reading with his students. Bringing together more than twenty years of teaching, Look Closer explores the iconic works of literature that have formed, sustained and entertained him, from timeless classics like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice to modern masterpieces such as Normal People and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as children’s books, poetry, plays, short stories and comics. It is a masterclass in how to be human. 
 
By revealing the simple techniques to slow down, take note and bring a text to life, Look Closer is the culmination of a life spent reading. This book is for anyone interested in how literature works and makes clear why reading is more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. Funny, illuminating and personal, Look Closer ultimately shows us how great writing can change a person’s life. It is a celebration of the simple joy of reading, and how becoming more attentive readers can open up worlds and bring us closer to ourselves in delightful and unexpected ways.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Praise for Look Closer

Reading Look Closer is akin to wandering through an art gallery with an expert on painterly detail by your side: you see familiar shapes afresh and are introduced to new artists along the way

Absorbing, inspiring, open-hearted and welcoming, Look Closer is the best book about reading I have read for a very, very long time. Brilliantly clever without being even remotely academical or ...

A welcome intervention in the alarming decline of literacy . . . Douglas-Fairhurst is like that one teacher we had at school who, despite the years, was still hopelessly in love with their subject

Reading Look Closer is akin to wandering through an art gallery with an expert on painterly detail by your side: you see familiar shapes afresh and are introduced to new artists along the way

Absorbing, inspiring, open-hearted and welcoming, Look Closer is the best book about reading I have read for a very, very long time. Brilliantly clever without being even remotely academical or ...

A welcome intervention in the alarming decline of literacy . . . Douglas-Fairhurst is like that one teacher we had at school who, despite the years, was still hopelessly in love with their subject

Reading Look Closer is akin to wandering through an art gallery with an expert on painterly detail by your side: you see familiar shapes afresh and are introduced to new artists along the way

Absorbing, inspiring, open-hearted and welcoming, Look Closer is the best book about reading I have read for a very, very long time. Brilliantly clever without being even remotely academical or ...

A welcome intervention in the alarming decline of literacy . . . Douglas-Fairhurst is like that one teacher we had at school who, despite the years, was still hopelessly in love with their subject

Books by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Articles featuring Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The Vintage Podcast: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Helen Simpson discuss Dickens at Christmas

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter