This provocative biography tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist.

Fully illustrated, and brimming with fascinating details about the larger-than-life man who wrote Bleak House, this is the closest look yet at one of the greatest literary personalities ever to have lived.

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.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates two entangled lives: the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories.

"This major study examines a Victorian obsession with 'influence', the often unpredictable after-effects of words and actions, in fields as diverse as mesmerism and theology, literary theory, and sanitation reform.

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.

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... ...