Recommendations
Books Like Martin Chuzzlewit
Best books to read after Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit is Dickens at his most satirically focused — every character in the novel is afflicted by selfishness in some form, and the novel's thesis is that selfishness is a disease that spreads from individuals to institutions to nations. If Mrs. Gamp's comic magnificence and the novel's American satire moved you, these books share its portrait of hypocrisy as a social system and its conviction that the world's organized frauds deserve to be exposed.
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Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
The most direct predecessor to Martin Chuzzlewit in Dickens's career — sharing its picaresque energy, its comic villains, and its portrait of a young man making his way through a world of organized fraud; where Martin Chuzzlewit has a thematic argument about selfishness, Nicholas Nickleby is more purely about the energy of confronting specific social evils
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Dombey and Son
by Charles Dickens
The natural next step from Martin Chuzzlewit — the first fully planned Dickens novel and the transition to his mature mode; where Martin Chuzzlewit treats selfishness as both comic and serious, Dombey and Son treats it as tragic, presenting the same moral concern through a fully realized character study
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's panoramic satire of English society — published in the same years as Martin Chuzzlewit's immediate successors — treats the same theme of how selfishness and social ambition operate through the English class system; the comparison between Thackeray and Dickens was the great Victorian literary debate, and Vanity Fair is the essential Thackeray to read alongside Dickens
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Candide
by Voltaire
Voltaire's philosophical tale about an optimistic young man encountering the world's actual suffering — the 18th-century formal ancestor of Martin Chuzzlewit's satirical picaresque; Dickens's novel shares Candide's conviction that the world's official self-descriptions are always lies, and its method of exposing them through a hero's journey
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's underground man, whose resentment and self-contempt are the reverse image of Martin Chuzzlewit's selfishness, is the character who best captures what selfishness looks like from the inside rather than the satirical outside; Dostoevsky is in many ways the anti-Dickens, responding to the same social conditions with opposite formal and emotional strategies
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Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis's portrait of the American Midwestern businessman George Babbitt — who believes sincerely in all the social clichés that bind him — is the American descendant of Martin Chuzzlewit's American chapters; where Dickens satirizes American self-congratulation from outside, Lewis satirizes it from inside, with less comic energy but more sociological precision
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The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
Ford's modernist novel narrated by an oblivious American who fails to understand the tragedy unfolding around him — the most technically sophisticated heir to the tradition of fictional narrators who don't know what they're describing; where Dickens's narrator in Martin Chuzzlewit sees and judges everything, Ford's Dowell sees everything and understands nothing
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American Notes
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's non-fiction account of his first American tour — the direct source material for the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit; reading American Notes alongside Martin Chuzzlewit shows how Dickens transformed journalistic observation into comic and satirical fiction
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