Recommendations
Books Like Martin Chuzzlewit
Best books to read after Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens's sustained satire of selfishness (1843-44) gave literature Pecksniff the supreme hypocrite, Mrs. Gamp the immortal nurse, and Dickens's sharpest attack on American democratic pretensions. These recommendations extend the experience through Dickens's mature masterworks, through Victorian satire, and through the tradition of the great literary hypocrite.
- 1Buy
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
The masterwork that Martin Chuzzlewit's ambition pointed toward — Bleak House takes the thematic analysis of a single vice (selfishness) that Chuzzlewit pioneered and applies it to an entire social system (the Court of Chancery), achieving in the 1850s what Chuzzlewit reached toward in the 1840s.
- 2Buy
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
The great Victorian companion-piece to Martin Chuzzlewit — Thackeray's satire of social selfishness and the worship of 'the Goddess of Getting On' covers the same moral territory as Dickens's analysis in Chuzzlewit, but from a more consistently ironic (and less sentimental) perspective.
- 3Buy
Tartuffe
by Molière
The founding document of the hypocrite in Western literature — Molière's play about the pious fraud who insinuates himself into a household is the ancestor of Pecksniff, and reading Tartuffe alongside Chuzzlewit shows how Dickens translated Molière's comic theatrical type into the Victorian domestic novel.
- 4Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's masterwork shares Martin Chuzzlewit's interest in the systematic analysis of self-deception — Bulstrode in Middlemarch is the Pecksniff type in its most fully realized psychological form, a man whose genuine religious feeling and systematic dishonesty are woven together into a single coherent character.
- 5Buy
The American
by Henry James
James's early novel about an American businessman in Paris who discovers that European aristocracy is not what it appeared inherits Martin Chuzzlewit's critique of America but reverses its direction — where Dickens showed Americans failing to live up to their democratic ideals, James shows his American (Christopher Newman) failing to understand European moral codes.
- 6Buy
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's final completed novel returns to the systematic moral analysis of Martin Chuzzlewit — the pretense that wealth is virtue, analyzed through the Veneerings and the Lammles, is the direct development of Chuzzlewit's study of selfishness; Mrs. Wilfer's social pretensions recall Pecksniff's moral pretensions.
- 7Buy
Dombey and Son
by Charles Dickens
The novel that followed Martin Chuzzlewit and that shows how Dickens turned the thematic ambition of Chuzzlewit's selfishness analysis into a more controlled novelistic architecture — Dombey's pride is analyzed with the same systematic attention as Chuzzlewit's selfishness, but in a tighter structural frame.
- 8Buy
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky was deeply influenced by Dickens, and the Underground Man's systematic self-justification — his ability to frame his own cruelty and resentment in the language of wounded virtue — is the Russian inheritor of the Pecksniff type; together they define the comic and tragic possibilities of systematic self-deception.
More Martin Chuzzlewit Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.