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Martin ChuzzlewitMartin Chuzzlewit Reading Order
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) by Charles Dickens is his most sustained satire of a single vice — selfishness — worked through a double narrative: the story of Martin Chuzzlewit Jr., who goes to America when his grandfather disinherits him, and the story of his cousin Jonas Chuzzlewit, who murders his father for his inheritance. The American section (chapters 15-22) was controversial: Dickens had visited America in 1842 and found much to admire and much to criticize, and his satire of American boosterism, slavery, and the gap between democratic ideals and social reality was attacked by American readers as unfair caricature. The English sections contain one of Dickens's greatest comic characters — Mr. Pecksniff, an architect and moral hypocrite of almost supernatural self-righteousness, who teaches morality while practicing systematic deception. Pecksniff's speeches — always morally elevated, always self-serving — are among the funniest sustained passages in Dickens, and his name has entered the language ('pecksniffian') as a term for a particular brand of sanctimonious hypocrisy.
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Martin Chuzzlewit (1843)
Complete Martin Chuzzlewit Book List
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Martin Chuzzlewit
Charles Dickens·1843
Martin Chuzzlewit — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Mrs. Gamp, and why is she famous?
Sarah Gamp is a monthly nurse (a nurse who tends the sick and the newly born) — fat, alcoholic, self-justifying, and one of the most fully realized comic characters in English fiction. She has an imaginary friend, Mrs. Harris ('who has heerd of Mrs. Harris?'), whose reported opinions invariably endorse Mrs. Gamp's own views. Her speech — a rich, tipsy, self-serving flow of malapropisms and non-sequiturs — is completely distinctive and completely consistent, and she arrives in the novel as a minor character and gradually dominates every scene she's in. Dickens himself regarded her as one of his best inventions, and the word 'gamp' entered British English as a colloquial term for an umbrella (Mrs. Gamp carries a large, unwieldy one as her trademark).
What does Dickens say about America in Martin Chuzzlewit?
Dickens's portrait of America is satirical and bitter in ways that surprised and offended American readers in 1843-44. He attacks American boosterism (the promotion of worthless real estate in the swamp settlement of 'Eden'), the gap between American democratic rhetoric and the realities of slavery, the servility of the American press, and the manners and social habits of Americans he encountered — their spitting, their titles, their constant invocations of Freedom and the Declaration of Independence while maintaining slavery in the South. The American section is now generally recognized as the most directly autobiographical part of the novel, shaped by Dickens's own 1842 American tour, and is read as a useful document of his experience even where it is clearly unfair as satire.
Is Jonas Chuzzlewit a convincing murderer?
Jonas is one of Dickens's most carefully developed villains — a man whose entire character is formed by his relationship with his father (he has been raised to calculate everything for financial advantage and to regard his father's death as his own most important financial event). His murder of Montague Tigg (a blackmailer) is carefully prepared and rendered with psychological accuracy unusual in Dickens — the chapter describing Jonas's state of mind before the murder is one of the most serious attempts at criminal psychology in Victorian fiction. His earlier plan to poison his father — which he carries out, only to discover that his father discovered the plot and died of shock rather than poison — is perhaps his most disturbing action.
What is Pecksniff's function in the novel?
Pecksniff is the novel's central comic figure and its most systematic embodiment of the theme of selfishness — he is a man who practices selfishness at every moment while speaking exclusively in the language of Christian morality and benevolence. His speeches are a sustained parody of a certain kind of Victorian moral discourse: every self-interested action is reframed as a sacrifice; every piece of exploitation is described as an act of generosity; every deception is cloaked in the language of duty. Dickens had been disgusted by the public reaction to the death of Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop — the maudlin sentimentality that seemed to him indistinguishable from self-congratulation — and Pecksniff is partly a portrait of that sentimentality stripped of its disguise.
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