"Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844) - where Charles Dickens goes to America

The most interesting aspect of this middle-period Dickens novel is that most of it takes places in the United States, whereto Martin flees to escape from disgrace in London and to make his fortune. However, everyone in New York is a hustler scrambling after the almighty dollar, and things get (much) worse when he goes pioneering down south along the Mississippi river to take possession of a property he has been sold by a glib New-Yorker shyster.

Although the book abounds in stunning portraits of off-beat characters like the adorable Mrs Gump and the biggest hypocrite in all literature (with Molière’s Tartuffe), Mr. Pecksniff, and features yet another clever and truer-than-life arch-villain, Martin’s own uncle Jonas, this book was not well received at the time, particularly in America where his public then much preferred reading about the down side of England rather than about that side of the U.S.A.

It was also poorly received in England, where the mass public was unprepared for the absence of a societal theme and of a central character easy to relate to. But there’s a lot of top-class Dickensian writing and subtle humour in this refreshing account of an America undergoing rapid change that the author summarised when he declared in his interesting Postscript:
...how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side—changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere.

In his way Dickens on his tour of America in 1842 was making a study of the functioning of the young American democracy in the same vein as Alexis de Tocqueville, who was had gone there in 1831-32 to research his On Democracy in America, as evidenced by numerous episodes in the novel, such as the following exchange:
‘Oh! there is an aristocracy here, then?’ said Martin. ‘Of what is it composed?’
‘Of intelligence, sir,’ replied the colonel; ‘of intelligence and virtue. And of their necessary consequence in this republic—dollars, sir.’

The results of both of those wide-ranging exploratory missions by de Tocqueville [1] and Dickens are still being read with interest and profit today, almost 200 years later.

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 19 instalments between January 1843 and July 1844 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,with a total of 40 illustrations by Phiz (Hablot Browne), all of which are included here.

(338,000 words)

An e-book (with the illustrations) is available for downloading below.

Martin Chuzzlewit (e-book)