The American Part of Charles Dicken's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

I glossed over “The American Part” of Martin Chuzzlewit earlier because it warrants its own discussion. Charles Dickens obviously wrote this book on his return to England from his first tour of the United States. From the biographies of Dickens I’ve read, he was NOT impressed by the New World. And it definitely shows in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Heroic Hot Potato in Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"

The novel Martin Chuzzlewit was fundamentally flawed even before it was written. Charles Dickens decided he wanted to write on the theme of Selfishness, building a story around that infrastructure rather than incorporating it more organically. Aside from this ambiguous topic, it doesn’t seem like Dickens really had an idea where he wanted to go with the plot, or the journeys his characters would take.

Breaking the cardinal rule of storytelling, Show, Don’t Tell, the reader is told that Martin Chuzzlewit is the main character. Yet even when Martin is not being mind-numbingly boring, he’s being mind-numbingly annoying. Whether Dickens ever admitted it or not, I think he felt the same way, which explains why Martin disappears for chapters at a time. (And the reader doesn’t even notice, much less miss him!)

My Personal Ranking of Jane Austen's Novels

1. Mansfield Park
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Sense and Sensibility
4. Persuasion
5. Emma
6. Lady Susan

The Plot of Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"

A lot of Charles Dickens’ novels are titled with the name of the main character:

•  The Adventures of Oliver Twist
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
• Barnaby Rudge
• Little Dorrit
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• And, of course, Martin Chuzzlewit

Dickens usually has loads and loads of characters—some being more interesting or assertive than the titular character—often divided into subplots of their own which eventually weave tighter and tighter together. These subplots orbit the main plot that concerns the title character, sometimes converging. Sometimes the titular character is not so much the Hero as the MacGuffin…like Edwin Drood who is allegedly killed.

But, through it all, one has a good idea who to root for and to which characters one is supposed to become emotionally attached.

No such luck in Martin Chuzzlewit, however. This story opens not with an introduction of the hero, but with the villain: Seth Pecksniff. 

Fundamental Problems with Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"

I’m not mad, just disappointed.

Okay, I’m lying. I’m pretty mad, too.

At long last I finished reading Martin Chuzzlewit, a novel Charles Dickens apparently thought one of his best books. Which just goes to show that a person doesn’t always have an accurate gauge on the worth of their works.

(I guess that could be considered something positive that came of this reading experience. If a person can overestimate the worth of something they do, then it’s just as easy for a person to underestimate the worth of the humdrum things they do every day.)

Martin Chuzzlewit was written, as Dickens explains in a preface, as a condemnation of Selfishness. Having established himself as a force of social reform in Oliver Twist (treatment of orphans) and Nicholas Nickleby (the harsh world of boarding schools) among other works, Dickens decided to approach a broad subject of human self-centeredness. As a result, almost every character in Martin Chuzzlewit is selfish to the core.