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.

There are two obvious problems with this setup, and I’m surprised that no one (such as an editor or publisher, for example) brought this to Dickens’ attention, or that Dickens didn’t realize it himself:

1. If an author has to tell his audience the theme of his story, then that should be a warning sign that the story needs work. Requiring a preface to explain the meaning of the contents of a book is essentially condescending to the audience. The Author is either saying “I think you’re too stupid to figure this out yourself,” or “I’m not confident that I made this clear enough in the actual story, so here’s the answer right away.”

2. As a storyteller Dickens should have been aware that his readership wanted to have a variety of characters. It’s what he usually does in his other works, and his fans would have expected it. When you develop each character around the same basic framework of Selfishness, that variety is dampened. Dickens has some good villains in this book, but the “heroes” are actually not much better. It makes the reader wonder who to root for…and the reader may eventually decide on someone other than the intended protagonist.