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!)

Martin’s character is supposed to undergo a radical change during the course of the novel, from Selfish to Selfless. But again, we’re told he changes. Even Martin himself tells the other characters he’s changed. The other characters tell OTHER characters that Martin has changed. Yet he doesn’t show himself to be different. His motivations throughout the story don’t alter—at the end of the novel Selfless Martin achieves the goal he started out with as Selfish Martin. And he doesn’t really have to try that hard to get his happy ending…he just sort of drifts through the plot aimlessly.

If young Martin Chuzzlewit is not the main character, though, who is?

Maybe his grandfather, also named Martin Chuzzlewit? It’s true that at the end of the novel Charles Dickens pulls out a plot twist regarding Grandpa Chuzzlewit. However, it’s a plot twist that is pretty unbelievable, and rereading his earlier scenes does not foreshadow or even logically make sense with the outcome of his story.

If the reader uses the focus of the story to determine the protagonist, this novel is still a mess, because it hops from Martin to all sorts of other characters, without giving much weight to any one of them to help single them out as the Main Character.

Some people argue that Tom Pinch, the Selfless and naïve apprentice/servant of Pecksniff, is the main character. It’s true he does seem to have more to do (he actually has a fight scene!), more change in his perspective (as he realizes the treachery of his beloved boss), and more description of his emotions and thought processes than most of the other characters.

Tom’s good but rather weak personality is overshadowed by John Westlock, who is good, if a bit hot-tempered and blunt. He also has a sense of humor that most of the other people in this book woefully lack. However, aside from giving assistance whenever another good character needs it (such as when Tom is fired by Pecksniff and needs a place to stay for the night), and having a delightful but brief subplot towards the end of the book, Westlock hardly appears. So he can’t be The Hero, either. (Much as I would want him to be.)

Mark Tapley is another character that could have become the Main Character, but this is made impossible by Dickens not devoting enough character development or simply more time with his character. Tapley’s distinguishing characteristic is that he is “jolly” or optimistic and thankful no matter the circumstances. Reasoning that it’s easy to be jolly when one has a good life, he seeks out adversity (in the form of accompanying Martin to America) to test whether he can be jolly even in the worst circumstances. This gets to be downright annoying, especially since Tapley never is anything but cheerful…if we saw him get depressed and have to be encouraged by, say, Martin, it would have been a better development of both characters and their relationship, and furthermore would have shown Martin doing something selfless.

Of these characters (and the many others that appear in Martin Chuzzlewit), ultimately I think that Tom Pinch emerges as the main character simply by merit of having the most ink spilled describing his subplot. The last paragraphs of the novel are devoted to what happens to him rather than the titular character. As a narrator, Dickens speaks particularly fondly of him (often making asides like “Poor Tom!” or “Kind-hearted Tom!”) and tries really hard to make the readers sympathize with him.

There’s a difference between sympathetic and simply pathetic, and in this case Tom is so gullible and naïve he falls into the latter category.