Review: Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens

Review: Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens

by Rich Horton

To be honest, I had planned for Great Expectations to be my next Dickens novel. But a friend had decided to attack Martin Chuzzlewit, so I figured I'd read along. I got impatient, though -- and read it through faster than advertised. I listened to much of it on my commute, but of course I also have a print copy, the Oxford World Classics edition originally from 1982, edited and with an introduction and notes by Margaret Cardwell.

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 1843. Dickens was by then an extremely popular and financially successful novelist, and was very proud of his achievement in this book, apparently because he spent a lot of effort making the book work as an examination of a consistent theme -- that of selfishness. For all that, the novel was a comparative failure commercially -- though it must be said it still sold well. It's interesting to note that around that time Dickens turned to his Christmas novellas, with A Christmas Carol appearing in 1843, The Chimes in 1844, and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. 

Dickens was very open about his aim in this novel, and said aim is pretty clear. He was portraying the effects of selfishness on people, and showing the harm -- to others and often to themselves -- that selfishness does. With four exceptions (not counting minor characters) everyone exhibits selfishness -- of differing kinds. Two characters reform (not necessarily convincingly) -- these are the two title characters, Martin Chuzzlewit and his grandfather, who shares his name. The other significant selfish characters are all punished, though, again, there's reason to believe that some of the punishment is wielded by the author, and might not have resulted in the real world.

In brief terms -- hard to do for such a long novel (Martin Chuzzlewit is about 700 pages in my edition, around 340,000 words) -- this is the story of Martin Chuzzlewit, the grandson of a rich miser of the same name. Martin the younger offends his grandfather by falling in love with Martin the elder's ward, the orphan Mary Graham. Martin is disinherited, and in the process loses his position as an architect in training working for Seth Pecksniff, another relation of the elder Martin. Martin the younger travels to America to try to make his fortune, in company with his friend Mark Tapley. Meanwhile, the other parts of the Chuzzlewit family are angling for the elder Martin's good will -- the egregious hypocrite Mr. Pecksniff, the vicious Jonah Chuzzlewit, the, er, slimy Chevy Slyme. Mr. Pecksniff tries to up his odds for a piece of old Martin's fortune by dangling his somewhat unpleasant daughters in front of Jonas. Mr. Pecksniff's much put upon assistant Tom Pinch, nearly saintly in his self-abnegation, does his best to  help his friends, particularly Martin and Mary Graham, until he finally realizes Mr. Pecksniff's villainy. Jonah and Mr. Pecksniff are both entangled in the doings of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, a pretty overt Ponzi scheme (before Ponzi!) run by Montague Tigg, or Tigg Montague, who was also involved with Chevy Slyme. Martin and Mark return from America, completely unsuccessful, and everything starts to unravel ... There are murders, thefts, terrible marriages, multiple fraudulent schemes in both England and America, plague, even an early literary detective ...

The novel is baggily structured, and there is a lot of coincidence driving the plot. The supposed main character, young Martin Chuzzlewit, isn't terribly interesting, and his romance with Mary Graham is very flat. Martin also takes up very little of the book for a protagonist -- perhaps a fifth of it. Dickens does not seem to have been able to portray love interests well -- the two virtuous young women in this book, Mary and Tom Pinch's sister Ruth, are both cyphers as characters, much like Dora and Agnes in David Copperfield. The conversion of the nice but unthinking and quite self younger Martin Chuzzlewit and the repentant elder Martin are both more convenient than believable.

All of the above are reasons why this is not one of Dickens' more highly regarded novels. But for all that -- it's really a very entertaining book. There are longueurs of course -- but there are longueurs in the much greater David Copperfield. The joys of this novel lie primarily in two areas. One is Dickens' prose, full of extended and strange but apposite descriptions of just about everything -- people, nature, buildings, schemes. The other, of course, is the characters, especially the villains. Mr. Pecksniff is one of Dickens' great creations, one of the most obscenely hypocritical of humans, full of borrowed aphorisms and borrowed ideas, constantly presenting a facade of virtue while keeping an eye on the main chance. Jonas Chuzzlewit is less interesting -- he's simply so horrible a person one can only gasp. The nurse Mrs. Gamp, not so much a true villain as a hopelessly almost innocently self-involved person, along with her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris. The various Americans don't get much space, but they are in their brief compass satisfyingly mean. Montague Tigg is in his way a somewhat conventional fraudster, but still holds the interest. There is a variety of less villainous but still involving characters -- Mark Tapley, ever convinced that for him to gain "credit" in life he must maintain jollity in the face of terrible circumstances, and who finally gets his wish in America; Mr. Nadgett, the almost invisible detective; the lugubrious Augustus, the much persecuted fiance of the elder Pecksniff girl; the energetic and ambitious boy Bailey and his friend Mr. Sweedlepipe, the barber and bird seller. There is always (well, almost always) something going on in the book, so one's interest doesn't flag. Is this a great novel? By no means, but it's a demonstration that Dickens had the magic gift of entertainment.