Martin Chuzzlewit

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (commonly known as Martin Chuzzlewit) is a novel by Charles Dickens, considered the last of his picaresque novels. It was originally serialised between January 1843 and July 1844. While he was writing it Dickens told a friend that he thought it was his best work thus far, but it was one of his least popular novels, judged by sales of the monthly instalments. Characters in this novel gained fame, including Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp. Like nearly all of Dickens’s novels, Martin Chuzzlewit was first published in monthly instalments. Early sales of the monthly parts were lower than those of previous works, so Dickens changed the plot to send the title character to the United States. Dickens had visited America in 1842 in part as a failed attempt to get the US publishers to honour international copyright laws. He satirized the country as a place filled with self-promoting hucksters, eager to sell land sight unseen. He also unfavourably highlighted slavery and featured characters with racist attitudes and a propensity to violence. In later editions, and in his second visit 24 years later to a much-changed US, he made clear in a speech that it was satire and not a balanced image of the nation and then included that speech in all future editions. The main theme of the novel, according to Dickens’s preface, is selfishness, portrayed in a satirical fashion using all the members of the Chuzzlewit family. The novel is also notable for two of Dickens’s great villains, Seth Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit. Dickens introduced one of the first literary private detective characters, Mr Nadgett, in this novel. It is dedicated to Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, a friend of Dickens.