The Life And Adventures Of Martin Chhuzzlewit

Charles Dickens’ work The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit was a serialized, satirical novel, published in monthly installments between 1843 and 1844, and was perhaps his least economically successful literary venture; however, while it was his least successful sales-wise, it was allegedly his personal favorite. It was composed following his first American Tour in 1842 “during which he lobbied for the issue closest to his heart: an international copyright,” a cause which was met with primarily negative reception in the United States (Castillo 436). However, the overarching, professed purpose of the novel was to illustrate the selfish nature of humans via the relationships between his characters, namely the wealthy supporting character
Though the novel itself is set in the 1840s when railways dominated transportation, Dickens inspired a great deal of nostalgia in his readers by harkening back to an England characterized by personal stagecoaches and familiar, country alehouses. Concurrently, the naive Martin arrived in the backwater swamp—ironically named Eden—of the United States, which he suggested in his American Notes was, in part, deeply unpleasant because of its sense of rapid movement. Dickens’ negative view of the United States was also based upon his experience in a United States that he asserted was filthy, amoral, and deeply unequal (in direct contrast to its egalitarian
Though Dickens’ narrative consists of both personal observations of reality and fictionalized characters, his method of storytelling allows the reader to objectively examine the failings of human nature through representative characters; he uses Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit to demonstrate those whose selfishness and hypocrisy lead to failure, and characters like Tom Pinch and young Martin Chuzzlewit, whose virtue and penitence ultimately lead to their success. Similarly, Dickens’ post-script in Martin Chuzzlewit reflects a redeemed America in which “changes moral,…[and] changes in the Press” (Dickens) had created an America that he characterized as unsurpassably polite, delicate, sweet tempered, hospitable, considerate, and unsurpassably respectful of him, a description he would stand by “so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books”