This was one of Dickens's least successful books commercially; it
would be a masterpiece for most other writers. It deals with an
inheritance, that classic trope of Dickens's, and while it moves
from farce to grim criminal psychology its main focus is on
selfishness and hypocrisy. Martin and Jonas are both descendants of
the brothers Chuzzlewit and are born and bred to the same
selfishness - goods, after all, are not the only things that people
inherit - and the novel charts their contrasting destinies.
Following a period in America, where he is defrauded by the utopian
Eden Land Company, Martin has pause to reconsider his life and
returns to Britain having learned a lesson about the nature of
generosity. Angus Wilson, the novelist and critic, thought Martin's
cousin Jonas was a stunning creation. He wrote: 'In the development
of the brilliantly drawn Jonas Chuzzlewit, under the stress of
blackmail, from a vulgar money-grabbing brute into a murderer with
a dark and complicated life of inner terrors and superstitions that
would have done credit to Dostoevsky'. Alongside the villainous
Jonas, other characters people the book memorably: the fabulous
hypocrite Pecksniff, and Mrs Gamp, the disreputable old nurse
'dispoged' to the not altogether occasional glass of gin. (Kirkus
UK)
While writing Martin Chuzzlewit - his sixth novel - Dickens declared it 'immeasurably the best of my stories.' He was already famous as the author of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.
Set partly in America, which Dickens had visited in 1842, the novel includes a searing satire on the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates of moral redemption and worldly success for one, with increasingly desperate crime for the other. This powerful black comedy involves hypocrisy, greed and blackmail, as well as the most famous of Dickens's grotesques, Mrs Gamp.
In her introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition, Patricia Ingham discusses how, in writing a story that was only meant to 'recommend goodness and innocence', Dickens succeeded in exploring 'the intertwining of moral sensibility and brutality.'
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