Is Martin Chuzzlewit a “Great Bad Book”?

 

     Martin Chuzzlewit can look a bit imposing to a twenty-first century reader with nearly a thousand pages, but it is, after all, a Dickens novel with a solid plot, clear-cut morality, and characters with funny names like Mrs. Gamp (“Sairey”) and Chevy Slyme.  American readers have long been particularly interested in the episodes of the younger Martin’s experiences in the United States, which generated considerable controversy upon publication.  Though Dickens himself had said thought the book “in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories,” [1] not all readers since have agreed. 

     In fact many critics have complained about the looseness of the narrative structure and the chapters concerning America have attracted particular criticism.  Even many of those who appreciated the book consider it to lack sufficient formal organization.  George Gissing, who thought Chuzzlewit “in some respects, the greatest of [Dickens’] novels” nonetheless felt himself “lost” in its plot.  “Repeated readings avail not to fix in one’s mind as a sequence of events; we know the persons, we remember many a scene, but beyond that all is a vague reminiscence.”  Gissing wondered at the great author’s “inability” to build a stronger plot line and wished he had “but trusted to some lucid story, however slight.” [2]  To Leslie Fiedler it was “a great bad book” with an “involved and cumbersome” story-line. [3]  According to Robert Polhemus Chuzzlewit is a “hodge-podge,” lacking “wholeness and order.”  He quotes Barbara Hardy with approval when she finds in the book a “failure” with “disintegrated form.” [4]

     Many have found the American chapters an adventitious addition.  Not only did they offend American sensibilities; they seemed out of place on formal grounds to such an extent that at least two British reviewers at the time of the book’s publication called the American episodes an “excrescence.”  To a modern critic they were neither “preconceived nor even well conceived,” but rather seemed “to be a spontaneous and indiscriminate eruption of hatred against everything American that had been seething in him for some time.” [5]

     Two motives seem to have motivated what seems to some an artistic faux pas.  Dickens had just completed his first visit to the United States which he had undertaken in large part with the goal of gaining legal copyright protection for his writing.  Considering himself, very likely correctly, to be the biggest financial victim  of pirated editions, he had hoped to convince the American Congress to make a new copyright law to protect writers.  Having failed to bring about that change, he felt an animated anger against the young country which he expressed first in an open letter of protest, then in his American Notes in which the very faults dramatically highlighted in Martin Chuzzlewit are detailed: slavery, violence, extreme individualism, an exclusive focus on money, and, as the physical corollary of these distasteful traits, personal slovenliness and foul habits, foremost among them the spitting of tobacco. 

     Apart from his annoyance at failing in his legislative objective and his desire to set down his impressions of the rather raw new country, Dickens may have thought he could increase the sagging sales of the serial publication with scenes in the New World.  His sales were scarcely half (or less) what they had been for Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, and below of third of the sales for Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop. Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans had been very popular twelve years earlier, but, if he and his publisher had thought they could boost sales with this turn of the plot, they were mistaken.  Chapman & Sons was sufficiently displeased that they required him to repay money they had given him as an advance to be certain that their costs at least were covered. 

     Further, Martin Chuzzlewit seemed to many readers not only to lack the effervescent humor of some of his earlier work  but even, according to Polhemus, any sense of a “relatively optimistic vision.”  His comedy is hamstrung by his uncertainty about the “possibilities of human communion and the goodness of life.” [6]  The fact is that, apart from the feckless Tom Pinch, the eccentric Mark Tapley, the highly compromised Mr. Chuffey, and the incidental Mr. Bevan, there are few really admirable characters, and none with the warm-heartedness of his most beloved characters like Micawber or Joe Gargery.  The novel focuses on petty self-interest and Pecksniff is hardly the only character to exemplify the theme.  Ruth and John Westlock are decent people, though not extraordinary, and old Martin turns out (rather incredibly) to be well-meaning in the end.  Even the redoubtable Mrs. Gamp, who plays a considerable role in the book’s comedy, is an ambiguous figure, a heavy drinker who looks after her main chance. 

     The thinness of any sense of attractive human potential is what makes the book wearing for some readers who feel as though they are treading water in a sort of endless purgatory.  The best way to read the book is probably as it was written, in instalments with little concern for over-arching structure or a reassuring affirmation of our species.  If Martin Chuzzlewit lacks the dazzling image clusters of Bleak House and the satisfying overall form of David Copperfield, it has its own rewards.  Here his amusing eccentrics such as Mark Tapley, who seeks suffering to ennoble his jollity, and Mrs. Gamp, who never lacks a few pungent words of commentary, operate in a world defined by a fierce, almost Swiftian, denunciation of human character, allowing Dickens to avoid the mawkishness of which he was capable, but at the sacrifice of a milder warmth.  The reader would be well advised to drift with the plot, unconcerned about literary theory or rules of good practice.  Dickens was an entertainer and, even on an off night, he has first-rate material to offer.  Even if Martin Chuzzlewit is not a "great bad book," it is assuredly a "good bad book."

 

 

1.  Letter to John Forster of Nov 2, 1843.  Dickens went on to add “I feel my power now more than I ever did . . . I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had.” 

2.  Gissing, George, Charles Dickens, a critical study, 50-51.

3.  Fiedler likes to position himself as a contrarian.  In A Centre of excellence : essays presented to Seymour Betsky (ed. Robert Druce), Fiedler calls the plot “involved and cumbersome” and complains of the novel’s “unremitting bitter tone.”  He finds it “unpleasant,” “disgusting,” “mean,” and “without real tenderness or love.”

4.  Robert Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, 90. 

5.  The word appeared in both the Athenaeum and the North British Review.  See a fuller account in Jerome Meckier’s “Dickens and the Newspaper Conspiracy of 1842,” Dickens Quarterly, V:1 (March 988) and Sidney P. Moss, “The American Episode of ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’: The Culmination of Dickens' Quarrel with the American Press,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1983), pp. 223-243.

6.  Polhemus 90