Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (1844)

There’s that time for a prolific writer when he’s moving from the utter facility of his juvenalia to the deeper levels of his art that are more difficult to attain. Martin Chuzzlewit has that early abounding vitality as well as intimations of the more profound themes to come. How can we change our characters and revise our prejudices? Must we suffer in order to grow in wisdom? It might be that his blacking factory abandonment fixed a permanent insecurity that did not allow Dickens to settle into a state of being Charles Dickens writing Charles Dickens’s novels. Of course there are plot devices that recur. In episodic publication there have to be doors to other rooms. Simulation and dissimulation are features, comic drunkards, transparent machinations of the addlepated and chuckleheaded and the flagrant coincidences that hardly micro mesh the plot. That’s Dickens but and you will come to love and expect the sudden emergence of a character that you presumed had served his purpose. As I was getting on in the book some several hundred pages had passed and Chivy Slyme had vanished even though Montague Tigg his confederate has put on the gaudy plumage of a nabob. You’ll be back for sure I thought. Hello again Chivy, I expect you were in the neighbourhood and thought it rude to pass. And in a surprising role. What can you say about a novel that has Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Young Bailey, the frightful daughters Pecksniff, Charity and Mercy, Mark Tapley, Mrs. Todgers, Montague Tigg and The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company. All characters whatever are given the full Dickens to the distress of American readers who objected to the satirical treatment of their great democracy. Dickens said that it was mere reportage. The book is full of crooks but there’s only one psychopath, Jonas Chuzzlewit. This is an unsettling portrait of a wicked man whose delight in his ruthlessness leaves him subject to manipulation by arch scoundrel Tigg. Jonas’s tracking of him by coach and foot has a macabre inevitability because we are told beforehand how it will culminate. It’s a comic masterpiece with an undercurrent of dread. Insipid females do no impinge on the story in a significant way which rushes along, by coach generally.