If you made a list of the Best of Charles Dickens, you would almost certainly not include Martin Chuzzlewit. You would not be unusual.
A sign of where this book ranks in the popular imagination: Doctor Who once met Charles Dickens and while expressing his general admiration, he did wonder what in the world Dickens was thinking when he wrote this novel.
Is it really that awful? A complicated question, that.
The subtitle of Martin Chuzzlewit could be A Tale of Two Novels. Well, really two novels and a short story.
The whole work is a little over 800 pages long. First, an aside: the sheer length of the typical Dickens book prevents many people from starting one. This is unfortunate. The novels really aren’t as long as they seem when they are sitting on the bookshelf. Remember, the novels were originally published in installments; when the installments were collected into a single volume, the break points were eliminated. Fear not. With the handy aid of Wikipedia, you can find the original installment break points. My advice: read Dickens in those installments. Each section is about 40 pages long. One section at a time is a rather short bit of reading, and the next thing you know, you are done with the book. Moreover, the installment breaks themselves are really interesting to notice, something which is totally lost in plowing through the book all at once.
Returning to Chuzzlewit: the first big break in the book comes around the halfway point. The first half of the novel was an awful slog. Characters are introduced and then meander around doing little to nothing. Then new characters come along and also do nothing. A few of the characters rise to the level of potentially interesting, but, even those characters have nothing to do and get lost in the general malaise of a novel heading nowhere.
Then quite suddenly, the novel shifts into something wonderful. The characters become Dickens characters, alive and full of irrepressible charm. The plot jerks into motion with dastardly villains doing evil things to good people. Through an improbable set of coincidences, the good people win out in the end. The good people live happily ever after; the villains meet their just ends. Best of all, characters who had potential realize their potential. Pecksniff, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley all become those perfect Dickens caricatures who reveal more about humanity than you would think could be possible.
This break in the quality of the novel was quite jarring. Here I was dutifully picking up the book again to read another 40 pages without anticipation that it was going to be a pleasant hour, and suddenly, I found myself immersed in a world of joy. Jonas Chuzzlewit turned from dull mean guy into a villain right up there with Bill Sykes. Pecksniff became fully Pecksniffian, a bombastic smarmy, manipulative conniving man whose every speech is so over-the top you can’t help but laugh at the wonder of it all. It even has one of those marvelous endings which Serious Literary Critics™ hate, but I absolutely adore, when we suddenly find out that one of the characters who seemed so mean was really just pretending all along and is actually a good guy!
Naturally enough I got to puzzling over why the novel suddenly became good, but while my cursory search of the matter did not turn up anyone talking about this (for reasons which will be discussed anon), I did find a remarkable coincidence, which may in fact be explanatory. In the midst of writing Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens also wrote A Christmas Carol. Then I looked at the dates and much to my shock, the story took on its charm at the very time when A Christmas Carol showed up.
The likely reason that nobody else is splitting the novel in two as I have done here is that there is another split which is even more obvious and which takes up all the air in the room in discussions of this novel. Suddenly, for no apparent reason in the middle of the long meandering first part, young Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley head off to America. This journey occupies three (non-sequential) installments. They go to America, meet some Americans, and then come home. There is absolutely nothing in this entire journey that advances the plot of the novel in any way whatsoever. You could rip this whole section out and there would be no break in the story.
Indeed, the American section would be better ripped out and published separately. It is nothing more than a chance for Dickens to vent his spleen a bit. The message: America is a land of slave-owners, swindlers, and saps. Had Dickens simply put this satire into a stand-alone work, it might have been quite good. There is some potential here for something akin to what Twain did on a regular basis. But, crammed into a novel about the Chuzzlewit family in England, the whole thing just leaves the reader trying to figure out where this is going. The fact that it goes nowhere then just compounds the bewilderment. As Doctor Who puts it: “Mind you, for God’s sake, the American bit in Martin Chuzzlewit, what’s that about? Was that just padding? Or what? I mean, it’s rubbish, that bit.” On the other hand, G. K. Chesterton likes that bit…which just shows the sad fact that Chesterton is not always reliable.
Enough about the downsides of the novel. Let us praise Mark Tapley for a bit. As Tapley is always quick to explain, he is a jolly fellow. But, he suffers from an unbearable problem. When you are living in good circumstances, it is easy to be jolly. There is no credit in being jolly when things are going well. For example:
“Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There an’t much credit in that. If I was very ragged and very jolly, then I should begin to feel I had gained a point.”
“There might be some credit in being jolly with a wife, ‘specially if the children had the measles and that, and was very fractious indeed. But I’m a’most afraid to try it. I don’t see my way clear.”
What is Mark Tapley to do? Everywhere he goes, he finds himself jolly. He desperately wants to find some way out of this problem:
‘I was thinking,’ Mark replied, ‘of something in the grave-digging way.’
‘Good gracious, Mark?’ cried Mr Pinch.
‘It’s a good damp, wormy sort of business, sir,’ said Mark, shaking his head argumentatively, ‘and there might be some credit in being jolly, with one’s mind in that pursuit, unless grave-diggers is usually given that way; which would be a drawback. You don’t happen to know how that is in general, do you, sir?’
‘No,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘I don’t indeed. I never thought upon the subject.’
‘In case of that not turning out as well as one could wish, you know,’ said Mark, musing again, ‘there’s other businesses. Undertaking now. That’s gloomy. There might be credit to be gained there. A broker’s man in a poor neighbourhood wouldn’t be bad perhaps. A jailor sees a deal of misery. A doctor’s man is in the very midst of murder. A bailiff’s an’t a lively office nat’rally. Even a tax-gatherer must find his feelings rather worked upon, at times. There’s lots of trades in which I should have an opportunity, I think.’
It is hard to fully recommend Mark Tapley as a role model, but there is something quite admirable about a guy whose biggest complaint is that things around him never seem bleak to him. He goes to America with Martin because maybe America will allow him to feel credit for being jolly. You will be happy to hear that things are indeed so awful in America that Mark fully deserves all the credit he can get for being jolly even in America!
All of which raises an interesting question: do you get credit for being jolly while reading Martin Chuzzlewit? For the first half, most certainly, but then the book becomes wonderful and I am afraid you will just have to be content with getting no credit for being jolly as you finish the novel.
