Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Charles Dickens (Introduction to Martin Chuzzlewit)

The first problem about Martin Chuzzlewit is its title. “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet,” opines Juliet, and normally I would agree, but I feel that in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit the axiom does not neatly apply. Martin Chuzzlewit is one of those novels that would benefit from a title change. It is a problem that emerges only once the book has been well begun, as a vague niggle at first, then a growing worry, and then, by the time one has reached the end, it is a full-blown puzzler. Why on earth is the book called Martin Chuzzlewit? More precisely: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit? Who, in all honesty, gives a fig about young Martin — whose story, I roughly calculate, probably occupies barely a fifth of the text — so why should the book be named after him? When one thinks of the great eponymous Dickens novels—Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby — it is apparent that Martin Chuzzlewit, though it would seem to be in the same family, is manifestly not. And this misnomer goes some way to account, I think, for the novel’s surprising though significant neglect. For one of Dickens’s greatest novels it is, without doubt, under-read and undervalued. It is as if it has been placed, as it were, in the wrong pigeon-hole: it shouldn’t be with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield but with, say, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend. Readers are expecting Dickens to offer them something they are familiar with, and something that he does unsurpassably well, and in the event the central character is almost insignificant, and was there ever such a bland pair of lovers as young Martin and Mary? It is not conclusive evidence, though telling enough all the same, but in a recent biography of Dickens the index cites only nine fleeting references to the novel, the longest being a couple of paragraphs dealing with the American episodes and their sources. Clearly, Martin Chuzzlewit is something of a square peg in a round hole; Martin Chuzzlewit is an odd fish.

And yet at the same time Martin Chuzzlewit is, I think, the most sheerly funny of all Dickens’s novels, with a teeming energetic humour that continues to delight some hundred and fifty years after its first publication. It contains enduringly celebrated Dickens creations, notably Seth Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, a whole gallery of brilliantly rendered minor characters and writing of a verve and vigour, and imaginative audacity, that is the equal of anything else in the oeuvre. Dickens himself was highly pleased with the book as he was writing it. “You know, as well as I,” he confided to his friend and future biographer John Forster, “that I think Chuzzlewit in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I know, if I had health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men, though fifty writers started up tomorrow. But how many readers do not think!” The somewhat plaintive self-justification is highly revealing, as is his evident ambition and confidence. It was prompted by the comparative failure of the novel, which was appearing in monthly parts throughout 1843 and the first half of 1844. By Dickens’s standards it was not doing well. Pickwick and Nickleby sold 40–50,000 copies a month: Chuzzlewit never rose much over 20,000.

It must have been hard for Dickens to comprehend this baffling shortfall. He was thirty-two years old and at the very apex of his fame. Chuzzlewit was his sixth novel, destined to follow the unequivocal triumphs of Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. He was in a real sense a mature novelist with a massive readership and in full and confident apprehension of his particular genius. He had special hopes for Chuzzlewit also: it was to be more deliberately structured than the picaresque form of its predecessors; moreover it was to have a clear moral agenda — it was designed to illustrate, according to Forster, “more or less by every person introduced, the number and variety of humours and vices that have their root in selfishness.” And throughout the novel Dickens dutifully reminds us of this great theme of “Self,” addressing little homilies to the reader, explaining motives and consequences, just in case the outlines of the grand plan are becoming a little blurred. But it does not work, or rather it works, but only in the most general sense. Yes, one can see what he is driving at, but this sententious overview is an afterthought; it has nothing to do with the success, nor of the greatness, of the novel.

And here we enter the realm of speculation, somewhat. Chuzzlewit is a huge novel, more than half a million words I calculate, which was written more or less continually over a period of eighteen months. Your average late twentieth-century novelist, producing a lean, well-tooled 200 pager every three or four years, must stand in shamefaced awe at this superabundant energy. Dickens’s letters are full of it—“writing like a Dragon,” “powdering away at Chuzzlewit,” “writing merrily.” Again he declares to Forster: “I have been all day in Chuzzlewit agonies — conceiving only. I hope to bring forth tomorrow” (my italics). The demands of monthly serial publication must have made this form of writing rhythm inevitable. A day of feverish thought and plotting followed by days of feverish writing. Even if we did not have Dickens’s own words for it the internal evidence of the text would suffice to establish that the novel was composed in this manner. You can chart the rise and fall of his energies and enthusiasms, easily spot the longueurs and the padding. That the novel is generally so unflaggingly zestful is what is astonishing: the fact that it is not wholly sustained, that it occasionally goes off the boil, meanders and loses its way, is not only inevitable, it is also — thank God — only human.

In every artist’s head, certainly in every novelist’s, there is an urversion — a perfect Platonic vision — of the art form he or she intends to produce. For various reasons — usually a blend of impossible ambition and pragmatic constraints — something different, and, rarely, something better, emerges. And this, I think, is what occurred with Martin Chuzzlewit. We know in fair detail what Dickens hoped the Chuzzlewit he was writing would be: we can only be grateful that it didn’t come off.

Because it has to be said that, for all his hopes about producing a more sophisticated and better-structured novel than its predecessors, Chuzzlewit — judged by Dickens’s criteria — fails. It is uneven, it is ungainly, it sags and from time to time bores and baffles. The most signal example of this, as I have already suggested, is the superficiality of the eponymous hero. But the American episodes are another instance of bad planning (apparently an attempt, in response to the disappointing sales, to win new readers). When Martin and Mark Tapley go to seek their fortune in the New World the whole tone of the novel changes. It reads today as laboriously heavy-handed satire, but I suspect that, even in 1843, when the narrative switched back to England and the Pecksniffs, a sense of relief would be inevitable. This is not to say that the novel is badly plotted: on the contrary, Dickens keeps the strands of various storylines taut and neatly interconnected. As the novel progresses, the geographical displacements of minor characters — Mark Tapley, Bailey, Mrs Gamp — function very effectively as points de repère for the multilevelled plot. Young Bailey, for example, neatly takes us from Mrs Todgers’s boarding house, to the Anglo-Bengalee Assurance Company, which links us again with Jonas Chuzzlewit and the unfortunate Merry Pecksniff. Another device Dickens employs is deliberately to withhold information from us, while at the same time letting us know that the information is highly significant. This is a form of teasing on the part of the omniscient novelist that can occasionally verge on the arch. An obvious instance is the “dirt” that Nadgett digs up on Jonas Chuzzlewit. He hands the details to Tigg Montague who reads them with mounting glee. Dickens knows, Nadgett knows and Montague knows… but we don’t. The reader’s curiosity is distinctly piqued. Also the invalid Lewsome confides to John Westlock that he has a dread and vital secret to impart and will do so as soon as he recovers his health. This knowledge ticks away like a buried time bomb as the story continues elsewhere. Another tribute to Dickens’s skill in the mechanics of novel writing is that nothing is wasted. I am sure every reader would have forgotten that young Martin designed a grammar school while he was briefly Pecksniff’s pupil. But it delivers a pleasant frisson of surprised recognition when, hundreds of pages later, Martin and Mark return to England and discover Pecksniff humbly receiving the plaudits of an admiring crowd as the foundation stone of Martin’s grammar school is laid.

All these techniques are narrative skills that Dickens possesses in abundance, that contrive to keep the story moving, that deliver a sense of something shapely and well constructed (though he doesn’t hesitate to resort to absurd coincidence when he is in a tight spot). But they are the sort of manipulations that, I would suggest, manifest themselves in the day to day business of writing and plotting the monthly numbers. The component parts — the whirring cogs, the levers and the pulleys — are all functioning well: it is only the grand design of the machine that is flawed.

Not that this unduly matters, I repeat. The poet and critic Craig Raine suggests, quite rightly I believe, that “finally, we read Dickens for his brilliant detail.” Detail like this, for example: “his fingers, clogged with brilliant rings, were as unwieldy as summer flies but newly rescued from a honey pot.” This is masterfully done, not simply in terms of the visual analogue provided — one knows exactly the degree of vulgar flashiness we are dealing with — but also for its undertones, of “flies round a honey pot,” of the element of corruption — there is something candidly disgusting about this image. The fact that the simile is applied to Tigg Montague in his newfound glory makes it all the more apt. And the fact too that this is but one image in a marvellously burnished paragraph devoted to a description of Montague Tigg turned Tigg Montague is further evidence of Dickens’s prodigality.

A little later, in the extraordinary pages that make up our introduction to the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, we find this: “Look at the green ledgers with red backs, like strong cricket-balls beaten flat …” The strength and sheer originality of this simile almost draw you up short. A cricket-ball beaten flat? Something I doubt anyone has ever seen, but in the forcing jar of Dickens’s imagination it not only is readily visualized but it also provides a vision of these mighty ledgers that is perfectly precise.

These “brilliant details,” the quality of writing, the very palpability of Dickens’s descriptive prose, are the nuggets we quarry from the great bulk of the novels and Martin Chuzzlewit is richly provisioned with them. But there are moments when Dickens, in full flow, is able to extend this feeling of physicality through entire paragraphs. Here, for example, is part of a description of Mrs Todgers’s boarding house:

In particular, there was a sensation of cabbage; as if all the greens that had ever been boiled there, were evergreens, and flourished in immortal strength. The parlour was wainscoted, and communicated to strangers a magnetic and instinctive consciousness of rats and mice. The staircase was very gloomy and very broad, with balustrades so thick and heavy that they would have served for a bridge. In a sombre corner of the first landing, stood a gruff old giant of a clock, with a preposterous coronet of three brass balls on his head; whom few had ever seen — none ever looked in the face — and who seemed to continue his heavy tick for no other reason than to warn heedless people from running into him accidentally. It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s, within the memory of man. It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy. And, at the top of the staircase, was an old, disjointed, rickety, ill-favoured skylight, patched and mended in all kinds of ways, which looked distrustfully down at everything that passed below, and covered Todgers’s up as if it were a sort of human cucumber-frame, and only people of a peculiar growth were reared there.

All the familiar Dickensian tropes are pressed into service here. Comic exaggeration, the swaggering simile (“balustrades …[that] would have served for a bridge”), personification, the conversational aside (“It had not been papered or painted, hadn’t Todgers’s”), the piling on of adjectives and then, finally, the startling transmogrifying image — of Todgers’s as a human cucumber-frame — that leaps from the page and delivers us Todgers’s in a manner so fresh, so audacious, that any sense that this was merely another run-of-the-mill tumbledown dwelling, of the sort that has been described in literature countless times before, is entirely banished from our minds.

There are also other, more covert, talents at work in passages like this: to do with punctuation and rhythm and sentence cadence. This is hard to analyse, and it may even be an instinctive gift, but Dickens, it seems to me, has a superb sense of timing, of when to throw in a short sentence—“It was very black, begrimed, and mouldy”—amongst longer ones; of when to allow the parenthetical clauses to build and mount; of when to introduce repetition (“The staircase was very gloomy and very broad”); and so on. This ability to orchestrate the pace of these bravura passages in no small manner contributes to their success. The way a paragraph like this is structured acts as a kind of invisible matrix upon which the ideas and images may confidently rest; and Dickens shows himself as deftly accomplished with these more recherché technical gifts, as with the principal ones of story, character and language, allowing them discreetly to distribute and enhance the various forces of the words he employs. One may admire the splendid ambition of the architect but one should never forget the less ostentatious labours of the engineer. Dickens, as we have seen, was a formidable exponent of both professions.

There are many passages of similar brilliance in Martin Chuzzlewit, as there are in all of Dickens’s novels, but Chuzzlewit, to my mind, is amongst the most amply provided. Furthermore, it is not simply a matter of sparkling and pyrotechnical description. Chuzzlewit, it is worth reiterating, is Dickens’s funniest novel, and it is the ever present, and effervescent, sense of comedy, alongside the virtuoso wordplay and image-mongering, that makes paragraphs like the one quoted above so memorably effective.

If, in some notional parlour game, I were asked to select the most sustained passage of comic writing in English literature, to choose a tour de force that one could confidently present as an exemplar of the comic form, then I think I would offer up as my choice the penultimate chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where Salter, the hapless news editor, follows William Boot to Boot Magna, the family home, and tries to persuade him to rejoin the staff of the Daily Beast. Every time I read these pages I laugh again and exult at Waugh’s impeccable comic sense. Comparisons are invidious, and the comic styles are so different in any case, but I now believe that the pre-eminence of the penultimate chapter of Scoop is seriously challenged, if not overthrown, by chapters eight and nine of Martin Chuzzlewit, pages which deal with the Pecksniff family’s trip to London, their arrival at Todgers’s, their visit to Miss Pinch and concluding with the Sunday dinner given in the Pecksniffs’ honour by the gentlemen lodgers. Waugh’s style is all to do with restraint, the humour is implicit, everything is merely presented — shown — and it is the reader who, automatically, fleshes out the context and significance, and supplies the humour and absurdity. Waugh sets the charges, if you like, and the reader detonates them. In Dickens the reverse is true — Dickens tells as well as shows — and it is a remarkable tribute to the potent verve and dynamism of his style (and perhaps to the fact that, at root, senses of humour barely change) that, a century and a half on, these forty pages or so of Martin Chuzzlewit provide such fecund and inventive writing as well as such rich and apparently timeless comedy. They are, in my opinion, unmatched in all his other novels.

But Dickens, as has been frequently observed, can all too easily make his critics appear clever. This may be a weakness apparent in a certain type of talent or genius — not so long ago Mozart was mocked for his “horrible little tunes”—a type that is generous and lavish, open and unguarded, the very opposite of the costive or over-intellectual artist. Dickens takes great risks (he was, it should always be remembered, writing for a huge popular audience) and he leaves hostages to fortune in every chapter. It is not difficult to deplore a ghastly passage like this, apostrophizing on the attraction between John Westlock and Ruth Pinch:

Merrily the tiny fountain played, and merrily the dimples sparkled on its sunny face. John Westlock hurried after her. Softly the whispering water broke and fell; and roguishly the dimples twinkled as he stole upon her footsteps.

Oh, foolish, panting timid little heart, why did she feign to be unconscious of his coming! Why wish herself so far away, yet be so flutteringly happy there!

Can this be the same man who can write, with the laconic quietism of a Kurt Vonnegut, of a child’s death: “Smart citizens grow rich, and friendless victims smart and die, and are forgotten. That is all”? The answer is “yes” and there is a complexity of reasons required to explain why this can be. Briefly, it is a combination, I would suggest, of autre temps, autres moeurs, and various impulses existing in the Dickens psyche. And there is no doubt that raw sentiment, in serious literature, is today almost wholly discredited and démodé to such an extent that we are embarrassed when we come across it in an artist we admire and revere. It is instructive to compare the contemporary responses to another comic genius — Charlie Chaplin (with whom, in the life and the work, there are many parallels) — who, forty years after Dickens’s death, also won enormous popular acclaim with a similar blend of comedy and unadulterated sentiment. In Chaplin’s case modern audiences feel happier analysing the complex architectonics of a pratfall or elaborate gag than responding to the two-fisted hauling on their heartstrings that many a Chaplin film indulges in. But Dickens is the greater artist (and, of course, his art form infinitely more rich and complex) and his genius, unlike Chaplin’s, more easily survives the excesses of an overloaded heart.

There are two broad reasons for this: one to do with content and one to do with form. Dickens proclaimed that Martin Chuzzlewit was to do with “Self.” But, as with many of the ostensible subjects of his great novels, this formulation is just another way of saying that it is to do with “Money.” Money and the getting of it are the key factors underpinning the narrative and moral strands of Martin Chuzzlewit. Martin wants money, as do Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit and Montague Tigg. Chuzzlewit, like many a Victorian novel, has as its starting point a potential inheritance, and the material changes that inheritance will bestow: who will get what and how will their lives alter thereby? It was a theme, to put it bluntly, very close to Dickens’s heart. But against this need, against this motive force, Dickens sets characters for whom these pecuniary desires hold no attraction. Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch, for example, lead lives in which the getting of money has no part to play beyond essential pragmatic concerns. (Symbolically, Tom sends back Mrs Lupin’s fiver without breaking it.) Their lives are driven instead by principles of simple human decency, and the moral tensions of the novel revolve around these counterposing tendencies. Money versus decency, and the eventual triumph of decency, is a sloganizing redaction of what Martin Chuzzlewit is “about.” It is not resolved in a satisfactory way because the comic form, the serious comic form, fights against this type of cosy sententiousness. This sort of conclusion is one where art is designed to console, but if it is to console in this way then it has to be handled, and the reader manipulated, with cool and masterly skill. A glance at the final paragraphs of Martin Chuzzlewit will illustrate just to what extent Dickens has lost this fingerparing, objective poise.

But it does not matter: the cute verities that Dickens endorses in the novel’s conclusion do not undermine its greatness (and in fact I defy anyone not to be delighted that young Bailey turns out to be alive after all. There is a small place for sentiment, one must grudgingly concede, however hardnosed we like our comedy to be in this day and age) because the triumph of decency, if we may so term it, is not why one values the novel. Because, to contemporary readers, its value must be to do with, in the end, questions of contemporary response. It is right that we should not bend Dickens’s work into some grotesque modern distortion—“The Existential Dickens,” or “Dickens as Marxist” or some such parody. He was an early Victorian, inescapably, with all the emotional and intellectual baggage that is implied in that classification. But at the same time it is vital for each new generation of readers to reassess and re-evaluate the great works of the past, and if we are to read Martin Chuzzlewit today, and derive pleasure from it — and not just as an anthropological curiosity — we must ask ourselves what there is in the novel that defies history, as it were, that makes it always valid.

My own response to this question would be that it lies in the comedy. The unequivocal fun and exuberance are crucial, as I have suggested, but there is a note in Chuzzlewit that is new in Dickens and marks Chuzzlewit as a precursor of the darker, later novels. The high-spirited comedy is mixed here and there with a brand of humour that one might designate “brutal” or “cruel”; moments where Dickens, like all great comic novelists, recognizes the indifference of the universe to mankind’s fate, recognizes that, to quote Evelyn Waugh, “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” One thinks in this context of the tenacious, indestructible fraudulence of Pecksniff, of Merry and Cherry and their respective fates, of Jonas Chuzzlewit’s bleak lechery and near-demonic possession, of the ruthless mockery of Chuffey and Moddle, of Mrs Gamp and her gallows humour, of Montague Tigg and his ebullient conning of trusting investors. Dickens’s comic vision of the world, despite his neat pairing off of happy young lovers, despite, one might say, his best intentions, is too sagacious, too clear-eyed and realistic, to pretend that all’s well that ends well. There is a moment, early in the novel, where Dickens is guying the rebarbative smugness of the Pecksniff family. “What words can paint the Pecksniffs in that trying hour? Oh, none: for words have naughty company among them, and the Pecksniffs were all goodness” (my italics). At the end of the novel “all goodness” seems to have triumphed but the jollity and benignity appear forced and self-deceiving. Tom Pinch may be bedecked with flowers and mellow harmonies may enfold him but we know what the world is really like because Dickens has just shown us, with fierce accuracy and intoxicating humour. It is the naughty company of words that we celebrate and recall: this is what gives Martin Chuzzlewit its edge, its wild glee, its cautious disquiet, and its greatness.

1994