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Charles Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit [REVIEW]

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Title: Martin Chuzzlewit

Author: Charles Dickens

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 829

Rating: 3.5/5

The Charles Dickens read through continues! So, where do we begin with this one?

Well, first off, there’s the usual background story and disclaimer, including the fact that I listened to this one as an audio book via Librivox, where volunteers provide free audio books of works that are in the public domain. This one was particularly good quality, with the whole thing read by the same person, and someone who clearly had a decent grasp of English.

When he was writing it, Dickens said that Martin Chuzzlewit was his best work so far, but given that he’d written Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge by this point, I don’t think that’s quite fair. He also found the time to pen A Christmas Carol in the middle of this one being serialised. What a guy.

Martin Chuzzlewit is said to be Dickens’ final picaresque novel, and while I’ve heard that term being used, I still had to look up what it meant. Apparently, there are seven key factors that are typically seen in picaresque novels, although not all of them need to be deployed:

  1. Picaresque stories are usually autobiographical or written in first-person.
  2. The main character is usually of a lower class, surviving on their wits.
  3. There’s not much of an overall plot; instead, the story is told in the form of a series of interconnected episodes.
  4. The main character, called a picaro, rarely undergoes character development.
  5. The story is generally told with plain language and plenty of realism.
  6. Satire is often used prominently throughout.
  7. The protagonist’s behaviour shouldn’t be criminal.

This describes many of Dickens’ early characters to a tee, and certainly does a good job of letting you know what you’ll be in for if you pick up Martin Chuzzlewit. And that’s particularly true for the Americans.

From what I’ve read, Dickens knew that the early chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit weren’t being read as much as some of his other books, and so he worked in a trip to the United States to try to tap into a new market. I’m not too sure whether it worked or not, but it certainly added a little something new that we haven’t seen from him elsewhere. Unfortunately, the great man was still at his best when he was writing about Victorian London.

For me, as a murder mystery fan and a lover of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Martin Chuzzlewit is perhaps most notable because of a character called Mr. Nadgett. It’s said that Nadgett is one of the earliest private detective characters in fiction, and so perhaps without this novel, we wouldn’t have had Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

And if we didn’t have Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, we wouldn’t have James Leipfold, Jack Cholmondeley and Maile O’Hara.

Unfortunately, that’s about all I have to say about this one, unless I start to recap the plot, which I don’t really want to do. Because of the nature of this as a picaresque novel it’s more about the different situations we find ourselves in as opposed to an overall plot that loops throughout it. And how do you summarise a plot when there isn’t one, or at least a traditional one?

I think that’s where the problems come in for me, because I’ve worked through a bunch of Dickens’ books by now and I’m starting to run out of patience when it comes to the more forgettable ones. I want to be entertained from start to finish with characters that I’ll never forget, and while there are little moments here and there that I thought were fantastic, it’s not something that holds true throughout the entire novel.

Oh, and because it’s a lengthy old read, I have to keep on writing. In case you missed the memo, each of my reviews has the same number of words as the book has pages, and Martin Chuzzlewit has 829 pages in my edition.

That highlights another one of the problems that Dickens dealt with, which is that he really could have done with a brutal editor. He had a tendency to stuff too much into a story, rather than wrapping things up once his work was done. Martin Chuzzlewit could have done with being half the length, especially if he’d kept the highlights in and scrapped some of the scenes and chapters where nothing much happened.

I’m still glad that I read this one, but with reservations. I certainly have no plans to ever re-read it, and I’m hoping for a little more from Dickens in the books to come. At the same time, it’s not that it’s a bad read, it’s just that it isn’t a particularly memorable one. For me, the characters’ names were more interesting than the characters themselves, and that’s never a good thing. Sorry, Charlie.

Learn more about Martin Chuzzlewit.


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