Martin Chuzzlewit

1844, 1965 Signet Classic edition
Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit
Original price unknown, bought used for $2.95
Worn paperback
B

Even though most of the characters are unpleasant to some degree, Dickens's skill as a storyteller keeps the reader going through more than 800 pages.   There are two title characters, old Martin Chuzzlewit and his namesake grandson, and some of the characters have two names, whether Montague Tigg/ Tigg Montague or the two Pecksniff daughters whose names and nicknames are meant to be ironic (Charity/Cherry and Mercy/Merry).  And many of the characters, Mr. Pecksniff in particular, are two-faced.  There are more than two plot threads, although since nearly every thread interweaves with the others, it's hard to sort them out.  The trip to America at first seems pointless, both as an expedition and as a subplot, but it's the vehicle for both selfish young Martin and selfless Mark to reexamine their lives.  Martin learns how he's mistreated people who care about him, and Mark learns that while it's nice to make the best of a bad situation, it's near suicidal to always choose the worst situation.

In his afterword, Marvin Mudrick notes that Dickens had his Pecksniff side, and I find the way Dickens drools over Ruth Pinch to be almost as nauseating as a Pecksniffian courtship.  Fielding was quite honest about his love of Sophia Western, who was modeled on his late wife, but at least he admitted her flaws.  Dickens seems to be unable to moderate either his adoration of "angelic" young women or his horror of devilish crones like Mrs. Gamp.  The latter does get a nice moment late in the novel when her probably fictional friend Mrs. Harris is used to trick a client.  It's not on the level of The Importance of Being Earnest's Bunbury or M*A*S*H's Captain Tuttle, but it does make me smile.

The American sequence contains broader satire than the English parts, and is interesting in that I haven't yet gotten up to any American fiction (and won't till the 1860s).  I love the titles of the New York newspapers, like The Plunderer, but I have my doubts about Dickens's ability to do American dialect.  While there may've been Americans who pronounced "are" as "air," whoever said "to" as "Toe"?  (Yes, capitalized.)