Martin Chuzzlewit

Paperback. English. Wordsworth. 1994. 762pp.

In fair condition.

Set partly in the United States, this novel includes a searing satire on mid-nineteenth-century America. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates: moral redemption and worldly success for one and increasingly desperate crime for the other. In her Introduction to this new edition, Patricia Ingham discusses how, in writing a story that was meant only to recommend 'goodness and innocence', Dickens succeeded in exploring 'the intertwining of moral sensibility and brutality'.