'The saints of this society (Dickens's America) are its
most competent scoundrels. Because of this perverted
ethic, it is not only consistent but brilliantly apt
that they should lionise Martin after they find he has
'purchased a 'location' in the Valley of Eden'. Dickens
is simply showing their most natural urge: to collect
in a pack and howl over the victim of their smartness'.
Eden turns out to be nothing more than a fever-ridden swap and Martin and
his faithful servant, Mark Tapley, escape with their lives (to the great
disgust of the Americans) only through a fictive device, Mr. Bevan, the one
good American in the novel. I call Mr. Bevan a fictive device because he is,
in the terms of this novel, an impossible character as there can be 'no
such a person' as a good American any more than there could be a good Yahoo
in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels. His incongruity is most obvious in his speech
for he speaks good standard English rather than the wonderfully inflated jargon
that characterises all the American characters, the meaningless of which
neatly parallels Mr. Pecksniff's brand of sanctimonious oratory back in
England.
Mr. Bevan is a definite embarrassment to the satire, because it is basic to this
that Americans are all the same - boastful, hypocritical, fraudulent, crude
in their manners, rapaciously materialist and either grossly philistine
('darn your books says one) or intellectually pretentious to a grotesque
degree. In this vast land of untrammeled individual freedom for everyone
with a white skin, we find only interchangeable specimens of the lowest common
denominator of humanity:
'wherever half a dozen people were collected together, there,
in their looks, dress, morals, manners, habits, intellect and
conversation, were Mr. Jefferson Brick, Colonel Diver, Major
Pawkins, General Choke and Mr. La Fayette Kettle, over and over,
and over again. They did the same things; said the same things;
judged all subjects by, and reduced all subjects to, the same
standard
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What is astonishing in the way on which Dickens's 'endless fertility of
laughter-causing detail' makes this sameness so entertaining. It 'surprises
us by a fine excess' as Keats said poetry should. Just when we are beginning
to think that Dickens must surely have exhausted the comic potentialities of
American public rhetoric he produces the Hon. Elijah Progam and his superbly
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of meaning altogether in the impassioned froth of the Transcendental lady
in a wig.
The Americans in Chuzzlewit are, in fact, a great Dickens character in composite
form. Like Scrooge or Micawber of Pecksniff they always talk in the same sort
of way and do the same kind of things whenever they appear; our delight in them
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