Ill
The readers of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens's first novel to appear after
his return home, were warned by the publishers' advertisements not to expect
an American story but one of 'English life and manners'. By the time that the
fifth monthly number appeared in May 1843, however, Dickens, seeing that sales
needed stimulating, had decided that he would immediately draw on his American
experiences to boost them. Accordingly, his young architect-hero suddenly
announces to his affrighted confident, Tom Pinch, that he has formed the
'desperate resolution' of seeing work in America. In the next number we discov
that he had no intention of remaining there but rather of quickly amassing
a heap of dollars and then returning to England to claim the bride at present
denied to him by poverty and the enmity of his rich grandfather.
Dickens scholars have spilled much ink in debating how far Martin's American
excursion may be said to damage the novel's structure but we are not concerned
with that question here. Our business if with the American scenes themselves,
considered in isolation. These scenes, Dickens's most sustained exercise in
satire since the opening chapters of 01iver Twist, have generally been found
too shrill, sour and monotonous by readers on both sides of the Atlantic
but I do not share this view myself. I find them extremely funny. Harry Sone
has objected that the lionisation of the obscure young Martin by the Americans
as he travels south to take possession of the land he has bought in the
Mississippi settlement of Eden is simply 'an absurdity which turns Dickens's
indignation into farce and his realism into caricature'. But absurd farce and
caricature are, of course, the essential modi operandi of all great satire
and it is satire that Dickens is writing as he gleefully distils that
'essence of comicality' largely excluded from American Notes. He is no more
attempting a 'realistic' portrayal of America than is Nathanael West in
A Cool Mi 11 ion a book which owes almost as much to the American scenes
in Chuzzlewit as it does to Voltaire's Candide). If he had been intending to
be fair to America he would have caused his hero to land in his beloved
Boston rather than in 'that damnable jungle of false pretensions
and humbug', New York, where for him the American Dream had begun to turn
decidedly sour. As for Martin's lionisation, it is absolutely central to
Dickens's attack on the Americans' fatal worship of clever fraud and
unscrupulous swindling, what they call 'smartness'. James Kincaid has made the
point very wel 1
