Charles Dickens (6 page)

Martin Chuzzlewit
was the first of Dickens's novels to be written around an overriding idea—in this case the forms and effects of selfishness—and so marks a departure from the more personal and character-driven novels of his earlier period. In
Pickwick
and
Nickleby,
the eponymous heroes had gotten around quite a bit, and their travels had brought them into contact with various examples of human folly and knavery. Oliver and Nell, too, had embarked upon dark, and then
darker, journeys. But the progress of each character toward his or her individual fate was paramount. Episodes and adventures and strange encounters could be a little arbitrary. The American journey had given Dickens many more specific opinions about himself and his society; more important, it had given him a vision that was more of a piece. When he arrived back in England on that first day, and saw everything rather smaller and more connected, it was as if it could be encompassed somehow, and understood, and, indeed, fixed. The reforming impulse begins, perhaps, in criticisms of society, but it relies upon the faith that what is wrong is only somewhat wrong—some money here, some effort there, some changes somewhere else, and the structure will yield to improvement. Additionally, improvements in the structure, be they sanitation, education, election reforms, or whatever, will produce better, more enlightened citizens, who will behave in a more community-minded fashion, turning away from evil and crime. In other words, human nature, too, is only somewhat wrong, not irredeemably corrupt and sinful. In this, Dickens differed from many of his fellow reformers, like Lord Shaftesbury, who were Evangelicals and promoted, first and foremost, the prohibition of sinful acts such as prostitution and alcohol consumption, who combined teaching the poor to read and write with rigorous religious instruction. Both sorts of reformers saw the inhumanity and, indeed, danger of the social chaos all around them, but Dickens always ridiculed the Evangelical impulse to look for sinfulness and evil nature, instead interpreting kindness, fellow-feeling, charitableness, and social conscience as virtues of generosity and love. Society would be reformed through an expansion of love
and responsibility, through the cultivation of comfort and beauty, not through a clamping down. With
Martin Chuzzlewit,
he was beginning to grope toward a theory of how human networks function. Social ills still had their source in personal qualities—selfishness, for example—but he was now interested in the social ramifications of this single quality.

And everything went wonderfully. Evidence from the manuscript and the notes shows that he set about writing the first numbers more carefully than any previous serial, and evidence from letters shows that he was quite pleased with the results, especially with Pecksniff and Tom Pinch. In the meantime, his intimacy with Angela Burdett-Coutts was growing. She had the purse and he had the energy and the mobility to serve as her agent.

He first acted for her in investigating what were known as “ragged schools”—that is, charity schools for the very poorest children. While working on
Martin Chuzzlewit,
he took time to visit the Field Lane School in Saffron Hill, to report on conditions there and to suggest ways in which Miss Coutts might help. Saffron Hill was widely considered to be one of the very worst “rookeries,” or slums, and coincidentally was familiar to Dickens from the
Oliver Twist
days. He remarked that the school was just where he had set Fagin's establishment. The condition of the children appalled him when he first visited—the stench was so great that his companion had to leave, and his very foremost recommendation to Miss Coutts was that the children be given a place to wash. Better ventilation, a larger space—there were certain basic changes that could be made, but in the absence of any sort of welfare structure or, indeed, any general social belief in what we
might call the obligations of the state to care for its citizens, even the depth of Miss Coutts's purse was insignificant. Dickens was ambivalent about the ragged schools, feeling that they were not good schools in general and that the structure for educating the teachers was sadly wanting. He was hardly able even to name what we can readily see was a failure of the entire system, reflecting a wholesale shift in the social structure of England from rural to urban, from traditional to capitalistic, from patriarchal to democratic. But one thing to be said for Charles Dickens was that he remained undaunted. The energy he expended for Miss Coutts, the example he set in his public speeches, and the ambition of his novels steadily expanded.

Nevertheless, his ambitions were not immediately rewarded. Sales of
Martin Chuzzlewit
fell off almost at once. A hundred thousand copies of
The Old Curiosity Shop
had dwindled to twenty thousand copies of the new novel, and the terms of his contract meant that he had to pay back a portion of his advance if sales fell below a certain level. He was in debt to Chapman and Hall,
American Notes
had not done well, and his obligations were greater than ever. Not only was his household growing, his father and brothers were clamoring for assistance. In some sense, he had wasted his moment; instead of following
Barnaby Rudge
with a surefire repeat of “Dickensian” forms and themes, he had gone to America on an expensive trip that would not, owing to American copyright piracy, repay itself in sales. Dickens was enraged by the idea that he might have to fulfill the letter of his contract and make the payments to Chapman and Hall—he declared that he would write nothing for them ever again. As earlier, with
Bentley, he was ready and even eager to feel himself ill used by his publishers, as, truly, he
was
ill used by the Americans. Sales did not pick up. It is possible that a general business slowdown was the main cause. At any rate, Dickens decided that he could have it both ways—not only a strong overarching structure, but a bit of improvisation as well—and he sent Martin and his henchman, Mark Tapley, to America to seek their fortune, which they certainly did not find. Nor did the American chapters provide the sales boost Dickens hoped for. In the end,
Martin Chuzzlewit
turned out to be something of a commercial failure and got mixed reviews.

It is not uncommon, though, for a novelist to lose part of his audience as he grows more ambitious. The willingness, and maybe even the ability, of the audience to follow a favorite writer into work of greater complexity and more somber vision isn't always immediate, and every author whose sole income is from his writings has to reckon with this dilemma. Dickens had experienced the freedom, importance, and warm regard that come with great popularity; now he was discovering that the freedom was not absolute, and that the potential for corruption exists in artistic support through sales as well as through patronage. In our day, for example, the disinterested “patronage” of the university and the National Endowment for the Arts is attacked by conservatives who always assert that the marketplace is the best test of artistic value. It seems clear, though, from the history of novel writing since Dickens's time, that the production of enduring literary art has little or no relationship to market success, except insofar as a publisher can fund the publication of more complex and difficult works with the profits of a steady stream of popular
stories. Even the most “loyal” readers grow “disloyal” when the work fails to please them.

But Dickens's larger ambition for
Martin Chuzzlewit
is evident, too, in its failures. In his eagerness to press his point, he belabors it, and the first chapters of the novel are tedious and wordy. This tendency to expand upon each idea until it is driven into the ground is a feature of
Martin Chuzzlewit
more than of earlier or later novels, evidence that Dickens doesn't trust his readers to understand the larger theme of which he is enamored, and it gives the novel a tiresome quality. Critics who are impatient with Dickens's abundance and see it simply as surfeit have ammunition in
Martin Chuzzlewit
.

In fact, Dickens is attempting a bildungsroman unlike anything he has done before—his theme is the moral education of young Martin, whose origins in the selfish bosom of the Chuzzlewit family compromise his innocence in a way that Oliver's, Nicholas's, and Nell's have not been. The question of the narrative is whether or not Martin will go the same way as Jonas, his cousin, who is so much cast in the family mold that “he had gradually come to look, with impatience, on his parent as a certain amount of personal estate, which had no right whatever to be going at large, but ought to be secured in that particular description of iron safe which is commonly called a coffin, and banked in the grave.” Martin's tale has no inherent structure, unlike Nicholas's tale, which takes its structure from the popular melodrama, or Oliver's tale, which takes its structure from orphan narratives. Nor is Martin himself of particular interest as a character; he is overshadowed by the changelessly grotesque comic figures like Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, in whose variations upon the
theme of selfishness and solipsism the author finds more of interest.

In volume form,
Martin Chuzzlewit,
which was dedicated to Angela Burdett-Coutts, did sell well enough. Dickens himself was enthusiastic about it, no doubt for the same reason that he was enthusiastic about
The Old Curiosity Shop
—it satisfactorily expressed his state of mind while he was writing it. He was, in fact, coming up with a unified social vision, something that marks the maturation of every serious novelist, since the novel is first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds. That this novelist, just thirty, hadn't quite refined his ideas, that he belabored some of them, that some of them were unsophisticated and harsh, should come as no surprise. Equally, that he fell back upon his natural gifts of language, invention, and character drawing to get himself through, while failing at story construction, something he always had to work hard at, comes as no surprise, either. That his social, as opposed to what might be called his “interpersonal,” vision would be dark surely had its source in the inequities, suffering, and indifference he saw around him. While by Dickens's time the novel had not yet become the dominant European literary form, it had been around long enough to explore one broad theme—the discovery of the World—and to begin upon the second: the exploration of domestic life. Dickens's own favorite novels, Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones
(Dickens named his eighth child and sixth son Henry Fielding Dickens), Tobias Smollett's
The Adventures of Roderick Random,
and Cervantes's
Don Quixote,
which Dickens loved as a child, all followed their heroes on adventures of discovery. What the heroes discovered was not
as important, historically, as the conviction that there was something to discover, that whatever it was would be interesting, illuminating, or enriching in some way. This mimics the European adventure of discovering and colonizing the New World. The adventure winds up bitterly, in the hands of Voltaire, when Candide returns, resolved henceforth to cultivate his own garden. The assumption of adventure literature is that domestic life is by nature already known, worth hardly a backward glance. In addition, the domesticated Cunegonde, originally Candide's romantic inspiration, ends up as a drudge and a disappointment, hardly worth depicting.

By Dickens's time, in many ways as a result of Sir Walter Scott's interest not only in the hero and his adventure, but also in the social and domestic circumstances of the hero's world, domestic life becomes as interesting as the adventure; in Dickens's work, domestic life becomes the goal of the journey, the prospective haven from the alienation and cruelty of homelessness. Dickens's heroes and heroines take many journeys, but only the travels of the Pickwick Club are embarked upon willingly. Most often, the protagonist is ejected from his original home and forced out upon a quest to make another. Dickens's social vision is formed by the recognition that in the world around him there are few bonds of social responsibility or generous humanity linking class to class or individual to individual, and that the government speaks and acts only for a small portion of the citizens, whereas the majority have no voice, no power, and no privileges. By contrast, small social groups, such as families, groups of friends, theater companies, and gangs of thieves, can mediate between the isolated
individual and the vast social machine. But their mediation and companionableness can go either way, morally and spiritually, depending upon whether the members are motivated by love and kindness or by greed and selfishness. In all of Dickens's early novels, at least one group represented the possibility of sociable safety and contentment—the Pickwickians, Mr. Brownlow's household, Nicholas's family and friends. In
Martin Chuzzlewit,
the selfish, greedy groups are dominant; Martin must find his way against a strong tide.

Much of what Dickens was trying to get at in
Martin Chuzzlewit
was distilled in nearly perfect, supremely popular, and highly theatrical fashion in
A Christmas Carol,
which Dickens conceived of suddenly a few weeks after visiting the Field Lane School for Miss Coutts. He worked on it during October and November 1843, while the tenth and eleventh numbers of the longer novel were appearing; and in spite of his vow of the summer,
A Christmas Carol
was published by Chapman and Hall. He delivered the manuscript in early December, to be published for the Christmas trade. In an effort to avoid the sorts of contractual problems he had encountered with the low sales of his longer novel, he agreed with the publishers to publish on a commission basis—that is, he would design, edit, and produce the book (rather like book packaging today). Unfortunately, his desire to produce a beautiful artifact as well as a popular story meant that production costs were very high, and he realized, once again, only a small profit on what turned out to be a very large sale.