{"id":4239,"date":"2025-01-08T21:44:21","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T21:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/charles-dickens-martin-chuzzlewit-review-danecobain-com\/"},"modified":"2025-01-08T21:44:21","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T21:44:21","slug":"charles-dickens-martin-chuzzlewit-review-danecobain-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=4239","title":{"rendered":"Charles Dickens \u2013 Martin Chuzzlewit [REVIEW] \u2013 DaneCobain.com"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

Title<\/strong>: Martin Chuzzlewit<\/p>\n

Author<\/strong>: Charles Dickens<\/p>\n

Type:<\/strong>\u00a0Fiction<\/p>\n

Page Count\/Review Word Count<\/strong>: 829<\/p>\n

Rating:<\/strong>\u00a03.5\/5<\/p>\n

The Charles Dickens read through continues! So, where do we begin with this one?<\/p>\n

Well, first off, there\u2019s the usual background story and disclaimer, including the fact that I listened to this one as an audio book via Librivox, where volunteers provide free audio books of works that are in the public domain. This one was particularly good quality, with the whole thing read by the same person, and someone who clearly had a decent grasp of English.<\/p>\n

When he was writing it, Dickens said that Martin Chuzzlewit was his best work so far, but given that he\u2019d written Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Barnaby Rudge by this point, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s quite fair. He also found the time to pen A Christmas Carol in the middle of this one being serialised. What a guy.<\/p>\n

Martin Chuzzlewit is said to be Dickens\u2019 final picaresque novel, and while I\u2019ve heard that term being used, I still had to look up what it meant. Apparently, there are seven key factors that are typically seen in picaresque novels, although not all of them need to be deployed:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Picaresque stories are usually autobiographical or written in first-person.<\/li>\n
  2. The main character is usually of a lower class, surviving on their wits.<\/li>\n
  3. There\u2019s not much of an overall plot; instead, the story is told in the form of a series of interconnected episodes.<\/li>\n
  4. The main character, called a picaro, rarely undergoes character development.<\/li>\n
  5. The story is generally told with plain language and plenty of realism.<\/li>\n
  6. Satire is often used prominently throughout.<\/li>\n
  7. The protagonist\u2019s behaviour shouldn\u2019t be criminal.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This describes many of Dickens\u2019 early characters to a tee, and certainly does a good job of letting you know what you\u2019ll be in for if you pick up Martin Chuzzlewit. And that\u2019s particularly true for the Americans.<\/p>\n

    From what I\u2019ve read, Dickens knew that the early chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit weren\u2019t being read as much as some of his other books, and so he worked in a trip to the United States to try to tap into a new market. I\u2019m not too sure whether it worked or not, but it certainly added a little something new that we haven\u2019t seen from him elsewhere. Unfortunately, the great man was still at his best when he was writing about Victorian London.<\/p>\n

    For me, as a murder mystery fan and a lover of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Martin Chuzzlewit is perhaps most notable because of a character called Mr. Nadgett. It\u2019s said that Nadgett is one of the earliest private detective characters in fiction, and so perhaps without this novel, we wouldn\u2019t have had Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.<\/p>\n

    And if we didn\u2019t have Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, we wouldn\u2019t have James Leipfold, Jack Cholmondeley and Maile O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n

    Unfortunately, that\u2019s about all I have to say about this one, unless I start to recap the plot, which I don\u2019t really want to do. Because of the nature of this as a picaresque novel it\u2019s more about the different situations we find ourselves in as opposed to an overall plot that loops throughout it. And how do you summarise a plot when there isn\u2019t one, or at least a traditional one?<\/p>\n

    I think that\u2019s where the problems come in for me, because I\u2019ve worked through a bunch of Dickens\u2019 books by now and I\u2019m starting to run out of patience when it comes to the more forgettable ones. I want to be entertained from start to finish with characters that I\u2019ll never forget, and while there are little moments here and there that I thought were fantastic, it\u2019s not something that holds true throughout the entire novel.<\/p>\n

    Oh, and because it\u2019s a lengthy old read, I have to keep on writing. In case you missed the memo, each of my reviews has the same number of words as the book has pages, and Martin Chuzzlewit has 829 pages in my edition.<\/p>\n

    That highlights another one of the problems that Dickens dealt with, which is that he really could have done with a brutal editor. He had a tendency to stuff too much into a story, rather than wrapping things up once his work was done. Martin Chuzzlewit could have done with being half the length, especially if he\u2019d kept the highlights in and scrapped some of the scenes and chapters where nothing much happened.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m still glad that I read this one, but with reservations. I certainly have no plans to ever re-read it, and I\u2019m hoping for a little more from Dickens in the books to come. At the same time, it\u2019s not that it\u2019s a bad read, it\u2019s just that it isn\u2019t a particularly memorable one. For me, the characters\u2019 names were more interesting than the characters themselves, and that\u2019s never a good thing. Sorry, Charlie.<\/p>\n

    Learn more about Martin Chuzzlewit.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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