NEW Dickensalong - Martin Chuzzlewit 2024-2025

[Piggywaspushed]

Come along and join me in the next Dickens readalong.

We have chosen Martin Chuzzlewit which was originally published by Dickens in 19 instalments, all exactly 32 pages long!

I propose condensing this to an eight month read, using Dickens' shorter sections as a guide (this is one fewer than NN). We begin in August, as follows:

August - Chapters 1 - 8
September - Chapters 9-15
October - Chapters 16-23
November - Chapters 24-29
December - Chapters 30-35
January 2025 - Chapters 36-41
February - Chapters 42-47
and finishing in
March 2025 - Chapters 48 - end

This on its publication history is interesting:

The early monthly numbers were not as successful as Dickens's previous work and sold about 20,000 copies each, as compared to 40,000 to 50,000 for the monthly numbers of the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, and 60,000 to 70,000 for the weekly issues of The Old Curiosity Shop. The lack of success of the novel caused a rift between Dickens and his publishers when they invoked a penalty clause in his contract requiring him to pay back money they had lent him to cover their costs.
Dickens responded to the disappointing early sales of the monthly parts compared to sales of previous works as monthly instalments; he changed the plot to send the title character to the United States. This allowed the author to portray the United States, which he had visited in 1842, satirically, as a near-wilderness with pockets of civilisation filled with deceitful and self-promoting hucksters.
Dickens's satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a "frenzy of wrath". As a consequence Dickens received abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the United States

Summoning old faithfuls and newcomers, one and all!

Oh really? Was that in the Not Actually Getting On Board chapter? I think it may have been.

Yes, perhaps! I'll go back and have a look.

Hello! Not much to add from me although I agree this was a much more interesting set of chapters. Like you I like the relationship between Tom, Ruth and John. I also really liked Mark’s return home to Mrs Lupin.

I did find it all a bit confusing though with all the comings and goings. I find it easier to keep track of who’s who when they’re all separately doing their own thing!

I’m still hanging in there! Not much to add except that the foreshadowing of Tigg Montague’s death was the most over-egged thing since the invention of puddings. And Mrs Gamp does make me laugh - sad to hear others are finding her a bit tedious: ‘Often have I said to Mrs Harris, “Oh, Mrs Harris, ma’am! Your contenance is quite an angel’s!” Which, but for the pimples, it would be…’

I think it's for me that there are often pages and pages of her and somewhere in what she says may be some plot development but I have to wade through it. There are gems such as that which you quoted but I just sometimes find Dickens' use of accent and dialect impenetrable.

I can't remember who it was who produce do's and don'ts of writing (don't know why but I think Kurt Vonnegut?) and one of them was 'never write in an accent' !

I love your comment about Tig Montague's death LadyBirdDaphne 😄
Very good!!
I think Mrs Gamp is funny but too much of the feather bed is overwhelming.

Running late but just binged the lot. It seems I'm continuing to enjoy the book more than others, though as it's shaping up to be a solid 3/5 for me that's unfortunate😅
That final chapter was such a banger though! I found the actual murder quite cinematic (substitute with a less anachronistic testament to Dickens' visual imagination, please): one man walks into the forest, we get glimpses of him through the branches, then pan across trees in the foreground, from which another man emerges, running. A Murderer. <shriek of violins>

Though, as we also learn in this packed set of chapters, he already was, of his father - that was what all Chuffey's talk of upstairs was pointing to. And now that Jonas knows that he knows, Chuffey's next on the list, maybe with the assistance of Mrs Gamp & her partner, once they agree on a price. Shortly followed by poor Tom, all because Nadgett made him deliver Montague's letter to Jonas on the wharf, so now Jonas thinks he's also in the know. And then whoever else Jonas thinks has been listening to Chuffey, or looking at him funny... Hopefully he thinks of Mercy as too completely under his thumb to bother with - though at this point the social-criticism-of-unregulated-nurses has taken so dark a turn I wouldn't put it past Mrs Gamp to demand Mercy's baby as payment for her services/silence. I don't even know what to call her now - a comic relief villain?

Although I'm finding Jonas a solid fictional murderer - the mood swings and capacity for compartmentalisation feel very plausible - his alibi was amusingly crap: basically 'I was asleep for a full 36(? or 48?) hours, in a room that has a lock on the door - oh, where's the key? What's a key, I've never even heard of keys!' Though I guess it's about on par with his idea of an inconscpicuous disguise for the failed escape by boat: swathed head to foot in a hundred layers of black crepe...

I agree Ladybird all the Dramatic Foreshadowing was overdone but somewhere in there I think we may have finally got a glimpse of the Mysterious Invalid Fuzzy's been tracking, in Montague's nightmare premonition in Ch 42:
"a strange man with a bloody smear upon his head (who told him that he had been his playfellow, and told him, too, the real name of an old school-mate, forgotten until then).... the man with the bloody smear upon his head demanded of him if he knew this creature’s name, and said that he would whisper it. At this the dreamer fell upon his knees, his whole blood thrilling with inexplicable fear, and held his ears. But looking at the speaker’s lips, he saw that they formed the utterance of the letter ‘J’; and crying out aloud that the secret was discovered, and they were all lost"

All the threads are being drawn together ready for the final number to tie up. I continue to enjoy all the echoes and parallels/contrasts between various storylines, from the major (the behaviour of the two old men, and their treatment by different characters) to the minor (Mr Moddle bemoaning how impossible it is to get run over vs. the stagecoach drama in the other plot).
And all the little details of course! Fuzzy quoted the feather bed 😁, I'll go with this charmer from Tom/Ruth/John's arm-linked stroll in the sunshine in Ch. 45, as they pass Temple Bar which 'had been, in the golden days gone by, embellished with a row of rotting human heads'. Just came out of nowhere to undercut all their twittering, which tbh I'm finding as tiresome as Piggy does Mrs G.

That's really interesting about Kurt Vonnegut Piggy! I've always thought reading a lot of SF (including KV) at a formative age built up my tolerance for strangeness and confusion while reading, including over things like accents and the cultural references/assumptions of different times/places - which ofc Dickens offers in spades!

It may not have been Vonnegut but I'm not sure I would have come up with that without it being him.

I was reading an interesting Reddit discussion by would be writers on the use of accents (most said no, especially when it it isn't your own) but one poster opined 'only Dickens is allowed to do this'.

I do think some writers are amazing at capturing voice without phonetic accent transcription - Shuggie Bain does this extraordinarily well and many Indian authors have this down to a fine art.

I agree that Dickens is cinematic and am sure this is why he has been adapted so much for screens. If anything, I think he is more televisual. I always think the same of Hardy. That Stonehenge bit - it's almost like he knew screens were coming. (well, actually they kind of had when Tess was written).

Enjoyable commentaries! Thanks all :)

I'm also catching up late, thanks everyone for the excellent comments! I'm overwhelmed with work stuff right now and feel like my brain is operating very slowly.

So Martin finally came back, but only for a chapter! He does seem like a minor character.

I did enjoy this installment though. I agree Piggy that Dickens is good at portraying happy sibling relationships. I hadn't thought of that before, but it's a refreshing focus.

I agree, LadybirdDaphne, that Tigg's death was VERY heavily foreshadowed, but I liked the scene in the carriage where there's a flash of lightning and Tigg thinks he glimpses Jonas, just for a second, hovering over him about to hit him with a bottle, and wild hatred in his eyes. Very gothic.

Thanks to Fuzzy for pointing out that Mr Chuffey is aware of someone having died upstairs, and to inaptonym for observing that it must have been Jonas's father, murdered by his son's own hand... that hadn't dawned on me! If J has already murdered his father, maybe that's why his murder of Tigg seems to weigh on him so heavily.

I liked the bit where Tom wants to tell Jonas about Nadgett (Nadgett according to Wikipedia is one of the first ever private detective characters in literature!), and Jonas won't let him speak, so therefore carries on with his plan to kill Tigg. Presumably he thinks that his secrets will die with Tigg; he doesn't realise that Nadgett knows everything Tigg knows. I found these lines about Jonas powerful, even though they're far from subtle: But the fatality was of his own working; the pit was of his own digging; the gloom that gathered round him, was the shadow of his own life. Very satisfying.

Inaptonym your post made me laugh, especially the bit about Jonas' rubbish alibi. You do have a way with words!

And yes, Dickens is very cinematic. I suspect his love of theatre is significant here. So many scenes have a visual quality that would lend itself well to either cinema or the stage.

So true @cassandre on Martin the very minor character 😆
And you're also totally right that Nadgett is another who knows, though Jonas doesn't know it! The words I cut off from the beginning of my quote from Tigg's dream were: "Nadgett, and he, and a strange man with a bloody smear upon his head," who I still think is John Westlock's Mysterious Invalid friend.
So that's three who knew of Jonas' original crime, and I think MI must have been the very first to be silenced by him, though unlike Tigg, and again unbeknownst to J, he survived the attempt - albeit with the kind of head injury that involves cryptic hints dropped in delirious ramblings, including the name 'Chuzzlewit!' This all way back in Ch. 25, btw, if anyone else wants to revisit - though tbh I can't work out the significance of the other things he says, beyond general deathy doom.

Interesting about Nadgett as early PI! You are very brave to be googling though, what about spoilers?! I enjoy speculating wildly too much to risk it. 😅

That lightning flash effect was another bit that would come across as pure visual cliché now, but you're right it felt perfectly stage-ready: gas spotlights and tableaux, really hot stuff then. I realise now the word I wanted for his visual qualities was basically theatrical, though Piggy if you're feeling patient, could you ELI5 the stylistic distinction between cinematic and televisual please? It sounds intriguing (and would filmic be the umbrella term or something else again?)

As for accents, I agree that eye dialect for the vibes in 2025 is almost always going to be a bad plan. But since Dickens predates popular access to a variety of voices from other forms of media or travel, I find a bit of phonetically rendered dialogue tolerable and even historically interesting - the depiction of accents in the American section is on my list of things to google after finishing the book.

Maybe I also tend to be forgiving because it doesn't feel intentionally alienating or like it's done to signal Literary Qualities iykwim? But more like musical notation. Similar to the way he writes action sequences and visual effects with built in stage directions, and similarly directed toward performance. I remember you pointed out ages ago what a plum role Mrs Gamp must have been for older character actresses, but even for the many more ordinary Victorians reading aloud in a domestic setting I think that bit of 'direction' the spelling provides would have helpful, and maybe even enjoyable. Though I can imagine contemporary bunfights over the correct pronunciation of "ev'nly dispogician," and fans taking notes at Dickens' public readings on the canonical versions 😁

Brilliant , yes. Earnest students scribbling away!

Televisual is smaller in scale - but often longer in chronology because it's episodic. Cinematic is broad sweeping landscapes and movements. Televisual ifs doof doofs and menacing close ups on snarling faces or gossipy, intimate scenes, a menagerie of characters and lots of dialogue. Cinematic is long establishing shots , followed by medium shots and then close ups. they have longer to do things, oddly.

It's like the difference between EastEnders (ever so Dickens) and , I don't know, Lawrence of Arabia or Titanic or a big sci fi. It's the difference , sort of , between Dickens - cramped, domestic, character driven , not driven by colour and beauty, multiple moments of high drama, comic relief ( yes, heavily influenced by the theatre of Shakespeare) and Hardy - sensuous, sweeping, panoramic, lingering. George Eliot (sp?) is televisual too.

I looked back on chapter 25, but the Mysterious Invalid didn't make any sense apart from saying 'Jonas Chuzzlewit'.
I like Inaptonym's theory. That's very cool about Nadgett being the first PI in literature. He predates the fellow in 'The Moonstone' so. The same fellow was more central to the story in any case, where Nadgett is a minor character in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. I feel Dickens could have chosen a better title for the book!

What's Bucket in Bleak House then? I thought he was the first something in literature? First police detective perhaps?

Thank you Piggy for explaining about films! So illuminating and lots to think about - I hadn't ever considered the time aspect but of course moving pictures have a rhythm.

Haha Fuzzy glad it wasn't just me still none the wiser after a reread! I'd forgotten the creepy foreshadowing involving Mrs G in that chapter too - practising laying out the MI and thinking what a beautiful corpse he'd make, yikes. So now is she the only character left who's heard both the MI and Chuffey speak? Though how much she's listened is another matter!

Both Bucket and Cuff are police inspectors, and Poe's Dupin (even earlier) is a Sherlock-type consultant. Though I guess it all gets even messier if we count theatre in fiction (remember there was an early ref in this very book to a play Dickens loved featuring a canine sleuth!) or amateur investigators like Marian/Walter in The Woman in White. The book on Victorian female detectives I read recently pointed out that Dickens, Collins and other sensation writers were being called 'the detective school' long before they'd written official detective characters.

Very interesting, Inaptonym.
Marian in TWIW is amazing. I love that book. * *

I haven’t been reading along this time but I have lurked occasionally - just butting into the very interesting discussion about cinematic/televisual qualities after seeing Hardy mentioned. I’ve just read a very long but interesting book which points out that Hardy lived to see not just one but two films made of Tess of the d'Urbervilles - both now lost, alas. He was fascinated by them, apparently. Bit of a time slip moment when you think this was a writer born in 1840.

Yes, he lived a long time and through seismic social change, didn't he? It's extraordinary.

I had no idea! How very interesting, Terpsichore.

That is interesting, thanks for sharing!

@inaptonym I am really bad when it comes to giving into the impulse to google things. I'm very impatient and have even been known to flip quickly ahead to the later pages of a novel just to see if a character is still alive, because I can't bear the suspense😂Similarly, I have never been able to understand pregnant women who wait until giving birth to find out whether they're having a boy or girl (!!!). I mean, how do they have the willpower?! Seriously, though, I've managed to read most of the wikipedia entry for MC while skipping over the plot summary part, so I remain mostly unspoiled, phew.

@Piggywaspushed that distinction between the televisual and the cinematic is fascinating and so helpful. Thank you!

@Terpsichore Wow, it's hard to get my head round that Thomas Hardy fact. Extraordinary.

Interesting about the history of detectives in literature. I'm also a big fan of The Moonstone and The Woman in White. @FuzzyCaoraDhubh I share your love of the iconic Marian.

Hello!

Just bumping the thread as I have just finished.

Prior to our discussions I found two Katie videos , one short and breathy and one longer. I have watched the short one thus far. She is a huge Tom Pinch fan, as are we all , and am yet to watch the longer one where I hope she goes into more detail about the American section and reflects upon the almost entirely absent protagonist.

Bumping again. I won't be able to post until later on!

I watched the videos last night. I thought they were good especially with regard to the themes in the book and it made sense of it as a whole as it was all over the place really.

I can't watch the videos but assuming she discusses all the doublings and real/false selves* and selfish/less stuff so will spare you my blather about that and just say that I enjoyed the book overall, but the readalong even more!

*which got me good with the not!murder behind the murder plot, tbf!

As usual with Dickens' wrapping-up endings there was a lot to annoy 😅but I managed not to eyeroll too hard at the nonsensical Big Reveal by playing Coincidence Bingo and Spot the Random among the crowds piling into improbably capacious rooms to take their HOW many?! curtain calls.

Surely even Piggy will acknowledge that Mrs Gamp had the best exit, in one of her many 'walking swoons' (or maybe just the fact that she was heading out of your reading life? 😁)

Now that it's safe to look stuff up, I was amused to learn after our chats that the role was almost always played by men in the Victorian era - Betsy Prig too, their scenes becoming a very popular drag double act. The first big West End adaptation in 1844 by the Keeleys (actor-mangagers of the Lyceum) had the husband Robert playing Mrs G, while his wife Mary Anne (who D wanted for Ruth Pinch) had a star turn as Mr Bailey (the boy who lived) instead - it all sounds very panto! The Pinches got significantly cut in that adaptation, but a 3-act sentimental 'Tom Pinch' (minus the murder/ American threads) was a big hit in the 1880s, so popular it toured Europe and America. So definitely not just you Fuzzy finding the whole book a bit of a mess. I'd be curious to watch the 1990s TV adaptation though!