With The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickens returned to monthly
numbers publishing in twenty installments from January, 1843, to July, 1844.
Martin Chuzzlewit is organized around the theme of selfishness, and marks an
advance in Dickens's development as a novelist. However, sales dropped off to
twenty thousand; in an effort to increase sales, Dickens sends Martin to America
where Martin discovers the boorish behavior Dickens had only gently portrayed in
American Notes . But if Dickens is scathing in his portrayal of America in
Chuzzlewit , he is even fiercer in exposing greed, selfishness, hypocrisy, and
corruption in his homeland.
He is able to sustain this satiric exposure with his comic genius, creating here
characters who have achieved a reality beyond their pages. Sairey Gamp is no
less real for us than Mrs. Harris is for her, and Pecksniff's name has entered
the language as descriptive of hypocritical benevolence.
