Martin Chuzzlewit

1984 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Sylvere Monod ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Margaret Cardwell
Keyword(s):  
Martin Chuzzlewit

The Lost Paradises of Martin Chuzzlewit

1970 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Stuart Curran
Keyword(s):  
Martin Chuzzlewit

VICTORIAN CARNIVALESQUE

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 365-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark M. Hennelly
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
The Other ◽  
Double Step ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
War Games ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
The Town

The Carnival is just over, and we have entered upon the gloom and abstinence of Lent. The first day of Lent we had coffee without milk for breakfast; vinegar and vegetables, with a very little salt fish, for dinner; and bread for supper. The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery. M. Héger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks. It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing.—Charlotte Brontë, letter, March 6, 1843. . . Humble as I [Pecksniff] am, I am an honest man, seeking to do my duty in this carnal universe, and setting my face against all the vice and treachery.—Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44)Women were playing [at cards and roulette]; they were masked, some of them; this licence was allowed in these wild times of carnival.—Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48)OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Allon White acknowledged “the small army of literary critics now regularly describing modern cultural phenomena as ‘carnivalesque’” (109). Surprisingly, though, only advance scouting parties of carnivalesque critics have infiltrated the various war games, love feasts, slanging matches, “blood” sports, food fights, drinking bouts, carnal appetites, funferalls, body cultures, ludic acts of toasting, roasting, masking, mumming, and other folk and fair festivities — besides the recurring clowns, fools, rogues, tricksters, killjoys, and spoilsports — that significantly enliven and inform Victorian literature. When such critical forays have occurred, the role of the carnivalesque has often been contested, reflecting perhaps what White’s liminal reading of cultural history calls the nineteenth-century’s initial “‘disowning’ of carnival, and the gradual reconstruction of the concept of carnival as the culture of the Other” (102). And yet Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi still speaks eloquently for various Renaissance and Victorian writers when he proclaims that he is but “one” of many who “makes up bands/To roam the town and sing out carnival” (ll.45–46). Indeed, his double-voiced, pantagruelian aesthetic is to “go a double step,/Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,/Both in their order” (ll.206–08), for

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
A Site

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

‘Yield to the mighty mind of the Popular Instructor’: Print and the Press in Martin Chuzzlewit

2020 ◽  
pp. 137-179
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
Mass Market ◽  
The Press ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

Building on the case made in chapter 3, chapter 4 tunes to consider Martin Chuzzlewit and examines the ways in which the novel addresses the relationship between literacy, print media, and the experience of modern urbanism. Together eith its predecessor, the chapter argues that for Dickens America was far more than what has been generally perceived as an increasingly negative experience that chastened his understanding of the press and of mass culture. Rather, and notwithstanding all his complaints about Americans, tobacco, and spit, the encounter with America in fact provided him with a new sense, at once disturbing and alluring, of the potential power of a cheap mass-market press led by entrepreneurial editors operating in a print environment unconstrained by state controls. Moreover, in writing about America, and above all in writing about its newspapers in both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens for the first time discovered a methodology for fusing fiction and the press in ways that would be foundational his most significant contribution to Victorian journalism, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round.

Dundreary’s Whiskers

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-45
Author(s):  
Sarah Meer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Student ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
The Times ◽  
Pedagogical Relationship ◽  
Great Exhibition

This chapter introduces precursors to the claimant—the theatrical Yankee and his vehicle the trip play, in which Britons travelled to the United States, or Americans to Britain. The trip plays cast light on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, and on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. In Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, a trip play involves a claimant, inaugurating patterns evident in the structure and characterization of subsequent claimant texts. The chapter relates mid-century transatlantic tensions to the creation and staging of Our American Cousin, as reflected in Great Exhibition dramas and the newsprint duels of The Times and the New York Herald. It also suggests that the play drew on a pedagogical relationship between Tom Taylor and an American student at Cambridge, Charles Astor Bristed.

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