ABSTRACT
A Dickens novel in nineteen/twenty monthly instalments is a huge and complex machinery. In order to determine by what means the machinery is set in motion, the beginning of the novel is here sub jected to close separate analysis. The first fourteen chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit are treated - perhaps arbitrarily - as constituting the initial phase; but chapter XV, which completes the sixth monthly instalment, takes Martin junior across the Atlantic, and thus clearly opens another phase of the story.
