ABSTRACT
Martin Chuzzlewit marks an important watershed in Dickens's career. It wants to make us see that the truth of art can only be indirect, through its capacity for fictions like Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris. The author wished to avoid the fate of Scott, suffering continually declining sales because his novels followed each other without a break; moreover, he wanted an opportunity to produce more carefully considered and organised work. In many quarters it was felt that one of the main reasons for this was that in these two books Dickens had over-indulged his liking for grotesque exaggeration and caricature. There is an ironic precision about these deliciously cloudy remarks, for the method of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit is indeed a humorous arrest of 'castles in the air'. Elsewhere in Martin Chuzzlewit the establishing of the utopian nature of such aims and visions is done more skilfully, perhaps, through an ironic undermining of their habitual rhetoric.
