ABSTRACT
Master Humphrey's Clock, which evolved between the summer of 1839 and the spring of 1840 as a pet project designed to continue the phenomenal success of the early novels with less sweat and fewer tears, returns to the formula of Picktwick Papers the club of peripatetic observers gathering insights into human nature whilst foregrounding through first-person narration the grotesque perspectives from which such wisdom is here to be culled. A Christmas Carol gives strategic employment to a first person narrator who appears to lack omniscient knowledge and authority over what he narrates. Thus, to turn to Master Humphrey's equivalent in later Dickens, the narrative persona of The Uncommercial Traveller, is to encounter a figure uneasily, and perhaps guiltily conscious of his marginality, and unable to transcend it in idealistic embrace of those who resemble him. Not that The Uncommercial Traveller completely abandons this device, but where it uses it, it does so only ironically and critically.
