The Lost Paradises of Martin Chuzzlewit

Abstract

IN HIS ILLUSTRATION of the climactic moment of Martin Chuzzlewit, the next to last plate in the novel, Hablot Browne (Phiz) artfully crowns a metaphorical structure that has persisted in the novel from literally its first sentence.' Entitled Warm Reception of Mr. Pecksniff by his Venerable Friend, the plate shows Pecksniff, fallen to the floor of Martin's study under the patriarch's merciless beating, with the rest of the assembly frozen in surprise and a flurry of books toppling in the confusion. Of the two volumes whose titles can be read, the most prominent is Paradise Lost. This minor and easily-overlooked detail is not merely an irony appro-. priate to the collapse of Pecksniff's house of trick cards, but is the single explicit reference in Martin Chuzzlewit to the myth that underlies the entire novel.2 The following discussion is addressed to those readers who, refusing to define the novel in a Pickwickian sense (which is to say, unstructured), demand a formal raison d'etre for so lengthy and tortuous a work of fiction as Martin Chuzzlewit. From the usually sympathetic George Gissing's stricture (a novel more shapeless, a story less coherent ... will not easily be found in any literature)3