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CHARLES DICKENS

CHARLES DICKENS

CHARLES DICKENS: Everyman's Library Hardcover - 1994

by Chuzzliewit, Martin

  • Used
  • Hardcover

Description

This novel as stated by Angus Wilson " is most sheerly exciting of all Dickens stories" A valuable book for anyone's library.

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Details

  • Title CHARLES DICKENS
  • Author Chuzzliewit, Martin
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition Reprint
  • Pages 851
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, New York
  • Date 1994
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Bibliography, Illustrated
  • Bookseller's Inventory # M39
  • ISBN 9780679438847 / 067943884X
  • Weight 2.04 lbs (0.93 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.38 x 5.21 x 1.93 in (21.29 x 13.23 x 4.90 cm)
  • Size 9"x5"
  • Reading level 1070
  • Library of Congress subjects England, Adventure stories
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 95136833
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

About Aruna Mettler New Jersey, United States

Biblio member since 2023

I do not have a store or a logo. I have rare books on several subjects. My husband loved history and loved to read. These books are in good condition.

Terms of Sale: 30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.

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About this book

While writing Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens declared it 'immeasurably the best of my stories.' 

Set partly in America, the novel includes a searing satire on the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates of moral redemption and worldly success for one, and increasingly desperate crime for the other. This powerful comedy involves hypocrisy, greed, and blackmail, as well as the most famous of Dickens's grotesques, Mrs. Gamp.

Martin Chuzzlewit is considered one of Dickens's last picaresque novels. 

From the rear cover

At the center of Martin Chuzzlewit is Martin himself, very old, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with good reason) is that every one of his close and distant relations, now converging in droves on the country inn where they believe he is dying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of his great fortune. Having unjustly disinherited his grandson, young Martin, the old fellow now trusts no one but Mary Graham, the pretty girl hired as his companion. Though she has been made to understand she will not inherit a penny, she remains old Chuzzlewit's only ally. As the viperish relations and hangers-on close in on him, we meet some of Dickens's most marvelous characters - among them Mr. Pecksniff (whose name has entered the language as a synonym for ultimate hypocrisy and self-importance): the fabulously evil Jonas Chuzzlewit: the strutting reptile Tigg Montague: and the ridiculous, terrible, comical Sairey Gamp.

First Edition Identification

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 19 monthly installments, each comprising 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Hablot K. "Phiz" Browne. Published in 1842-1844. 

The first compiled book edition was published in1844 by Chapman & Hall.


Media reviews

Martin Chuzzlewit is a dramatic serial on Masterpiece Theatre, a PBS television series presented by WGBH-TV, Boston, made possible by a grant from Mobil Corporation.

About the author

Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in London backing warehouse, where his job was to paste labels on bottles for six shillings a week. His father John Dickens, was a warmhearted but improvident man. When he was condemned the Marshela Prison for unpaid debts, he unwisely agreed that Charles should stay in lodgings and continue working while the rest of the family joined him in jail. This three-month separation caused Charles much pain; his experiences as a child alone in a huge city-cold, isolated with barely enough to eat-haunted him for the rest of his life.

When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school, after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter and finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836-7) he achieved immediate fame; in a few years he was easily the post popular and respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) were huge successes. Dickens followed Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) with his unforgettable, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1855-7) reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of British Society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) complete his major works.

Dickens's marriage to Catherine Hoggarth produced ten children but ended in separation in 1858. In that year he began a series of exhausting public readings; his health gradually declined. After putting in a full day's work at his home at Gads Hill, Kent on June 8, 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke, and he died the following day.

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