Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (version 2)
Dickens called this his finest work, and those who've lingered in its pages understand why. Darker and sharper than his earlier novels, Martin Chuzzlewit follows a young man exiled from his grandfather's fortune for the crime of falling in love. But the real journey begins when Martin sails for America, seeking his fortune in a land of brash promises and hollow idealism. What follows is one of Victorian literature's most vicious satires: a withering portrait of American boosterism, slavery, and the gap between democracy's rhetoric and its reality. Yet the novel's heart beats in England, among the Chuzzlewits themselves, a family of schemers and sentimentalists where hypocrisy flourishes and redemption remains possible. At its center stands Pecksniff, a villain for the ages: a man whose courtesy is a weapon and whose virtue is performance. This is Dickens unchained from sentiment, wielding irony like a blade.
X-Ray
