Dundreary’s Whiskers

This chapter introduces precursors to the claimant—the theatrical Yankee and his vehicle the trip play, in which Britons travelled to the United States, or Americans to Britain. The trip plays cast light on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, and on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. In Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, a trip play involves a claimant, inaugurating patterns evident in the structure and characterization of subsequent claimant texts. The chapter relates mid-century transatlantic tensions to the creation and staging of Our American Cousin, as reflected in Great Exhibition dramas and the newsprint duels of The Times and the New York Herald. It also suggests that the play drew on a pedagogical relationship between Tom Taylor and an American student at Cambridge, Charles Astor Bristed.

‘Yield to the mighty mind of the Popular Instructor’: Print and the Press in Martin Chuzzlewit

Building on the case made in chapter 3, chapter 4 tunes to consider Martin Chuzzlewit and examines the ways in which the novel addresses the relationship between literacy, print media, and the experience of modern urbanism. Together eith its predecessor, the chapter argues that for Dickens America was far more than what has been generally perceived as an increasingly negative experience that chastened his understanding of the press and of mass culture. Rather, and notwithstanding all his complaints about Americans, tobacco, and spit, the encounter with America in fact provided him with a new sense, at once disturbing and alluring, of the potential power of a cheap mass-market press led by entrepreneurial editors operating in a print environment unconstrained by state controls. Moreover, in writing about America, and above all in writing about its newspapers in both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens for the first time discovered a methodology for fusing fiction and the press in ways that would be foundational his most significant contribution to Victorian journalism, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A GENRE FEATURE OF COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS BY CH. DICKENS

The article explores autobiography as one of the genre features of the coming-of-age novels in the context of Charles Dickens’ legacy. Dickens’ realistic novels appeared as a result of his own life experience; the writer wanted to bring and share his views, ideas, life lessons with the readers and teach them to what he considered the correct moral behavior. Episodes of the author’s life, as if scattered through all his novels about a young man such as “Nicholas Nickleby”, “Martin Chuzzlewit”, “David Copperfield” and “The Great Expectations”. Autobiographical genre features are revealed in the coming-of-age novels in two ways– through a full depiction of the whole life stages or, alternately, with the help of the episodic retrospective description of life experience. In both cases the author draws up a rational balance of biographical facts, social and historical background of the era combined with artistic fictional reality.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) has struggled against negative reactions from general readers and critics from its beginnings as a serial, but numerous advocates for the novel’s value have shown that these negative responses often provide clues to more fruitful and positive approaches. These include especially the scrutiny of the characters and their afterlives, both creative and critical, and the re-evaluation of features thought problematic from a narratological perspective, such as coincidence and an abundance of characters too old or infirm to have a role in the plot. More careful attention to the chronological overlap of Chuzzlewit’s and A Christmas Carol’s composition and publication is another promising avenue for future scholarship.

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.