Chuzzlewit Wit

 

I’m about two-thirds through with Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, plugging along at about thirty pages a day. To read the man is to immerse yourself in witty humor, and it’s a thing that must be taken in slowly to be best savored. Speed-reading is antithetical to any of the works of Charles Dickens. One must read it as if one were actually present in the events being described. I’ll admit, it’s a struggle for me to do, but when I do manage to pull it off, I’m repaid by passages like this –

 

All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature. The poultry, which may perhaps be considered to have formed the staple of the entertainment – for there was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at the bottom, and two fowls in the middle – disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like sugar-plums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and awesome thing to see.

 

There’s more, much more to reward the sensitive reader, but most of us today are incapable of following, having long been acclimated against lingeringly overlong sentences and protracted paragraphs in our post-internet world.

 

A page or two later –

 

Pursuing his inquiries, Martin found that there were no fewer than four majors present, two colonels, one general, and a captain, so that he could not help thinking how strongly officered the American militia must be; and wondering very much whether the officers commanded each other; or if they did not, where on earth the privates came from.

 

Surprisingly, or maybe not so, Dickens does not seem to be a fan of the United States. At least the U.S. circa 1843. One of the main characters, whose reputation is (possibly) falsely maligned in England, sails to America to make his fortune, is promptly fleeced and forced to return humbled. A good hundred or so pages are devoted to the U-Nited States pinned and penned under the wit of Dickens, and it is quite the unfair match.

But I am still enjoying the ride.