Set partly in the United States, this novel includes a searing satire on
mid-nineteenth-century America. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two
Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic
Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates: moral redemption
and worldly success for one and increasingly desperate crime for the other.
In her Introduction to this new edition, Patricia Ingham discusses how, in
writing a story that was meant only to recommend goodness and innocence,
Dickens succeeded in exploring the intertwining of moral sensibility and
brutality.