DICKENS, Charles.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. First edition, from the parts, in a striking art nouveau style binding by William Worsfold (1856-1929), who established his premises at Frith Street in Soho around the year 1889 and remained there for over three decades. Dickens was proud of Chuzzlewit: in a November 1843 letter, he described it as "a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories" (Hartley, p. 126). It was first published in monthly parts between January 1843 and July 1844 and is the last of Dickens's picaresque novels. Ackroyd, Dickens's biographer, believes it marked "a great change in Dickens's conception of moral characteristics... For the first time Dickens begins to explore the contradictions and difficulties of the contemporary human world; these are no longer figures defined by a single characteristic or animated by the wilful principle of a 'humour', but ones who are seen to change with the changing world, to live and grow" (Ackroyd, p. 392).

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