In the Library
Martin Chuzzlewit
Charles Dickens, 1843
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 24 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 56
- Length
- Length 336k words
£1.99
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Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.
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About the book
Mr Pecksniff is an architect who has never designed or built anything. He is fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book, his very throat is moral, and he can weep over his own goodness while emptying a friend's pockets. Around him the family circles a rich old man's money like gulls at a wreck. His pupil sails for America to make his fortune and buys into a flourishing city called Eden, which turns out to be a few log huts rotting in a hideous swamp. In a London back room a hired nurse named Sairey Gamp sits up with the sick and the dead, fortified by gin and by an imaginary friend who agrees with every word she says. It is the funniest thing Dickens ever wrote and one of the coldest, because beneath all that talk of virtue a murder is being arranged. Nobody has ever caught so exactly the sound a man makes while convincing himself he is good.