V
Well, with Dickens, his own adoring public corrected him sharply and, on the whole, with true instinct. To them he was the wand-waving magician, the improvisatore in excelsis who had caught up out of their midst an elderly small gentleman in spectacles and gaiters and shot him suddenly out of Goswell Street into the firmament, to be a star equal with Hercules—
sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera—
“instead of which” he had turned to making plots so patently theatrical (and of the theatre of Crummles) that the man himself was helping everybody to see through them. So came the revenge; over-proved by the opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, which I suppose to be about the sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer. Its perusal induces on me at any rate, something like physical misery, not unmixed with the sort of shame any one of us might feel if a parent behaved unbecomingly in public. I want to obey the exhortation on Mrs. Sapsea’s monument and “with a blush retire.”
But, note you, the general reader—that entity often abused, seldom quite the fool that he looks—was quick to mark and punish. Listen to Forster:
Chuzzlewit had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its predecessors.... The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two stories.... The forty and fifty thousand purchasers of Pickwick and Nickleby, the sixty and seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprises in which The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge appeared had fallen to little over twenty thousand. They rose, somewhat on Martin’s ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he’d go to America....
They rose at once by a couple of thousand: but a serial of course can never be easily lifted out of a rut into which it has once dropped. The reasons for this are obvious, and the serial sales of Chuzzlewit never over-topped twenty-three thousand. There was a very different story when Chuzzlewit came to book form. “Its sale, since,” writes Forster, “has ranked next after Pickwick and Copperfield.” In short, Dickens had been, quite conscientiously, in the opening chapters of Chuzzlewit, working against the grain of his genius. His public recalled him to it in the brutal way the public uses. When he sat down to write Chuzzlewit he had never an idea of carrying Martin off to America. Suddenly, in fear of falling sales and many challenges to make good his American Notes, he became the improvisatore again and switched his hero across the Atlantic. Who will deny that the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit are its best and, save for any given chapter upon which Sarah Gamp knocks in, its most memorable?