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(Reblogged from musikurt-deactivated20130518)
My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
Charles Dickens (Martin Chuzzlewit)
Showing posts tagged martin chuzzlewit
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(Reblogged from bookriot)
I was filled with sadness for a man who had been dead 142 years, but for the space of nearly 500 pages, he had been kindled to life again. Rejuvenated, he bustled through the Old Bailey, taking notes as a young journalist; he moved his pen across 9 x 7 inch pages at fevered speed, dipping the nib into the inkwell and spattering drops as he created Wackford Squeers and Uriah Heep and Sairey Gamp; he hurried through the London suburbs on one of his legendary walks, his legs carrying him across the land, his England, at speeds up to five miles per hour. He smoldered, he sparked, he burst into flame.
Sarah Gamp: My favourite Charles Dickens character
Sarah Gamp - from Martin Chuzzlewit - is one of Charles Dickens’s best grotesques and is the fourteenth in the Telegraph pick of the best Charles Dickens characters.
A Christmas Carol
[A Christmas Carol] was written in the autumn of 1843, during the hungry 40s, a prolonged period of depression and unemployment. Dickens was busy writing a novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, which was not selling well in serial form. He was also interesting himself in the condition of the country. He visited a ragged school, which offered basic education to street children…
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(Reblogged from ryannapier)
How could he ever go to America! Why didn’t he go to some of those countries where the savages eat each other fairly, and give an equal chance to every one!
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (via ryannapier)
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(Reblogged from ryannapier)
Martin knew nothing about America, or he would have known perfectly well that if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (via ryannapier)
“As the grand tones resounded through the church, they seemed, to Tom, to find an echo in the depth of every ancient tomb, no less than in the deep mystery of his own heart. Great thoughts and hopes came crowding on his mind as the rich music rolled upon the air, and yet among them—something more grave and solemn in their purpose, but the same—were all the images of that day, down to its very lightest reflections of childhood.”
—Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewitt
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(Reblogged from ryannapier)
Mr Pecksniff was in the frequent habit of using any word that occurred to him as having a good sound, and rounding a sentence well, without much care for its meaning. And he did this so boldly, and in such an imposing manner, that he would sometimes stagger the wisest people with his eloquence, and make them gasp again.
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (via ryannapier)
The BBC's Charles Dickens season: what's on
Lots and lots of Dickens-related programming!
As the BBC launches its all-star adaptation of Great Expectations, we run down what’s on in the rest of the channel’s season dedicated to Charles Dickens.
“On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels.”
While writing Martin Chuzzlewit - his sixth novel - Dickens declared it ‘immeasurably the best of my stories.’ He was already famous as the author of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.
Set partly in America, which Dickens had visited in 1842, the novel includes a searing satire on the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates of moral redemption and worldly success for one, with increasingly desperate crime for the other. This powerful black comedy involves hypocrisy, greed and blackmail, as well as the most famous of Dickens’s grotesques, Mrs Gamp.
My favourite Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
‘I think that Chuzzlewit is in a hundred points immeasurably the best of my stories’ …
The 1867 Chapman and Hall ‘Charles Dickens’ edition
untitled by Matt Neale on Flickr.
Always the best section of any library!
