Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens` comic masterpiece about which his biographer. Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author`s development as he began to delve deeper into the `springs of character`. Old Martin Chuzzlewit, tormented by the greed and selfishness of his family, effectively drives his grandson, young Martin, to undertake a voyage to America. It is a voyage which will have crucial consequences not only for young Martin, but also for his grandfather and his grandfather`s servant, Mary Graham, with whom young Martin is in love.
The commercial swindle of the Anglo-Bengalee Company and the fraudulent Eden Land Corporation have a topicality in our own time. This strong sub-plot shows evidence of Dickens` mastery of crime where characters such as the criminal Jonas Chuzzlewit, the old nurse Mrs Gamp, and the arch-hypocrite Seth Pecksniff are the equal to any in his other great novels. Generations of readers have also delighted in Dickens` wonderful description of theLondon boarding-house - `Todgers`s`.