The Superficiality of the American Society in Martin Chuzzlewit

James R. Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California

Note 11 to Chapter 6 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.

Edgar Johnson says these Americans are "non-human beings" (p. 39). Miller, similarly, says that "America is an entire society which lives as pure surface, a surface which hides a profound void" (p. 180).

Victorian Overview Charles Dickens Contents

Last modified: 3 May 2001