Note 5 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.
It must be added that Dickens's humour had also never been so continuous. There is simply far more humour in Martin Chuzzlewit than in my other novel, with the possible exception of Pickwick. The difference in quantity obviously makes a difference in one response, but I know of no way to account adequately for the quantity, One can only nod to it in passing, and perhaps offer as evidence of the overflowing abundance something like the following, a nameless butcher who appears in only two paragraphs to sell some meat to Tom Pinch: "When he saw Tom putting the cabbage-leaf into his pocket awkwardly, he begged to he allowed to do it for him; 'for meat,' he said with some emotion, 'must be humored, not drove'" (XXXIX).
Last modified: 3 May 2001