HEAD>Dickens's Assault on the Readers in Martin Chuzzlewit?: Ch 6 Note 8

Dickens's Assault on the Readers in Martin Chuzzlewit

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

Note 8 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.

Quoted in Forster's Life, i. 296. Steven Marcus argues that "the novel amounted to something in the way of an assault upon Dickens's audience" (p. 223) but misplaces the motive and result of this assault, I think, in emphasizing the "separation between Dickens and his audience".

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Last modified: 3 May 2001