Travails in Hyper-Reality, 1842–48

Abstract

From the point at which he joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle in 1834 until the appearance of the concluding number of Barnaby Rudge in November 1841, Dickens was constantly engaged in writing sketches, stories and serial narratives for immediate publication. Exhausted by this regime, anxious to avoid the perils of over-production (which he felt had blighted Scott’s career as a novelist), and eager to meet his American readers and to consolidate his position in America, Dickens took a break from writing for immediate publication when he had finished Barnaby Rudge — although not before he had secured a monthly salary of £150 from his publishers Chapman and Hall, to be drawn from his share of the profits of his next novel. This novel was Martin Chuzzlewit, the first of whose twenty monthly numbers came out in January 1843, shortly after the publication of Dickens’s impressions of his disappointing and disillusioning travels in America, American Notes for General Circulation (October 1842).

… we never knows wot’s hidden in each other’s hearts; and if we had glass winders there, we’d need keep the shetters up, some on us, I do assure you!’

(Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit chap. 29, 400)