Dickens’s sixth novel is remarkable for many things. Prominent in it, for example, is the astonishing fertility and invention of Mr Pecksniff whose holier-than-thou eloquence never fails even when his sordid self-interest is being publicly denounced. As the novel’s eponymous hero visits the United States in order to improve his fortunes, there is a satire on American manners and business practices much more savage than any Dickens had included in the travel book (American Notes) that he published very shortly after his return from his own visit there in 1842. During young Martin’s absence in America, a couple of the novel’s more dubious characters become involved in what is clearly a Ponzi scheme, expertly described well before the Italian con artist Charles Ponzi was lending his name to this type of financial fraud and it is in fact the establishment of the `Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company’ which leads to one clear murder while the mystery surrounding what seems like another can only be solved by the introduction of an embryonic detective figure who would have multiple descendants in later novels. And yet for all these and other aspects too numerous to mention here, what makes Martin Chuzzlewit especially memorable for most readers is the appearance in it of perhaps Dickens’s most well-known comic character. Describing the novel’s composition, John Forster, Dickens’s close friend and first biographer, refers to Mrs Gamp’s `grim grotesqueness’ while at the same time calling her `the happiest stroke of humorous art in all [his] writings’.
Variations on `grotesque’ are ubiquitous in Dickens criticism where they are usually assumed to be associated with his comedy; but they are not always easy to understand. In 1827, only 16 years before the first instalments of Martin Chuzzlewit began to appear, Victor Hugo had foregrounded the term in a long introduction to his play Cromwell that became a manifesto for European Romanticism. Dividing the whole history of Western culture into the primitive, the antique and the modern, he claimed that it was above all the `fecund union of the grotesque with the sublime’ that gave birth to the genius of modernity and that it was in the grotesque that one would find `the germ of comedy’ (rather underplaying that there had already been quite a bit of comedy around before the modern era).. Like many before him, and even more after, Hugo associated the origins of the term with architecture as in those strange figures that are perhaps most familiar to the English in the gargoyles of Gothic churches, with faces and bodies that deviate often wildly from the norm or combine human with animal characteristics. According to the criteria these provide, the most obvious example of the grotesque in Dickens’s early writing is Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop. As Q. D. Leavis pointed out a long time ago, in a chapter on `The Dickens Illustrations’, the depiction by Hablot Browne, or Phiz as he was known, of that moment in the novel when Little Nell is frightened by her sudden glimpse of Quilp in the town where she and her grandfather are hiding, is especially appropriate in that it has as its backdrop a gothic archway, as if the evil dwarf had just stepped down from one of its empty niches.
Quilp certainly conforms to what is usually thought to be grotesque yet there is nothing about him that is especially amusing. The assumption that the grotesque and comedy are always united is nonetheless deep rooted as Ruskin illustrates when, in the third volume of The Stones of Venice, he writes that the grotesque `falls into two branches, sportive grotesque, and terrible grotesque’ but then claims that `we cannot legitimately consider it under these two aspects, because there are hardly any examples that do not in some degree combine both elements’. However true this might be of architecture, it hardly defines the difference between Quilp and Mrs Gamp and not least because there is little in the way Dickens describes her dress, surroundings and physical appearance that would justify calling her grotesque or lead his illustrators to depict her in that way. Forster’s reference is to her `grim grotesqueness’ by which he is presumably alluding to her distinct lack of empathy in her dealings with the sick and dying and that, as a `nurse, and watcher …she went to a laying-in or a laying-out with equal relish’. That she does so does not mean that she omits the usual words of condolence for those who have lost loved ones, being as proficient in that area as Pecksniff in his endless and ingenious variations on turning the other cheek, but they are clearly part of a battery of means she has of trying to keep herself in work rather than expressions of genuine sympathy. When we first meet her, she invokes her friend Mrs Harris in order to advertise her services, claiming this lady has said to her that `if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen pence a day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks – night watching … being an extra charge – you are that inwallable person’, and adding that she had then replied: `Mrs Harris don’t name the charge, for if I could afford to lay out my feller creeturs out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears `em’.
The comedy of Mrs Gamp offers little opportunity for Dickens’s illustrators because it is so much concentrated not on how she looks but what she says. At the beginning of chapter 49, there is a detailed description of her exiguous living conditions with its strange assembly of furniture as she prepares to welcome her co-worker Betsy Prig to a tea of salmon, `intensely pickled’, which may suggest eccentricity but hardly that she is grotesque. By this time, Dickens has invented for her an astonishingly rich personal idiom, an idiolect as the linguists say, with its unconventional grammar, mispronunciations because of what may be a speech defect (`inwallable’, `suppoge’), more than enough Malapropisms to make the character in Sheridan’s The Rivals proud, and a slew of imperfectly recalled proverbial or biblical expressions: `Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for `em to see out of a needle’s eye’. All these she delivers with an utter lack of self-consciousness and the energy of a widow proud of being able to hold her own in a harsh world (even if it is with the considerable aid of alcohol). In its own way, her rhetoric can rise to the same dizzy heights as Pecksniff’s as in this well-known account of how she has responded when Mrs Harris, `through the square and up the steps a-turnin’ round by the tobacker shop’, has asked her how many children she herself might have:
No, Mrs Harris I says to her, `excuge me, if you please. My own’, I says, `has fallen out of three-pair backs, and had damp doorsteps settled on their lungs, and one was turned up smilin’ in a bedstead, unbeknown. Therefore, ma’am’, I says, `seek not to proticipate, but take `em as they come and as they go.’ `Mine’, says Mrs Gamp, `is all gone, my dear young chicks. And as to husbands, there’s a wooden leg gone likeways home to its account, which in its constancy of walkin’ into wine vaults, and never comin’ out again `til fetched by force, was quite as weak as flesh, if not weaker.’
As John Bowen explains in the notes to the Wordsworth Classics edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, `three pair backs’ are the rooms on a third story at the back of a house. For all its solecisms, grammatical and otherwise, the language in Mrs Gamp’s description of the children’s fate can become positively poetic, evocative of illness, poverty and struggle. As for the ex-husband with a wooden leg, he makes several other appearances in addition to this one and might well require a trigger warning in these sensitive times although that we are all now too refined to make fun of a disability would be belied by listening to almost any of today’s stand-up comedians.
There is a pathos that underlies Mrs Gamp’s assertiveness and buoyant self-sufficiency. It comes out in the dismayed anger with which she responds to Betsy Prig’s charge that Mrs Harris is no more than a figment of her imagination. The ensuing quarrel between the two nurses means that she is on her own after she has been asked by Jonas Chuzzlewit, who believes that his plan to poison his father has been successful, to keep a close eye on Mr Chuffey, an old servant of the family firm who combines incoherent mutterings about this supposed murder with on-coming dementia. In the climactic scene where old Martin Chuzzlewit exposes his nephew, who while he may not in fact be technically guilty of patricide has in fact murdered someone else, Martin asks Mrs Gamp who she now has to help her look after Mr Chuffey if it is not Betsy Prig and, on being told that it is Mrs Harris, reduces her to an entirely uncharacteristic state of silent confusion by asking to be introduced to her. This is at a stage in the novel where old Martin has emerged as no longer the bitter and misanthropic invalid we met at the beginning and is ready to take back into the fold the young grandson after whom the novel is named, and whose inherited Chuzzlewit selfishness has been corrected by his hardships and misfortunes in America, and also publicly expose Pecksniff for the hypocrite he is. It is through old Martin that Dickens is able to gather together all the many varied strands of his complicated plot and weave them into a satisfactory conclusion. The way he does this is remarkably ingenious even if it has to rely a good deal on coincidence, and in particular the accidental coming together of the numerous different characters: one does of course occasionally `run into’ someone one never expected to meet but not so often as in a Dickens novel. For a late entrant, someone who has not made her initial bow before the 19th of the novel’s 54 chapters, Mrs Gamp plays a relatively large part in these final resolutions but is eventually dismissed from the action by old Martin with stern admonitions about `the expediency of a little less liquor, and a little more humanity’. As a satire on the inadequacies of social care in Dickens’ time, she is not without some political or sociological relevance today; but it is hard to think about her in that way when her comic speech gives the reader so much enjoyment.
For many critics, if Mrs Gamp is not grotesque she is at least a caricature (the two terms tend to run into each other) with many features deliberately exaggerated; yet in a preface Dickens wrote for a late edition of the novel he pointed out that, `What is exaggeration for one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another’ and said that he sometimes wondered `whether it is ALWAYS the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull’. As for her being grotesque, when that term is defined as whatever deviates from the norm we are all, in one way or another, likely to fall into the category the word designates. Preternaturally observant, walking down the street, or listening to conversations, might have been a torture for Dickens had he not had the capacity to turn all the peculiarities he perceived into humour and we ourselves are protected from the idea of what it would be like to be nursed by a Mrs Gamp, should we become ill or demented, by the comedy of her speech. There is a broadly similar if much less obvious procedure at work in Dickens’s presentation of Pecksniff. He is a mercenary, conniving rogue, a heartless parent and a sexual predator, but he handles the language of love and forgiveness so expertly that it is hard not to anticipate his every appearance with pleasure.