Our next book club choice will be Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit was Dickens’s sixth novel. It was first published in installments that began in January of 1843 and ran through July of 1844.
The overriding theme of Martin Chuzzlewit is selfishness, selfishness of all types.
This was Dickens sixth novel, written in installments after taking a year off during which he visited America for the first time. It was less than enthusiastically received. The novel deals with the greed of Old Martin Chuzzlewit's relatives, chiefly Mr. Pecksniff, hoping to inherit his wealth.
During the writing of Martin Chuzzlewit, sales of the monthly parts were disappointingly low and Dickens was experiencing financial difficulty. He had borrowed from his publishers for his American trip in 1842 and his wife Kate was expecting their fifth child. He responded by planning a small book for the Christmas season of 1843 which followed the theme of greed he was writing in Martin Chuzzlewit. The result was the classic A Christmas Carol, published in December 1843.
The BBC made this novel into a mini-series in 1994. It's a little over 6 hours long. It might be fun to read part of the novel and then watch the first 3 epidodes and then schedule our discussion and the last 3 for a second evening. Can we shoot for perhaps the weekend of October 16th to watch the first half of the movie?
Let me know your thoughts!