

                                Charles Dickens

                           The Life and Adventures of

                               Martin Chuzzlewit

                                    Preface

What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to
another. That which is commonly called a long-sight, perceives in a prospect
innumerable features and bearings non-existent to a short-sighted person. I
sometimes ask myself whether there may occasionally be a difference of this kind
between some writers and some readers; 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?
    On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience, more curious than
the speculation I have just set down. It is this: - I have never touched a
character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of that character has
incredulously asked me: »Now really, did I ever really, see one like it?«1
    All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that Mr.
Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever existed. I will
not offer any plea on his behalf to so powerful and genteel a body, but will
make a remark on the character of Jonas Chuzzlewit.
    I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in the precept
and example always before him, to engender and develope the vices that make him
odious. But, so born and so bred; admired for that which made him hateful, and
justified from his cradle in cunning, treachery, and avarice; I claim him as the
legitimate issue of the father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I
submit that their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere
piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition of a direct truth.
    I make this comment and solicit the reader's attention to it in his or her
consideration of this tale, because nothing is more common in real life than a
want of profitable reflection on the causes of many vices and crimes that awaken
general horror. What is substantially true of families in this respect, is true
of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we reap. Let the reader go into the
children's side of any prison in England, or, I grieve to add, of many
workhouses, and judge whether those are monsters who disgrace our streets,
people our hulks and penitentiaries, and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are
creatures whom we have deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
    The American portion of this story
