_Master Humphrey's Clock_ concluded, Dickens started in 1842 on his first visit to America--an episode hitherto without parallel in English literary history, for he was received everywhere with popular acclamation as the representative of a grand triumph of the English language and imagination, without regard to distinctions of nationality. He offended the American public grievously by a few words of frank description and a few quotations of the advertisement columns of American papers illustrating the essential barbarity of the old slave system (_American Notes_). Dickens was soon pining for home--no English writer is more essentially and insularly English in inspiration and aspiration than he is. He still brooded over the perverseness of America on the copyright question, and in his next book he took the opportunity of uttering a few of his impressions about the objectionable sides of American democracy, the result being that "all Yankee-doodle-dom blazed up like one universal soda bottle," as Carlyle said. _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1843-1844) is important as closing his great character period. His _sève originale_, as the French would say, was by this time to a considerable extent exhausted, and he had to depend more upon artistic elaboration, upon satires, upon _tours de force_ of description, upon romantic and ingenious contrivances. But all these resources combined proved unequal to his powers as an original observer of popular types, until he reinforced himself by autobiographic reminiscence, as in _David Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, the two great books remaining to his later career.
After these two masterpieces and the three wonderful books with which he made his début, we are inclined to rank _Chuzzlewit_. Nothing in Dickens is more admirably seen and presented than Todgers's, a bit of London particular cut out with a knife. Mr Pecksniff and Mrs Gamp, Betsy Prig and "Mrs Harris" have passed into the national language and life. The coach journey, the windy autumn night, the stealthy trail of Jonas, the undertone of tragedy in the Charity and Mercy and Chuffey episodes suggest a blending of imaginative vision and physical penetration hardly seen elsewhere. Two things are specially notable about this novel--the exceptional care taken over it (as shown by the interlineations in the MS.) and the caprice or nonchalance of the purchasing public, its sales being far lower than those of any of its monthly predecessors.