James Joyce Charles Dickens Parallels Martin Chuzzlewit

From the Joyce in the World thread on Swerve of Shore, by Brandon Nicklaus.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Mr. Pecksniff, the master of self-serving morality, reflects on his higher status, contrasting himself with a beggar he saw on the way to London. With seemingly insincere tears, he tells his daughters:

“For if every one were warm and well-fed, we should lose the satisfaction of admiring the fortitude with which certain conditions of men bear cold and hunger.”

Here, Dickens exposes Pecksniff’s hypocrisy, his performative righteousness, and self-congratulatory attitude toward the suffering. This recalls Joyce’s critique of social and religious structures in Ulysses, where institutions uphold inequality while masking it as virtue.

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