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announced as “English life and manners,” and which centered on the machinations of a family assembled in a country house and jockeying for the fortune of Martin Chuzzlewit Sr.
    Early on, Dickens wrote glowingly to John Forster, his friend and literary adviser, of his pleasure in seeing how his characters had “opened out.” The publishers were plagued by falling sales, but he was particularly happy with his decision to send his young protagonist, Chuzzlewit junior, off to tour America by the time he was writing the twelfth episode of the book. Though some critics saw this turn as a desperate attempt to revive the sluggish sales, Dickens took great pleasure in the opportunity to unleash one more salvo against the nation that had so disappointed him. “Martin has made them all stark raving mad across the water,” he crowed to Forster in August of 1843.
    Among the things that rankled Americans (and cost him the friendship of his former booster Washington Irving) were observations like those of Martin’s friend Mark Tapley, who explains how he might draw the likeness of a much-exalted American symbol. Says Tapley to Martin, as they stand at the bow of their ship, watching the shore of the States disappear behind them:

“Why, I was a-thinking, sir…that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?”
“Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.”
“No,” said Mark. “That wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its shortsightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity, like a Ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it.”

    Still, if Dickens thought a fiction-based campaign against the United States would win him an increased readership in his homeland, he had once again miscalculated. Sales rose slightly for the later installments of the book, from 20,000 copies to 23,000, but that remained a far cry from the 50,000 per issue for Nicholas Nickleby and 100,000 for The Old Curiosity Shop. When publisher William Hall reminded Dickens of the clause in their contract allowing for a reduction in his salary based on slow sales, an already agitated Dickens exploded. He dashed off a letter to Forster in which he vowed never again to write for Chapman and Hall, and stated his intentions of striking an agreement with the firm of Bradbury and Evans, the printers of his books, who had demonstrated their generosity and loyalty—in the author’s mind, at least—by sending him a turkey each Christmas.
    From the outside, Dickens’s response might seem petulant. There are few writers to this day even in countries with populations far larger than Victorian England who would not be thrilled with the prospect of 23,000 copies of anything they had written flying out the doors of bookshops over the course of a week or a month, and most of them would be willing to put up with the barbs of a few critics and the enmity of a public that lay an ocean away.
    But the truth is—just as the bar is never lowered in the course of a vaulting competition—few writers drop their expectations from book to book. A diminution of sales, interest, and public gestures of approval is tantamount to a lowering of self-worth. And certainly, for anyone who had ascended to the heights of literary Olympus, as Dickens had, the prospect of banishment to the foothills would be unbearable.
    As his friend Forster often bristled when reminded of his origins as the son of a butcher, Dickens would never forget whence he had come. He was no child of privilege. There was no trust fund backing his endeavors. There was no family estate to which he might retire. He was, as is often said, only as good as his next book.
    He might have passed off the disappointing response to Barnaby Rudge as his own fault, a miscalculation born of exhaustion. His sense that he needed a bit of time away from the grind of