Publication
Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 19 monthly instalments, each composed of 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Hablot K. "Phiz" Browne and costing one shilling. The last part was double-length.
- I - January 1843 (chapters 1-3)
- II - February 1843 (chapters 4-5)
- III - March 1843 (chapters 6-8)
- IV - April 1843 (chapters 9-10)
- V - May 1843 (chapters 11-12)
- VI - June 1843 (chapters 13-15)
- VII - July 1843 (chapters 16-17)
- VIII - August 1843 (chapters 18-20)
- IX - September 1843 (chapters 21-23)
- X - October 1843 (chapters 24-26)
- XI - November 1843 (chapters 27-29)
- XII - December 1843 (chapters 30-32)
- XIII - January 1844 (chapters 33-35)
- XIV - February 1844 (chapters 36-38)
- XV - March 1844 (chapters 39-41)
- XVI - April 1844 (chapters 42-44)
- XVII - May 1844 (chapters 45-47)
- XVIII - June 1844 (chapters 48-50)
- XIX-XX - July 1844 (chapters 51-54)
The early monthly numbers were not as successful as Dickens' previous work and only sold about twenty thousand copies each (compared to forty to fifty thousand for the monthly numbers of the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby and sixty to seventy thousand for the weekly issues of Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop) causing a break between Dickens and his publishers Chapman and Hall when they invoked a penalty clause in his contract requiring him to pay back money they had lent him to cover their costs. Also, Dickens' scathing satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a 'frenzy of wrath' and the receipt by Dickens of much abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the States (Pearson 1949: 132-33).
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