Charles Dickens · 1844 · road

Dickens's sixth novel, written straight after his 1842 American tour and so rude about America that it cost him readers there for a generation. Young Martin sails from Liverpool to make his fortune and buys a plot in a city called Eden, which turns out to be a fever swamp on the Mississippi with four log huts in it.

1. 1
   Salisbury

   Mr Pecksniff's establishment near the cathedral city, where architecture is taught by a man who has never designed anything and pupils' drawings are submitted as his own - Dickens's most complete portrait of a hypocrite.

2. 2
   London

   Old Martin Chuzzlewit, his money, and the relatives gathering round it - and Todgers's boarding house, and Mrs Gamp the drunken nurse, who was drawn from life and became one of the most quoted characters in Victorian England.

3. 3
   Liverpool

   Young Martin and Mark Tapley take steerage for America to make their fortunes, Mark cheerfully looking for circumstances miserable enough for it to be a credit to a man to be jolly in them.

4. 4
   New York

   America, written straight after Dickens's own disillusioning tour of 1842 - and so savage about American manners, boasting and slavery that it damaged his sales there for years.

5. 5
   Eden

   A swamp on the Mississippi sold to them as a thriving city with public buildings on the plan - and it is a few log huts in a fever bog, drawn from Cairo, Illinois, which Dickens had seen and detested. Both of them nearly die there.

6. 6
   New York

   Back east ruined and cured of something - Martin having gone out selfish and come home otherwise, which is the moral engine Dickens said afterwards he had built the whole novel to demonstrate.

7. 7
   London

   Home to the unravelling of Pecksniff, the murder of Tigg by Jonas Chuzzlewit, and old Martin revealing he has been playing the fool on purpose - and Mark Tapley finally getting his miserable circumstances and being happy anyway.