As is the case with Paul Sweedlepipes, some of Dickens's best-remembered characters have little to do with the main plots of their respective books. The genealogy of the opening chapter seems to reflect the novelist's difficulty in beginning the story. The description of the wind is characteristic of the humorous style of the early Sketches by Boz , Dickens employing a farcical note to introduce the story's butt, the sham architect Seth Pecksniff. Pecksniff anticipates the sleek, soft, oily hypocrisy of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield . Dickens tendentiously surrounds anything he dislikes with unpleasant connotations.
Objects have value only in their positive or negative effects on the human situation.
Dickens can charge a situation with either horror or amiability and exuberance. His point of view is often that of an imaginative yet frightened child in an enchanted forest of grotesque and divine shapes. For Dickens only individual acts of generosity can improve human circumstances. Dickens portrays Sairey Gamp the nurse and Seth Pecksniff the architect as frauds and hypocrites, but he gradually loses his indignation as he offers amusing details about their characters, particularly their speech and appearance. Young Martin's journey is a reflection of Dickens's own, not only from social naivete and financial insecurity towards self-knowledge and affluence, but also to the United States and back again, a political Odyssey of sorts.