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.
Read the full piece at Swerve of Shore
Opening paragraphs quoted from swerveofshore.com and reproduced with the author's permission. This site is a layout rebuild on the zer0-mistakes theme — the full essay lives on the original.