Dr Nancy Aycock Metz has written articles on Dickens, Trollope and Victorian urban culture. She is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech, USA.

"The latest in this admirable series of Companions to Dickens's works maintains the high standards of its precursors and immediately becomes an indispensable guide to one of Dickens's funniest novels. Nancy Aycock Metz shows, beneath its exuberant facade, how deeply "Martin Chuzzlewit" is engaged with contemporary political, social and historical debate, in particular with the 'socially constructed nature of personality and behaviour', and how significant are its allusions to Rousseau and Paley, and to the wild children and orang-utangs that inhabited and tested the boundaries of human nature"--Times Literary Supplement

"Nancy Aycock Metz's The Companion to "Martin Chuzzlewit" one of the now familiar Companion series to Dickens's novels, is a wonderful opportunity to immerse oneself in the thick details of Dickens's fictional worlds - to learn, for example, that Montague Tigg's "hollow square" was an absurd military formation for an attack [pp. 121-2] and that Mrs. Gamp's "cowcumbers" were considered an "'aristocratic delicacy'" [p. 343]. A nice bonus is an appendix of the novel's more egregious Americanisms."--IStudies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Nancy Metz's Companion to "Martin Chuzzlewit" is a wonderful book and a good example of how scholarship at its best can be both enlightening and fun to read. ...this book is a feast! Metz writes in clear, concise prose and the quality and quantity of the information she provides makes this reference book a pleasure to read through, even from cover to cover."--IDickens Studies Annual, 33

"The Dickens Companions are clearly indispensible to the scholar."--Modern Language Review