Dans sa «Préface au roman», Charles Dickens écrit à propos des conditions sanitaires telles qu'elles apparaissent dans son roman: «In all my writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity of showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor. Mrs. Sarah Gamp was, four-and-twenty years ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances of their mismanagement, that Mrs. Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds, should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on an attempt to improve that class of persons--since, greatly improved through the agency of good women» (Consulté le 7 juin 2011).
(en) Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, (ISBN978-0-19-818461-4, lire en ligne).
(en) Philip V. Allingham, An Overview of Dickens's Picaresque Novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Lakehead University, (présentation en ligne), p.1.
