Home is a name, a word, it is a strong…

The sentence comes in chapter 35 of Martin Chuzzlewit, as Martin and Mark Tapley sail up the Thames after a year in America. Even the sparkling river, Dickens writes, was not half so buoyant “as their fluttering hearts, when yearning to set foot, once more, on native ground”. In health and fortune they come back poorer men than they went away, ruined by the swamp settlement of Eden. “But it was home. And though” the line, that word is strong enough. Set ashore with little money and no plan, they regale themselves on a smoking steak and mugs of beer.

Dickens published the novel in monthly parts in 1843 and 1844, and sent his hero to America, which he had visited in 1842, partly to revive disappointing sales. In the same chapter, Martin discovers that his old master Pecksniff has passed off Martin’s own design for a grammar school as his own.

The passage is often quoted at Christmas and on returns from exile; the wording of its second half varies slightly between editions.

Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 35, 1844

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work