Themes and Reference to Context: The Pickwick Papers

Theme five: England on the road

The proposition. Like Fielding a century earlier, Dickens uses a journey to put his characters in front of a whole society.

Where it is worked. Eatanswill and its election, the inns, the coaches, the country houses, the prison. The structure is inherited from the eighteenth-century comic novel, and comparing it with Joseph Andrews is a legitimate and often rewarded move in an essay.

Reference to context: the passages that are set

1. "A good, contented, well-breakfasted juryman is a capital thing to get hold of. Discontented or hungry jurymen, my dear sir, always find for the plaintiff." Chapter 34. Spoken by Perker, Pickwick's attorney, over breakfast on the morning of the trial. It sets the tone of the whole chapter by suggesting that the verdict may turn on the jury's digestion rather than on the evidence.

2. "Damages, gentlemen, heavy damages is the only punishment with which you can visit him; the only recompense you can award to my client." Chapter 34. Spoken by Serjeant Buzfuz, counsel for Mrs Bardell, at the close of his address to the jury. The damages demanded were fifteen hundred pounds, and the jury awarded seven hundred and fifty.

3. "Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick." Chapter 34. Read out by Serjeant Buzfuz as one of two letters said to prove a promise of marriage. It is in fact a note from a lodger to his landlady about his dinner, and Buzfuz's treatment of it as a covert communication is the best-known piece of legal satire in English fiction.

4. "Why, gentlemen, who does trouble himself about a warming-pan?" Chapter 34. Spoken by Serjeant Buzfuz about the second letter, in which Pickwick tells Mrs Bardell not to trouble herself about the warming-pan. He argues that the word must be a cover for hidden fire and a substitute for some endearment in a preconcerted system of correspondence.

5. "they said what a wery gen'rous thing it was o' them to have taken up the case on spec, and to charge nothing at all for costs, unless they got 'em out of Mr. Pickwick." Chapter 34. Spoken by Sam Weller in the witness box, called as a witness for the plaintiff. It reveals that the plaintiff's attorneys are running the action for their own costs, and Buzfuz abandons the cross-examination immediately.

6. "Oh, Sammy, Sammy, vy worn't there a alleybi!" Chapter 34, the last line. Spoken by Tony Weller, Sam's father the coachman, to Sam outside the court after the verdict. It is the popular verdict on the whole proceeding, and it is funny because an alibi is a defence to a crime and this was a civil action about an engagement.

7. "You may try, and try, and try again, Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, but not one farthing of costs or damages do you ever get from me, if I spend the rest of my existence in a debtor's prison." Chapter 34. Spoken by Mr Pickwick to the plaintiff's attorneys in a side room immediately after the verdict, while Perker is paying the court fees. He keeps the promise for several months and gives it up only to release Mrs Bardell.

8. "You gave them a cognovit for the amount of your costs, after the trial, I'm told." Chapter 46. Spoken by Jackson, a clerk of Dodson and Fogg, to Mrs Bardell in a coach which she believes is taking her on an outing. She answers that she did, "just as a matter of form". The coach is in fact taking her to the Fleet Prison.

Five more the University has actually set

Note. Added by the past paper check. All five are from chapter 34, the trial.

A. "The plaintiff is a widow; yes, gentlemen, a widow." Spoken by Serjeant Buzfuz in his opening speech for Mrs Bardell, in what Dickens calls a melancholy voice. It is the first move of the speech: before any fact is stated the jury is told the plaintiff's condition, and the whole address is built on the sympathy that word is meant to produce.

B. "Apartments furnished for a single gentleman. Inquire within." The written placard Mrs Bardell placed in her front parlour window in Goswell Street, read aloud in court by Buzfuz. He treats an ordinary advertisement for a lodger as evidence of a design upon a husband, and the passage is the clearest instance in the text of a document being given a meaning it does not carry.

C. "I wonder what the foreman of the jury, whoever he'll be, has got for breakfast." Spoken by Mr Snodgrass on the morning of the fourteenth of February, at the opening of chapter 34, by way of keeping up a conversation. Perker answers that he hopes it is a good one, and then explains that a contented, well-breakfasted juryman is a capital thing to get hold of, which is the remark set out as passage 1 above.

D. "What were you doing in the back room, ma'am?" inquired the little judge. Spoken by Mr Justice Stareleigh to Mrs Cluppins during her evidence, after she has placed Mr Pickwick's sitting-room on the first floor front. Her answer, that she will not deceive his Lordship and was there on a private matter, is what leads her to admit she overheard the conversation through a door left ajar, which is how the case's best evidence arrives by eavesdropping.

E. "I know I ought to do, if I got on as well as I deserved; but I don't, my Lord," answered the chemist. Spoken by Thomas Groffin, the chemist pressed on to the jury when a tales is prayed, replying to Mr Justice Stareleigh, who has reddened and told him that he ought to be able to afford an assistant. Groffin is one of two common jurymen sworn that morning, the other being Richard Upwitch, the greengrocer, and he warns the court before taking the oath that there will be murder before the trial is over, since he has left nobody but an errand boy in his shop who believes that Epsom salts means oxalic acid.

F. "Your little boy is a very long time gone." Spoken by Mr Pickwick to Mrs Bardell in chapter 12, as she finishes dusting his rooms and he works himself up to ask whether keeping two people costs much more than keeping one. He is talking about hiring a servant, Sam Weller, and she believes he is proposing marriage; the whole action of the trial grows from the conversation that begins with this line, which is why the examiner sets it.

How to place a passage from this novel

Names decide it. Pickwick, Bardell, Weller, Buzfuz, Snubbin, Stareleigh, Dodson, Fogg, Perker, Cluppins, Snodgrass, Winkle and Tupman appear in no other text on this paper.

Speech decides it. Sam and Tony Weller's dialect, with "v" for "w" and "w" for "v", is unmistakable.

Legal vocabulary decides it. Tales, special jury, serjeant, cognovit, sponging house and the Fleet belong to the Victorian court, not to Fielding's country justice.

What beginners get wrong

They treat the novel as one long joke. The Fleet chapters and the Chancery prisoner are not comic, and an answer that misses them misses the argument.

They attribute Buzfuz's lines to the judge, or Perker's to Snubbin. Keep the sides straight: Buzfuz and Skimpin, instructed by Dodson and Fogg, are for the plaintiff; Snubbin and Phunky, instructed by Perker, are for the defendant.

They say the satire is against Mrs Bardell. It is against the profession, and she is one of its casualties.

A worked answer

Question. "Discuss Dickens's treatment of imprisonment for debt."

Paragraph one, the position. Dickens treats the debtors' prison as the point at which the comedy of the novel stops, and he makes three arguments about it, in ascending order of seriousness.

Paragraph two, that it punished poverty. A debtor stayed until his creditor was satisfied or he was discharged, so there was no fixed term, and a man with money left at once while a man without money did not leave at all. Inside, everything had to be bought: a room, food, and relief from being chummed on other prisoners, so the prison reproduced the inequality that had filled it.

Paragraph three, that it was civil and not criminal. Pickwick has committed no offence. He is there because a judgment creditor could take a debtor's body, and because he refuses on principle to pay Dodson and Fogg. Mrs Bardell, who committed no offence either, is there because she signed a cognovit for her own attorneys' costs.

Paragraph four, the Chancery prisoner. In chapter 44 a man who has been inside for twenty years on a Chancery matter dies there. Dickens makes no joke in these pages, and the point is delay rather than debt: a suit could outlive the parties to it.

Conclusion. Dickens is writing from his own family's experience, his father having been imprisoned for debt, and the campaign the novel belongs to succeeded long afterwards, imprisonment for debt being substantially abolished in England by the Debtors Act 1869.

Quick revision

Themes: satire of the profession; imprisonment for debt; innocence meeting experience; master and servant; England on the road.

The escalation of the satire: performance, then a sleeping judge, then an accidental jury, then attorneys on speculation, then a client imprisoned for her own lawyers' costs, then a man dead in prison after twenty years of Chancery.

Set passages: the well-breakfasted juryman; heavy damages; chops and tomato sauce; the warming-pan; Sam on "spec"; the alibi; not one farthing; the cognovit.

Test yourself

1. State Dickens's central charge against the law in one sentence. That nothing which ruins the parties requires any rule to be broken: the procedure is regular throughout, and its regular operation ends with the successful plaintiff in prison and the attorneys paid.

2. Place: "vy worn't there a alleybi!" Tony Weller, Sam's father, speaking to Sam outside the court immediately after the verdict in chapter 34. It is the last line of the trial chapter, and the joke is that an alibi is a defence to a criminal charge while this was a civil action for breach of promise.

3. Which passage shows that the action is really about costs? Sam Weller's evidence in chapter 34 that Dodson and Fogg took the case on speculation and would charge nothing unless they recovered from Mr Pickwick, confirmed in chapter 46 when they imprison their own client on a cognovit for those costs.

4. Why are the Fleet chapters necessary to the novel's argument? Because they show the consequence of the trial for everybody in it, and because they make the point that a debtors' prison punishes inability to pay rather than any wrong. Without them the trial is only a funny chapter.

5. Compare the use of the road in this novel and in Joseph Andrews. Both use a journey to bring the central characters before every level of society in turn, so that each encounter tests the people met rather than the travellers. Dickens inherits the structure from Fielding, and both novels put a legal scene at the centre of the journey.