Pickwick Papers

Pickwick runs into Magnus at breakfast, who has sent his card to the woman whom he plans to propose to. Magnus introduces his new fiancée, Miss Witherfield, to Pickwick. She happens to be the woman into whose room Pickwick accidentally intruded into the night before. When Miss Witherfield refuses to tell Magnus how she knows Pickwick, Magnus becomes jealous of Pickwick. Miss Witherfield goes to a local magistrate, Mr. Nupkins, to stop Magnus and Pickwick from dueling, naming only Pickwick and Tupman to protect Magnus. Back at the inn, Pickwick is dining with the recently arrived Pickwickians when Mr. Grummer, an officer of the magistrate, comes to arrest Pickwick and Tupman. A crowd follows them to the magistrate’s house, where Sam finds them and attempts to fight Grummer before he, Snodgrass, and Winkle are also apprehended.

The Pickwickians arrive at Mr. Nupkins’s house, the house that Sam saw Job leave earlier. As Nupkins sentences the men, Pickwick asks for a private interview after Sam tells him that Jingle and Job are pretending to be friends to the magistrate. Nupkins agrees to Pickwick’s plan to let the Pickwickians stay for dinner, which Jingle is expected to attend, to prove that he’s a villain. At Nupkins’ house, Sam meets and flirts with a housekeeper named Mary and tells the other servants about the villainy of Job Trotter, who suddenly enters. Upstairs, Nupkins and the Pickwickians admonish Jingle, whom Pickwick knows he’s being kind to by not exposing him to any more of society. Nupkins and the Pickwickians part ways amiably, as do Sam and Mary.

Pickwick asks Sam to visit Mrs. Bardell when they return to London to pay her the last of his rent and tell her that he won’t be returning. Sam sympathizes with the woman when he meets with her and learns that she seems to love Pickwick and that the case will be tried in two or three months. Pickwick worries about the case against him as he prepares for a Christmas visit to Dingley Dell.

Sam visits his father and stepmother in Dorking at their public house. In addition, while Tony is out, Sam meets a Mr. Stiggins, a religious man his father told him about. It’s clear to Sam that Mr. Stiggins and his stepmother are flirting with one another, and Sam says that if he were his father, he’d poison Mr. Stiggins’s wine.

The Pickwickians are received warmly by those at Manor Farm, who are joined by several friends of Miss Wardle’s for Isabella’s wedding the next day. Mr. Winkle is attracted to one of these young women, who is later introduced as Arabella Allen. After the wedding is a Christmas ball, at which even Pickwick dances. The group is merry, and Wardle sings a Christmas carol. Mrs. Wardle alludes to a story her late husband told about goblins.

Mrs. Wardle’s story of the goblins concerns a gravedigger named Gabriel Grub on a Christmas several years earlier. While digging a grave, Gabriel meets a goblin who is upset with what he’s doing on Christmas Eve. The goblin and several others in the churchyard are angry with Gabriel for hating others’ merriness because of his own unhappiness, and they kidnap him, taking him to their cavern. The goblin king shows him a scene of a happy family and then one of a picturesque landscape, and Gabriel is moved by these (similar to Ebenezer Scrooge in the popular Dickens story A Christmas Carol).

Two medical students, Benjamin Allen (Arabella’s brother) and Bob Sawyer, visit Manor Farm on Christmas morning and are introduced to Pickwick. These men and some of the Pickwickians go ice skating that day, and the athletic Winkle proves very awkward at it. Wardle and the ladies who watch the men encourage Pickwick to slide on the ice, as he said he did as a boy. However, when he does so, the ice cracks beneath him. Fortunately, the frozen lake is only a few feet deep so he’s easily saved and rushed into bed in his warm room. Before everyone leaves Manor Farm, the medical students invite Pickwick to visit them sometime.

A clerk from Dodson and Fogg named Mr. Jackson visits Pickwick while he’s dining with his three friends. Jackson subpoenas Snodgrass, Tupman, Winkle, and Sam and reveals that the trial will be held on the 14th of the following month, which happens to be Valentine’s Day. Sam tells Pickwick a story about a sausage maker who disappeared nearby and in an erratic episode put himself into his sausage grinder. Pickwick goes to visit his lawyer, Perker, who insinuates that Pickwick will have to pay the damages because there’s no evidence to support him. Pickwick thus resolves to never pay Dodson and Fogg a cent and to visit Serjeant Snubbin, the solicitor assigned to his case. Snubbin passes Pickwick and Perker off to a junior lawyer on the case, Mr. Phunky, who hears Pickwick’s complaints and tells him that they’re lucky to have Snubbin on their side.

Bob Sawyer prepares to receive the Pickwickians with Ben Allen, as his landlady, Mrs. Raddle, comes to his rooms to get the rent that he hasn’t yet paid. The Pickwickians arrive, as does Sawyer’s friend Jack Hopkins, another surgeon who tells Pickwick strange stories from their profession. More friends of Sawyer’s arrive, and they all play cards and drink loudly, so the landlady kicks them out. Ben Allen tells Winkle that he wants Sawyer to marry Arabella and will kill anyone who gets in the way.

The day before Pickwick’s trial, Sam buys a Valentine card for Mary, which his father mocks him for when he finds him writing in it. Sam reads his letter to his father, and Tony critiques it, but Sam signs it from Pickwick instead of using his own name. Tony tells Sam of a plan to embarrass Stiggins, who has been invited to a temperance society meeting, by getting him drunk beforehand. Sam and Tony attend this meeting, at which Stiggins accuses everyone else of being drunk and starts fighting many of the members as Sam and Tony escape.

At the trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, Mrs. Bardell’s solicitor, Mr. Buzfuz, slanders Pickwick’s character from the beginning of the trial and emphasizes Mrs. Bardell’s role as a sympathetic widow. Buzfuz and his partner, Skimpkin, try to confuse the Pickwickians and lead Winkle to reveal how Pickwick inadvertently entered a woman’s bedroom in Ipswich. The jury rules in favor of Mrs. Bardell but only for half of the 1,500 pounds she has sued for, and Pickwick tells Dodson and Fogg that they’ll never receive any of the money even if he’s sent to debtors’ jail.