Pickwick Papers

The Pickwickians head to Eatanswill (a name that the editor suggests Pickwick made up to conceal its true location). This politically polarized town holds an election between the “Blue” and “Buff” parties. They meet with Mr. Perker, Pickwick’s lawyer, and his friend Mr. Pott, the editor of the Eatanswill Gazette, the Blue party’s newspaper. The inns in Eatanswill have little room, so Pickwick and Winkle stay with Mr. Potts and his wife. The next morning, Sam tells Pickwick about the ways that the two political parties of Eatanswill try to prevent members of the other party from voting and sabotage one another to win. The Pickwickians attend the elections, which are riotous, and the Blue candidate wins.

In a common room at the inn where Snodgrass and Tupman are staying, the two Pickwickians listen to another of the inn’s lodgers tell a story about a man named Tom Smart, who meets a wealthy widow at her public house and wishes to marry her. In Tom’s room, a chair turns into an elderly man and tells him that he’s the widow’s guardian, and the man wants Tom to marry her. Tom tells the widow that the other man she’s courting is married, and he marries her a month later, after which he never hears from the chair again.

When heading to Snodgrass and Tupman’s inn, Pickwick encounters a man named Leo Hunter, whose wife often invites people of great intelligence to breakfasts, as her husband now does with Pickwick. The breakfast happens to be a costume party, and the Pickwickians must buy costumes to attend with the Potts. At the breakfast, the Pickwickians meet many important scholars and writers before the arrival of a man announced as Charles Fitz-Marshall, who turns out to be Mr. Jingle. Once he’s spotted, Jingle leaves, with Pickwick and Sam chasing after him.

Pickwick and Sam get to the inn where Jingle is staying, and Sam meets Jingle’s servant, Job Trotter. Job tells Sam that Jingle intends to elope with a young woman at a boarding school, and though Job doesn’t want to betray his employer, Sam convinces him to tell Pickwick about the scheme. The men form a plan to catch Jingle in the act when he leaves to elope with the young woman that night, but Job and Jingle set Pickwick up, leaving him to be discovered alone in the garden of the ladies’ boarding school. The women of the house think Pickwick is there to rob them, but he asks them to call for Sam, who will exonerate him. Sam comes, as do Mr. Wardle and Mr. Trundle, who just so happened to be staying at the same inn, and they bring him back from the boarding school more angry at Jingle than ever.

Pickwick writes down a story Sam told him about a teacher named Nathaniel Pipkin who falls in love with Maria Lobbs, the daughter of a wealthy neighbor. Maria toys with the teacher’s emotions before marrying her cousin, and Nathaniel is a witness at their wedding.

While Winkle remains at Mr. Pott’s house, the other Pickwickians remain at Eatanswill. One morning, Pott suddenly accuses Winkle of seducing his wife, as he had read about in his rival’s newspaper. Mrs. Pott is thrown into “hysterics” when she hears this news and can’t be convinced to stop until Pott agrees to fight the editor who published the slander. Winkle receives a letter asking him and the other Pickwickians to join Pickwick at the Angel Inn where he’s staying, and Winkle departs from Pott, both men never wanting to see each other again.

When the Pickwickians arrive at the inn, they meet Wardle and Trundle, whom Wardle announces will soon marry his daughter Isabella. Sam brings Pickwick a letter, which was at the post office for two days, from the lawyer of his landlady, Mrs. Bardell, and mentions that she’s suing him for breaking his promise to marry her. Pickwick is confounded but knows that her son has seen her in his arms when Mrs. Bardell fainted on him, putting them in a compromising position.

The Pickwickians (minus Snodgrass), Wardle, and Trundle go out shooting the next day. Pickwick, who caught a cold during his adventure at the boarding school, must be pushed by Sam in a wheelbarrow to see the events but is afraid because the other men’s guns keep pointing at him in that position. Winkle’s gun accidentally goes off, almost shooting someone just as he shot Tupman earlier. The men eat lunch together, and Pickwick gets extremely inebriated and falls asleep in the wheelbarrow, where the men leave him to nap. The landlord of the spot where they dined, Captain Boldwig, finds Pickwick and wheels him to the pound. Wardle and Sam find him there with a crowd throwing vegetables at him, and they take him back with them.

Pickwick visits the office of Dodson and Fogg, Mrs. Bardell’s lawyers, and listens to the ravings of their spirited clerks. Dodson and Fogg confirm Mrs. Bardell’s accusations and try to egg Pickwick into insulting or beating them so that they might have more evidence against him. Sam stops Pickwick from acting on this impulse and takes him to a public house, where they run into Sam’s father, Tony. Tony tells them where Jingle and Job are, and Pickwick wants to follow them to Ipswich. In the meantime, Pickwick and Sam try to find the lawyer Mr. Perker, but his offices have closed, and they’re directed to where his clerk, Mr. Lowten, is staying at a nearby pub.

At the pub, an elderly man named John Bamber begins to tell scary stories about London’s Inns of Court. He tells a longer story about an odd client he had when he worked in a law office named Heyling; the client vowed to avenge the death of his son and wife while he was in Marshalsea debtors’ prison. The man inherited wealth and ruined his wife’s family, who had thrown him in jail and refused to help his family.

Tony, a retired coach driver, takes Pickwick and Sam to Ipswich along with a nervous man named Peter Magnus. They dine at the inn where they’re both stopping, and Magnus tells Pickwick that he’s there to propose to a woman. Pickwick tells Magnus that he’s there to expose Jingle. After going up to bed, Pickwick realizes that he left his watch downstairs, and he inadvertently enters a woman’s bedroom when he heads back up. The woman kicks him out of her room, and Pickwick determines to stay in the hall the rest of the night rather than repeating his embarrassing venture before he sees Sam, who leads him back to his own room.