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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Pickwick Papers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Male Friendship
Predatory Social Institutions
Social Class and Inequality
Marriage and Courtship
Generosity and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
On May 12, 1827, Joseph Smiggers, the Perpetual Vice-President of the Pickwick Club, presides over a meeting where the members of the club unanimously express their admiration for Samuel Pickwick’s paper titled “Speculations on the Source of the Hampstead Ponds, with some Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats.” The club, sensing the potential for even greater discoveries, supports Pickwick’s proposal to expand his travels. Alongside three other members—Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass, and Nathaniel Winkle—Pickwick, who is also the President of the Club, forms a new branch called the Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club. The goal is to document their adventures, observations, and experiences for the benefit of the original club in London. Each member will fund their own travels, and the group agrees to send detailed accounts of their journeys.
The opening of the novel satirizes the structure and self-importance of gentlemen’s clubs in the early 19th century. These clubs often promoted intellectual and social superiority, but Dickens humorously deflates their seriousness through the absurd subject of Pickwick’s paper. Forming a new branch mocks how such organizations expand to seem prestigious without real purpose. The members’ self-funded travels reinforce their vanity, suggesting their adventures serve less to benefit society and more to indulge their egos.
Themes
The scene shifts to a lively meeting where Pickwick rises to address the club. He speaks passionately about fame and its value to different people, noting how each of his companions seeks recognition in their respective field—poetry for Snodgrass, love for Tupman, and sports for Winkle. Although he admits that pride influences him, Pickwick insists that his true motivation lies in benefiting humanity. His scientific contributions have brought him recognition, but nothing compares to the pride he thinks he will feel in leading the club on these new adventures. The speech sparks a spirited debate when Mr. Blotton of Aldgate interrupts, accusing Pickwick of being a humbug. Tensions flare, but order is restored when Blotton clarifies that he only meant it in a “Pickwickian” sense, meaning no real offense. With the misunderstanding cleared up, the club continues its meeting.
Pickwick emphasizes his companions’ diverse ambitions—poetry, love, and sports—but the real joke lies in how the group treats these trivial pursuits with the same gravitas as genuine achievements. As the rest of the novel will demonstrate, Snodgrass, Tupman, and Winkle have no aptitude in their supposed fields, making Pickwick’s speech rhetorically flashy, but completely lacking in substance. Similarly, Blotton’s interruption pokes fun at how these clubs use convoluted rhetoric to resolve conflicts. Blotton’s defense—that his insult was meant in a “Pickwickian” sense—parodies the way these clubs obscure petty quarrels with pretentious language.
Themes
