The Pickwick Papers — Charles Dickens

You have seen it on a Mumbai society WhatsApp group: one harmless message gets forwarded, someone reads a hidden meaning into it, and by evening a whole building believes a story that never happened. Dickens put that same machine inside an English courtroom. A kindly old gentleman asks his landlady whether keeping two people costs more than keeping one — he means hiring a servant — and some months later a jury orders him to pay £750 for breaking a promise of marriage he never made. How can a court, built to find the truth, end up so far from it? That is the question Bardell v. Pickwick answers.

In two minutes

Bardell v. Pickwick is Dickens's comic trial in which a landlady's misunderstanding, two money-hungry attorneys, a theatrical Serjeant Buzfuz and a careless judge turn an innocent remark into a £750 verdict for breach of promise of marriage — a satire on how legal procedure and rhetoric can defeat plain truth.

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