Chapter 9

Is there any writer, now living, I may be asked, who could furnish such a picture as this, one so full of reality and true humour, of one of our modern Courts of Justice? The answer must be that it would be idle to look for such a person. There are thousands who could supply minute drawings in which not a single detail would be omitted. But the piercing to the essence, the happy generalization, the knowledge of the true points of character, these would be sought in vain.

Footnotes:

{26} So confused is the chronology of _Pickwick_, that it is difficult to fix the exact date of the Trial. Boz, writing some ten years after the event, seems to have got a little confused and uncertain as to the exact year of the Trial. He first fixed the opening of the story in 1817: but on coming to the compromising incident in Goswell Street, which occurred only a few weeks later, he changed the year to 1827. Then Jingle's anachronism of the French Revolution of July suggested that the new date would not do. So 1830 was next adopted. But this did not end the matter, for in the "errata" we are directed to change this date back again to 1827. And so it now stands. The Trial therefore really took place on April 1, 1828.

{84} Seven years after the Trial this monopoly was taken away from the Serjeants--namely in 1834: then capriciously given back to them, and finally abolished in 1840.

{85} I have heard from the daughter of Mr. Chapman, the original publisher of _Pickwick_, that Talfourd revised and directed the "Trial." On one occasion Boz was dining with him when the proof was brought in, with some legal mistakes noted by Talfourd. Boz left the table and put it right.