The Serjeant’s dealing with the warming pan topic is a truly admirable satiric touch, and not one bit far-fetched or exaggerated. Any one familiar with suspicious actions has again and again heard comments as plausible and as forced. “Don’t trouble yourself about the warming pan! The warming pan! Why, gentlemen, who does trouble himself about a warming pen?” A delicious non sequitur, sheer nonsense, and yet with an air of conviction that is irresistable. “When was the peace of mind of man or woman broken or disturbed by a warming pan which is in itself a harmless, a useful and I will add, gentlemen, a comforting article of domestic furniture?” He then goes on ingeniously to suggest that it may be “a cover for hidden fire, a mere substitute for some endearing word or promise, agreeably to a preconcerted system of correspondence, artfully contrived by Pickwick with a view to his contemplated desertion and which I am not in a position to explain?” Admirable indeed! One could imagine a city jury in their wisdom thinking that there must be something in this warming pan!
Not less amusing and plausible is his dealing with the famous topic of the “chops and tomato sauce,” not “tomata” as Boz has it. I suppose there is no popular allusion better understood than this. The very man in the street knows all about it and what it means. Absurd as it may seem, it is hardly an exaggeration. Counsel every day give weight to points just as trivial and expound them elaborately to the jury. The Serjeant’s burst of horror is admirable, “Gentlemen, what does this mean? ‘Chops and tomata sauce! Yours Pickwick!’ Chops! Gracious Heavens! What does this mean? Is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away by such shallow artifices as these?’”
I recall that admirable judge and pleasant man, the late Lord FitzGerald, who was fond of talking of this trial, saying to me that Buzfuz lost a good point here, as he might have dwelt on the mystic meaning of tomato which is the “love apple,” that here was the “secret correspondence,” the real “cover for hidden fire.”
He concluded by demanding exemplary damages as “the recompense you can award my client. And for these damages she now appeals to an enlightened, a high-minded, a right feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a contemplative jury of her civilized countrymen!”
THE PLAINTIFF’S CASE.
It was really of a very flimsy kind but “bolstered-up” and carried through by the bluster of the serjeant and the smartness of his junior. It rested first on a dialogue between Mr. Pickwick and his landlady which was overheard, in fact by several persons; second, on a striking situation witnessed by his three friends who entered unexpectedly and surprised him with Mrs. Bardell in his arms; third, on some documentary evidence, and lastly, on a damaging incident disclosed by Winkle.
The first witness “put in the box,” was Mrs. Martha Cluppins—an intimate friend of the plaintiffs.
We know that she was sister to Mrs. Raddle, who lived far away in Southwark, and was the landlady of Mr. Sawyer. She might have been cross-examined with effect as to her story that she had been “out buying kidney pertaties,” etc. Why buy these articles in Goswell Street and come all the way from Southwark? What was she doing there at all? This question could have been answered only in one way—which was that the genial author fancied at the moment she was living near Mrs. Bardell.
Besides this, there was another point which Snubbin, in cross-examination, ought to have driven home. Mrs. Cluppins was of an inferior type, of the common washerwoman or “charing” sort; her language was of Mrs. Gamp’s kind; “which her name was” so and so. Yet, this creature, in another room, or on the stairs, the door being “on the jar,” can repeat with her limited
appreciation, those dubious and imperfect utterances of Mr. Pickwick! How could she remember all? Or could she understand them? Impossible! She, however, may have caught up something.