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David Wilson, a young lawyer, moves to town, and a clever remark of his is misunderstood, which causes locals to brand him a "pudd'nhead" (nitwit). His hobby of collecting fingerprints does not raise his standing in the eyes of the townsfolk, who consider him to be eccentric and do not frequent his law practice.
Pudd'nhead Wilson Summary. The novel opens in February 1830 in the small Missouri town of Dawson's Landing. A young New York lawyer, David Wilson, arrives in the town, seeking his fortune. Shortly after his arrival, Wilson hears a dog barking and notes that he wishes he owned half of the dog.
Herman Melville and Charles Dickens also use the phrase before Twain did. Melvill, in Ch. 108 of “Moby Dick” has a carpetner yelling at his worker, “Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.-
"Pudd'nhead" Wilson is left in the background as the focus shifts to the slave Roxy, her son, and the family they serve. Roxy is one-sixteenth black and majority white, and her son Valet de Chambre (referred to as Chambers) is 1/32 black.
In The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the book is basically two stories: the first, a white child of privilege and a slave being switched at birth and the second, a murder mystery involving Italian twins.
Pudd'nhead takes the fingerprints of Roxy, Chambers, and Tom. Roxy switches the identities of Tom and Chambers. Percy Driscoll grants Roxy her freedom and she sets off to become a chambermaid on a steamboat. Roxy retires from chambermaiding and loses all of her savings when the bank goes under.
Escalation: Tension in the town swells as Judge Driscoll is murdered with a knife belonging to the Capello twins. The idea these two beloved men could be capable of such a heinous crime is inconceivable. However, Luigi and Angelo are without defense until Pudd'nhead Wilson comes to their rescue.
Suddenly she is struck by his resemblance to the other baby, and she has an idea: she will switch the infants so that if anyone is sold down the river, it will not be her biological child.
The town has thought of him as a black man for so long that it is impossible for him to move into white society, yet their view of what is proper for a white man keeps him from his friends in the slave quarters.
Pudd'nhead takes the prints of Tom and each of the twins. Then Tom persuades Pudd'nhead to read the palms of the twins. Pudd'nhead studies Luigi's hand. He's reluctant to tell what information he's discovered, but eventually reveals that it looks like Luigi has killed someone.
He still has the knife in his possession, he tells the men, and its sheath is covered with precious gems. "Tom" is secretly thankful for this information: he has stolen the knife, but thought that the jewels were just glass and had been ready to sell it for a pittance.
When Tom bungles the job and kills Driscoll instead, the murder is pinned on Luigi and Angelo.
Pudd'nhead Wilson is a Northerner who comes to the small Missouri town of Dawson's Landing to build a career as a lawyer. Immediately upon his arrival he alienates the townspeople, who don't understand his wit. They give him the nickname "Pudd'nhead" and refuse to give him their legal work.
Plot. The setting is the fictional frontier town of Dawson's Landing on the banks of the Mississippi River in the first half of the 19th century. David Wilson, a young lawyer, moves to town, and a clever remark of his is misunderstood, which causes locals to brand him a "pudd'nhead" (nitwit).
When. While the story begins in 1830, a majority of the novel takes place in the 1850s, a time when ''The people took more pride in the duel than in all the other events put together, perhaps.
1894Pudd'nhead Wilson, fictional character, the protagonist of Mark Twain's satiric novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).
The town eccentric, Pudd'nhead Wilson first came to Dawson's Landing intending to set up a law practice. His sense of humor proves too much for the townspeople, though, and his law practice goes nowhere.
Roxana, called Roxy, begins as a slave owned by Percy Driscoll. Only one-sixteenth black, she looks white, and is described as an extremely beautiful woman. She gives birth to a son, Chambers, who will later be known as "Tom" when she switches him with another infant.
Roxy's son. At a young age he is switched by his mother with Thomas a Becket Driscoll, a white child who shares his birthday and looks just like him. From then on he is known as "Tom." Raised as a white heir to a substantial estate, "Tom" is spoiled, vicious, and dissolute.
The son of Percy Driscoll, Tom is switched with Roxy's baby Chambers when he is only a few months old, and is called "Chambers" from then on.
A member of a prominent Virginia family, the judge is a leading citizen of Dawson's Landing. He and his wife are childless, but adopt "Tom" when the judge's brother, Percy Driscoll, dies. The judge is powerful enough to indulge his eccentricities, and he forms a philosophical society with Pudd'nhead Wilson after he retires from the bench.
Luigi and Angelo Capello, a set of near-identical twins, appear in Dawson's Landing in reply to an ad placed by Aunt Patsy, who is looking for a boarder. They say they are looking to relax after years of traveling the world. They claim to be the children of an Italian nobleman who was forced to flee Italy after a revolution and died soon afterward.
Judge Driscoll's brother and Tom's father. A speculator, he dies when Tom and "Tom" are fifteen, with his estate heavily encumbered by debt. Shortly before he dies, he frees Roxy, who was his slave.
Dawson's Landing, Missouri, is in 1830 a bucolic little town on the Mississippi River, complete with white picket fences, perfectly groomed yards, and a cat asleep in the front window of every house. Behind the town stretches the countryside, the town's means of economic support; there, slaves raise pigs and grow grain.
Each of these chapters begins, like all the other chapters in the book, with a maxim from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar," a work that seems to be similar to Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac." Wilson's Calendar, though, is filled with wry, pessimistic sayings of the kind that originally got him in trouble with the townspeople of Dawson's Landing.