Book the First: Poverty, Chapters I-VII Summary

Chapter I, opens in Marseilles, France, in August. Two men, John Baptist Cavalletto and Monsieur Rigaud, are in a dismal cell. When the jailer comes to bring them their dinner, he advises Rigaud that he has been called to see the tribunal. Rigaud is accused of murdering his wife. In Chapter II, the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, their daughter Minnie and her maid Tattycoram, Arthur Clennam and Miss Wade are introduced as travellers in France who are returning to England. Miss Wade encounters Tattycoram alone when the maid is crying, and assumes the woman is as unhappy with life as Miss Wade has always been.

In Chapter III, Mr. Clennam is in London, after an absence of twenty years in China, and must go to the house of his mother, a...