Charles Dickens

The Trial for Murder Charles Dickens

This story is told by a first-person narrator who recalls his experience with a heinous murderer. The narrator is a banker and a bachelor in good health, although slightly depressed. This description is meant to establish the narrator as mostly reliable. The narrator foreshadows that the murderer has been convicted and is now dead by stating that 'his body was buried, in Newgate Jail.'At the time of the trial, the narrator does not remember hearing anything about the accused in the newspaper that would influence him. However, he does remember reading about the murder, and the picture that forms in his mind afterwards seems so real that it feels as if the narrator was there. One day, the narrator looks outside his window and sees two men across the street. The one in the back 'was the colour of impure wax' and appears to be following the other.