A Trial For Murder is a tale of supernatural retribution, with the murdered man’s spirit returning to ensure his killer’s execution. If you haven’t read it yet click here—it only takes ten minutes.
In his usual fashion, Dickens uses verbal allusions to heighten the atmosphere and strengthen his meaning:
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‘John Derrick, my trusty and attached servant for more than twenty years’. A derrick was the frame from which the hangman’s noose was supported. Thomas Derrick executed over 3,000 people in the Elizabethan era and it was from this hangman that it attained its name.
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‘As if . . . Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon’. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
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But the story’s most notable feature is its creative use of numbers.
Counting up the jurymen: “we are Thirt—; but no, it's not possible. No. We are twelve.” The ghost increases the jurymen up to thirteen, a traditionally unlucky number, and so it proves for the murderer.
‘A thirteenth juryman, without a bed’. Unlucky again.
‘If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to it audibly. But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel.’ Sixth or eighth? What happened to seventh? Evidently, the ghost was occupying number seven.
A parallel, doubled vision: ‘On the night of the second day I saw again the figure I expected,--the second of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly’; ‘there are two [windows] in the room, and the room is on the second floor’; ‘I did not know into which of the two Courts sitting my summons would take me.’; ‘Soon afterwards the Judges, two in number, entered’; ‘On the second morning of the trial, after evidence had been taken for two hours’.
‘We retired to consider, at seven minutes before ten at night . . . and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes past twelve.’
Such specificity of time is unusual in Dickens and highly suggestive. It means the Jury took 137 minutes to reach their Guilty verdict.
Psalm 137 begins:
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
And the crucial part, that sums Dickens’s story up:
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
The number 137 also has a double application as it relates to the ‘Kabbalistic system of calculating numerical values of Hebrew words [to discern] their deeper meaning. Thus, we see that the numerical value of the Hebrew word kabbalah is 137, which is equal to the combined value of the words chochmah, “wisdom,” (73) and nevuah, “prophecy” (64)’. The murderer, before being taken, has a prophetic vision of being woken in bed and a rope put round his neck (by the story’s narrator): “My Lord, I knew I was a doomed man, when the foreman of my jury came into the box . . .”
The Greek form of ‘Babylon’ means ‘Gate of the God’, and Babylon’s Tower of Babel was built by Man to be a gateway to the heavens. This attempt didn’t please God, though, so to stop its construction, he dispersed the builders. In A Trial for Murder, Dickens implies that the murdered man comes down from the heavens:
‘The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a spiral pillar [In one of its meanings, pillar is a synonym for tower, of course]. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East.’ [They’re travelling away from the pillar, not towards the prospective (about to be built) Tower, so the direction in the Bible (‘they journeyed from the east’) is reversed. From Wikipedia: ‘It is not mentioned in the Genesis account that God directly destroyed the tower; however, the accounts in the Book of Jubilees, Cornelius Alexander, Abydenus, Josephus, and the Sibylline Oracles (iii. 117-129) do state the tradition that God overturned the tower with a great wind.’ In Dickens’s story, wind briefly creates a gateway rather than destroys one.]
The Tower of Babel (note the traditional spiral shape) by Athanasius Kircher.
