Charles Dickens

The Trial for Murder Illustrated Charles Dickens

After reading Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story", Dickens was critical of its ending where everyone in the story could see the ghost. He felt that it was too similar to other famous works, such as William Shakespeare's representations of ghosts, and would be uninteresting to readers.[3]As Dickens wrote to Gaskell: "I have no doubt, according to every principle of art that is known to me from Shak-speare [sic] downwards, that you weaken the terror of the story by making them all seethe phantoms at the end. And I feel a perfect conviction that the best readers will be the most certain to make this discovery. Nous verrons."[4]This later inspired the main concept within "The Trial for Murder", whereby terror was to be achieved through ambiguity and obscurity.