Preview: Part II, Chapter 2
Reading boundary
Start: You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?
Stop after: hammer the nails into the scaffold.
Jerry Cruncher carries a message to the Old Bailey, where a treason trial has drawn a hungry crowd. Dickens treats the courtroom less as a calm search for truth than as public entertainment shadowed by brutal punishment.
Before testimony begins, faces, gestures, architecture, and rumor all create judgments in the spectators before evidence does.