ABSTRACT
The author puts forward the theory on which his novel is based, which, he says, has never hitherto been tried in fiction —namely, that ‘the story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book’—in other words, …it is based upon the proceedings at a criminal trial. He seems, however, …either to have read very little fiction except his own, or to have unaccountably forgotten that several of the best novels in the English language are written in the epistolary form, which, in fact, is making ‘the characters of the book tell the story of the book’, or it is nothing. Nor can the plan of a criminal trial be considered as the best for a novel, even if it was never ‘hitherto tried in fiction’—at least as it is developed in these pages; for the author has so overlaid his story with minute details, which are wholly irrelevant to the issue, that the reader ceases to feel any interest in that result before the work is half concluded….
