Washington State's YMCA Youth & Coverment 2014 Mock Trial Case

In re­cent years, our mock trial cases have cel­e­brat­ed the 200th birth­days of Edgar Allan Poe and Al­fred Lord Ten­nyson. This year, it is Charles Dick­ens’ turn. True his 200th birth­day slipped by us on Febru­ary 7, 2012 but the first quar­ter of 2014 marks the cen­ten­ni­al of one of the most fa­mous mock tri­als of all time. In Jan­uary of 1914, with G.K. Chester­ton act­ing as judge and George Bernard Shaw as the pros­e­cu­tor, a mock trial con­vened to get to the bot­tom of Dick­ens’ un­fin­ished novel The Mys­tery of Edwin Drood. (For the record, that mur­der pros­e­cu­tion of choir­mas­ter John Jasper ended in a mis­tri­al.)

We’re going to pick up the thread of that old in­ves­ti­ga­tion this year. Of course Dick­ens’ open nar­ra­tive hasn’t stood still dur­ing the 143 years since he put it down. To serve our pur­pos­es, his facts have been placed into a lit­er­ary mash-up blender to which we’ve added such mod­ernisms as In­ter­net brides, in­sid­er trad­ing scan­dals, po­lice drones and the up­side down as­sem­bly of a peanut but­ter and jelly sand­wich. For flavour­ing, some el­e­ments from other Dick­ens works have been tossed in and maybe even a lit­tle of the 2012 pop­u­lar novel Gone Girl…

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