Jericho is a northern district of Oxford that links Professor Richard Linton Lovell’s private domestic world to the wider political violence engulfing the city. It first functions as the location of Robin Swift’s guardian, a destination associated with hospitality and family obligation; later, its barricade becomes the scene of an exchange of gunfire in which a girl is killed, marking the collapse of symbolic conflict into open warfare.

Setting and Domestic Association

Jericho is introduced indirectly through Professor Richard Linton Lovell’s residence there. After Robin arrives at University College, Oxford, Professor Richard Linton Lovell tells him that his own home lies north in Jericho and gives him directions in an envelope. He also arranges a future dinner there with Mrs Piper, presenting the district as the setting of an ongoing guardianship relationship rather than merely a point on the map.

The first separation between Robin and Professor Richard Linton Lovell therefore ends with Jericho as a promised destination. Professor Richard Linton Lovell is uneasy as he leaves Robin with his keys and trunks, speaking rapidly about the city, Robin’s cohort, and the planned dinner. Jericho stands outside Robin’s new institutional home at University College, Oxford, but remains connected to it through the professor who has brought him there and continues to claim responsibility for him.

Robin’s Visits

Robin later uses Jericho as the reason for leaving Ramiz Rafi Mirza. While the two are in another part of Oxford after seeing the girls safely home, Robin says that he has forgotten to visit Professor Richard Linton Lovell. Jericho is conveniently closer than University College, Oxford, allowing the excuse to sound practical. Robin then admits internally that he is lying to Ramiz Rafi Mirza, adding that Mrs Piper has cakes waiting for him.

On the second Saturday after arriving in Oxford, Robin genuinely travels north for dinner with his guardian. The residence in Jericho is smaller than Professor Richard Linton Lovell’s Hampstead estate, with only front and back gardens rather than an expansive green, yet it remains conspicuously affluent for a professor’s salary. Cherry trees line the front-door hedges, although the fruit appears out of season; Robin suspects that silver bars would be found beneath their roots. The detail makes Jericho a domestic space shaped by the same unexplained wealth and silver economy that surround Professor Richard Linton Lovell elsewhere.

Mrs Piper receives Robin at the door, brushing leaves from his jacket and turning him around to inspect his thin frame. Jericho thus briefly offers a scene of physical examination, welcome, and quasi-familial care. Its warmth is not uncomplicated: the house’s prosperity and Robin’s suspicion of silver beneath the grass place domestic affection alongside the material inequalities and hidden structures governing his life.

Barricades and Open Warfare

Jericho’s meaning changes sharply during the later crisis. When the telegraph party hears that a girl has been killed, they go to the rooftop and look northward toward the district. Robin can see a commotion with his naked eye, then uses a telescope to focus on what the gunmen are indicating. The distant district becomes visible not as a private neighborhood but as a battlefield observed from afar.

At the Jericho barricade, soldiers and labourers have exchanged fire. Such confrontations had usually produced only warning shots, with each side firing symbolically before retreating behind its barricades. The recurring ritual had preserved the appearance of conflict without immediately producing its full consequences. This time, however, a body has fallen. The death of the girl converts the barricade from a theater of intimidation into a site of irreversible violence.

Narrative Significance

Jericho provides one of the book’s clearest spatial reversals. Early scenes associate it with Professor Richard Linton Lovell’s home, Mrs Piper’s welcome, cakes, gardens, and Robin’s uncertain place within a guardian’s household. Later, the same northern direction leads toward crowds, soldiers, labourers, barricades, telescopes, and a dead girl. The district’s domestic and political identities are not separate: the wealth represented by the residence, including Robin’s suspicion of buried silver, belongs to the same social order whose tensions erupt in the streets.

As a location, Jericho also measures the widening scale of the narrative. Robin first approaches it on foot for a private visit and experiences it through personal relationships. During the uprising, he sees it from a rooftop as one node in a city-wide emergency, while the telegraph machine carries news of the killing. Jericho consequently shifts from a place Robin enters as a dependent guest to a place that broadcasts the consequences of public conflict. Its barricade is the point where symbolic resistance fails, a single body forcing the surrounding city to recognize that the war has become real.