The Mystery of Edwin Drood

CHARLES DICKENS

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school, but this was curtailed when his father’s fortunes declined. More significant was his childhood reading, which he evoked in a memory of his father’s library: "From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphry Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time."

When Dickens was ten the family moved to Camden Town, and this proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. (He wrote later of his coach journey, alone, to join his family at the new lodgings: I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.) When he had just turned twelve Dickens was sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned by his family: No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God! Around the same time, Dickens’s father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where he was known for the speed with which he took down speeches.

By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as Sketches by Boz (1836). These were followed by the publication in installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), whose unprecedented popularity made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a period of fifteen years. Dickens’s energies enabled him to lead an active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for serial publication, and was himself the editor of many of the periodicals—Bentley’s Miscellany, The Daily News, Household Words, All the Year Round—in which they appeared. Among his close associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Barnaby Rudge (1841), sometimes working on several novels simultaneously.

Dickens’s celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842. There he met Longfellow, Irving, Bryant, and other literary figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes (1842) and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual tradition for him to write a story for the season, of which the most memorable were The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). He continued to produce novels at only a slightly diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David Copperfield in 1850; of the latter, his personal favorite among his books, he wrote to Forster: If I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.

From this point on his novels tended to be more elaborately constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier works. These late novels include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). In the Preface to A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens mentions that he thought of the idea for his great novel of the French Revolution when he was acting in Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep. He became involved with a fellow cast member, the young actress Ellen Ternan, an association that led Dickens to separate from his wife in 1858, a scandal that alienated him from many of his former associates and admirers.

Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, was his last completed novel, and perhaps the most somber and savage of his later works. Dickens was weakened by years of overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless he embarked on a series of public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left unfinished upon his death on June 9, 1870, at the age of fifty-eight.

CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION by Matthew Pearl

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

CHAPTER I: The Dawn

CHAPTER II: A Dean, and a Chapter Also

CHAPTER III: The Nuns’ House

CHAPTER IV: Mr. Sapsea

CHAPTER V: Mr. Durdles and Friend

CHAPTER VI: Philanthropy in Minor Canon Corner

CHAPTER VII: More Confidences Than One

CHAPTER VIII: Daggers Drawn

CHAPTER IX: Birds in the Bush

CHAPTER X: Smoothing the Way

CHAPTER XI: A Picture and a Ring

CHAPTER XII: A Night with Durdles

CHAPTER XIII: Both at Their Best

CHAPTER XIV: When Shall These Three Meet Again?

CHAPTER XV: Impeached

CHAPTER XVI: Devoted

CHAPTER XVII: Philanthropy, Professional and Unprofessional

CHAPTER XVIII: A Settler in Cloisterham

CHAPTER XIX: Shadow on the Sun-Dial

CHAPTER XX: Divers Flights

CHAPTER XXI: A Gritty State of Things Comes On

CHAPTER XXII: The Dawn Again

THE TRIAL OF JOHN JASPER FOR THE MURDER OF EDWIN DROOD

NOTES

ILLUSTRATIONS

IN THE COURT

UNDER THE TREES

AT THE PIANO

ON DANGEROUS GROUND

MR. CRISPARKLE IS OVERPAID

DURDLES CAUTIONS MR. SAPSEA AGAINST BOASTING

GOOD-BYE, ROSEBUD, DARLING!

MR. GREWGIOUS HAS HIS SUSPICIONS

JASPER’S SACRIFICES

MR. GREWGIOUS EXPERIENCES A NEW SENSATION

UP THE RIVER

SLEEPING IT OFF

INTRODUCTION

Matthew Pearl

HOW WAS THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD TO END? This question has been asked ever since Charles Dickens died in early summer 1870 and left only the first six of the book’s planned twelve installments complete. A few weeks after his death, the magazine Public Opinion promised that Dickens’s private notes were forthcoming and would enable the reader to arrive at a partial solution of the mystery, while the American Literary Gazette & Publishers’ Circular reported even more optimistically that Dickens had in fact finished the whole book. But the publisher’s prefatory note in the first edition of Drood, which contained only the six installments, responded indirectly to this wishful thinking and, in the tone of an affidavit, stated categorically that there were no pages, clues, or notes left by the author about the second half of the novel:

All that was left in manuscript of EDWIN DROOD is contained in this volume … The only notes in reference to the story that have since been found concern that portion of it exclusively, which is treated in the earlier part. Beyond the clews therein afforded to its conduct or catastrophe, nothing whatever remains.

This statement did little to satisfy readers. More than for any other unfinished book, we are incorrigible in our demand for an ending to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. After all, the title promises a mystery, and a mystery, traditionally, promises a solution. But—here I tread sacrilegious ground—are we certain Dickens himself knew the ending?

The novel’s setup is swift. A few chapters in, we navigate our way around claustrophobic chattering old Cloisterham—a stand-in for the rural village of Rochester in Kent, where Dickens lived. In part because the plan for twelve installments invited a smaller canvas than Dickens’s usual twenty, the cast of characters is more focused and single-minded than in most serialized Dickens novels. At the center of this cast is a provocative figure named John Jasper, simmering with obsession over the pretty and starry-eyed Rosa Bud, who is engaged to marry Jasper’s nephew Edwin Drood. What is no mystery is that Jasper wishes to remove his unsuspecting nephew Ned as an obstacle and rival. Whether he has succeeded in doing this by the end of the existing story provides that burning question we wait in perpetuity for someone to answer.

The long-standing assumption that Dickens knew how the novel would end—and the vague suspicion that it is our own deficiency that we haven’t deduced his conclusion yet—emanates from two primary sources. First, there seems to be an unspoken fantasy that, because of Dickens’s great mastery and consistency as a storyteller, his novels emerged more or less complete from his head. Second, despite some excellent scholarship on the subject, the process of writing in the serial-novel format of the nineteenth century is still not widely appreciated.

At times an inspiration, at other times a burden, publishing a novel in serialized installments usually meant composing in installments, so Dickens might be a few months, weeks, or just days ahead of each installment deadline while writing. We need not speculate whether this led him to change significant parts of the machinery of his stories midstream; there are striking examples on record. The final scene of Great Expectations, for instance, was scrapped and rewritten, based in part on feedback from one of Dickens’s friends, in a way that completely transformed the fate of Pip and Estella’s relationship. Four installments of Martin Chuzzlewit had already been published before Dickens decided to send the title character on an excursion to the United States. This surprise geographical plot shift, which introduced the scathing critique of American manners and ideals for which the novel is primarily remembered, was an act of vengeance after the negative coverage in the States of his recently published American Notes. It is equally intriguing that Dickens changed Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield into a more noble figure after receiving a letter of complaint from Jane Hill, on whom the character was based. Hill was not an editor or a Dickens insider, she was simply following the serialized installments with the rest of the reading public.

Even Dickens’s original number plans suggest fluidity and flexibility rather than fixed intentions. The surviving plans show the novelist’s practice of outlining primary plot points and character arcs under chapter headings for each installment of his serial work. However, evidence strongly suggests that the number plans were not filled out until after he had written the installment itself. Rather than being intricate blueprints, Dickens apparently logged the chief developments of his plots as he wrote in order to have a handy reference for purposes of continuity. In fact, the number plans for the fifth and sixth installments of Drood, the last two that Dickens completed before his death, are blank except for chapter headings. His work while in progress really was a work-in-progress.

None of this is meant to suggest that Dickens flew by the seat of his pants when creating Drood or that he didn’t know where he thought John Jasper and Edwin would end up by the close of the book. However, it should be recognized that Dickens—wisely—allowed his writing to be influenced by a range of real-time variables, some as external as the comments of a reviewer in another country or a letter from a reader, and others as close to home as simple inspiration or advice from a friend. It is worth noting, too, that Dickens paid close attention to the sales reports for the installments, each of which was released in London on the last day of the month, on Magazine Day. This meant he could quickly revise according to a market success or a disappointment. In other words, Dickens, who frequently complained of the pressures of the serial format, took advantage of its unique hybrid state—wherein a book is printed and still fluid at the same time—in ways that helped keep his texts alive, marketable, fresh, and surprising.

Perhaps the unfinished state of a novel like Drood unnerves because it reminds us, despite all our dissertations and annotations, how little we can possess of the creative mind of one of our great writers. In a sense, the lack of an ending for Drood—the frustrating absence of the usual resolution of loose ends—symbolizes the end of the nineteenth century novel. On the other hand, Drood fossilizes the serialization process from which we’ve become so far removed in an on demand age: it preserves forever the sensation of suspense inherent in installment reading. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, we appreciate the anticipation mid-nineteenth-century Londoners felt when lining up on Paternoster Row on Magazine Day.

Sending along Drood’s first installment to Buckingham Palace in the spring of 1870, Dickens did offer to tell Queen Victoria a little more of it in advance of her subjects, but the novelist was more tight-lipped in two other remembered exchanges about Drood that took place as the novel was being published. Here is an account by son Charley:

CHARLES DICKENS, JR.: Of course, Edwin Drood was murdered?

CHARLES DICKENS: Of course; what else do you suppose?

And another, from a separate conversation recounted by Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law and confidante:

GEORGINA HOGARTH: I hope you haven’t really killed poor Edwin Drood?

CHARLES DICKENS: I call my book the Mystery, not the History, of Edwin Drood.

The first exchange calls to mind the phrase The Loss of Edwin Drude, one of Dickens’s early scribbled title choices, and the second evokes another title in the same list, Edwin Drood in Hiding. What these flashes of remembered exchanges give us are not answers but important indications that, in whatever detail Dickens had worked out his story, he wanted it to be a surprise even to those close to him. That he had offered a preview to the queen—though in language suitably gradual (a little more of it in advance) rather than suggesting a full revelation of the ending—should remind us what a commodity surprise was to Dickens.

Rather than asking how was this to end? of a book that might have been asking itself the same thing, we may enjoy a more fruitful reading of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by asking how was Dickens building up to a surprise? Armed with this lens, we can concentrate more on what’s there instead of what’s not. The book contains an interconnected network of destinies and memories that captures the energy and suffocation of the kind of English village that gave rise to Dickens’s talents and many of his recurring anxieties. For example, in a conversation with Jasper, Dickens has Durdles the stonemason refer to an event that occurred a year before Edwin’s disappearance in order to prepare his readers to delve more deeply into the characters’ pasts as much as their futures. Elsewhere, there are mentions of the death of Edwin’s parents, who are buried in Cloisterham, with his father referred to only as Drood, or, as Crisparkle breaks the name down, D-r-double-o-d. Is his first name withheld purposefully? Like the two Barnaby Rudges (one of whom is presumed dead) and the two Martin Chuzzlewitzes, not to mention the two Charles Dickenses, was Dickens tipping us off to learn about another Edwin Drood? Could the title’s mystery have been about the senior Drood as much as the younger one?

When Dickens began The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1869 he was an ill man who tried his best to hide or deny his physical deterioration. John Forster, Dickens’s executor, incorrectly claimed that the clause in Dickens’s contract for Drood establishing compensation in case he died before finishing was a unique one. In fact, an equivalent clause appeared in the contract for Our Mutual Friend, the novel directly preceding Drood. There was nothing academic about this clause. After all, Dickens, during Our Mutual Friend’s serialization, did almost die in a calamitous train accident, when in what was an eerie experience, he had to climb into a train compartment dangling over a ravine in order to retrieve the manuscript of the latest installment of that novel. After work on Drood had begun, in what may have felt an ominous turn, Dickens’s chosen illustrator, his son-in-law Charles Collins, became too ill to finish the job, after drafting only the kaleidoscopic cover design. Dickens must have been apprehensive about the novel reaching completion, particularly because it had been five years since Our Mutual Friend, the longest break he had ever taken between books. If please God, I live to finish it, Dickens wrote of Drood to his daughter Katey, Charles Collins’s wife, "I say if, because you know, my dear child, I have not been strong lately." The fraught experiences of the two novels seem to have blended together for Dickens; in the manuscript for Drood, we find that Dickens at one point accidentally writes Bella, a character from Friend, instead of Rosa.

The stakes were raised higher by Drood’s special status in America. Still twenty years before the U.S. Congress passed legislation that would recognize copyright protection for foreign authors, Dickens had agreed that Fields, Osgood & Co., a Boston publishing firm, would be named his authorized American publisher and that royalties would be provided based on sales. Previously, under the Harper Rule, the practice had been to pay a sum up front for advance proof sheets but nothing beyond that. The new system, while commonplace enough now, sparked a firestorm of debate in the trade and in the press, which called it the Dickens Controversy. Fields & Osgood, standing firm, proudly labeled each installment as authorized by Dickens. All eyes were on Drood to see how far it would go in altering a long-standing American system that took advantage of unprotected foreign authors and their works.

It is no surprise that some of Dickens’s fears about finishing The Mystery of Edwin Drood seep into its text. As we begin the novel, Rosa and Edwin wrestle with completing their respective parents’ arrangements for their marriage, and then with their incomplete plans to undo them. The sanctimonious Sapsea’s wife could only ever speak to him in unfinished terms. Mr. Grewgious, Rosa’s guardian, uses a fragmented guiding memorandum—strongly reminiscent (and perhaps self-consciously parodic) of Dickens’s number plans—to help resolve his long obligation to Rosa. Grewgious’s clerk, Bazzard, has written a play but cannot manage to get it staged. In some ways, the book was already structured through the anxiety of completion before Dickens’s death ever passed that anxiety on to its legion of readers.

The most immediate mystery for first-time readers of the novel—before reaching the questions that plague the ending—might be how to approach Edwin Drood himself. In chapter 3, we see him as something of a celebrity at Miss Twinkleton’s school for girls; in fact, one female pupil is making his acquaintance between the hinges of the open door, left open for the purpose, which is exactly what had happened to Dickens at his Boston hotel on a visit to America not long before he began Drood. But Edwin, charming from afar, is hard to like, or even tolerate, closer up. An insufferable bore, as tagged by George Bernard Shaw, he is carefree without being free-spirited, fanciful without any romance, and perhaps can be encapsulated by his provoking yawn. He is irritatingly obtuse when Rosa breaks down at the piano under fear of Jasper’s attention. Pussy’s not used to an audience, that’s the fact, he comments. Nor is his remark to the swarthy outsider Neville that you are no judge of white men particularly ingratiating.

Of course, Edwin’s exasperating traits serve a very basic purpose in the plot—to provoke the short-fused Neville enough so that he will seem guilty to the townspeople of harming Edwin. Jasper goads Neville on about Edwin, knowing just which buttons to push because of his own bitterness toward his freewheeling and unreflective nephew:

See how little he heeds it all … It hardly is worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that hangs ripe on the tree for him. And yet consider the contrast, Mr. Neville. You and I have no prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and excitement, or of domestic ease and love. You and I have no prospect … but the tedious unchanging round of this dull place.

Jasper’s words could easily have been used by Dickens when complaining about his own sons. Like Edwin Drood with his airy plans to travel to an undeveloped country, by 1869 all but one of the six surviving Dickens boys had been, or were, involved in exotic colonial pursuits. Most of Dickens’s sons would have likely joined Edwin in claiming to be about doing, working, engineering and in contempt of reading. Theirs were flighty, unfocused, and wastefully expensive lives, at least in the eyes of their famous and inordinately successful father. There was danger, too. When Frank, the third son, arrived in India to join the British civil service, he found that his brother Walter, who had been in the army there, had died on the last day of the previous year—though the news did not reach Charles in England until February.

Despite flashes of pride, Dickens’s private comments about his sons more often sound notes of disappointment and Jasper-like resentment: I never sing their praises, because they have so often disappointed me; My boys with a curse of limpness on them. Dickens, flipping his dynamic with his own irresponsible father, at times felt a virtual orphan of his own children: "Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father! About his son Sydney, born in 1847, he ventured into even darker territory. The diminutive Sydney, called the Little Admiral by his family but known as Little Expectations" by his messmates after the publication of Great Expectations, was a sublieutenant in the Royal Navy—on his way to becoming like Drood’s noble naval character Tartar—but the uniform that so impressed his family when he was on shore leave could not blot out compulsive debts and financial straits. Dickens banned him from Gadshill, the family estate. I begin to wish, he says of twenty-year-old Sydney, that he were honestly dead. This contrasts with his comment to his printer George Clowes a few months prior, when checking Clowes’s receipt of the latest pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, that the safety of my precious child is my sole care. In this case, the novel was his child, one he could perfect and control.

Whether Dickens was playing out the fantasy of wishing Sydney dead through John Jasper’s ire, or reconciling himself to the earlier disappearance of Walter through Edwin, one need not delve into psychoanalysis to recognize the emotional parallels with Dickens’s own family life that are contained in Drood. These parallels are not necessarily straightforward, and it is likely that writing the book would have been less cathartic for the author than writing a novel such as David Copperfield, which restaged Dickens’s youth. Still, Dickens’s regrets about his own youthful marriage and its ultimate incompatibility are poignantly reflected in the anxieties of Rosa and Edwin. Jasper, Edwin’s uncle, meanwhile, cannot fail to remind us of Dickens’s rather unscrupulous, backbiting, and lecherous brothers, who also had dark double lives—Augustus, who abandoned his wife after she became blind, and Frederick, who defaulted on loans Dickens’s friends helped to secure.

There is a surprising amount of Dickens in the shadowy Jasper as well. Like Jasper, Dickens burned his diaries at the end of each year, along with many letters. In his final years he relied on medical opiates to ease his ailments, surely an experience he channels into Jasper’s drug use. He also kept up hypnotism (or mesmerism) as a hobby, and this description of its effect on him from his eldest child, Charles Jr., in an article entitled Personal Reminiscences of My Father, suggests a carryover to everyday life also seen in Jasper: the mere intense gaze of those keen and luminous eyes, even without any of the passes and manipulations which form so much of the stock in trade of the ordinary mesmerist, had astonishing influence over many people, as you will read in all sorts of descriptions of him, and to my mind always seemed as if it could read one’s inmost soul. Dickens’s wife, Catherine, before their separation, suspected that his mesmerism was wrapped up in a romantic obsession and emotional liaison with at least one woman. Whether Dickens also saw himself as the older man wedging himself into the life of young actress Ellen Ternan we cannot say, but at the very least he was obliged to keep their relationship as secret as possible, and some of his conflicted feelings about this may be on display in Jasper’s destructive and clandestine pursuit of Rosa. The dark secrets of abandonment and resentment in family life—and by extension the life of an incestuously small village—are more key to an understanding of Drood than any single character in the cast.

The characters in the novel may be divided between the writers and the men and women of action. Edwin, with his contempt for you readers, heads up the latter category. Jasper is the primary writer figure. His diary, a crucial object in the plot, is called A Diary of Ned’s Life, which sounds more like a novel and could be an alternate title to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In fact, the Dean of the Cathedral makes Jasper’s position as writer explicit, repeating the sentiment You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper … to write a book about us. Well! Other characters also fall somewhere in the spectrum of authorship: Like Bazzard the playwright, Sapsea is a parodic example of the writer who has—adding yet another trace of completion anxiety—an Author’s anxiety to rush into publication the inscribed monument for his late wife, and Stonemason Durdles, who speaks of himself in the third person as though narrating his own book, is described among his tombs as surrounded by his works, like a popular Author. The naval Tartar, who takes pride in growing a garden, the amateur pugilist Crisparkle, and the restless Helena fall more in line with action than author. The mystery of what has happened to Edwin becomes, by the end of the unfinished book, a competition among variously aligned characters between storytelling about it—Jasper’s response—and action around it, which culminates with the quasi-detective Dick Datchery, whose own writing amounts to illegible chalk marks on a cupboard door.

Datchery, who shows up in chapter 18 after the novel has leaped forward six months, is the character typically lavished with the most attention by Droodists. By the time we reach the end of Drood, we still do not know where this man came from or his motivation; all we know is that he is surreptitiously investigating Jasper and the strange events of Christmas Eve. As a result, Datchery becomes the vehicle—the lost hope—for how the book would have ended. Interestingly, many of the theories involve some disguise on Datchery’s part, despite little to no textual support for it: Datchery is Neville Landless, Datchery is Helena Landless, Datchery is Bazzard—in short, Datchery is not Datchery, he is a proxy for anyone else we want him to be.

Not unlike these responses to Datchery’s open-ended status, and with Dickens unable to provide us with an answer, the yearning for some other figure to step in and solve the mystery arose quickly. Dickens’s body had hardly been laid to rest at Westminster Abbey before a rumor spread that his sometime-collaborator and rival Wilkie Collins was undertaking the completion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. That rumor was untrue; in fact Collins dismissed Drood as the melancholy work of a worn-out brain, but many other people—including Charles Dickens Jr., in the form of a still-unstaged play he co-wrote circa 1880—eventually tried their hand. Too often, those who have attempted to complete what happened to Edwin—whether through fiction or scholarly speculation—call to mind the scene in chapter 9 when the girls at Miss Twinkleton’s school re-create the fight between Edwin and Neville Landless using a paper mustache as costume and silverware as weaponry. An American named Thomas Jones, who published a Drood completion, even put out the public claim, which was taken rather seriously, that his version was dictated to him by Dickens’s ghost.

Of all the sequels and completions—Don Richard Cox lists thirty-six of them in his annotated bibliography of the novel—the Trial of John Jasper for the Murder of Edwin Drood is perhaps the most unusual and ingenious. When it was staged in 1914 in London, intense interest from the public meant the venue had to be moved to King’s Hall in Covent Garden, where the proceedings lasted from six-thirty until almost midnight. The trial united important Dickens scholars—J. Cuming Walters, B. W. Matz, and Cecil Chesterton—with prominent editorial and publishing figures such as Arthur Waugh (father of Evelyn) and writers G. K. Chesterton, who served as the trial’s judge, and George Bernard Shaw, a late addition as foreman of the jury.

The result was an enjoyable and somewhat bizarre blend of literary analysis and cultural commentary, of debate and dramatization, that ended up edging into a postmodern paratext of the unfinished book. The live performance must have been made more striking still by the period costume of the participants playing fictional characters juxtaposed with the contemporary dress of the jurors. The format worked well because intrinsic in the idea of the trial is the absence of a single correct way to read Drood. No one opinion triumphs, and all voices must compete with rivals and arbiters. When the literary analysis turned esoteric, humorous interjections were made from Judge Chesterton or Shaw. Such antics prompted complaints for months after the trial (and a retrial of sorts in Philadelphia) that it had not been serious enough and the rules hadn’t been followed.

At the end of The Trial, a surreal satisfaction came when judge Chesterton was faced with a cacophony of somber literary analysis and prejudgments by the jury. Chesterton, himself a famed mystery writer influenced by Dickens, decided to hold everyone in the crammed courtroom (except himself) in contempt of court—turning the tables so that the readers were as answerable for The Mystery of Edwin Drood’s fate as its characters.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Because Charles Dickens died while writing the novel, there is no single authoritative text of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In addition to not finishing the novel, Dickens did not survive to review proofs for the sixth installment. The present text reproduces the first 1870 London edition, serialized and then published in one volume by Chapman & Hall, and adjusted for errors and apparent misreadings by comparison to the original manuscript, the partial proof sheets, and ancillary materials. The illustrations also come from the first edition.

All that was left in manuscript of EDWIN DROOD is contained in the Number now published—the sixth. Its last entire page had not been written two hours when the event occurred which one very touching passage in it (grave and sad but also cheerful and reassuring) might seem almost to have anticipated. The only notes in reference to the story that have since been found concern that portion of it exclusively, which is treated in the earlier Numbers. Beyond the clues therein afforded to its conduct or catastrophe, nothing whatever remains; and it is believed that what the author would himself have most desired is done, in placing before the reader without further note or suggestion the fragment of THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD.

12th August, 1870.

IN THE COURT

CHAPTER I

THE DAWN

AN ANCIENT ENGLISH Cathedral Town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What IS the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors, and infinite in number and attendants. Still, the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.

Another.? says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. Have another?

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight, the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad! Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for ye, dreary. Ye’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle high just now? More than three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful! And ye’ll remember that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing it? Ye’ll pay up according, dreary, won’t ye?

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it, inhales much of its contents.

O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for ye, dreary. Ah poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, ‘I’ll have another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay according.’ O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye see, dreary—this is one—and I fits in a mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on her face.

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearthstone, draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three companions. He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his color, are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods, or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still.

"What visions can she have? the waking man muses, as he turns her face towards him, and stands looking down at it. Visions of many butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an increase of hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this horrible court swept clean? What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that!—Eh?"

He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.

Unintelligible!

As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies—and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean spirit of imitation.

Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and, seizing him with both hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed. The Chinaman clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

What do you say?

A watchful pause.

Unintelligible!

Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon with an attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth upon the floor. As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen attitude, glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his arms, and draws a phantom knife. It then becomes apparent that the woman has taken possession of his knife, for safety’s sake; for, she too starting up, and restraining and expostulating with him, the knife is visible in her dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop back, side by side.

There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to no purpose. When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had no sense or sequence. Wherefore unintelligible! is again the comment of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a gloomy smile. He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and passes out.

That same afternoon, the massive grey square tower of an old Cathedral rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells are going for daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from his haste to reach the open cathedral door. The choir are getting on their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to service. Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled into their places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, When the Wicked Man— rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered thunder.

CHAPTER II