Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     The title of Edwin Drood advertises the book as a "mystery" novel. It is unfortunate that Dickens died when the book was only half completed, leaving no notes or sketches indicating how the balance of the story would proceed or what the conclusion was to be. In the century that has followed Dickens's death, literally hundreds of scholars and commentators have lavished a good deal of time and ingenuity in trying to establish, first of all, just where the "mystery" of Edwin Drood was intended to lie, and then to propose solutions for the various puzzles they found in the plot.
     Dickens himself indicated to his friend and biographer, John Forster, that there was to be something unique about the story. He said that he had "a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work."
     In the orthodox modern detective novel, we expect the story to begin with a description of the circumstances that lead to the murder and constitute the puzzle the detective is to unravel. In the inverted detective story or crime novel, we are introduced to the intended murderer, taken (often pretty promptly) into his confidence about his murder plans, and then permitted to watch both the commission of the crime and the detection.
     The Mystery of Edwin Drood begins in neither of these ways -- it begins with a nightmare, an opium dream of John Jasper, at once lay precentor and choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral and a secret drug addict:

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well known massive gray 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 colours, 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.

Christmas Eve of the year before. According to Aylmer, Jasper's famous nocturnal visit to the cathedral was made not in preparation for Drood's murder, but to attempt to reconstruct the earlier killing and to determine whether it was intentional or accidental. However, Aylmer's attempt to make a virtuous man out of Jasper runs into difficult obstacles, including Jasper's brutal treatment of Rosa Bud; and he appears to have written a new Edwin Drood, much inferior to Dickens's.
     More controversial is the question whether Edwin was dead or whether (as most believers in his survival -- with due respect to Mr. Aylmer -- would have it) he survived a murderous assault by his uncle.
     Among the leading exponents of the survival theory are Andrew Lang and R.A. Proctor. Proctor believed that Drood was the disguised Datchery, who was watching over Jasper and awaiting an appropriate hour of vengeance. In his article "Watched by the Dead" Proctor pointed to the pervasiveness in Dickens's writing of the theme of the criminal watched, sometimes by one he thought to be dead. Proctor also relied on a highly subjective feeling that the "music" of the writing did not suggest that Edwin Drood was doomed to die. Subjectiveness is, unfortunately, an occupational failing of Drood critics. Thus Mr. Aylmer thinks he sees an evolution of Jasper, between the preliminary sketches of Charles Collins! and the final illustrations of Luke Fildes, into a "hero who looks like a villain."
     Among the original evidence that has been relied on to support the survival theory are certain alternative titles listed by Dickens in his private notes on the book, namely: "The Disappearance of Edwin Drood," "Edwin Drood in Hiding" and "Dead? or Alive?" However, these alternatives may indicate only that Dickens intended the ultimate fate of Drood to remain unknown until the end, a purpose that was served by the use of the noncommittal word "mystery" in the title he decided upon. (Dickens as editor suggested on one occasion to the author of a murder story the use of "mystery" in the title to keep the fact of murder concealed.)
     Another piece of evidence cited to prove Drood's survival is the middle picture at the bottom of Collins's sketch for the Drood cover, later elaborated in the final cover drawing by Fildes, who took over as illustrator. The "survivalists" say that this sketch shows Edwin Drood confronting John Jasper at the tomb of quicklime in which Jasper believed he had buried Drood's dead body. But interpreters of a contrary mind have said the sketch represents a hallucinatory image of the dead Drood summoned up by the guilty conscience of John Jasper. Others have said that Helena Landless appears in the drawing disguised as the dead Edwin.

     The list of those who say that Edwin is dead is long and impressive. John Forster and Charles Dickens, Jr., have said that Dickens told them so. Luke Fildes claimed that Dickens informed him that Jasper was to strangle Edwin with Jasper's black scarf, which was to appear in the illustrations; Dickens had also intended to take Fildes to Maidstone Gaol to sketch the condemned cell, apparently as a basis for a drawing of Jasper in prison.
     Among the critics, J. Cuming Walters and Edmund Wilson concluded that Drood was murdered. Some critics have drawn support for this conclusion from Dickens's notes for the completed chapters. The notes for an early chapter describing an interview between Drood and Jasper read ". . . murder far off'; those for the chapter describing Jasper's nighttime expedition through Cloisterham Cathedral include the phrase: "Lay the ground for the manner of the murder to come out at last." Many critics have interpreted the expedition either as a rehearsal of the eventual murder or as providing Jasper the means of obtaining a key to a tomb for the burial of Edwin's body as well as scouting the cathedral and its precincts as an intended site for the crime and disposition of the body.
     What we might call quasi-judicial confirmation of the death of Edwin is provided by the manslaughter verdict returned by a blue-ribbon literary jury in a mock trial of John Jasper held in London in January 1914. The prosecutor was J. Cuming Walters. Justice Gilbert Keith Chesterton presided, and a certain G. Bernard Shaw served as foreman of the jury. The verdict was announced by Shaw:

My Lord, -- I am happy to be able to announce to your Lordship that we, following the tradition and practice of British Juries, have arranged our verdict in the luncheon interval. I should explain, my Lord, that it undoubtedly presented itself to us as a point of extraordinary difficulty in this case, that a man should disappear absolutely and completely, having cut off all communication with his friends in Cloisterham; but having seen and heard the society and conversation of Cloisterham here in Court to-day, we no longer feel the slightest surprise at that. Now, under the influence of that observation, my Lord, the more extreme characters, if they will allow me to say so, in this Jury, were at first inclined to find a verdict of Not Guilty, because there was no evidence of a murder having been committed; but on the other hand, the calmer and more judicious spirits among us felt that to allow a man who had committed a cold-blooded murder of which his own nephew was the victim, to leave the dock absolutely unpunished, was a proceeding which would probably lead to our all being murdered in our beds. And so you will be glad to learn that the spirit of compromise and moderation prevailed, and we find the prisoner guilty of Manslaughter.

     We recommend him most earnestly to your Lordship's mercy, whilst at the same time begging your Lordship to remember that the protection of the lives of the community is in your hands, and begging you not to allow any sentimental consideration to deter you from applying the law in its utmost vigour.

the now-familiar device of the "least likely person," he might, as Felix Aylmer asserts he did, have chosen for this role Grewgious's apparently insignificant clerk, Bazzard. On the other hand, Dickens's choice for Datchery might have fallen, as Walters, Wilson and others contend, on Helena Landless, if he was relying on the famous plot device whereby the apparently least relevant fact becomes the most relevant. We are told early in the fragment that Helena has a talent for male disguise, having as a child run away from home dressed as a boy. But even here we are on dangerous ground, because others have argued that Helena's flair for disguise would be shown by her impersonation of the ghost of Edwin Drood in an attempt to frighten Jasper into incriminating himself.
     Dickens left himself an even greater range of choices for the ultimate revelation of the identity of the Opium Woman and her motives for pursuing Jasper. Nobody among the cast of characters appears to know her, and Dickens was free to give her any personality and relationship he saw fit to devise. Here Drood critics have given their imagination free rein, depicting her alternately as Jasper's mother or the mother of a girl he had wronged and later abandoned because of his mad infatuation with Rosa. Richard Baker concludes more prosaically that she was a blackmailer.
     To my mind, the most interesting commentators have been those who conclude that though Dickens intended and successfully contrived to construct a baffling plot, the heart of the mystery was intended to lie not in the fate of Edwin or in the details of the crime and its detection, but in the psychology of Jasper and his eventual confrontation of his own misdeed. Forster states that Dickens told him:

the originality . . . was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him.

If those who are interested in the subject will carefully read what I have quoted, they will not be able to detect any word or hint from my father that it was upon the Mystery alone that he relied for the interest and originality of his idea. The originality was to be shown, as he tells us, in what we may call the psychological description the murderer gives us of his temptations, temperament, and character, as if told by another. . . . I do not mean to imply that the mystery itself had no strong hold on my father's imagination; but, greatly as he was interested in the intricacies of that tangled skein, the information he voluntarily gave to Mr. Forster, from whom he had withheld nothing for thirty-three years, certainly points to the fact that he was quite as deeply fascinated and absorbed in the study of the criminal Jasper, as in the dark and sinister crime that has given the book its title. . . . It was NOT, I imagine, for the intricate working out of his plot alone that my father cared to write this story; but it was through his wonderful observation of character, and his strange insight into the tragic secrets of the human heart, that he desired his greatest triumph to be achieved.

identified as Dickens's home town, Rochester). To Johnson, Cloisterham stands as a symbol of Victorian society, against which Jasper's crime and his whole life constituted a revolt. He points to the smugness and suffocating closeness of Cloisterham; the imperialistic feeling of superiority displayed by its good people, including Edwin, against foreigners (represented by the Landlesses); and the insincerity of bombastic philanthropy embodied in the unforgettable Mr. Honeythunder.
     When these psychological and social implications are considered to-gether with the admirable complexity of the plot, it is difficult to escape what is perhaps the only conclusion about the book that is beyond controversy: that Edwin Drood, if completed, would have been one of Dickens's greatest novels.

* This article was previously published in 10 (1) Armchair Detective 14-16, 82 (1977) and in Innocence and Arsenic, pp. 53-62.