Supplement to The Mystery of Edwin Drood

* * * SPOILER ALERT * * *

Ackroyd once again sets the stage for us in terms of Dickens’s activities and mindset leading up to and during the writing of his novel.

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The first paragraph of this essay is really great! 

“Pickwick was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled up by Dickens. Edwin Drood, the last book, was a book designed by Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. The Pickwick Papers showed how much Dickens could make out of other people’s suggestions; The Mystery of Edwin Drood shows how very little other people can make out of Dickens’s suggestions.”

That said, Chesterton gives us his own opinion of the “mystery”, a run-down of other people’s suggestions to date (1911) and his opinions of each.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22362/pg22362-images.html#DROOD

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This essay written for Household Words (14 June 1856) is Dickens’s response to news articles about a recent murder case which made much of “the murderer’s complete self-possession, of his constant coolness, of his profound composure, of his perfect equanimity”. (477) Dickens objected to such emphasis and contends that if observed closely the defendant was “[d]istinctly not quite composed”. (478) Dickens’s observation of the defendant in question is, according to David Paroissien’s “Introduction to Edwin Drood”, the basis for John Jasper’s character as evidenced Jasper’s “working features and his convulsive hands” (Paroissien xxviii; Drood Ch 19).

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Tracy identifies several sources Dickens turned to for information relative to opium (its use, affects/effects, user’s behavior) including Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, the contemporary medical literature of Dr. John Elliotson and Dr. Robert Mannish. Dickens also drew on his personal experiences of visiting opium dens and limited use of opium (in the form of laudanum) and that of his friend Wilkie Collins.