The Mystery of Edwin Drood: An Introduction

Wherein your co-hosts of The Dickens Chronological Reading Club 2022-24 introduce our twenty-fifth and final read together: The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last, unfinished novel.

By Boze & Rach

It is the stuff of a gothic, genre mystery. Opium addiction. Envy. A double life. Obsessive love… or lust. Jealous rivals. Possible murder weapons. A young man gone missing, and possibly murdered. Possible locations for the crime, and for the body. Quicklime. A missing ring.

But we don’t have a body. Is the missing man dead or alive? And who the Dickens is Dick Datchery? Is he a new character, or one of our already-known characters in disguise?

These and many other questions have haunted Droodists and Dickensians for decades.

How would Dickens have finished his final, half-completed novel? It’s our turn to be the detective, a Dick Datchery…

But first, a few quick links:

1. Historical Context
2. Thematic Considerations & Enigmas
3. A Note on the Illustrations
4. Reading Schedule
5. Additional References & Adaptations
6. General Mems for the #DickensClub
7. A Look-Ahead to Week One of The Mystery of Edwin Drood
8. Works Cited

Historical Context – Dickens’s Life at the Time

“Drood has to be seen in three ways. First, as the unfinished mystery which has received extraordinary attention just because it is a puzzle left by Dickens and offers itself for ingenious speculation by those who enjoy thinking up solutions. Secondly, as half a novel … which has divided opinion sharply even among Dickens’s warmest admirers, from Chesterton’s hailing it as the creation of a dying magician making ‘his last splendid and staggering appearance’ to Gissing’s and Shaw’s dismissal of it as trivial and of no account. And thirdly, as the achievement of a man who is dying and refusing to die, who would not allow illness and failing powers to keep him from exerting his imagination, or to prevent him from writing: and as such it is an astonishing and heroic enterprise.”

— Claire Tomalin

Charles Dickens was getting older. He had passed fifty-five, and in the final years of the 1860s his health continued to wane. Lingering troubles with his foot made it difficult to climb stairs. He suffered from hemorrhaging and occasionally found that he only recognized the right halves of words. After his death, loved ones recalled a moment when he struggled to say the word Pickwick, pronouncing it “Pickswick” and “Pecksnick.” Privately they worried for him, and began to imagine what had once previously seemed unthinkable—that the great pen might one day be stilled. That Charles Dickens might come to an end.

Dickens himself was taking precautions. Shortly after his fifty-eighth birthday he wrote a letter to Macready congratulating him on turning 77—this in an age when men were lucky to reach sixty. It’s clear from his letters, and from certain passages in Drood, that his thoughts were turning towards the next world. During a trip to London in May 1869 with American friends Annie and James Fields he visited the settings of some of his more famous books—“the room where Pip had lived in Great Expectations, the dark staircase on which Magwitch had stumbled and the narrow street where Pip had found lodgings for his unwanted benefactor,” Peter Ackroyd tells us, “Dickens pointing out these dwellings as if his characters had been real.” On the following day, 12 May, he drafted a new will.

The fates of his children weighed on him, more so than ever. He had only recently rescued Charley from insurmountable debt by inviting him onto the staff of Household Words. Sydney had incurred so many debts that Dickens, in an unguarded moment, voiced a wish that he were dead. Charles Collins, elder brother of Wilkie and husband of Kate Dickens, was in poor health and would soon die of stomach cancer. Dickens made it known that he regretted Kate having married Charles, which badly stung Wilkie and led to a cooling off in their friendship (not helped by Dickens calling The Moonstone “wearisome beyond endurance”).

Not all his children were failures. Says Slater, “Frank was doing well in the Bengal Mounted Police, as was Alfred, working as a land agent in Australia, while Henry was beginning to distinguish himself academically” at Trinity Hall, Cambridge—the only one of his seven sons to attend university. But by and large they were not a promising bunch. Just how much Dickens was concerned with their fates—their success or, in most cases, failure—is clear from two memorable incidents at this period. One was the departure of Plorn—ineffectual but beloved—for Australia, a trip that his father had organized on the suspicion that Plorn would not fare well in England. (Plorn’s life in the Outback is the subject of a recent novel, The Dickens Boy, by Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler’s List.) When the time came for Plorn to board the train at Paddington Station that would take him away forever, Henry later recalled that the normally reserved Dickens was overcome. “My father,” he wrote, “openly gave way to his intense grief quite regardless of his surroundings … I never saw a man so completely overcome.” Several days later Dickens was heard to say, “I find myself constantly thinking of Plorn.”

The second incident involved Henry himself, who so distinguished himself at Cambridge that he was awarded an annual stipend of fifty pounds. (“Henry,” Ackroyd reminds us, “was the only one of his children to have achieved any success in life”). Years later, Henry would write of the moment when he shared the good news with his father:

I knew that this success, slight as it was, would give him intense pleasure, so I went to meet him at Higham Station upon his arrival from London to tell him of it. As he got out of the train I told him the news. He said, ‘Capital! capital!’ – nothing more. Disappointed to find that he received the news apparently so lightly, I took my seat beside him in the pony carriage he was driving. Nothing more happened until we had got half-way to Gad’s Hill, when he broke down completely. Turning towards me with tears in his eyes and giving me a warm grip of the hand, he said, ‘God bless you, my boy; God bless you!’ That pressure of the hand I can feel now as distinctly as I felt it then, and it will remain as strong and real until the day of my death.

In the years after the publication of Our Mutual Friend Dickens continued to work vigorously. During the summers he worked from Monday to Thursday of each week in London, managing All the Year Round, while on the weekends he returned to Gad’s Hill. But already he was planning a new novel and “in the autumn,” Slater tells us, “a six-month farewell series of one hundred readings, for which the Chappells would pay him eight thousand pounds plus all expenses…” The highlight of this public tour, which led him all over England and destroyed what remained of his health, was a dramatic reading of the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. Forster and friends attempted to dissuade Dickens from embarking on this lucrative venture because they feared, rightly in retrospect, that Dickens was driving himself into an early grave. As he took the stage each night, says Slater, he was not only killing Nancy—he was killing himself. 

Dickens and Ellen Ternan no longer seem to have lived together, but she continued to accompany him to his readings to the last. There are some hints in Edwin Drood which biographers have seized on to suggest that their relationship was now more akin to that of a brother and sister. Whatever the case, in the early months of 1870 Dickens stayed often at Tyburnia, overlooking Hyde Park: he told his reading manager, Dolby, that he enjoyed hearing the noise of the waggons each morning at dawn as they made their way from Paddington to the central markets. In the late spring he returned to Gad’s Hill Place, where he wrote the final chapters of Edwin Drood—the final words he would ever write—and enjoyed a series of visits with his children that are haunting for what they reveal about the nervous strain he was under, and the weight of regrets. (One can’t help but think, in this respect, of Johnny Cash—another beloved entertainer who told stories of desperate souls leading unvarnished lives, who in his final years trailed a cloud of exhaustion and despair, who held his success lightly, who wondered whether fame had been worth it.)

Ackroyd picks up the tale—it is one of the most devastating scenes in the annals of Dickens:

That night he stayed at the office, unusually for him, and on the following morning his son, Charley, found him working there on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He was about to leave for the day and went in to see his father, who was still ‘writing very earnestly.’ After a moment ‘I said, “If you don’t want anything more, sir, I shall be off now,” but he continued writing with the same intensity as before, and gave no sign of being aware of my presence. Again I spoke—louder, perhaps, this time—and he raised his head and looked at me long and fixedly. But I soon found that, although his eyes were bent upon me and he seemed to be looking at me earnestly, he did not see me, and that he was, in fact, unconscious for the moment of my very existence. He was in dreamland with Edwin Drood, and I left him—for the last time.’ There is something very disturbing about this anecdote, the prematurely aged man still so immersed in his images and words that he could not even see his own son standing in front of him. And what of Charley himself? In retrospect he must have been disturbed, too. This was the last time he would ever see his father, and yet he was ignored by him in favor of the creatures of his imagination.”

A few days later he had his last encounter with any of his children—with his daughter, Kate:

He seemed to improve during dinner and then, afterwards, he smoked his usual cigar and took a stroll in the garden with both his daughters, the air filled with the sweet scent of syringa shrubs. Afterwards he sat in the dining room and contemplated his new conservatory, which had just been completed as an extension to that room. Mamie had gone into the drawing room to play the piano, and Dickens listened to her solitary music as he sat looking at the flowers. Kate had mentioned to her father that she wanted to talk to him about a decision she was about to make—she wanted to go on the stage, in order to earn some money for herself and her ailing husband—and at eleven o’clock, when Georgina and Mamie had retired to bed, and the lights in the conservatory had been turned down, father and daughter talked together. They discussed her plans, of which Dickens disapproved since there were people in the theatrical profession ‘who would make your hair stand on end.’ They considered the matter for a while but then, when Kate rose to leave, Dickens asked her to stay because he had more to say to her. He talked of his hopes for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ‘if, please God, I live to finish it.’ Then, he added, ‘I say if, because you know, my dear child, I have not been strong lately.’ He went on to talk of the past but not of the future, and it seemed to his daughter that ‘he spoke as though his life were over and there was nothing left.’ Then he went on to regret that he had not been ‘a better father—a better man.’ Kate said, in a later unpublished account, that he also mentioned Ellen Ternan. Father and daughter did not leave each other until three in the morning.”

Regretted that he had not been a better man. There is a world of weariness and desolation in those words.

The way he was speaking must have spooked Kate. On the following morning Dickens went into the chalet to write, and she, knowing how much he hated being disturbed, asked Georgina to send him her love. But then, whilst waiting on the porch for the carriage, she thought better of it. Seized, as she later wrote, with “an uncontrollable desire to see him once again,” she ran through the tunnel to the chalet. On previous occasions Dickens, immersed in his book, had merely offered his cheek to be kissed. But on this morning he glanced up eagerly and then, in an unprecedented gesture, took her into his arms and held her close.

It was the last time they would see one another. Four days later he was suddenly taken ill during dinner with Georgina and asked to be lowered to the floor. He fell into a coma from which he never recovered. Early on the following evening, with his family arriving from across London, he began to sob loudly. Fifteen minutes later he let out a heavy sigh, and a single tear, and passed from this world. Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist in the English language, was no more.

Thematic Considerations & Enigmas

Dickens’s “Writing Lab”: Tone & Atmosphere; Influence of Wilkie Collins; Dickens as Mystery Writer

“The real theme of the novel lies not in its complicated plot but rather, as Dickens’s daughter, Kate, has expressed it, in Dickens’s ‘wonderful observation of character,’ and his strange insight into the tragic secrets of the human heart.’”

— Peter Ackroyd

From Drood’s opium-dream opening, we realize that we’re not in Kansas anymore…nor even the Dickensian London that we know. Still, for all its strange, dark elements–the double-life of the choirmaster, the storm of Christmas Eve echoing the danger to come, the Gothic crypts of Cloisterham Cathedral–there is arguably a lighter narrative touch here than in, say, Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. From the teasing relationship of Edwin and Rosa, to the eccentric Bazzard to the fresh & wholesome Tartar and Minor Canon Crisparkle, there is a kind of airiness to the narrative that might hearken back to some of Dickens’s earlier works.

As Drood followed on a success such as Collins’s The Moonstone, one wonders what influence, if any, Wilkie’s own detective story, full of the intrigue of other cultures, might have had on the Inimitable. Dickens was always a “mystery novelist,” in that there are always mysteries and secrets at the heart of all of his novels—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations come especially to mind—but was Drood to be the beginning of what we might call a more “genre mystery” period in Dickens’s writing career? Or was he less interested in the “whodunnit” aspect, than in the psychology of a jealous addict and killer?

Contrasts: Light and Shadow, Life and Death

From Pickwickian sunshine to Droodian shade, this novel, suffused with a Gothic atmosphere, also strongly contrasts the light and shadow within its pages. The very name “Crisparkle” suggests shining, lightness, airiness; Jasper, by contrast, is all duplicity and obscurity and shade. From the light airiness of “the Nuns’ House” and Miss Twinkleton, to the darkness of the crypt and the intentions of one who wants to search its mysteries and, perhaps, use them for his own shadowy purposes.

Dickens as “The Haunted Man”: A Return to Rochester; Unfulfilled Loves; A Double Life

With Drood, we have truly come full circle in another sense: Dickens’s childhood and early memories of Rochester. Dickens never strayed far from his origins, and Rochester, which featured back during our travels with Pickwick, and which was one of the subjects of an essay in The Uncommercial Traveler, now is front and center (under the pseudonym “Cloisterham”) for Dickens’s final, unfinished novel.

During this period, Dickens himself might be said to be leading a double life, providing for and visiting Ellen Ternan and her mother–often under the name of John Tringham. And if there is one thing abundantly clear in a novel full of unsolved mysteries, it is that Dickens is fascinated by the double life of John Jasper, opium-addict and ostensibly the respectable choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral. In Jasper’s obsessive, hopeless love/lust, do we see echoes of Dickens’s own frustrated life, and loves?

Obsession, Addiction, & Mental Illness

Addiction now adds imaginative force to the obsession of John Jasper for Rosa Bud. Hasn’t “obsession” and “unrequited love” been a theme for many of our journeys with the Inimitable, especially recently? Note a scene later in our readalong which might echo that of Headstone’s proposal to Lizzie Hexam.

A “Fixed Attention”: Ways of “Seeing” One Another; Cultural Racism and Stereotyping; Mesmerism

Chris brought this up this “seeing” or “looking” as a theme that was striking her more and more as she dipped into Drood again. Daniel brought it up in relation to Our Mutual Friend–where everyone is observing one another: John observes Bella and Bella watches Mr Boffin; Riderhood watches Headstone as the latter watches Eugene and Lizze, etc.

Here, Jasper is often described as having a look of “fixed attention,” especially towards Rosa and Edwin. How many characters “watch” one another in this book? Just as John Harmon watched Bella from the secret double (or triple) life he was leading, so too do several characters watch one another here. When we meet the “stranger” who arrives in Cloisterham later in our read, “he” seems to be watching everyone, especially Jasper.

We also have instances of how one’s look or gaze has power over another, echoing Dickens’s own belief in and practice of mesmerism. Jasper has this effect upon Rosa, which resembles one of control, or being compelled; Neville and Helena have a kind of telepathic connection to one another, and Helena is described as having a very strong influence upon him, as well, which she seems to be able to control with a look.

And there is so much more to ponder about the Landless twins. (Helena is certainly one of the most fantastic Dickensian heroines in our opinion.) They are part of the enigma of the story. Orphans from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) who have suffered ill-treatment from a cruel father, and their relationship to our other characters one of the book’s many unsolved mysteries. Neville proves to be the scapegoat of the story due to his own “violent” temper (not unlike that of our beloved Nicholas Nickleby, especially when there is injustice to combat), and due to his “Un-English” complexion, as pompous, self-satisfied Sapsea never fails to point out. What are we to make of them both? Who would each have ended up with, romantically? Is Neville guilty or innocent? Would Dickens have proved them to be related to one of our central characters? Might either one of them have disguised his/herself as another character in the story?

A Note on the Illustrations

Charles Collins, brother of Wilkie and husband of Dickens’s daughter Katey, began illustrations for The Mystery of Edwin Drood with its enigmatic wrapper which is supposed to contain–or does it?–several clues to the mystery. Due to Charles Collins’s poor health, the illustrations were taken over by Luke Fildes, an artist introduced to Dickens by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais. Fildes provided two illustrations for each of the published installments.

Reading Schedule*

*note: We will read The Mystery of Edwin Drood over the course of 6 weeks—one “installment” per week—with a summary and discussion wrap-up every week.

Week/Dates	Chapters	Notes
Week 1: 20-26 August, 2024	1-4	The first installment was published in April of 1870.
Week 2: 27 Aug to 2 Sept, 2024	5-9	The second installment was published in May of 1870.
Week 3: 3-9 Sept, 2024	10-12	The third installment was published in June of 1870.
Week 4: 10-16 Sept, 2024	13-16	The fourth installment was published posthumously, in July of 1870.
Week 5: 17-23 Sept, 2024	17-20	The fifth installment was published posthumously, in August of 1870.
Week 6: 24-30 Sept, 2024	21-23	The sixth installment was published posthumously, in September of 1870.

Additional References and Adaptations

Films have been made, novels written, and much critical ink spilled over the question of how the novel might have ended, with various solutions and resolutions proposed. Several authors have tried to complete the novel. Dan Simmons’s Drood takes a different spin, telling the story of Dickens’s final years from the perspective of friend/rival Wilkie Collins, in an almost Amadeus/Mozart-vs-Salieri like story. A book called The D Case brings in all of our beloved fictional detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Father Brown, in order to solve it. Dr Pete Orford (University of Buckingham) not only has a wonderful book on the subject, but he led readers from all walks of life in a detective hunt to solve it with The Drood Inquiry. G.K. Chesterton was involved in a court case set up by the Dickens Fellowship to “try” the fictional John Jasper for murder. A popular stage musical gets the audience involved in solving the mystery.

On film, we have a 1935 adaptation with Claude Rains as John Jasper. In 1993, Robert Powell took the role. Both are hard to find on streaming now.

If you have BritBox, you can witness a wonderfully atmospheric 2012 BBC adaptation with a frighteningly brooding Matthew Rhys as Jasper, a marvellous (as always) Alun Armstrong as Grewgious, gorgeous and intelligent Amber Rose Revah as Helena, and a scene-stealing David Dawson as Bazzard/Datchery. Whether or not the ending that they construct is likely to have been Dickens’s solution, it is certainly a clever one.

General Mems for the #DickensClub

SAVE THE DATE: Our final Zoom chat in our Dickens Chronological Reading Club will take place on 5 October, 2024! 11am Pacific (US) / 2pm Eastern (US) / 7pm GMT (London). Email Rach if you’re not on our ongoing Zoom link list and would like to join in!

If you’re counting, today is Day 960 (and week 138) in our #DickensClub! This week we’ll be starting The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, and our twenty-fifth and final read as a group. Please feel free to comment below this post for the first weeks’ chapters, or use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter.

No matter where you’re at in the reading process, a huge “thank you” for reading along with us. Heartfelt thanks to our dear Dickens Fellowship, The Dickens Society, and the Charles Dickens Letters Project for retweets, and to all those liking, sharing, and encouraging our Club, including Gina Dalfonzo, Dr. Christian Lehmann and Dr. Pete Orford. Huge “thank you” also to The Circumlocution Office (on twitter also!) for providing such a marvellous online resource for us. And for any more recent members or for those who might be interested in joining: the revised two-and-a-half year reading schedule can be found here. If you’ve been reading along with us but aren’t yet on the Member List, we would love to add you! Please feel free to message Rach here on the site, or on twitter.

A Look-Ahead to Week One of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (20-26 August, 2024)

This week, we’ll be reading the first installment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Chapters 1-4. This installment was published in April of 1870.

Feel free to comment below for your thoughts this week, or use the hashtag #DickensClub if you’re commenting on twitter.

If you’d like to read it online, you can find it at a number of sites such as Gutenberg.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Orford, Pete. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’ Unfinished Novel & Our Endless Attempts to End It. Barnsley: Pen and Sword History, 2018.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens: A Life. Penguin: New York, 2012.