First published at EN3515 DICKENS Blog

Endings. Steven Connor has written persuasively on the way notions of ending, of false-endings, concealed endings and permeate the text. What is interesting for our purposes is the way the ‘ending’, half-way through the text, intersects the ‘life’ of the novel and leaves us with only a ghostly, spirit-text as conclusion. This in turn devolves upon two questions: how would Dickens have finished Edwin Drood, had he lived? How did Dickens finish Edwin Drood, being dead?

The former is the more respectable question, and has exercised critics ever since 1870. One interesting aspect of it is the way it elides into a specific ethical question that has to do with authorship. Dickens told Forster his intentions – that Jasper had murdered Edwin, and ‘at the close’ would ‘review’ the crime ‘as if, not he the culprit, but some other man’ were the criminal.

The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which the wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. [Forster, 365]

It has been suggested that this was a blind, a tale told to throw the dust in Forster’s eyes whilst Dickens planned some utterly other ending. Whether this seems plausible or not will depend upon the individual reader, although one factor that has always struck me is that this premise, recorded in Forster, is actually a very good one – why would Dickens waste such an ingenious conception as a mere beard? In effect, it postulates a man haunted by his crime, and presumably by his impending death, as Fagin is at the end of Oliver Twist, except that the ‘crime’ was committed by a different Jasper than the Jasper who reviews its circumstances. The device facilitating this is the opium, but he effect is to imagine a character haunted by himself at the novel’s end.

The question as to whether we believe Forster’s report was initially couched as a moral judgement upon Dickens’s character. Kate Perugini, Dickens’s daughter, wrote endorsing Forster’s account, in the Pall Mall Magazine 1906:

He told his plot to Mr Forster, as he had been accustomed to tell his plots for years past; and those who knew him must feel it impossible to believe that in this, the last year of his life, he should suddenly become underhand, and we might say treacherous, to his old friend, by inventing for his private edification a plot that he had no intention of carrying into execution. This is incredible [282].

‘Treachery’ – as if to suggest that Dickens would lead a double life, in howsoever small a way, aligns him with the underhandedness of his creation, Jasper. Luke Fields reported that Dickens told him that he must draw in a long neck-tie for the illustrations of Jasper because ‘it is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it’. Subsequently, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in 1905, he insisted that doubting this story would be to deny ‘the nobility of character and sincerity of Charles Dickens’ and to accuse Dickens of being ‘more or less of a humbug’ [285].

Here's another ending:

Dickens awoke early on the following day, Wednesday 8 June 1870 in excellent spirits. He talked a little with Georgina [one of his daughters] about his book, and then after breakfast he went straight over to the chalet in order to continue to work on it. He came back for lunch, smoked a cigar in the conservatory and then, unusually for him, returned the chalet where he remained occupied upon the novel which had taken such a hold upon his imagination. The last pages were written with relative ease, marked by fewer emendations than usual … He wrote the last words to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ‘and then falls to with an appetite’; after which he formed the short spiral which generally marked the end of a chapter. He came back to the house an hour before dinner and seemed “tired, silent, abstracted”.

While waiting for his meal he went into the library and wrote two letters. One to [his friend] Charles Kent, in which he arranged to see him in London the following day: “If I can’t be – why, then I shan’t be.” The other to a clergyman to whom, in response to some criticism [that he had quoted the Bible irreverently in ch. 10 of ED: ‘like the highly popular lamb who has so long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter’] he declared that “I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of Our Saviour…”.

Georgina was the only member of the family with him, and just as they sat down together for dinner, she noticed a change both in his colour and his expression. She asked him if he were ill, and he replied “Yes, very ill. I have been very ill for the last hour.” Then he experienced some kind of fit against which he tried to struggle – he paused for a moment and then began to talk very quickly and indistinctly, at some point mentioning Forster. She rose from the chair, alarmed, and told him to ‘come and lie down.”

“Yes,’ he said. “On the ground.”

But as she helped him he slid from her arms and fell heavily to the floor. He was now unconscious. He died the following day without regaining consciousness. [Ackroyd, Dickens, 1077]

Doubling: ‘As in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though tit were continuous instead of broken (thus if I hide my watch when I am drunk I must be drunk again before I can remember where) …’ [ch. 3]

Mesmerism: Jasper’s look ‘is always concentrated’; in his mesmeric intensity of communication all the power of his body is focused in his eyes: ‘the steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his breathing seems to have stopped’; when he plays accompaniment to Rosa’s singing ‘he followed her lips most attentively, with his eyes as well as his hands,’ producing strange music of subliminal sounds that become unbearable to the girl, for as Jasper stared he ‘ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself…’ So powerful is this transmission of influence through the eyes that ‘all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: “I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!” [ch. 7]. Except when he is under the influence of opium, nothing blocks Jasper’s view. Rosa laments that ‘he has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence without uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing he never moves his eyes from my lips. There is no escape from this mesmeric power: ‘ “he himself is in the sounds … I avoid his eyes but he forces me to see them without looking at them”’ [ch. 7]’ [Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism. The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Pinceton University Press 1975), 131-2]

Orientalism and Race: The Landlesses are ‘much alike, both very dark, and very rich of colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed in both of them’. Mr Crisparkle, leading them through the Cathedral close thinks of them ‘as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild tropical dominion’ [ch.6]

[Edwin Drood and Neville Landless argue]: ‘Say here, then,’ rejoins the other, rising in a fury … ‘You are a common fellow and a common boaster.’ ‘Pooh pooh,’ said Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; ‘how should you know? You may know a black common fellow or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men’ This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that violent degree that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood’ [ch.8]

Death and the Gothic Mode: Peter Ackroyd thinks Edwin Drood is 'the closest Dickens came to Gothic'. One of the key themes of the novel is certainly the co-presence of the living and the dead:

‘Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun began to perish … in the Cathedral, all became grey, murky and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of music’ [ch, 9]

Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way. The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts – albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself – but is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed … ‘If the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living …’ [ch, 12]

Ackroyd argues: ‘the mingling of the living and the dead is at the centre of nineteenth-century Gothic but of course it had also been at the centre of Dickens’s own imagination; the opening of David Copperfield, with the infant David’s fear of his father rising from the graves’ (1054) … and we might add the opening of Great Expectations too, with Magwitch leaping up from amongst the gravestones.

22 FEBRUARY 2010