Ending The Mystery of Edwin Drood

At the end of his career Dickens begins but is unable to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The mystery so contained is unassailable. Mortal fatality intervenes and defeats criticism, It is not my intention to argue, therefore, that Edwin Drood is in any artistic sense a culmination of the development of Dickens's art. It was not the point where Dickens's development of mystery techniques was always leading to, rather, simply the place where this development was brought to an arbitrary halt, and merely another point in the continuum of Dickens's writing. Thus, by beginning at the end of Dickens's career, I hope to evade the covert teleology that can come to inform any study of the treatment of an idea in the work of one author. My aim is to attempt to unpick the thread of Dickensian mystery by beginning with the work which is, even to its title, most overtly a mystery novel. The singularity of mystery in this case allows us to concentrate initially on issues of narrative, yet at the same time Edwin Drood is, as I have already indicated, in one sense a significant departure from Dickens's old urban and institutional concerns. In Edwin Drood the psyche of Jasper is at the centre of the mystery, and a reading for mystery in the novel must be a reading of the career of the troubled mind of the murderer. It is in the next chapter on Our Mutual Friend that the multiplicity of mysteries in the urban narrative will become apparent. In Edwin Drood, we do see the point where the sprawling urban mysteries have given way to the focused mystery of detective fiction.

Edwin Drood was published in 1870, two years after Wilkie Colllins's The Moonstone, which is widely considered as perhaps the first work of detective fiction in English, and certainly did much to form the generic conventions of classical detective fiction (Peters 304). Wilkie Collins and Dickens were friends, workmates and collaborators of long standing, and The Moonstone appeared in All the Year Round, the Dickens-edited periodical. In fact, the success of The Moonstone raised the circulation of All the Year Round to a level greater than that which it had reached during the serial publication of Great Expectations (Peters 310-311). Initially, Dickens was enthusiastic about The Moonstone, but later he wrote that "the construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers" (qtd. in Peters 311). What Dickens drew from The Moonstone and incorporated in Edwin Drood was that prominent singularity of mystery, the case (the Drood disappearance) that is foregrounded early in the text and solved (though not, of course, in Edwin Drood) by the end of the text, that is also characteristic of the detective novel. In this, Dickens makes a strong claim on the origins of the genre, but, as his comment on The Moonstone (whatever his motives) and my argument will show, what Dickens would have rejected is the elaboration of plot and clues that turns the reading experience into a kind of contest between reader and writer. In Edwin Drood it is still the suggestive mystery, and not the process of detection, that is essential. The Moonstone, in its subversion of Sensation fiction, also marks the end of that genre, as the logic of detection eroded the impulse of melodrama. Both Edwin Drood and The Moonstone, though in different ways, exert a formal and formative influence on early detective fiction. Thus Edwin Drood is the first obvious point of entry for an excursion into Dickensian mystery.

This retrospective process is, of course, akin to the retrospective processes of detective fiction — we begin at the end in order to uncover the hidden connections linking this effect to an unknown cause. This can lead to the bind of the "double logic" which Martin Kayman warns against: "the literary scholar may be tempted by an analogy with the detective gathering material evidence and proposing a retrospective theory which situates every event in its appropriate place in an orderly and totalizing narrative" (3). This is not the logic of the double-narrative, but the logic of an assumed analogy between detective and critic, in which the critic undertakes to assemble and present the solution: that is, the critic's version of a pre-existing reading. By pursuing this analogy openly, I hope to avoid any teleology that assumes that Edwin Drood is the natural development of Bleak House, but instead uncover those links, some buried, some continued and some abruptly cut-off, which connect the one with the other within a complex web of Dickensian texts. Thus, I hope also to avoid the Darwinian evolutionary metaphor already discussed with respect to the development of detective fiction (see section 1.4). Texts do not evolve towards some determined end through a series of discrete, linear embodiments, though this is not to say that they do not sometimes express definite lineages. To resort to the "double logic" outlined above, my project is more akin to that of a Dickensian detective than a modern one, one that avoids a supposed mastering process: closer to Inspector Bucket, who is a guide within the maze, than Sherlock Holmes, who shows only the definitive way through.

To work backwards from effects to causes is an apt project in the context of Edwin Drood, since in the absence of an ending we possess only the effects of a projected plot that the author could not complete. Only the mystery, and not its solution, remains before us. However, the particular risk of interpreting Edwin Drood is to fall into the trap of detection. That is, the critic becomes a literary detective, sifting through the extant text, the manuscripts, the plans, the testimony of witnesses (those who knew Dickens, or claimed insight into his intentions) and every other chance clue, in order to discover the nature of the unwritten conclusion. To the purely textual critic, this intrusion of the author's intention is highly embarrassing. On the other hand, these efforts are peculiarly warranted by the nature of the narrative, the double-narrative, since as readers of mystery we know that a solution exists, but that its overt expression is absent from the fragment we possess. These attempts at speculative conclusions fall within a category of writing about Edwin Drood that I will call "Droodist." If the Droodists are, in part, exemplary readers — they respond eagerly to every clue and hint — they are also motivated by a tendency to read Edwin Drood as more than it is, to seek out a solution more circuitous and cunning than the one Dickens indicated. There is a sense behind their efforts that Edwin Drood is insufficiently mysterious: that the part of it we have is too obvious to contain the real answer. They tend to force on the text a retrospective application of the generic rules of detective fiction. Behind the question of the disappearance of Edwin Drood, then, lies the question of what the "real" mystery of Edwin Drood is. The reality of this mystery is not in the conventions of detective fiction that the text anticipates, but in Dickens's fascination with criminality and mysteries of the mind which had always been part of his mystery technique. The innovation here is in the intensity of Dickens's conception, his argument that the criminal mind is indeed a "horrible wonder apart" (233), beyond conventional explanation. This chapter will attempt to trace some of these mysteries of apartness. This mystery must surely lie not in the act but the consciousness of the murderer, but there must also be grounds on which the complexities of the mystery plot can be seen to engage with the complexities of the criminal mind. Through Dickens's process of substitution, we can see how the empirical murder gives into metaphysical speculation. However, a lurch towards psychological interest is in danger of further obscuring questions of plotting. For plotting, in the context of the murderous preparations of John Jasper, is surely an issue in Edwin Drood, even if it is ultimately defeated by the simple fact of its nature as fragment. John Jasper plots murder, but a greater force, providence, plots against John Jasper. The final mystery of Edwin Drood is a mystery of providence, and that providential structure gives Edwin Drood a kind of ending that it would not otherwise possess. In this manner, knowing that evil will be defeated, the reader feels a sense, through the double-narrative, that Edwin Drood is finished. Though it remains irrevocably incomplete, there is a kind of ending.

Narrative: Beginning and End in Edwin Drood

Among Dickens's notes and number plans for Edwin Drood we find a list of possible titles for the projected work. The list has led to some conjecture about Dickens's intentions for the outcome of the novel. Before settling on "mystery," Dickens also considered "loss," "flight" and "disappearance" as operative terms, as well as "Edwin Drood in hiding" (Working Notes 381). Drawn to the suggestiveness of loss and flight, as well as the more neutral disappearance, critics have speculated that Edwin Drood may yet be been alive and is prepared to return to confront his uncle at the conclusion of the novel. The appended question in the notes seems to support this: "Dead? Or alive?" (Working Notes 381). Of course, this final question may refer to the other characters' central dilemma, not the resolution of the novel, and murdered persons and then bodies may be said to be lost, too. The innocuous "Edwin Drood in hiding" may conceal a grim pun in the notion of the body being purposefully hidden by another agent. Even so, recent critics Robert Raven and Elsie Karbacz, in 1994, have argued that Edwin Drood survived his uncle's attempt on his life and will return, and there are many precedents for this contention, David Parker, in "Drood Redux: Mystery and the Art of Fiction," is only the latest in the line of critics who argue that the character of Edwin is being groomed by Dickens for a later resurrection. What Dickens's projected titles outline more clearly than exactly what would have happened is that, for the author, some decisive notion of the outcome of his narrative must have been in his mind when he began to write. Whether Drood has merely disappeared, or been murdered, possibilities inherent in his playing with titles, mattered to Dickens when he began.

That the end is in some way inherent in the beginning is a cardinal aspect of the structure of mystery plots: the double-narrative. The crime precedes the investigation but is only explained at the end of the text. Naturally, Dickens did not have the detailed entirety of Edwin Drood in mind when he began, and his notes are not exact plans but more often aides memories and records of what he had done and intended to do.

Nevertheless, the "very curious and new idea" (qtd. in Forsyte, Decoding 28) that was to motivate Edwin Drood was an essential point of departure, and, as the trial titles show, it was also an idea about which there was to be some uncertainty. It was a mystery whose ultimate solution and resolution would have come out only at the end. As Dickens wrote, he developed his initial idea, and subsidiary problems and mysteries arose. In each case, however, the reader must believe that the author has an answer. The text prompts these questions, but the text will also answer these questions at the end of the narrative. The double-narrative would be at play. We would possess an initial story, the story of a "disappearance" in which a young man has gone missing in a way we cannot determine, and we observe the investigation and uncertainty surrounding this. At the end of the text we would gain an insight into the second story, the true story located at that vital point of elision on Christmas Eve when Edwin Drood went missing, whether it were that of a young man who voluntarily went into hiding, or who had been murdered. At all times we assume that Dickens knew both stories but only interpreted to us the one through the other. And yet, six numbers into a series of twelve, Dickens died and left Edwin Drood unfinished.

It is the particular force of the double-narrative within the mystery story that brings a strange sense of finality to Edwin Drood. Since the narrative is double, we know that the end in some way informs the beginning. The clues are all in place, but the solution that would contextualise the clues is absent. Working merely with the clues, countless readers and critics have presumed to formulate and project endings for Edwin Drood. As the title of the completion by Charles Forsyte, The Decoding of Edwin Drood, shows, the ending of Edwin Drood does not involve an act of complete creation but an act of decoding, of unravelling the covert action which is only hinted at by the extant portion. Edwin Drood is unfinished, but it is complete — we need only discern in the shape of the first part the concluding part to know how Edwin Drood would have looked in its entirety. Thus, Dyson expresses his sense in The Inimitable Dickens that the last few paragraphs are "a not unfitting conclusion to the novel" (272). In those few disquieting actions — Princess Puffer's threatening wave of a fist. Datchery's confident marking up of the score — we project the entire conclusion of the work.

In this, the writers of conclusions to Edwin Drood do no more than any reader does. Umberto Eco observes the extensional operations that the reader undertakes (see section 1.6). We habitually look forward in a text, building personal speculation into expectation. These expectations are not necessarily based on the solution of the murder — we also expect that Rosa will marry Tartar, or that Helena Landless will yet have some significant role to play in the apprehension or uncovering of Jasper — but they are all functional in our orientation towards the ending where we anticipate the discovery of the murder plot. In this manner, Droodist critics who seek to answer the manifold questions raised by Edwin Drood, and then dispute among themselves the validity of their solutions, are exemplary readers, all the more so because their projections are merely more sophisticated versions of the extensional operations that any ordinary reader undertakes.

Droodists are different from other critics, however, because in their reading they seek always a definitive solution rather than interpretations, but the work that attaches to Edwin Drood under the banner of Droodist is interesting not only in its content but as a phenomenon itself. In the first case, the ingenious variety of solutions, and the sense that Edwin Drood can be solved if we were only wise enough and attentive enough to ah of the clues, indicates the immanence of the double-narrative, the way such a structure is presumptively complete. It shows up how speculatively we are drawn into the Dickensian mystery text by the very energy and variety of the suggested solutions. But Droodist criticism also contains a trap, since the variety of contentious and unsettled issues involved leads us not only into speculation, but into thickets of speculation from which it is extremely difficult to be extricated.

Droodist Criticism

The Droodist is driven to "solve" the mystery of Edwin Drood by completing the truncated text. Often, this is averred as an act of literary detection, a seeking out of cunningly concealed clues. Droodists sift through the text, treat those who knew, or claimed to know, of Dickens's intention as witnesses, and undertake forensic examinations of the whole of his canon and cultural milieu. Charles Forsyte, a pseudonym for published writers of detective fiction, is drawn to these problems in the very sense of detection: The Decoding of Edwin Drood was published under the Gollancz Detection imprint. The variety of Droodist responses points to the fecundity of readerly imagination but also, as clearly, to how forceful and various Dickensian suggestion can be, for projected solutions range over a great many possibilities.

Droodist speculation generally falls around a few specific problems: Is Edwin Drood dead, or alive and in hiding? Is Jasper, his uncle, guilty of his murder? And if not, who is guilty? And, finally, what is the identity of the mysterious Datchery? The following comments deal only with the most prominent of these questions, and ignore the matter of Datchery.

Conservative critics, such as John Thacker and Richard Baker, tend to agree that Jasper is responsible for the murder of his nephew, and has subsequently concealed the body in the crypt of the cathedral. There are more exotic explanations. Howard Duffield follows the conjecture that Jasper is the murderer, but proposes that Jasper is a member of the Indian sect the thuggee, or thugs, who murdered then victims by strangulation. A similarly exotic solution is that of Felix Aylmer, who holds that Jasper is innocent of his nephew's death, and that Edwin has fled England in order to avoid the results of a complex family feud involving an Egyptian sect. Other critics, persuaded that Edwin is alive, have suggested either that Jasper botched his killing of Edwin in a haze of opium or killed some hitherto unknown relative luckless enough to be called in at the critical juncture. Proctor conjectures thus from the common Dickensian motif of an individual who is thought to be dead returning to observe the living. Robert Raven and Elsie Karbacz have invented an entirely new person for Jasper to kill more than a year before the action of Edwin Drood, a lost half-brother who stands between Jasper and a legacy.

More marvellous and absurd conclusions exist within Droodist literature, such as that of Benny R. Reece, who argues from an elaborate (and largely groundless) parallel with Greek mythology that Helena Landless is the true culprit. Unfortunately for Reece, the passage which he advances as key to his interpretations was marked for and then perceived from deletion in Dickens's proofs (Clarendon 160). This is hardly the treatment Dickens would have given an essential clue, though a truly cunning Droodist could argue that this was a sly piece of misdirection.

Clearly, Reece is an extreme example of Droodist excess. He has crossed some limit of interpretation, though, like all Droodists, his evidence rests within the text. Nevertheless, the Reece "solution" comes to impose a spurious transformative logic of its own upon the text — Minor Canon Comer must become a representative of Ursa Major in order to fit the Reece thesis. Reece has, like his fellow Droodists, except in a more exaggerated fashion, become lost in a labyrinth of his own speculation — a Droodist labyrinth. His labyrinth is not within the text but a kind of redundant elaboration of the text. Yet Pansy Packenham has also observed that Edwin Drood was "not a riddle, but a labyrinth" (qtd. in Beer 183)19. How then, are we to interpret Drood, without falling into the meanderings of Droodist speculation? Every critical reading in some sense must presume upon a non-existent ending, or rather, the ghost of an ending, a ghost which is at once an absence, because unwritten, and yet felt as a presence because of the force of the double construction of the mystery narrative. From where can we derive a consciousness of an ending which would allow us to deal with the extant fragment without succumbing to the lure of Droodism?

It is tempting to read Edwin Drood as complete: to treat the text as if it required no act of extension at all. This is what Gerhard Joseph argues in "Who Cares Who Killed Edwin Drood?" Drawing attention to the curious formal symmetry achieved at the end of the fragment, which lends it a kind of completeness, he notes that there is no need for the novel to be finished at all. Thus, all its mysteries remain mysteries without any sort of irritable reaching after facts. This is not feasible, since many of the central issues of a reading of Edwin Drood go straight to the heart of the solution to the mystery. Even Joseph makes the direct assumption that Jasper is guilty. Our reading of the fragment must engage in some form of supposition, some reading of surface facts as if they contain more than they represent. If we do not in some way assume murderous intent in Jasper, his plotting becomes wholly inexplicable, and his curious psychology becomes uninteresting. We cannot leave the fragment incomplete; we must imagine some kind of solution. The most straightforward supposition is that Jasper did it.

This is, of course, part of the simple answer to the mystery of Edwin Drood: that Jasper killed his nephew and subsequently concealed his body within the precincts of Cloisterham Cathedral. But it is this simple answer against which Droodist criticism reacts and operates. That is, it seems too obvious to be satisfactory, too straightforward for the mastery of Dickens to satisfy the demands of a work of mystery which would prove even more elaborate and cunning than Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. To the Droodist, this solution is not elaborate enough to justify the position of the Dickensian genius in the canon of early detective fiction.

There are many reasons for preferring this obvious explanation: the testimony of Forster, internal evidence and manuscript evidence, Dickens's working notes link "the murder to come out" and "laying the ground" (Working Notes 387); Jasper is the only character who is seen laying the ground. If this is truly the solution, however, the Droodist objection must still be addressed: what is the real mystery of Edwin Drood, if events seem to be as any reader of average intelligence would foresee? But the answer is not an over-elaboration of the solution, not in the Droodist efforts to find an outcome more cunning and deceptive than before. The mystery is not to be located in the conventions of detection, in the elaborate concealment of the truth and the need for the guilty party to be the "least likely" suspect. This would be the sort of mechanical exaggeration that Dickens would resist. The real mystery of Edwin Drood is not, in fact, the fate of Edwin Drood, but lies, concealed, in the consciousness of his killer.

Mysteries of the Mind in Edwin Drood

The novel draws on those mysteries of the mind that we can see in Dickens's earlier work, always connected with the constitution of the individual, the enigma of psychology. John Jasper shares in the murderous violence of Bradley Headstone and the doubled, secretive personality of Alexandre Manette. The mysteries of Edwin Drood lie not only in action but in consciousness, not in guilt but in motivation. In reading for motivation, the Droodists are seeking a kind of psychological insight, but they tend to divine material motives, which is why they habitually invent unanticipated inheritances and wills that would drive Jasper to murder. The mechanical or empirical mysteries which fascinate Droodist analysis themselves contain a deeper mystery, the metaphysical mystery not of conspiracy but of psychology. Naturally, the two are closely linked. We cannot guess at how John Jasper thinks except by observing how he behaves; thus, the mystery of his actions elicits this double reading — the horrors which operate in the mind of the murderer are shadowy secrets enacted only in the suspicion that Jasper is the murderer. If we accept that Jasper is the killer of his nephew, we must not merely know how he did it but how he could do it. How to be kinsman and killer, so solicitous and slaughterous, how loving and murderous.

At the very first, Edwin Drood invites this sort of insight, leading us into the text through the drugged and drowsy consciousness of John Jasper. The opening promises us a world of psychological perspectives. Yet thereafter, though the thoughts and motives of Jasper continue to fascinate us, this insight is no longer granted us. The first lines are paradigmatic of mystery and perception: a reiterated question, a mystery both of identity of place (the apparent doubling of here and there) and of the observing consciousness — "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!" (37). As Joseph O'Mealey points out, the opening scene, in its shifts between visions and reality, the fantastic palace and the actual bedstead, defines John Jasper's psychological state, the split between his aspirations and the reality of his situation (131). The fuddled vision alternates between scenes of sensuous abandonment and scenes of violence: "ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers" while the sultan is "impaling a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one" (37). Desire and violence are both multiplied and drawn together: "Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers" (37). These scenes, in the metaphorical mode of dreams, point to Jasper's submerged violence against his nephew compounded by his possessive love of Rosa. Yet this is the last direct insight we have into Jasper's consciousness. From then on he must be viewed either from the outside, or, if we are given clues to his interiority, it is an insight sanctioned by Jasper himself: his own words, entries from his diary, the ravings of delirium prompted by Princess Puffer. The exterior view which we have of Jasper after this will always be tainted by this opening. We continue to search in his outward behaviour for the traces of his inward visions. Of course, Dickens could not let us look into the consciousness of the man who was to murder his own nephew, but we are offered further insights into the problem of mind and doubled personas.

John Jasper, lay precentor, occupies an overworked and underpaid — and little regarded — post within the hierarchy of the Cathedral. A man of artistic abilities, he presumes, despite his lowly if respectable state, to dream greater dreams than the common mass. "What visions can she have... Visions of many butcher's shops and public houses and much credit? What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that! — Eh?" (38). John Jasper, we know, has more baroque dreams than this. Yet he is trapped in the stultifying atmosphere of Cloisterham: "no meet dwelling place for any one with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout" (51). Silence and monotony are even more poisonous for the professional maker of music. Why Jasper is trapped, why he does not make something of his ambitions, we do not know. He may be limited by economic circumstances; it is more likely that his inertia is pait of his psychic sickness.

Certainly he sublimates his desire for change in opium driven fantasies, which may eventually discharge themselves as murderous impulse. It is deal' that under the strictures of Cloisterham life some negative impulses must emerge in new and grotesque forms:

'The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place, before me, can have been more tned of it than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my own heart?' (48)

The imperative "must" has the feel of an appeal against existing circumstances. Jasper carves out a gargoyle-like alter ego which seeks expiation for his inaction in opium taking. This, the John Jasper who attends the shabby opium den, and shudders in "unclean... imitation" (39) of the others, is an alien to the figure that Edwin sees: "your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such an independent position" (48). It is precisely this image of Edwin's that Jasper reacts against. But his outburst is merely a superficial kind of confession. Edwin sees it as wholly open: "your painfully laying of your inner self bare, as a warning to me" (49), but at this phase Jasper halts his breathing, fearing absolute discovery, and only breathes again when Edwin moves on. Jasper's transition is extraordinary: "Mr Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the smallest stage of transition between the two extreme states" (49). Not merely breathing again, but becoming a different man moving swiftly between extreme states. The image of extreme states within persons adheres not only to Jasper, who is the most sinister example of this, but to other characters throughout Edwin Drood (Forsyte, 'Decoding' deals extensively with this theme).

Other characters in Edwin Drood seem to express, in different ways, split or alternative personas. More often than not presented lightly, they are a kind of parody of the extremism in the character of John Jasper. At the same time, they often express a kind of insecurity or frustrated aspiration that is in keeping with the stultifying atmosphere of Cloisterham. In Cloisterham identity becomes mysterious, or in the case of Miss Twinkleton, secretive, a doubling through which one side of the personality conceals another: "Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. Every night, the moment the young ladies have retired to rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up her eyes a little, and become a sprightly Miss Twinkleton, whom none of the young ladies have ever seen" (53). Miss Twinkleton, in her nocturnal social excursions, is a parody of Jasper's more sinister immersion in the London opium houses. Some characters merely aspire to be other than they are, as Mr Sapsea, bore and "Tory Jackass," presumes to a high position in the ecclesiastical ranks: "Mr Sapsea 'dresses at' the Dean; has been bowed to for the Dean, in mistake; has even been spoken to in the street as My Lord, under the impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly" (62).

Other characters living such doubled roles are not presented so humorously. The Landlesses, brother and sister, twins, are similar in appearance, and seem to emphatically share their thoughts. There is an unsettling duality in their manner: "something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress: yet withal a certain air of the objects of the chase" (85). Alien and unsettled, in a foreign society, they are both intruders and victims, coloniser and colonised, male and female, poised to attack or flee. As both hunter and hunted, it is possible that they will fulfil both roles — Neville hounded to death by Jasper, Helena his avenger. Their duality is a function of their status in society. Only Miss Twinkleton, who holds her identities in strict ignorance of each other — "Every night... does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night, comprehending the tenderer scandal of Cloisterham, of which she has no knowledge whatever by day" (53) — enjoys a kind of stability in her duality. Yet it is John Jasper and his secret life whom these other doublings reflect and parody, and his divided selfhood which is the most extreme.

In Cloisterham, with its continual hints of a subconscious world and doubled character, Dickens was pointing toward "the tragic secrets of the human heart" (qtd. in O'Mealy 129). No heart in Edwin Drood is more secretive, or mysterious, than that of Jasper. Similarly, no state of consciousness is more potentially contentious. Adding to a long line of theatrical murderers, from Jonas in Martin Chuzzlewit to the more deeply realised Bradley Headstone of Our Mutual Friend, in Jasper the figure of the murderer is surely presented in an even more complex fashion than before. And yet the nature of his madness and addiction is unknown. Is he a conscious killer, a knowing hypocrite, or does Jasper suffer from an absolute form of doubling, in which one self does not know of the actions of the other? What are the motivations of his sometimes erratic behaviour? How can his loving aspect to his nephew be reconciled with his murderous actions? Such questions assail the mind of Rosa when she considers the possibility that Jasper is the murderer of her fiancé, yet she can only conclude, "he was so terrible a man" (233). Dickens adds in an aside: "for what could she know of the criminal intellect, which its own professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of identifying it as a horrible wonder apart" (233). The reader, like Rosa, is immersed in these questions. We are, like Dickens, who had a long interest in criminals, their punishment and education, drawn to and repulsed by the possibility of insight into the criminal intellect. Criminality implies the substitution of the problem of evil with the secular fear of a certain pathology. Like Rosa, the reader's anxiety about the constitution of the criminal intellect discloses this inquiry: what are the horrible wonders of such a mind?

Perhaps Jasper's "horrible wonder apart" can be accounted for by a horrible form of apartness, a split self that anticipates not only Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde but multiple personality disorders. So argues Charles Forsyte in The Decoding of Edwin Drood, anticipating also the argument that Jasper is a clinical schizophrenic (Comyn, using as the title of her essay, "John Jasper, Schizophrenic," would agree with this interpretation, though her reading of Jasper's schizophrenia is literary rather than clinical). Forsyte observes that there are characteristic differences in the nature of the fits endured by the opium takers Princess Puffer and the Lascar" and those attacks endured by Jasper. Jasper turns rigid; his fits are intense and of short duration. The others shake, and recover much more slowly. This difference, Forsyte concludes, is covered by a subtle piece of misdirection. Referring to Dickens's skills as a stage-magician, and the importance in stage-magic of misdirection, Forsyte argues that the opening of the novel, which precedes Jasper's first attack, cues us to mistakenly interpret all of Jasper's fits as if they are opium-induced, whereas in reality they have a different function. Jasper's fits, which are symptomatically different from those of other opium users, are in fact a form of transference between two discrete personas, one of which Forsyte calls the "innocent" Jasper and the other the Murderer. No less than three such transformations occur in the first chapter. Like the cabinet in Minor Canon Corner, where sliding panels obscure one half of the closet while the other is open, both sides of Jasper's personality are in complete ignorance of each other, or, at least, Jasper is ignorant of the Murderer (Forsyte, Decoding 98). This condition is a similar, if more advanced, form of that ascribed to Jasper by many Droodists who argue that Edwin is still alive. If, under the influence of opium, Jasper has a similarly split personality, then it is possible that the opium-driven side of Jasper botched the murder of his nephew while the other side knows nothing of this. Regardless of this, the split-personality theory has a basis in the description of Miss Twinkleton:

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 it 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), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. (53)

Thus, whether the spit is absolute and psychological, or opium induced, the contention is that Jasper has two separate and discontinuous states of mind which never meet. The horrible wonder apart of this criminal mind is, in fact, the absolute apartness of the good and loving self from the murderous self.

This solution is attractive, since it is certainly an extreme form of dualism and a direct explanation for the mysteries of the Jasper mind, but, as John Thacker has pointed out, it is morally uncomfortable (58). If one Jasper is truly good and innocent, while the other is a totally corrupted murderer, then the good Jasper will die a wrongful death as an innocent man while being morally exonerated, freed of blame, thanks to the activities of his darker half. In effect, this kind of binarism is a simplification; though complicated in its execution, it is reductive in its ethics, relieving Jasper of his responsibilities as kinsman, host and human being. Furthermore, as Thacker, among others, has pointed out (135), the Twinkleton description is a gentle parody of the central mechanical device of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, in which the jewel is "stolen" by Franklin Blake while under the influence of opium, after which he forgets his involvement. Dickens approved of The Moonstone at first, but later wrote that: "The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers" (qtd in Peters 311). If, as already discussed, Dickens pretended suggestion and surprise to obstinate misdirection (section 1.6), what was the character of Jasper to suggest, if not absolute binarism? What was the idea — "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" (qtd in Forsyte, Decoding 28) — that seemed to lodge in the personality of John Jasper? If it was not to be like Miss Twinkleton's "two distinct and separate phases of being," (53) what was it?

What we tend to overlook in that phrase, even when reading it as a satirical swipe at The Moonstone, is the ironic tone, for Miss Twinkleton is merely likened to the drunkard, and in both her social states she is perfectly well aware of the other. Like other doubled characters in Dickens, such as Wemmick (at Walworth and at Little Britain) or Sairey Gamp (and her projected double, Mrs Harris), the divisions are divisions of habit, not absolute divisions of the psyche. Miss Twinkleton is but one person, existing in two separate modes, but the barrier between them is an elegant mental fiction. So, the mind of Jasper, though drawn between the two extremes of loving uncle and killer, is yet one entity, continuous and self aware. As A.E Dyson in "Edwin Drood: A horrible wonder apart" argues, "The 'split' in [Jasper] is not between two personalities but two deliberate personae — the respectable public self of Cloisterham and the exotic private self of the Limehouse den. At all times in his 'normal' life Jasper commands both personae" (153). The curiosity and the difficulty of Dickens's idea, then, lay in its very simplicity, for Jasper was not to be a psychotic double person, of whom one half never knew the workings of the other, but instead one person, one personality which would swing, sometimes wildly, between two extremes of mind. The complexity of the presentation of this idea lies beyond simple binarism, since Jasper is at one and the same time killer and conventional man, alternating between the two poles of his being, and yet always with the seed of self- awareness within him. To humanise such a state of mind would be a task worthy of Dickens's art, far more complex and demanding than Forsyte's Jasper and Murderer solution. To present the movements, the tides of Jasper's doubled but undivided mind as they flowed along the complex poles of passion, love, hatred, longing and obsession, would indeed be "very difficult to work." The logic of such a mind, murderous, knowing itself murderous, resisting murder and yet unable or unwilling to change, is not the common logic of the self which could be solved by the simple conceit of psychological or opium-induced split personalities. It is, indeed, "a horrible wonder apart" which Dickens wished to communicate. Without a close reading of this mystery, the most prominent of all the mysteries of the mind in Edwin Drood, as an ongoing process, our understanding of the novel is incomplete. In the extant half of Edwin Drood we can see the subtle and complex process in motion, not as a simple dualism but a horrible career.

"A Horrible Wonder Apart": The Career of the Murderer

Edwin Drood opens within the consciousness of John Jasper, a beginning both illuminating and deceptive. His fantasies of violence and sensuous fulfilment are subtle clues to his inner desires, but, as Charles Forsyte has pointed out in "How Did Drood Die?", these visions are only the conclusion, the last part of a grimmer scenario: the long journey undertaken in the opium trance, which we later learn is nothing less than the rehearsal of murder (268-271). John Jasper's opium dreams, it seems, are not so much cathartic as a means of bolstering his resolve. If, at first, they were a way of harmlessly living out his darkest desires, eventually they become a prefigurement of and goad to action.

Following this opening, and Jasper's return to Cloisterham, is Jasper's first meeting with his nephew, an interview which is both alarming and tender. In this scene we see Jasper's love for his nephew, but we also come closest to a kind of confession or admission of his deepest desires — even a warning. John Jasper's chambers, sombre, shadowed, with the portrait of Rosa Bud in a central position, hold clues to his character, if only Edwin could perceive them. At fust, however, Jasper is deeply, perhaps even overly, affectionate: '"My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone. Don't moddley-coddley, there's a good fellow'" (44). Dickens emphasises twice in the chapter, in two fits, one reported and one actually seen, the effect that Jasper's opium taking has on him. In Jasper's physical reactions to opium we see the close proximity of his dreams of murder. At the same time, the uncle who observes his nephew with such "hungry, exacting, watchful and yet devoted attention" (44) comes close to confessing, or justifying, his murderous fantasies and his opium taking. Edwin Drood is too shallow to recognise any of this, and so the scene proceeds between Jasper's oblique confessions and Edwin's cheerful and superficial misunderstanding of him. When Edwin bursts out that, "You can choose for yourself. Life, for you, is a plum with the natural bloom on; it hasn't been over-carefully wiped off for you" he does, in fact, describe the very sense of constraint that Jasper feels. That his outburst refers in the main to his planned marriage to Rosa Bud merely adds to the unconscious injury. It is during this speech that Jasper has a fit. Edwin wonders if he has hurt his uncle's feelings. Jasper speaks vaguely of a pain. When the fit has passed, Jasper tells his nephew, "There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought there was none in mine, dear Ned" (47) and goes on to describe his sense of enclosure and frustration at Cloisterham life. Complex impulses are at work here: on the one hand, Jasper is thinking of murder and violence (in the MS a reference to knives was deleted (Clarendon 10-11)), yet the potential murderer also tries to deflect the violence, to make an oblique confession of the very forces which are driving him. The part of Jasper which is tender and loving seeks to confess, yet his murderous intent obscures this desire and holds him back from full disclosure. When Jasper speaks "he lays a tender hand upon his nephew's shoulder, and, in a tone of voice less troubled than the purport of his words — indeed with something of raillery or banter in it — thus addresses him" (47). In the gaps between his tender gesture, the dark import of his words and the disguising tone of his words, lie the complex stresses and conflicts within John Jasper. Edwin misunderstands these signals, or rather, reads only their surface import. Jasper communicates in a profoundly mysterious manner — his every word is a clue to his murderous intent and frustration but also contains a superficial and less ominous truth. Ironically, Edwin thanks him: "I have something impressible within me, which feels — deeply feels — the disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a warning to me" (49). He misinterprets both the inner self and the warning. John Jasper concludes on an ominous note: "You won't be warned?" (50). Edwin will not be warned — he has not the maturity or the insight to see the deep clash of impulses within his uncle. In another grim foreshadowing, the chapter ends with the two men deciding to walk in the churchyard.

The Cathedral and its environs are the grounds within which Jasper plots his murder. Those Droodists who debar Jasper as the murderer have an intensely difficult task in dismissing his assiduous preparation for the murder: cultivating Sapsea, touring the crypt with Durdles, fomenting the quarrel between Edwin and Neville Landless. In all of this he exhibits a calculating and malicious command of circumstances. If the John Jasper of the second chapter scruples enough at murder to in some way reveal his inward impulses, then the Jasper of "A Night with Durdles" consciously plots to commit a murder. There is no other explanation for this outing which even Dickens names "the unaccountable expedition" (160). The arrival of Neville Landless in Cloisterham is, to Jasper, fortuitous; it is also unexpected, yet within the space of hours he has begun to prepare Landless for the role of scapegoat for the murder by encouraging a quarrel between the two young men. This side of Jasper plots coldly, swiftly and efficiently.

Landless could not be more apt to Jasper's plans. The very qualities which Landless possesses are those within Jasper which simultaneously he represses and drive him to murder. Landless admits that he is "secret and revengeful. I have always been tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This had driven me, in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean" (90). Jasper, also secretive and vengeful, has in Landless a perfect surrogate for his darker self. Like Bradley Headstone imitating Rogue Riderhood in dress, but in a more elaborate fashion, Jasper finds a vessel towards which he directs suspicion. The doubled murderer has a physical shadow through which he forces a kind of apartness, the ascription of his own homicidal impulses to another. The very terms of complaint with which the argument between Landless and Drood is encouraged, including sexual jealousy, are those resentments which Jasper bears towards his nephew. Jasper, then, begins to represent his own grudges through Neville.

As Neville Landless is groomed by Jasper to act out the part of murderer, the better part of John Jasper may recoil in fear from the very role that he has created for Neville out of his own desires. John Jasper is repulsed by his substitute self, deepening his mental partition. Of course, these admissions further his plans, building a role for Neville, but as Landless represents the violent part of Jasper's personality even to himself, his confessions of fear are genuine confessions. Where Jasper communicates his fear to Crisparkle he does so, curiously, through his diary. The diary, which is normally an intimate and personal document, becomes, in a limited way, pubic because Jasper can express his inner evil only by indicting another:

After what I have just now seen, I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear" boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me. (132)

Replace 'Neville Landless' with 'John Jasper' in this passage, and we have an account of the state of affairs of the mind of its author. The diary entry is both self-analysis and deception. John Jasper, in his doubled self, creates a surrogate figure, a vessel for his own suppressed resentment. This furthers his plans, but the psychological logic of it — a logic which is both rational and irrational to our ordinary understanding — exacerbates his mental split, though we must remember that this split is never absolute but part of a turbulent polarity. This mental state is both "a horrible wonder apart" from the norms of behaviour and a state of apartness. Though coldly planning a murder, Jasper is also a fearful onlooker to his own plans, as personified by him in Neville Landless. It may be that subject to these divisive pressures he can only seek to close the breach in his psyche by going through with the plan, finally uniting himself with the murderer's role he has projected on to Neville Landless. It is Dickens's darkest insight that the fulfilment of his careful preparations only deepens the confusion within John Jasper. By becoming a murderer he is morally set apart from humanity by the very act that sought to correct his apartness.

In the aftermath of the murder John Jasper immediately pursues Neville Landless in order to confront him with the disappearance of Edwin Drood and tirelessly searches the banks of the river for some sign of his nephew (189). He plays the accuser and the distraught uncle to perfection, and it may be that this is more than simple acting. Like Macbeth, for whom to be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus, everything, Jasper now depends on the guilt of Neville and his own innocence — these things are not merely acted but devoutly believed. And yet within hours he is confronted with a devastating revelation, and suffers his most extreme fit so far. The entire futility of his planning and the murder is thrown in his face by Grewgious, who reveals that Rosa and Edwin had called off their engagement. Jasper collapses, unconscious; the killing of Edwin Drood has been superfluous, for nothing. Though Jasper has assumed the part of the outraged uncle, he has also been conscious of his own guilt, and this consciousness is brought heavily upon him by the realisation of the futility of his actions. It is Dickens's supreme artistry that Jasper, like Shakespeare's Macbeth, is driven only to greater and greater extremes by the very act he believed would bring him security. A divided character before the murder, though no simple Jekyll and Hyde automaton, after the murder he is driven to even more extraordinary and contradictory behaviour.

Jasper's first impulse is denial. He cannot deny his complicity in murder, since no one has accused him yet; hence, he can only deny the possibility of murder itself. He insists that the devastating news that has come to him gives him hope that Edwin may yet be alive. He admits openly to a prejudice against Neville Landless, since a belief that Neville is his nephew's killer would contradict his new-found hope. Yet suppressed guilt will find a way out, and Jasper's surrogate vessel for his guilt and denial is Neville. Furthermore, he soon learns that Neville is a potential rival for Rosa's affections. This is another motive to persecute the youth (Forsyte, Decoding 200). Edwin's personal effects are found at Cloisterham weir. It is generally understood that Crisparkle is led to them by some suggestion planted by Jasper, though the evidence for this is sketchy to non-existent. In one sense, Jasper has planned too well: despite his effort to deny the possibility of murder, the suspicion of guilt fastens on Neville even more powerfully. Once again, Jasper executes an extraordinary reversal of behaviour. He now firmly believes in Edwin's murder. Yet he cannot, now that he knows how futile that murder is, admit his own complicity. His apartness becomes a need to assume a variety of dramatic parts. He is a tortured figure, both knowing and willingly unknowing, desperate to play the role of loving uncle and avenger, yet driven to revealing his own complicity. Once again the public-private diary entry, the lie that contains a strange kind of truth, expresses this:

My dear boy is murdered.... All the delusive hopes I have founded on his separation from his betrothed wife, I give to the winds. They perish before this fatal discovery. I now swear and record the oath on this page, That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any human creature, until I hold the clue to it in my hand. That I never relax in my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime of the murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer. And That I devote myself to his destruction. (201)

This oath contains a kind of psychological utility. On the one side, the ironic counter-meaning contains the seeds of Jasper's destruction. On the other, to pin the crime ultimately on Neville is, for Jasper, to rid himself of guilt and, indirectly, to lead to his ultimate aim. But it entails even more bizarre contortions of his character.

In the garden of Miss Twinkleton's ("Shadow on the Sundial"), Jasper plays the lover and villain to exaggerated lengths. His words are wild and over-dramatic, his actions constrained. Jasper is acting out two parts for separate yet simultaneous audiences. In its juxtaposition of the melodramatic actions of the villain and domestic setting, the interval has a Sensation fiction flourish. The entire scene is extreme, but this is because Jasper now operates in an extreme state where his wild fantasies intrude on his daylight behaviour. In his protestations of love to Rosa, Jasper veers perilously close to an outright confession of guilt: "I have made my confession that my love is mad. It is so mad that, had the ties between me and my dear lost boy been one silken thread less strong, I might have swept even him from your side when you favoured him" (229). This is not the confession of a cold and calculating killer, this near admission of guilt. It rises out of the massive fractures in John Jasper's mind: his knowledge of his own guilt and his desperate desire not to be guilty. The same need is evident in his determination to pin the crime on Neville, along with the ironic coda that it is Jasper who, in fact, pursues himself:

'I have devoted myself to the murderer's discovery and destruction, be he who he might, and that 1 determined to discuss the mystery with no one until I should hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as m a net. I have since worked patiently to wind and wind it about him; and it is slowly winding as we speak.' (229)

His apartness is manifest again, as Jasper must be both suspect and accuser. There is another reason why Jasper must make Neville guilty. Only if this is so can he perhaps find the emotional leverage with which to force Rosa to accept him, and only in winning her can he justify the otherwise futile murder of his nephew. His complicated and excessive threats against Neville, meant to influence Rosa, are the only means by which he can win. Of course, Jasper is once again in the grip of fantasy, the same place he entered and re-entered under the influence of opium, but, as he lived out his fantasies in the murder of his nephew, now he must try to live out his fantasies of revenge and expiation in order to win through to an ecstatic triumph.

Naturally, the terrified Rosa can understand none of this. If there is any index to the complexity of the mysteries in the mind of John Jasper, it is the list of desperate questions inspired by his actions in the thoughts of Rosa Bud:

If he were afraid of the crime being traced out, would he not rather encourage the idea of a voluntary disappearance? He had even declared that if the ties between him and his nephew had been less strong, he might have swept 'even him' away from her side. Was that like his having really done so? He had spoken of laying his six months' labours in just vengeance at her feet. Would he have done that, with the violence of passion, if they were a pretence? Would he have ranged them with his desolate heart and soul, his wasted life, his peace, and his despair? (233)

Only by ranging backwards over these questions can the reader gain insight to these mysteries, which show the complex and dynamic patterns in the divided mind of John Jasper. Dickens carefully reminds the reader in this very passage that the criminal intellect is "a horrible wonder apart" which cannot, as Rosa tries to, be reconciled with the "average intellect of average men" (233). In the terrifying excesses and reversals of Jasper's behaviour, we see this affirmed. Jasper is not comprehensible as a simple stock villain or as a static split persona. Neither of these explanations answers to the complexity of the questions his behaviour elicits. Perhaps in the ending that we do not possess, yet which everything hints at, only a further kind of doubling and wonder apart can enable John Jasper to see himself as he is, and close the fatal breach in his personality. Forster wrote that Edwin Drood would end with "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" (qtd. in Thacker 60).

Such a resolution is compatible with the psychological conditions so far outlined in John Jasper's murderous career, but it depends not merely on the disposition of character but the resolution of a complex plot.

The Murderer's Plotting and the Providential Plot

O'Mealy expresses the more common attitude to Dickens's plotting when he writes that, "Dickens's plots rarely represent more than a minor facet of the genius we call Dickensian" (129). While character is a powerful consideration in reading Edwin Drood, we are not reading coherently without reading for the plot. For our understanding of Jasper's motives derives from the clues of his actions, and his actions are clearly directed towards one end. John Jasper is, fundamentally, a creature of plot: he is a character who plots (in the murderous and planning sense) and it is his plotting, and the consequences of his plotting, which command much of the fascination of the novel. But there is, nonetheless, an agency that works against John Jasper, a counterplot that operates against the grain of his plotting. There are points of resistance, of course, in all the characters who work against John Jasper, from the detective figure Datchery to Rosa Bud (who evades Jasper by running away from him). These form the moral core of good characters who eventually come to suspect and then oppose him. In the novel's last, ominous gestures, we can but assume that Jasper will ultimately be captured and defeated. Some greater force than these characters also operates in Edwin Drood. This is the force of providence. As Sapsea observes, '"Man proposes. Heaven disposes'" (66). The sentiment may seem pompous in the mouth of this comic figure, but the phrase is formulaic, virtually a truism to the Victorian frame of mind, and this indicates the prevalence of what Vargish called the "providential aesthetic" in Victorian fiction. Jasper rebels against the moral order and assiduously plans his murder, but a greater power than he plans against him, and so creates the circumstance of his destruction. Providence, plotting and psychological necessity are closely aligned here.

John Jasper, pre-eminently, plots. Seeking the transformation of fantasy into reality, first through opium visions and then through action, he plans and arranges matters towards this end. No Droodist "solution" which seeks to exonerate Jasper can convincingly deal with the range of his efforts: he foments a quarrel between Neville and Edwin, cultivates the aid and influence of Sapsea, and carefully reconnoiters the scene of the murder-to-be, Cloisterham Cathedral, from its crypt to its tower. Such gestures are enigmatic. For the reader at first reading, they are both ominous and strangely inexplicable — it is only the completion of the double-narrative which will place the fullness of their meaning in om hands. As Dickens wrote in his notes for the chapter "A Night with Durdles," the aim was to "Lay the ground for the manner of the Murder, to come out at last" (Working Notes 387). In the first place, it is Jasper who carefully prepares for murder, securing his access to the tower and a hiding place for the body, and going so far as to partly enact the murder itself by half throttling the street-imp Deputy. The preceding chapter is "Smoothing the Way," that is, as Dickens writes in his notes, "for Jasper's plan" (Working Notes 387). But the phrase "Lay the ground" is now familial": Dickens used the same words when speaking of the plotting for A Tale of Two Cities, in a rather different context. "The business of art is to lay all that ground carefully, not with the care that conceals itself... but only to suggest until the fulfillment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which all art is but a little imitation" (Letters to Wilkie Collins 95). Yet where Alexandre Manette's secrets are prepared for and revealed, so too was the purpose and meaning of Jasper's plotting to be eventually uncovered. In a novel in which the character plots, the author creates a narrative plot, and this plotting is conceived of in conscious imitation of providence. Informing the narrative is providence, God's plotting. The novel of mystery and detection is commonly thought of as being pre-eminently concerned with plot, but the plot that Dickens plays with here is not merely the enclosed plot of John Jasper, but the greater divine plot that encompasses him, and this is a providential plot.

The mysterious relationship between human choice and divine ordering is a complex one. Sapsea may fear having advanced his wife's demise through over-stimulating her, but Jasper replies that "he 'supposes it was to be'" (66). In some cases, chance seems to advance the murderer's course. Jasper has no way of anticipating the Landless's arrival, or that Neville will be a perfect scapegoat. The storm which provides cover for his murder is purely fortuitous (for him). On the other hand, human intention is profoundly circumscribed by circumstances. Jasper, for all of his abilities, has an inadequate career. The family histories of the Buds and Droods are married by tragedies, drowning, accidental deaths. Their intentions, in terms of the proposed engagement between Edwin and Rosa, are not fulfilled. Human beings enjoy freedom of choice, even the freedom to murder, but the outcome is not determinable. The victim is given an opportunity to save himself, in the form of a warning (179), yet he chooses to ignore or misinterpret this, and so goes to his death. To this complex mesh of choice, chance and providence, there are no apparent answers. Like Grewgious observing the stars, we cannot interpret that future that is designed by God's providence:

his gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet — or seem likely to, in this state of existence — and few languages can be mastered until the alphabets are mastered. (216)

The fixed pattern of the stars is the fixed pattern of providence, but that pattern is not legible to the human observer in this stage of existence. Thus, both chance and choice can seem to be part of a wider design. Though it is possible neither to predict nor enforce the future, it is possible to discern within the novel the working of a divine providence.

Out of the tragic circumstances of the older generation comes the planned engagement between Edwin and Rosa, and the ring which is a token of that pact. Though the intention of the engagement is, perhaps, a futile attempt to control the future, it is conceived of not punitively (as the Harmon Will is) but as a hopeful project, with no absolute binding power. Nevertheless, the ring represents the characters' faith in providence. It is a symbol of the trust that Grewgious repeatedly emphasises, and a symbol of fidelity between the living and the dead. '"Your placing it on her finger,' said Mr Grewgious, 'will be the solemn seal upon your strict fidelity to the living and the dead'" (145). By putting their faith in the past and the possibility of the future, the characters put their faith in a beneficial design. It is the trust implicit in the giving and holding of this ring which brings out the best in both Rosa and Edwin. Otherwise immature characters, who tend in their relationship to childish arguments, the decision engendered by the ring, the serious choice not to marry, brings out the better, more mature aspects of their characters: "The relations between them did not look wilful, or capricious, or a failure, in such a light; they became elevated into something more self-denying, honourable, affectionate, and true" (165). So Edwin, retaining the ring to return to Grewgious, paradoxically holds to the trust between past and future, and shows his fidelity to providence.

The ring is among his personal effects when he is murdered, but it is not one of those items so exactly catalogued by Jasper. Nor is it found by Crisparkle at the weir. It still accompanies the body and thus, as a unique object, it will identify the corpse. Having already emerged unscathed from the death by drowning of one owner, it will similarly emerge, uncorrupted, from the quicklime which now conceals Edwin Drood's remains (Though Dickens's belief that quicklime will destroy a human corpse is, in fact, erroneous). Edwin's keeping of the ring is a providential choice and the culmination of a complex chain of circumstances. Its power, in this case, is absolutely decisive.

Edwin's decision is the choice of a moment, but also laden with the entirety of his responsibility to the past:

Let them be. Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are forever forging, day and night, in the vast Ironworks of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag. (169)

Dickens's view of providence is profound and universal. This "small conclusion" is set among a "mighty store of wonderful chains." Trivial of itself, it is a vital point in the plot, a chance decision which is not merely chance but driven by a mysterious providence. Minor, yet of monumental importance, it expresses the paradox of God's mystery, His infinite care for the slightest detail. Its potential force is a gift which, like grace, cannot be earned but is divinely given. Its power to "hold and drag" is equal to the strength of divine justice, and its object will be John Jasper.

Already we have seen Jasper's repeated assertions of his determination to track down the killer, as in the oath he shows to Grewgious. The oath has an overt value as part of his charade as loving and outraged uncle, but it also has a psychological utility in the insight it affords to his guilty and haunted consciousness. There is also a dramatic irony in this oath, for in the end Jasper will hold the essential clue, the ring, in his hands, and at that moment the entire truth will emerge. As he himself foreshadows, he will not cease "until I should hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net" (229). This projection is, of course, merely speculative, but the weight given to the ring and Jasper's oath in the text justify the reader's expectations. At one point, with this object, someone, probably Helena Landless, will elicit a confession from John Jasper. The murderer will prove to have hounded down and trapped himself. Providence will contain and overmaster all of his effort, co-opting Jasper in his own confession. Like Bradley Headstone, who in his desperation to secure all forms of possible discovery unconsciously leaves one route to his guilt open, Jasper's very intensity in the chase will prove his destruction. (The relationship between the plot, Providence and Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend will be dealt with fully in the next chapter). This ending exists only speculatively, in the reader's imagination, and there is no opportunity here to delineate its details, even if that were possible, but our consciousness that something like this must happen, a sense that is grounded in our readerly understanding of the imperatives of narrative, is undeniable. In the end, then, despite the supremacy of his murder plot, it is providence which plots against John Jasper and defeats him. John Jasper, seeking freedom by corrupt means, only manages to ensnare himself within a web of choices and circumstances which he will not be able to escape. Providence is not always explicable, but there is a moral inevitability in the forces that will eventually close around the murderer.

This may be the moment foreshadowed in the opening and marked by Dickens in his working notes as the "key note 'When the Wicked Man'---" (383). The keynote, as in a theme in music, suggests Jasper's eventual confession and redemption, the confession that may be the only way out of the fearsome, self imposed binarism, the apartness, of loving uncle and killer. Just as the ring survived the corruption of the body to return to the hand of the murderer as a token of an ineradicable truth, so too the innate goodness of Jasper (whose name, after all, denotes a kind of precious stone) may survive the evil that he commits — the ring becomes a symbol of his immortal soul, and the loving providence that redeems it. Fusco has suggested that John Jasper will not repent (69-70, 79), yet there is already a trace of regret or compassion in his realisation of the true nature of murder m his last visit to the opium den, that suggests a possible repentance, or at least compassion for his victim: '"Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is! That must be real" (271). Whether Jasper refers to the corpse or the act of murder itself, his comment implies sorrow and recognition of its final futility. Comparison with earlier Dickens novels may be illuminating, but just as Jasper is a more sensitive character than Bradley Headstone, we might reasonably anticipate some new development in Dickens's patterning. In the "keynote" Dickens suggests that Jasper may repent, and near' the end of the novel he begins to see the truth of his actions. With the ring in hand, this realisation may become complete.

John Thacker has suggested that the ring also represents the immutable truths of Christian beliefs, submerged in but not destroyed by the distorting body of dogma: "There may well have been an intended and symbolic parallel between the jewel on Drood's body surviving burial and the eternal truth of (Dickens's) Christianity surviving men's efforts to bury it under layers of dogma, ritual, sect and so on, the burial place of each being the Cathedral" (111). The suggestion is enlightening, but Thacker is right to see the religious theme as only one thread in the entire tapestry of the work. The Cathedral, though an important setting for the novel, is not developed as a mysterious institution as, for instance, the Court of Chancery and the Circumlocution Office are. The ring's value as a clue, or symbol, of a buried truth is more than its status as a token of Christian doctrine, for the very eternity of the ring and the truths it represents are also, as Grewgious notes, a bitter comment on the shallow temporality of life: "1 might imagine that the lasting beauty of these stones was almost cruel'" (144).

The providence invested in the ring can bring about justice but not prevent murder. In its almost cruel persistence, the ring represents an uneasy point of negotiation between the processes of life and death. And thus the ring also demonstrates the displacing effect of secularisation, since the moment of providentially determined insight will also be the instant that the secular murder plot is solved. The engagement ring is both a token of love and clue to a murder. Its rediscovery in the Sapsea crypt may symbolically enact the revival of truth in the Cathedral from beneath the weight of dogma and cant, but its significance is broader based than this.

Throughout Edwin Drood, the processes of life and death, eternity and temporality, the divine and secular, sit uneasily together. The Cathedral, like Cloisterham, rests upon the world of the dead. Thus, city and Cathedral become stifling, and good characters must flee the tiny town to escape its strictures or else, like Jasper, become prey to their own evil impulses. Yet Dickens also powerfully suggests that a resumption of natural processes can reconcile these oppositions, and that life can arise out of death. The justly famous passage, written only a few hour's before the author's death, illustrates this:

A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lasting ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy an*. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, song of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields — or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm, and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble comers of the building, fluttering there like wings. (278)

The light still strikes on tombs, and the air merely subdues, and does not obliterate, the earthy odour of death. The gardens outside are still filled with the dust of lost abbots and abbesses. But in the processes of nature, in movement and in change, rest the eternal truths of providence, immutable as a jewel. Mystery illuminates where it darkens, and sometimes forms shadows where it is illuminated. The final mystery at work through the plot of Edwin Drood is the mystery of providence.

Concluding a Mystery

A faith in providence and divine justice resembles the reader's faith that, in the unwritten end to Edwin Drood, all will be well and the murderer discovered. In the last gestures of the novel, as light penetrates the Cathedral, darker forces, observed by Datchery, close in around John Jasper:

Mr Datchery looks again to convince himself. Yes, again! As ugly and withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under brackets of the stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One, as hard as the big brass eagle holding the sacred books upon his wings... [Princess Puffer] hugs herself in her lean arms, and shakes both fists at the leader of the choir. (279)

The demon that John Jasper has carved out of his own soul takes form in order to threaten and incriminate him. Like Datchery, the reader feels in this gesture the beginning of revelation, the edge of truth. But Edwin Drood stops here; there is nothing more. We sense that at this point, if we could only interpret, put all the clues in their place, we would know how the novel ends. Thus, Edwin Drood is unfinished but complete, and thus the Droodist impulse to root out all die clues and place them in then-context is only an exaggerated form of the certainties and speculations of all possible readers of Edwin Drood. But Droodist criticism also attempts to draw Edwin Drood into the complex of detective fiction without considering Dickens's resistance to overly elaborate construction, his preference for suggestion over concealment, and his interest in the constitution of the criminal intellect. We can, in the power of the double-narrative, see the novel as influential in the development of detective fiction. Edwin Drood, following from The Moonstone, in its development of a singular crime or enigma, marks the point of termination of the sprawling, multiple mysteries of the novel of urban mystery. Yet we must set aside the elaboration of mechanical mysteries to peer into the metaphysical mysteries of the criminal mind. When Edwin Drood is finished, we may at last win through to an understanding of the fascinating, baffling consciousness of John Jasper, a mind which 1 have argued is both doubled and unified, torn apart and self-conscious, a superb representation of the psychology of the murderer as something beyond normal human understanding. John Jasper, out of his dark impulses, plots. Though the weight of interest is in the complex presentation of this character, we cannot ignore the dependency of this representation on considerations of plot. As John Jasper plots murder, providence plots against John Jasper, ironically laying the ground for his capture and repentance. That ground is visible to us only as a suggestion, as territory sensed rather than seen. It is a mark like that which Datchery makes: "he opens his comer-cupboard door; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard-door to the bottom" (280). If we could only decipher that enigmatic score, know what it represents, then we would know the ending of Edwin Drood. Like the ring, it is evidence of an eternal truth, waiting to be recovered, a clue which is not the truth itself but only its token, demanding that it be read with fidelity. With this ambiguous sign, The Mystery of Edwin Drood ends.