One thing, at least, everyone is agreed upon: John Jasper is a mesmerist. This is the earliest, and possibly still the only, discovery (as distinct from a mere speculation) ever made about Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

J. W. Wilson seems to have been the first to hit on it. In a brief none to The Dickensian, he calls attention to Jasper’s relations with the young girl, Rosa, in which he rather seems to have hypnotized her, in the common meaning of that word, and, more particularly, to the scene in the garden in which Jasper, proposing to Rosa, lays some figurative sacrifices at her feet, “each time with an action of his hands as though he cast down something precious”. The illustration drawn by S. L. Fildes for the first edition depicts this action: Jasper is shown with his arms extended before the cowering girl, a posture, observes Wilson, not unlike that of a mesmerist passing the magnetic fluid.

Shortly after this, the Cambridge scholar Henry Jackson noted that there is an incident in the story which unmistakably shows the presence of animal magnetism: the brief passage in which Mr. Crisparkle, much preoccupied in his mind and not much heading the direction his steps are tending, takes a memorable night walk to the weir near Cloisterham.

“How did I come here?” was his first thought, as he stopped.

“Why did I come here?” was his second.

Then, he stood intently listening to the water. A familiar passage in his reading, about airy tongues that syllable men’s names, rose so unbidden to his ear, tint he put it from him with his hand, as if it were tangible.

It is difficult now to see how anyone could have mistaken this; especially, as the investing of water with the magnetic fluid had always been a popular feat of the mesmerists. Today it is generally accepted that Jasper has “willed” Crisparkle to go to the weir, so that he may discover there the watch and shirt-pin of the missing Edwin Drood, with the result of further incriminating the much harassed Neville Landless.

“John Jasper, mesmerist”. That is how the matter stood in its entirety until 1922, when Aubrey Boyd published his monograph, “A New Angle on the Drood Mystery”. What Boyd did was to connect this element (which some readers had always thought out of place in a story otherwise pleasantly domestic) with a passage whimsically descriptive of the prim schoolmistress, 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 drink, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. "

This was very promising. It opened up possibilities. Because, as everyone knew, Dickens had told his friend John Forster that the uniqueness of his story was to consist in “the review of the murderer’s career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man were the tempted”.

John Jasper, then (so hinted Aubrey Boyd), has two separate identities and has committed the crime, the murder of his nephew Edwin Drood, as Someone Else. Boyd went on to suggest, tentatively, that Jasper the mesmerist would meet his nemesis in Helena Landless, Neville’s sister, who has been presented to the reader as resolute and strong and contemptuously defiant of him.

Edmund Wilson later took up these ideas and, malting them more explicit, gave them a much wider circulation in his famous essay, “Dickens: The Two Scrooges”; his personal contribution being the theory that Jasper’s other identity is a state induced by the smoking of opium; that in that other state he is a member of the murderous Hindu sect of Thuggee and has murdered his nephew ritualistically; that before he could confess the crime, he would have to take opium to put himself back into that state: that he cannot be made to take opium and so the strong-willed Helena is to come to the rescue and hypnotize him. Obviously, there is a good deal of carpentering going on here, but the essential part of the notion—that Jasper has a double consciousness—has passed from Wilson’s essay into general literary acceptance. It is encountered in many books and essays on Dickens, where it is set down as an almost self-evident fact and a very significant one—for wasn’t the author too a man divided against himself? Wilson makes this last thought a vital and somewhat astonishing part of his own reading of Dickens’s character; for he concludes that Dickens died, leaving his story unfinished, so as to evade the necessary final confrontation of the two halves of John Jasper, which are the fictive projections of the two halves of himself.

What is most plainly wrong with these of Wilson and, though to a lesser extent, Boyd, is that they misunderstand Dickens’s conception of animal magnetism (he seldom called it mesmerism), representing it as more grossly mechanical than it was. His philosophy of animal magnetism owed as much to a general psychology of the type articulated by David Hume and others, as it did to Mesmer. The key word in this psychology was not Will but Sympathy. That is, Dickens, like the others of his time, thought that before one person could magnetize another, there had to exist between them some marked degree of sympathy or moral accordance.

His mesmeric friend, Chauncey Hare Townshend, author of Facts in Mesmerism (1841), theorized about the matter at some length. Noting that there was not only “an occasional community of notion” between the magnetist and his subject, but that the latter frequently experienced the sensations of the magnetist, he concluded that there was “an identification of the vital and nervous systems of the two parties”, resulting in a complete “sympatl1y”. The magnetist, himself, it is true, did not share the others sensations, but this was because he was not himself in the mesmeric state: “there was union, but not reciprocity”.

The author of The Animal Magnetizer (“By a Physician”, also 1341) put it more succinctly:

In order that one individual should act upon another, it is necessary that there should be a moral and physical sympathy between them, and when this sympathy is produced, we say that the parties are in perfect communication ...

Magnetism can be conveyed to great distances when persons are in perfect communication.

(So Dickens, in a letter to James T. Fields, February 15^th, 1869, refers amiably to “a remarkable instance of magnetic sympathy” in that he had the other in mind at the same time that Fields, in America, was thinking of him: an example of communication over great distances)

In short, this melodrama of wills—the conflict of wills, strong wills dominating weaker ones—is part of the popular mythology of modern hypnotism and has little connection with animal magnetism, as it was understood by Dickens and most of his acquaintances. “Hypnotism” has a built-in principle of antagonism and conflict which would have dismayed them. Their animal magnetism was a more friendly and less strenuous thing. Even, for example, in the actual mesmeric situation, where one person magnetizes another and gives him commands, there was not much talk of “submission”: rather, it was said that in the magnetic union the magnetist was “active” and the other “passive”. The kind of weight Will was thought to have (by Dickens, at lust) might he inferred from the degree of success which the Svengali-like Jasper has with his singing-pupil Rosa. His “force of purpose” undoubtedly is stronger than hers, but his influence overher is fragmentary and largely negative. We may guess that he would have had no success were it not for a subliminal erotic response on her part—in other words, a physical sympathy, morbid because it doesn’t have the acquiescence of her moral being.

It follows that we should pay particular attention to any instance of sympathy in the story, beating in mind that sympathy was understood to consist not only in liking but in likeness, in resemblance. The most easily-recognizable such instance is, of course, that “complete understanding ... though no spoken word, perhaps hardly as much as a look, may have passed,” which exists between Neville Landless and his twin sister, Helena. This is not much emphasized, it is given no supernormal coloring, and is passed over by most readers as a touch of character as it has no apparent connection with the workings of the plot; but it establishes the existence of sympathy (though not magnetic sympathy, as such) in the moral landscape of the story. The word sympathy itself is avoided, but there are synonyms, such as “agreement”, “accordance”, “harmony”, and others less obvious. When the old lawyer Grewgious asks his ward Rosa if she corresponds with her fiancé, Edwin Drood, she answers, “We write to one another”. To which he replies, “Such is the meaning that I attach to the word ‘correspond’ in this application, my dear,” his ear failing to catch in her quibble the hint that the young couple are incompatible.

But it is particularly where Jasper is concerned that we must be alert to any mention or evidence of sympathy. Dickens is very explicit as to the choirmaster’s lack of bonds with the rest of mankind: though “exercising an Art which brought him into mechanical harmony with others ... the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or interchange with nothing around him.” And he is very cautious as to imputing sympathy of any sort, however momentary, on the part of Jasper with another person. For instance, there is a passage in the manuscript in which the stonemason Durdles complains of the cold in the cathedral: “ ‘It is a bitter cold place,’ Mt. Jasper assents, with a sympathetic shiver”; but the author caught the slip before it reached the printed text and changed the last phrase to “with an antipathetic shiver”.

The reason for this caution is plain. Whoever is like Jasper, or much in agreement with him, is his ally, accomplice or spiritual kinsman of one sort or another.

But this poses a problem when we consider Mr. Crisparkle’s trip to the weir under the magnetic prompting of Jasper—which is, How is it possible? If the magnetic influence depends upon sympathy, upon some sort of physical or moral correspondence between the parties, how can John Jasper, that “bad, bad man”, as Rosa calls him, magnetize that good man, Mr. Crisparkle, into doing anything?

It will be recalled that the walk follows the interview in Jasper’s chambers between Jasper and Crisparkle, in which the former, seemingly sincere, discharged himself of certain unworthy suspicions against young Landless, whom Mr. Crisparkle had befriended and championed. “This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much. He felt that he was not as open in his own dealing,” because he had suppressed mention of Neville’s infatuation with Rosa and of his second outburst of anger against Drood. “However, here was a model before him.” He imitates Jasper’s action and unburdens his breast likewise. And in this moment of seeming mutual frankness and mutual relenting—in short, of apparent mutual confidence—he and Jasper are in something like rapport.

So “it fell out that hit. Crisparkle, going away from this conference, still very uneasy in his mind ... took a memorable night walk. He walked to Cloisterham Weir.” Jasper is able to guide him so far only because there is no serious resistance to the magnetic prompting. “He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable in his footsteps tending that way. But the preoccupation of his mind so hindered him from planning any walk ... that his first consciousness of being near the Weir was derived from the sound of falling water close at hand.” It is then that he senses the “airy tongues that syllable men’s names,” the source of which is a passage in Comus, followed by these lines—

“These thoughts may startle well, but not astound

The vertuous mind, that ever walks attended

By a strong siding champion, Conscience.”

In short, Jasper can have no serious magnetic influence over Crisparkle, because the sympathy between them can never be more than superficial. But Jasper has accomplished his purpose. The minor canon’s weird errand to the weir, made possible by Jasper’s “artful turn” in falsely laying open his mind and heart, is a major turning point in the story: for the discovery of the watch and shirt-pin precipitates the case against Neville Landless.

“Like takes to like,” says Mr. Crisparkle, “and youth takes to youth,” explaining to his mother why they should invite Edwin Drood to meet the newcomers, Helena and Neville Landless. He adds as a matter of course, “We can’t think of asking “him without asking Jasper,” and so opens the way for an application of his formula, “like takes to like,” that he hasn’t foreseen.

This young man, Neville Landless, is slyly proud, easily wounded, violent in his anger. He quarrels with Edwin Drood, resenting Drood’s light treatment of him. Jasper invites the two to his rooms for a stirrup-cup, ostensibly to smooth over the matter, but he muses the quarrel to break out afresh, more violently than before, by his sly probing of Neville’s wound. Speaking in a tone of bantering raillery, he insists on the likeness of Landless and himself, in that they, unlike the golden youth Edwin, have before them no stirring prospects of exciting work, domestic ease and love, but only “the tedious, unchanging round of this dull place.” Under further provocation, Landless gives expression to a murderous rage, though in a somewhat ineffectual form, and clashes from the place. Returning to Mt. Crisparkle’s house, where he is quartered, he confesses his ill beginning. Jasper appears shortly afterward with Neville’s hat and describes in an exaggerated tone the late fracas; but his phrases descriptive of it and Neville’s character are so similar to expressions that Neville has used already in private confidence that Crisparkle is much struck by them.

Mr. Crisparkle urges a reconciliatory meeting between Neville and Drood, and his pupil, though he has found fresh reasons for bearing a grudge against Drood, agrees. “What may be in your heart,” says Crisparkle, “when you give him your hand, can only be known to the Searcher of all hearts; but it will never go well with you if there be any treachery there.” To which Neville gives a rather curious reply, saying that he pledges to do his best out of his “innermost heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!” Crisparkle hears no hollow echo in this. He is satisfied with Neville’s earnestness and is assured of his innocence after Drood’s mysterious disappearance, following the dinner party in which the two were to be reconciled. So much so, that he tells a detractor of Neville, somewhat forgetting his own previous words, that “I knew” —the emphasis is his—“I was in full possession and understanding of Mr. Neville’s mind and heart at the time of this occurrence.”

And the reader is equally confident that he knows the mind and heart of Mr. Neville, for the events immediately following the disappearance of Drood are described as they appear to Landless—who had left Cloisterham on a walking trip—as he is tracked down, seized, and confronted with the fact of Drood’s disappearance. It is true that we are shown very little of what is passing in his thoughts (the apparent situation would not call for it), although he is depicted near the beginning of the chapter as sitting in the sanded parlor of the Tilted Wagon “wondering in how long a time after he had gone, the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm”—hardly the preoccupation of a murderer, we would think. Nothing awakens any suspicion in our breasts. We need hardly bother to assert his innocence, Jasper’s guilt is so evident. And we are casually confident that we fully understand what little there is to understand when we come upon a passage such as this:

“It would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed with horror and amazement: Neville Landless, or John Jasper. Bur that Jasper’s position forced him to be active, while Neville’s forced him to be passive, there would have been nothing to choose between them.”

Especially, as Dickens has added a further short sentence: “Each was bowed down and broken.”

There is, in fact, less to choose between them, even in broader areas, than one might have thought at first. Their life-situations, as Jasper has remarked, are somewhat similar particularly as contrasted with Drood; and both respond to the situation and the contrast in similar, though not identical, ways. Landless indulges himself in an obstinate anger against Drood, just as Jasper secretly feeds upon a cooler but more intense hatred of the young man. Landless’s envy is encouraged and his anger sustained when he finds himself in love with Drood‘s fiancee, just as Jasper justifies his actions by the “madness” of his love for the girl. In short, Landless, in his less schooled and less premeditated way, behaves like the close-watching choirmaster in his. And it is this sympathy, we must conclude—for to observe the sympathy is to the alliance—it is this sympathy which enables the demoniacal Jasper to magnetize Landless into assisting him with the murder of Edwin Drood.

This recognition greatly alters our consciousness of what is happening in the story. Even those things which before seemed most plainly of a surface sort are discovered in this new light to afford some perspective. Consider, for example, the familiar matter of the discovery of the watch and shirt-pin. Our first thought is that Jasper has placed these items in the weir himself, but there is an objection to that: which is, that he hardly seems to have had any opportunity for doing so. Drood had had his watch wound at the jewellers on the evening of his disappearance and much weight is to this the next day, as it was the jewellers authoritative opinion that it had never been re-wound and that it had run down before being thrown into the water. In other words, the watch could have been thrown away only after Neville was overtaken the next morning and brought back to Cloisterham. It was in someone’s possession all that while. But Jasper, during the subsequent period when Neville “had been seen wandering about on that side of the city—indeed on all sides of it—in a miserable and seemingly half-distracted manner,” was, with a great show of industry and desperation leading the search for Drood’s body along the river towards the marshes and the sea; that is, on the opposite side of the town from the weir. There is nothing in the wording that absolutely precludes the possibility that he could have stolen the time to make a skulking expedition to the weir, but the clear implication of the paragraphs describing the search is that he is among the other searchers the whole time: a day, a night, and a clay again, before he drags himself home at last, unpretendingly exhausted.

These circumstantial arguments could be extended and multiplied quite easily. But the real reason for suspecting that it was Landless who disposed of the articles and not Jasper is of quite a different order. It is that his hiding the watch (“and shirt-pin”—this being a deflection) is so suggestively a part of the separate consciousness plot: “If I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where.” We suspect that Landless, wandering in that “seemingly half-distracted manner,” found the occasion, under the sympathetic prompting of Jasper, to rid himself of the articles. We pause over one doubt, however, which is that the second half of the equation, “... I must be drunk again before I can remember where,” seems to be left hanging, without any effective realization in action.

It will be remembered, though, that Drood had something of him other than his watch and shirt-pin to which the formula might apply, something which no one, including John Jasper and Neville Landless, knew he had on him. This was the “ring of diamonds and rubies delicately set in gold,” given to him by Grewgious. It was this ring (so said John Forster, in the paragraph in which he sets out his little store of information about the book) which was to seal the fate of the murderer by resisting the action of the quicklime in which the body had been placed. Various commentators, acting on this suggestion, have conjectured an ending to the story in which Jasper, learning that Drood had had the ring upon his person and having his reasons for not wishing the body to be identified by it, rushes to recover it from the plane of concealment, and is apprehended in doing so. But there would be no more reason for Jasper to go and fetch the ring himself than there would have been for him to have fetched the watch from the weir himself.

This thought is supported by something Jasper says to Rosa in his interview with her in the garden. He threatens her with a kind of power he holds over the safety of Landless, a power which apparently consists only in his tireless pursuit of the young man and his implacable determination to fix the blame for Drood’s disappearance upon him. He has good reason, of course, to insist on Landless’s guilt; his problem is to prove that guilt to others without incriminating himself. It would seem from his persecutory watching of Landless that he does not have at hand the evidence he needs; but, “one wanting link,” he tells Rosa, “discovered by perseverance proves his guilt, however slight its evidence before and he dies.” The phrase “one wanting link” hints what the evidence will turn out to be. It is a faint echo of the impressive language descriptive of Drood’s decision, on parting from Rosa, not to cell her that he has such a ring in his breast pocket, a decision which is strangely likened to the forging of a chain, one of those “wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time and circumstance.”

To make explicit, then, what seems to be implicit in all this: When Jasper learns of the existence of the ring, he doesn’t hurry to snatch it back in propia persona, but sends his sleeping partner to recover it; himself, perhaps, being on hand (in company with his dupe, the magistrate Sapsea?) to catch Landless in the act. This, I think, was to have been the catastrophe, the fateful reversal in the last chapters of the story, the discovery which was to bring everything crashing down about Mr. Crisparkle and the other sympathetic characters—the irrefragable proof of Neville’s guilt.

We know that one of the things Dickens had planned for The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a trip, in company with his illustrator Fildes, to Maidstone, or some other jail, so that Fildes could make a drawing of a condemned cell there “and do something better than Cruikshank”; in reference, of course, to Cruikshank’s drawing in Oliver Twist, showing the distraught and maddened Fagin in the condemned cell on the night before his execution. “Surely this,” remarked Fildes to W. R. Hughes, who tells the story in A Week’s Tramp is Dickensland, points to our witnessing the condemned culprit Jasper in his cell before he met his fate.” No, not surely. The only sure thing it points to is the emphasis the author was to give the scene, the intensity of effect he was to try for in his last chapters. The weak and passive Landless is much better equipped than Jasper for the production of such a strong effect. It would have to be Landless who was to recount the crime “as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.”

But how was this to be worked? We might think that he, somehow, is simply to be “put into” that other self, but that is contradictory. It is true he would know then, but in that state he is the criminal and even if he could be brought to confess he would not do so “as if ... some other man” were the perpetrator. What such a description implies is a transition phase between the two states: the sets of the other are perceived and remembered, but are not accepted as one’s own. Something like this is described in a brief passage in the story, “An Experience,” by Emily Jolly, which Dickens published in his magazine All the Year Round shortly before beginning work on Drood, and which he praised to several persons in a way that has been thought extravagant. The guilty narrator of the story, recovering from a dangerous illness, writes:

“For some time after I had got on a good way towards recovery, I talked and thought of myself as “that sick man”; seemed to watch what was done to me, as if it were being done to some other person.

When this phase cleared off, the sense of relief was not unmixed: for I had so laboriously to take myself to myself again—to learn that that sick man’s history was mine, that his memories were mine, his remorses mine, that I often groaned with the labour of it.”

I would claim for these lines a greater relevance to The Mystery of Edwin Drood than appears immediately, marked as that relevance would seem to be; for I believe they were written by Dickens and not by Miss Jolly. He had told his daughter Mamie that he had added a little something to the second part of the story, but didn’t tell her what, leaving it as a mystery for her (and us) to solve. He said that it was not a mere tum of phrase but something definitely altering the story as he found it, but not, it would seem, greatly altering it. He added that it was not the ending. The only element which would seem to satisfy the conditions of the puzzle, something striking enough to stand out as a thing of interest in itself, yet not inescapably a part of the basic conception, consists of these two paragraphs.

The equivalent passage in Edwin Drood would have to be much elaborated and extended. For one thing, there would be that third-person flashback narration of the events of the fatal night. Landless would reveal thus, indirectly, what portion of the material guilt, to call it such, belonged to him and what to Jasper. (The division of labor is indicated, or so we may guess, by the accessories each had upon him that evening: Landless carried a heavy walking stick, of ironwood and Jasper wore a large black knitted scarf.) The next retreating step in Landless’s disavowal of responsibility for the crime would be his accusation of Jasper. “It was he who made me do this thing. Jasper was the tempter, the evil one. His is the moral guilt. Mine was but the hand that struck, the foot that left the imprint.” Here it would be the minor Canon’s hard task to convince Neville of his own responsibility. For unless he acknowledges his guilt, he cannot repent. And if he doesn’t repent, he cannot—in the words of the biblical passage (Ezekiel, 18, xxvii) alluded to in the first chapter and to which Dickens refers in his cryptic manuscript jottings as the “keynote” of the story— “save his soul alive.”

Landless’s slow and agonized acceptance of all this would be a new and untried kind of pathos and Dickens would have made a good deal of it. The success of such an effect, we see in retrospect, depends largely upon preventing the reader from recognizing the seriousness of what is being shown him of Landless’s character and actions. To do this, Dickens brings other story-lines prominently to the fore: Jasper’s plot against Drood, which develops up until the end of the fourth monthly number; after Drood’s disappearance, there is the mystery of the identity of the white-haired stranger, Datchery (“an interest suspended until the end,” he told James T. Fields). The surfaces of both of these plots, which together constitute what might be called “the foreground story,” are worked over with various minor mysteries and puzzles. He means for the reader to exercise his speculative faculties upon such questions as whether Edwin Drood is alive or dead; whether his body is concealed in Mrs. Sapsea’s tomb; whether the boy Deputy witnessed the interment; whether the old woman is to play some major part in Jasper’s downfall; whether the mysterious stranger is a disguised Helena, Buzzard, Neville Landless, or even Edwin Drood—in short, upon those very things that have occupied his attention and inspired his ingenious speculations for almost a century. And all for the purpose of diverting attention from the other story developing in the background: the truer, the more ironic and more pathetic story of Neville Landless. He called this process, which he had used before on more than one occasion, “dividing the reader’s thoughts.” We are not being too subtle, I think, to see it as an attempt to produce in the reader a state analogous to that division of mind in Neville Landless himself.

We may go so far as to say that there is a sense in which it is not Dickens’s purpose to deceive the reader. But he must prevent him from realizing fully what he already knows in fact, until the fateful moment. This is so that when the truth is finally and unmistakably revealed, Mr. Crisparkle’s admonitions to Landless will be found, with the force of discovery, to have been wise and viable. His warning words on duty and the proper application of pride are merely conventional sentiments at first, but the experience and the suffering prove them. In the beginning, they are maxims; in the end, they become philosophy.