Unfinished at his death in 1870, Dickens’ last novel, a murder mystery, remained a fragment. John Jasper, a choirmaster, lives in a world between the monotony of the "drowsy city" Cloisterham’s everyday life and the exotic visions of his opium dreams. No one knows of Jasper‘s opium addiction and his trips to the opium dens of London, because the choirmaster keeps a very law-abiding demeanor. Nevertheless, underneath this apparently common appearance lurks another, darker self. That Dickens draws in this story on opium to provide Jasper with an altered state of consciousness, may likely have risen from the author’s own experience with the drug. In his last years, Dickens took laudanum regularly to find relief from his neuralgia. Others as well had made a connection between opium induced dreams and mesmeric trance, and Thomas de Quincey had drawn the Victorians‘ interest to the effects of opium on the mind by the extensive account of his opium addiction in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. So Jasper‘s double consciousness, although the effect of a drug, is only a variance of the traumatic experiences of Manette and the haunting memories of Redlaw. The Mystery of Edwin Drood contains another case study, this time of the criminal mind. However. The choirmaster is not only the entranced subject, but also a mesmeric operator. Hardly any other of Dickens’ characters is so much the evil, manipulative mesmerist that John Jasper is.

The Passion of the Mesmerist

The choirmaster is infatuated with Rosa Bud, his music pupil and the fiancé of his nephew Edwin. He forces a mesmeric power on her, which has a clearly erotic quality, and of which Rosa is much afraid. The instance on which this power is first displayed is during a little tea party at Jasper’s place, when he plays the piano and Rosa sings. Watching her lips intently and “hinting the key-note” occasionally, he tries to “tune” her to his playing and, at the same time, whispers his love to her through the music. Finally, Rosa grows hysterical and shrieks out that she cannot bear it any longer, but no one except Helena Landless, a young woman from Ceylon who will become Rosa's friend, divines the reason for this outburst. Later that night, Rosa confides the reason for her dread to Helena:

He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without uttering a threat. [...] When he correct me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them [...] and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever.

Jasper has long haunted Rosa's thoughts, but on that night of the tea party, she felt not only terrified but “ashamed and passionately hurt," because, she discloses, “it was as if he had kissed me". Her music-master's mesmerism is a sexual harassment which violates the young woman‘s personal feelings and threatens her sense of security.

When Edwin Drood is believed to be dead, Jasper declares to Rosa that he loves her madly, and his love is mad indeed. It is an unhealthy love of idolization and “a fierce extreme of admiration”. He threatens her that he would kill any rival, threatens her that he will bring the gallows on Neville Landless, Helena‘s twin brother who is also enamoured with Rosa, if she refuses him. His love, passionate as it is, is only a love of the physical senses, for the music-master declares that he does not ask for her love, but asks her to give herself to him. The way in which he delivers his declaration of love, shows the wickedness and falseness of his character. Being aware that they might be watched, his pose and gesture, while he terrorizes Rosa with his confessions, would suggest to the onlooker a completely different conversation.

Rosa has a deep abhorrence of Jasper and finds him repulsive, yet, when he appears “the old horrible feeling of being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her“. The music-master can command her silently, by a will opposed to her own “he draws her feet towards him” and she is unable to resist his power. It is “the fascination of repulsion” that gives him the power “to bind her by a spell”. The young woman is scared, feels haunted, endangered, and fancies his ghost might even penetrate the solid convent walls of her school.

Jasper’s passion is always violent and destructive. His passionate obsession with Rosa is just as mad as his passionate hate of Neville Landless is murderous. When, on the night of his excursion with Durdles, he watches Neville from his hiding place, his look is “as though his eyes were at the trigger of a loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and were going to fire”. His “fixed and deep attention" on Edwin, his “fixed” eyes upon Rosa, his concentration “on one idea” express his madness — his monomania. By means of his fixed gaze, Jasper exercises his mesmeric power over Rosa, by means of his fixed attention, he puts himself into his altered state of mind. Every time, before he falls into one of his “paroxysms”, he concentrates on an object related to his obsessed thought, then a film comes over his eyes and thereafter he “wanders away into a frightful son of dream in which he threatens most“. By concentrating on an idée fixe, Jasper seems to exercise some kind of autosuggestion or ‘monoideism’.

The Criminal Mind’s Power of Manipulation

Not only Rosa falls under the influence of the dark mesmerist. By means of association and suggestion, Jasper manipulates others to his desired ends and carefully weaves his evil web of crime and suspicion. When Edwin and Neville, after having had a heated discussion, which started on the subject of Rosa, enter Jasper‘s rooms, the first visible object is the portrait of Rosa over the chimneypiece. The two young men glance at it but avoid saying anything. “Jasper, however, directly calls attention to it” and makes it the conversation topic, thereby reviving the earlier heated discussion. Looking observantly at the two rivals, who are heating up for another fight, he “slightly smiles” and mixes a mulled wine that will work towards heating their tempers oven quicker. The dark mesmerist is an intriguing serpent and relies on drugs to enhance his mesmeric powers. Neville later tells Mr. Crisparkle that the drink overcame him, as well as Edwin, “in the strangest and most sudden manner”. Durdles, the stonemason, is put into a sleep-waking state by means of a similar drink, so that Jasper gels hold of the key of the crypt door for the duration of the stupor. Even the Minor Canon Crisparkle falls under some mysterious spell, walking as in a trance to the Weir, wondering how and why he came there. At the Weir he finds Edwin‘s watch and shirt-pin, a discovery which renders Edwin‘s sudden departure of his own account very improbable and incriminates Neville Landless, who has been seen walking about that pan of the country.

Mind-reading and verbal suggestion help Jasper to lay out the lines that will trip young Landless. Shortly after Neville got home from the fight with Edwin and confessed all to Crisparkle, Jasper appears, to return the hat Neville forgot at his place. He describes the scene which has just happened at his home as ‘“murderous" and, in saying that Neville “would have cut him [Edwin] down” and has “something of the tiger in his dark blood”, uses two expressions Neville himself used when he confesses his Furious rage to Crisparkle. The Minor Canon silently notes this repetition of Neville‘s own words by Jasper, metaphoric expressions which raise pictures of murderous energies, and goes “thoughtfully to bed” that night. Another instance of Jasper's manipulations by verbal suggestion is the scene in the jeweller’s shop. On the day of his disappearance, finding his watch has stopped, Edwin walks into the shop to have it wound and set. The jeweller tries to interest Edwin in some jewellery, but the young man answers that he wears no jewellery except for his watch and shirt-pin. Of this the jeweller had been aware, he replies, because Mr. Jasper told him so the other day. Due to the suggestion, the jeweller will later recognize the watch and remember the scene well and contribute important evidence for the reconstruction of Edwin's time of disappearance.

All Jasper says and does seems calculated towards some self-serving purpose. Crisparkle, when he feels an inkling of this at one point in the story, cannot or will not believe it to be true, nevertheless, he does find the choirmaster‘s face most perplexing. Jasper‘s mind is the mind of a criminal and this type of mind is particularly difficult to read, because it cannot be approached from the vantage point of one’s own experiences. “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 has to be identified “as a horrible wonder apart”.

Jasper's Split Personality

The mystery of Edwin Drood opens with a view on John Jasper coming out of an opium dream. The exotic scenes of his opium vision fuse with reality. At length, when his “scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together“, he rises and leaves the opium den. Returning from East End London and his opium excursion to Cloisterham, he arrives just in time for the commencing Cathedral service and joins the congregation in singing their Morning Prayer of the wicked man who returns to a lawful existence. This clearly introduces the respectable choirmaster as a man who has a nightside to his personality.

Jasper is “a dark man” with black hair and whisker, a “nervous temperamtent” and a manner that “is a little somber”. He is a melancholic and lives a solitary life mostly in shadow. Further, he is liable to fits, due to his opium addiction, which he keeps a secret. Mr. Tope, Chief Verger, noted a kind of fit during the service, when “his [Jasper’s] memory grew dazed”, Rosa tells Helena of “a glaze” which comes over his eyes sometimes, and Edwin, on the first night of his visit, remarks to his uncle: “Jack, you look frightfully ill! There’s a strange film come over your eyes”. On this night, Jasper confesses to his nephew that he has been taking opium and that the effects he observed were the effects of the drug. He also confesses that he hates his life and “the cramped monotony of [his] existence“ that wears on him, that he is weary of his profession and the church service. And he warns his nephew that “even a poor monotonous chorister [...] may be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction“. Although mistaking the nature of the warning, Edwin rightly conjectures that this side of his uncle is “very unlike your usual self” and that he has bored his “inner self” to his nephew. He also observes “that that unhealthy state of mind,“ the intense awareness of a monotonous life and a tedious profession, “is attended with some real suffering”. This hidden, “other” Jasper is his true self, while the usual appearance of the chorister is a mask.

Only on rare occasions in the narrative, does this secret personality show itself. One such occasion is when Jasper confesses his madly passionate love to Rosa and “the violence of his look and delivery,” only visible to Rosa, clash with “the composure of his assumed attitude”, which he represents to any common observer. Another, when he aims that lethal look at Neville on the night of the excursion with Durdles. When he feels followed and watched by the lodging-house boy Deputy, a ferocious fury overcomes him and he checks himself only when asked by Durdles to recollect himself. And Mr. Grewgious attains a sight of Jasper's true nature on the night he tells him of Rosa and Edwin‘s mutual decision not to get married.

The split personality of the choirmaster is reflected, to a certain degree, in the Landless twins, two entities of one psychology who communicate by telepathy. While Helena has the same “iron will” of purpose as Jasper — but channeled positively, in contrast to him — Neville has a similar passionate temperament and latent criminal energy. From his boyhood on, he has had “to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred” and this has made him “secret and revengeful“. In fact, at times, Neville becomes the alter ego of Jasper: “But 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”. In contrast to Jasper, though, young Landless does not hide these dark passions hut confides them openly to Crisparkle and asks the Minor Cation for guidance.

The state of double consciousness is related to mesmerism in the chapter succeeding Jasper’s confession. Miss Twinkleton, directress of the Ladies Seminar, is the other person with one day and one night time existence:

As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two slates of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus if l hide my watch when I am drunk, I must he drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being.

Although this connection is of a metaphorical and rather humorous nature, it effectively brings together the different components opium, drink and mesmerism, all working in this novel to induce altered slates of mind. Neville and Edwin are manipulated by a drink, Durdles is put into a sleep-waking state by a similar drink, Jasper uses opium to flee from his monotonous existence into the excitement of his exotic visions, and Crisparkle wanders about in a somnambulistic trance. The graphic example of the watch also fits in harmoniously with the key role of Edwin's watch — although Crisparkle is not drunk when he finds it and it is must improbable that he ever hid it, since that would make him the murderer. Another crucial difference is that Miss Twinkleton’s double existence is constituted of “two distinct and separate phases of being,” while Jasper‘s “two states of consciousness” at times overlap. This applies as well to Durdle‘s trance-like state, who, awaking from his stupor, immediately recovers the key he ‘day‘ existence become more and more confused, the violent passion and the criminal energy increasingly dominant.” Vision and reality become increasingly difficult to distinguish, until, finally, the virtual action, perpetuated many times in the mind, is carried out in reality. Jasper reveals this in his opium dream in the London den at the end: “l did it, here, hundreds of thousands of times. I did it so often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when it was really done, it seemed not worth the doings, it was done so soon“. In the opium dream, Jasper is taken off his guard, his consciousness is put to sleep, his subconscious is no longer suppressed, his mask no longer hides his inner self. The opium woman has “learned the secret how to make [the criminal] talk" and how to apply the drug to secure forensic evidence. On the next morning, Jasper returns to Cloisterham, chapel service and his existence of the quiet choirmaster, and the narrative comes full circle. But this time a persecuting shadow is following him.