On the evening of Wednesday 7 January 1914, a large crowd gathered before King’s Hall in Covent Garden. It was not uncommon to see an excited throng outside the premises of the National Sporting Club. Only a few weeks earlier, a crowd of similar proportions had amassed to watch the British boxer Billy ‘Bombardier’ Wells fight George ‘The Orchid Man’ Carpentier for the European Boxing Union heavyweight title. It had been an important contest in one of the country’s most popular sports. In its post-match report, the Daily Mail dubbed it the ‘Waterloo of British Boxing’—a headline that bore little relation to the evening’s action, given that the Frenchman had knocked-out the Englishman in under a minute. That the January crowd was as large is noteworthy because it was composed, not by fans of pugilism, but of the Pickwick Papers. The entertainment, organised by the Dickens Fellowship, was to be a Trial of Jasper, Lay Precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral in the County of Kent, for the Murder of Edwin Drood, Engineer.

The event was a great success. The Fellowship’s official journal, The Dickensian, reported that a large number of people who had not been lucky enough to secure tickets had ‘begg[ed] to be allowed to pay for the privilege of standing or a seat in the gallery upstairs’. In recognition of the Victorian author’s social principles, the account of the evening printed in the society’s journal emphasised the diversity of the audience, which was said to encompass ‘every phase of society’, from ‘lords and ladies, actors and actresses, barristers, solicitors, authors, journalists, dramatists, scientists, city magnates and typists, clerks and office boys.’ However, it seems unlikely that office boys were well represented, since the cheapest ticket cost a shilling. Moreover, as tickets were split into six classes, with the most expensive costing 10s 6d, the hygienic separation enacted by the superfluous ‘and’ in the Dickensian’s list of attendant professions must surely have been replicated in the auditorium seating arrangements. Certainly, no Estella-types were likely to find themselves sat beside a Pip.

It was an unquestionably grand affair, with the media circus to prove it. The Dickensian counted fifty pressmen, sportingly attired in period costume. News of the trial appeared prominently in all the major national dailies, with particular interest shown by the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Daily Express, as well as in numerous provincial newspapers across the land, from the Brighton Argus to the Aberdeen Evening Gazette. Even a number of foreign papers picked up the story. All told, the event inspired more than a hundred articles in sixty-four different periodicals. In the Dickensian, the press attention was seen to be proof of ‘the universal regard in which the great Victorian writer is held by his fellow-countrymen’. There is, however, another explanation for the great interest shown by press and public and that was the trial’s intriguing cast.

The Daily Telegraph described the trial’s performers as ‘a constellation of literary stars’. The Pall Mall Gazette called them a ‘literary and dramatic constellation’. The defence team, though only dimly recognisable to the wider public, were important figures in the Dickens Fellowship. J. Cuming Walters, an author and critic who specialised in Dickens’s unfinished mystery, led the defence, with B. W. Matz, a founding member of the Fellowship and the editor of its journal, acting as Cuming Walters’s second. The prosecution was led by New Witness editor and self-confessed Drood fanatic, Cecil Chesterton. It was only the previous spring that Chesterton’s own court appearance had filled the papers, when he had been found guilty of criminal libel for his reporting of the Marconi Scandal. The public were no doubt amused to see him back in court so soon.

Under the foremanship of the eminent playwright George Bernard Shaw, the jury was comprised of popular authors (including Coulson Kernahan, William Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs, Arthur Morrison, Max Pemberton, Tom Gallon, Ridgewell Cullum, William Edwin Pugh, and Raymond Paton), belletrists (George Slythe Street 16 and Hilaire Belloc), and former members of parliament (Sir Edward Russell and Justin Huntly McCarthy). Many of the character parts were also played by well-known literary figures, with former Daily Herald editor, C. Sheridan Jones, taking up the role of Thomas Bazzard and Arthur Waugh, the author, critic, and owner of Chapman & Hall publishing firm, appearing as Reverend Canon Crisparkle. In addition to these ‘literary stars’, the comic actor Bransby Williams (widely known as ‘the Henry Irving of the music halls’) added a much-commended performance as Anthony Durdles.

Over this most auspicious rabble, the Honourable Mr Justice Gilbert Keith Chesterton presided. On paper, G. K. Chesterton was an excellent choice for judge. In 1914, he was one of the most popular living British writers. Already celebrated as a journalist and novelist, Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries had secured him a large, dedicated, and socially diverse fan-base. The first omnibus, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), had been a great commercial success and, a few months after the trial, a second omnibus, The Wisdom of Father Brown, would sell just as well. Chesterton’s name shifted books, sold papers, and packed halls. By involving him so prominently in the trial, the Dickens Fellowship could guarantee wide press coverage and massive public interest.

There were also other reasons why Chesterton was an apposite choice for judge. Like his brother Cecil, to whom a number of biographers credit the idea of holding the trial, Chesterton had long been a member of the Dickens Fellowship. Moreover, Chesterton was a pre-eminent critic of Dickens’s work. As well as articles and introductions to new editions of Dickens’s books, he had produced two monographs about the author: Charles Dickens (Methuen, 1906) and Criticism of the Works of Charles Dickens (Dent 1911). The Victorian Age in Literature, which had been published only a few months before the trial, also featured Chesterton’s hero and was available in all good bookshops. A few years later, Chesterton’s position as the senior authority on Dickens would be validated by his contribution of the entry on the author in the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929). Frank S. Johnson, Honourable Secretary of the Dickens Fellowship, saw in Chesterton a man who could be relied upon to bring to the trial proceedings great publicity, a lively personal interest, and an appropriate level of decorum. In his third prediction, as those more familiar with Chesterton’s frequent speaking engagements might have anticipated, Johnson was much mistaken.

The Dickens Fellowship had been founded in London in 1902 and, since that time, it had expanded exponentially. By 1905, when the first issue of the Dickensian came out, the society had in excess of 6,500 members, spread across thirty affiliated groups. By 1914, there were over a dozen Fellowships operating in London alone (including Forest Gate, Hackney and Stoke Newington, and Tottenham), as well as branches spanning out across Britain, incorporating places like Birmingham, Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool and even Swadlincote. Moreover, the Fellowship had quickly become international in scope, boasting societies as far flung as Philadelphia, Montreal, and Sydney.

The Dickens Fellowship was one of the first international author fan clubs and, like many of the comparable associations that would follow, its members took their subject deathly seriously. Those who chanced to leaf through the earnest expositions that filled the pages of the Dickensian might never guess that Dickens had been a humourist. A hundred years down the line, Dickens’s fate at the hands of the Fellowship would be mirrored by the activities of the American Chesterton Society, who recently celebrated a breakthrough in their campaign to get Chesterton sainted. The Bishop of Northampton had finally agreed to appoint a priest to make, as he put it, ‘tentative enquiries’. One can only imagine what the author of ‘The Resurrection of Father Brown’, a story in which the cleric sleuth narrowly avoids being accused of shamming a miracle, would make of the Society’s well-intentioned crusade for his halation.

For the Dickens Society, the object of the trial was not to raise Dickens’s profile, which, given their swelling ranks, was clearly unnecessary, but to raise funds for its charitable wing. If this had been the only gauge of success that contributors to the Dickensian had used to measure the event, then the night would have been an unmitigated success. Unfortunately, many of its more active members had a professional and financial interest in the evening being more serious than Chesterton’s involvement would permit. Jasper’s lead prosecutor, J. Cuming Walters had published widely on Dickens, but his works had attracted little of the public interest that had been generated by Chesterton’s contributions to the field. In 1911, Chapman & Hall had brought out Phases of Dickens: the Man, his Message, and his Mission, in which Cuming Walters writes as passionately and seriously about Dickens as the title suggests. In addition to a more general interest in Dickens, Cuming Walters was fascinated by the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. In 1905, he had put forward his own theory about the book’s planned ending in Clues to Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood and, in 1912, had followed it up with a second book on the history of Drood theories, The Complete Mystery of Edwin Drood; the History, Continuations, and Solutions, 1870-1912. With so much of his professional life sunk into the question of John Jasper’s guilt, the Fellowship’s mock trial was unavoidably bound up with Cuming Walters’s livelihood. The trial would offer him the opportunity to appear in public, on a level stage with Dickens’s most eminent critic. It would not, however, offer him the chance for which he had most hoped—to ‘prove’ his theory correct above that of his competitors.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the business of finishing Dickens’s novel had become a profitable niche in the literary market. In addition to the numerous dramatic and prose fiction continuations of the mystery, critical books that attempted to ‘solve’ the question of Jasper’s guilt were legion. In the year that Cuming Walters had published his Clues, two other accounts competed for the public’s cash and credulity. Barring minor differences, Andrew Lang’s Puzzle of Dickens’s Last Plot and William Archers’ 15 July, 1905 article in the Morning Leader both accorded with the theory that had been put forward by Richard A. Proctor in 1887. In Watched by the Dead: A Loving Study of Dickens’ Half-Told Tale, Proctor had argued that Drood was not dead. In an opium haze, Jasper had bungled his nephew’s asphyxiation. Having also been drugged, Drood had not been able to identify his attacker and had taken on the disguise of Datchery to solve his own ‘murder’. A lone voice amongst many, Cuming Walters had argued otherwise—Drood was dead and Helena Landless had disguised herself as Datchery in an attempt to clear the name of her beloved brother. As the sole propagator of the Helena-as-Datchery theory, Cuming Walters could expect professional satisfaction and, perhaps, interest sufficient for a further edition of his book, if only the London jury could be convinced to find in his favour. All he had to do was beat Cecil Chesterton in a public debate.

A verbatim report of the trial proceedings was published by Chapman & Hall a few weeks after the trial, with copies priced at 2s 6d. Its script-like format permits a unique insight into the events as they unfolded. The book also included a list of rules that had been drawn up with aim of securing a ‘fair trial’, which, to Cuming Walters and his ilk, meant one in which the verdict remained faithful to Dickens’s text. Three of the rules directly concerned the enforcement of literary fidelity. Firstly, neither legal team could call Drood as a witness, regardless of their views about the state of his health. Drood could prove too much, including Jasper’s innocence or guilt, and could take too little of his testimony from the book. A second rule, that Cecil Chesterton would later rely on in court, stipulated that ‘[a]ll statements made in the book shall be taken to be true and admitted by both sides, and any statement by a witness contradicting such statements shall thereby be proved false’. A third rule bound the witnesses exclusively to evidence provided by the book. Only the chief witnesses, Helena Landless and Bazzard, were permitted some creative leeway, so that reasonable progress could be made. This rule effectively precluded any useful input from Durdles, Crisparkle, and Princess Puffer. Instead, these characters took on the responsibility of setting the scene for the audience, prior to the examination of the chief witnesses. There was no way to legislate the degree of creativity that the chief-witnesses could employ and, as it turned out, the defence’s chief witness was willing to be a lot more inventive than was the prosecution’s.

As we might have guessed, the prosecution’s chief witness provided testimony in accordance with Cuming Walters’s theory. Helena Landless attested that she had disguised herself as Datchery with the motive of clearing her brothers’ name and, having found the only piece of jewellery that Jasper had not known Drood to possess in the pile of quicklime in the tomb, had been convinced that Jasper had killed Drood. Apparently keen to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief, the defence did not point out how few pages this account would have added to the novel that Dickens’s notes indicate was only half finished. Instead, Cecil Chesterton focussed upon the ludicrous proposition that Landless, a woman who had lived in Cloisterham for six months, could convince her friends and neighbours that she was a strange old man, simply by putting on a wig. Furthermore, how had such a dainty girl manage to consume the pints of sherry, pots of ale, and hearty meals that Datchery is known to have ordered? Finally, where had she acquired knowledge of the system of scoring used in old English taverns? Her answer to the latter—that she picked up the system during her childhood in Ceylon—was preposterous enough that Bazzard joked about it when he took the stand.

I rather amused myself by opening the cupboard door in my room, and chalking it up as is done in taverns which on occasion I have visited in Ceylon—I mean Norfolk.

After only a few minutes of cross-examination, Cecil Chesterton had Landless’s testimony and, with it, Cuming Walters’s thesis, up against the ropes. It was time for him to step in and deliver a final crushing blow.

Had not Landless claimed that, whilst disguised as Datchery, she had pretended to get lost during her initial exploration of Cloisterham? Landless admitted that she had done so in an effort to make her disguise more credible. Reading out the passage describing Datchery’s disorientation, Chesterton reminded the prosecution of the second rule. The passage in question, he claimed, represented a ‘definite statement as to the condition of your mind and not as to your external actions’, which meant that Helena Landless was a liar.29 Accusing Landless of masterminding a plot against Jasper, Chesterton found the motive of fraternal love that Cuming Walters’s had used to explain Landless’ decision to masquerade as Datchery to be equally suited to his version of events. The trial would continue, but Cuming Walters’s theory had been thoroughly defeated.

As the prosecution simmered, there followed an entertaining but ultimately inconsequential comic interlude, in which Cecil Chesterton examined the evidence of his girlfriend Ada Jones (otherwise known as ‘Keith’ Chesterton, or by her journalistic pseudonym, J. K. Prothero), who was playing the part of the opium dealing Princess Puffer. Then it was Thomas Bazzard’s turn to take the stand. Cecil Chesterton’s examination proceeded on the assumption that Bazzard, rather than Landless, had assumed the identity of Datchery—the claim that had been made by Lang. During his examination, cross-examination, and re-examination, Bazzard unfolded an account in which Jasper had attempted to drug and kill Drood but had failed, suffering a seizure brought on by prolonged opium use at the crucial moment. In Cloisterham to spend Christmas with Rosa Budd, Grewgious had found Drood unconscious in the churchyard. Bazzard had then taken on the disguise of Datchery in an effort to prove Jasper had attempted murder. He had placed the ring in the quicklime and he planned to put up posters enquiring after the lost jewellery, in the hope of catching Jasper returning to check the tomb in which he imagined he had placed Drood’s remains. It was known that Dickens had provided insights about the ending of his novel to a number of individuals, including his illustrator and, on the famous title page that had been destined to accompany Dickens’s text, Chesterton pointed out a poster bearing the single word ‘[l]ost’.

In the course of his testimony, Bazzard also claimed that he had seen Drood alive and well on 1 January, 1861. If Cuming Walters had been annoyed by the short work that Cecil Chesterton had made of his theory, then Bazzard’s testimony was too much. The declaration that Drood was alive and well had the same effect as putting the supposed murder victim on the stand. Furthermore, C. Sheridan Jones’s amusingly sharp-tongued and quick-witted portrayal of Bazzard bore little resemblance to the oafish character that Dickens had outlined. Yet, instead of complaining about these infractions, Cuming Walters decided to proceed with his planned line of questioning. He claimed that Bazzard had cooked up his entire testimony in an attempt to raise his profile enough to find a publisher for his play, ‘The Thorn of Anxiety’. Faithful to Dickens’s narrative though it was, Cuming Walters’s argument sounded so fanciful that Bazzard barely needed to defend himself.

It was clear that the defence had prepared for the trial with very different ideas about its purpose than those held by the prosecution. Chesterton’s willingness to bend the rules had produced an amusing and compelling case against Jasper, but had made it impossible for a verdict to be arrived at that would satisfy the earnest members of the Dickens Fellowship. If Cecil Chesterton had failed to take the event as seriously as Cuming Walters had hoped, then George Bernard Shaw’s conduct as lead juror must have disappointed him bitterly. Apparently under the misapprehension that an audience needed to be entertained, Shaw took every opportunity to inject a little mirth into the proceedings.

As the Dickensian’s editor B. W. Matz brought to a close his Case for the Prosecution, Shaw interjected.

[A]ll I can say is, that if the learned gentleman thinks conviction[s] of a British jury are going to be influenced by evidence, he knows little of his fellow countrymen!

As a seasoned lecturer and after dinner speaker, Shaw’s comic delivery was dry, devilish, and impeccably timed. One can only imagine the relief that accompanied the laughter, as the journalists who had turned up with the sole aim of procuring witty quotations from Shaw and G. K. Chesterton realised that the night would not proceed entirely as Matz’s dry opening speech had suggested it might. In his high Irish accent, Shaw invited the audience to laugh at themselves—a beloved English pastime—and to laugh at the trial, which his off-hand assertion had entirely undermined.

Shaw had great esteem for the author of Drood. He once noted that the best dramatic writing was accomplished when playwrights lifted their characters ‘bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.’ Yet, the public trial of John Jasper was not, for Shaw, an opportunity to venerate his hero, nor was he interested in ‘solving’ a mystery. What it offered him was a chance to amuse an audience and to be in the papers. Like G. K. Chesterton, his reputation as a writer was such that he did not need help to sell tickets to the forthcoming London premier of Pygmalion, which would run at His Majesty’s Theatre for 118 performances from 11 April, but extra publicity was always welcome.

The fact that the publicity was on Shaw’s mind is evident in the second of his many jokes of the evening. When Arthur Waugh appeared on the stand as Reverend Canon Crisparkle, Shaw interrupted with an assertion of identity fraud. Was it not rather Christopher Nubbles who stood before them, whom G. K. Chesterton had previously ‘tried’ and ‘found guilty’ of ‘snobbery’ in ‘one of those summings-up which have made your name famous wherever the English language is spoken’? In his 1907 introduction to the Dent edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, Chesterton had concluded that ‘Kit’ Nubbles was a snob, by virtue of his acceptance of his position in a fixed social hierarchy; a revised version of the essay had also been included in his Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Dickens when it appeared in 1911. If an aspect of Waugh’s history, appearance, or costume had provoked Shaw’s comment, there now remains no evidence of it. The author of the Daily Express report was nonplussed, cagily suggesting that the joke was ‘only understandable by Dickensians’. Clearly, Shaw had seen an opportunity to make a tenuous link to the fine quality of G. K. Chesterton’s Dickens criticism and he had taken it.

In a later quip, Shaw also revealed the public networking he and his fellow jurymen had been engaged in during the event itself, when he admitted that they could not refer to the court documents because they had all ‘gone, covered with our autographs.’ The progress of the trial was, to Shaw and his panel of literary lights, of secondary importance to the relationship between them and their fans in the stalls. In his attitude towards the evening, G. K. Chesterton was of a mind with Shaw. He made a number of jokes that relied upon rupturing the audiences’ suspension of disbelief, with the effect of turning their attention to the personalities on stage.

During Cecil’s examination of Durdles, G. K. Chesterton pretended to forget their shared surname, addressing Cecil as ‘Mr. Chesterman—or Chesterton—whatever it is.’ Later, after Crisparkle had been accused of being influenced by his attraction to Rosa Budd, Chesterton interjected thus:

I should suggest that question is very improper. We are all under the influence of each other to a great extent. I am as much under the influence of the foreman of the Jury that I almost entirely agree with the view he takes of the situation when he mentions it.

Here Chesterton returns Shaw’s earlier compliment—though in a more backhanded manner—since members of the audience would have been well aware of the good-humoured but vehement disagreements that the pair had aired in the press, as in 1907, for example, when they had participated in a protracted dispute about socialism with Hilaire Belloc and H. G. Wells in the pages of the New Age.

In the spirit of Shaw’s ‘bit’ about the autographs, Chesterton made his own jokes about fame. Quickly picking up on the irony of Cuming Walters’s line of questioning in his disastrous cross-examination of Bazzard, in which he argued that the witness had falsified his testimony with the object of promoting his writing, Chesterton put forward a humorous objection.

Cuming Walters: Do you think it would be to your advantage to be a little famous?

Judge: I must interpose, because I don’t think I know any human being in the world who would not think it to his advantage to be rather famous.

Wittingly or unwittingly, Cuming Walters’s had put the real motives of the celebrity participants under the spotlight. It is testament to G. K. Chesterton’s commitment to comedy that, rather than letting the awkward correlation between the world of the trial and the reality of its actors slip by, he decided to bring the comparison to the fore with an acknowledgement of his own hunger for renown. In his summing up, Chesterton returned to the subject of the trial participants’ ‘day jobs’.

You must forget that you [the jury] are solid and good citizens summoned to decide a serious matter, nay, I must forget that I am an experienced Judge seated on this Bench for many years; and we must all try to think—both the Jury and myself—try to think we are authors.

The comment masterfully blurred the fictional reality of the trial, the historical fact of Drood’s fictionality, and the actual reality of the public relations exercise the contemporary authors were engaged in. The delivery of the trademark ‘paradox’ made the audience roar with laughter, their real anticipation for the evening, it must be suspected, having just been met.

In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Johnson could have expected a collection of literary personalities to stage a serious trial. Yet, even the Honourable Secretary of the Dickens Fellowship was surprised by the extent of Shaw’s shenanigans. As the trial rolled into its fifth hour, Chesterton finished his summing up and the jury were invited to retire to consider their verdict. At which point, Shaw rose and, without any attempt to consult his fellow jurymen, pronounced that ‘following the tradition and practice of British juries’ the group had decided their verdict at lunch. Though Jasper’s guilt could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt, he was clearly a sinister fellow and therefore the verdict had to be one of ‘manslaughter’. As whatever was left of Cuming Walters’s fantasy of a serious, impartial and decisive judgement on the Dickens mystery vanished, he demanded that the jury be discharged for improper conduct. Instead, seeing that it had gotten rather late, Chesterton gleefully found all present in contempt of court and asked that they be locked up. It was inevitable, really, that Chesterton would have seized upon what was likely to be his one and only chance to send Shaw to prison.

The next issue of the Dickensian was full of talk of the trial. The editorial reported ‘one of the most exhilarating, most enjoyable, and most distinguished and historic literary evenings that London had had the opportunity of taking part in for many years.’ Though broadly positive about the event, dwelling on the press interest and charitable revenue raised, the editorial notes that ‘some thought it too serious, some thought it flippant at times’ and expresses mild disappointment at the verdict. In the two articles that followed, one by the event’s stenographer, J. W. T. Ley, and the other by Cuming Walters, a more aggressive tone was taken.

The verdict was no less than an outrage. […] I am positive I am expressing the opinion of everyone who was present, or […] had read about the proceedings in the daily newspapers.

According to Ley, the trial was a failure that could be attributed to the conduct of one man. The trial, which had been ‘regarded by all concerned as a serious effort to find a logical solution to the mystery’, had been ‘spoiled by the impishness of Mr. George Bernard Shaw […] the one man in the building who was not in a serious mood.’ As we might expect, Cuming Walters’s article takes a similar line, lamenting the fact that ‘a certain section, including Mr. George Bernard Shaw, persisted from the first to the last in treating the Trial as an unadulterated jest.’ It was rather unfair to single out Shaw, given Chesterton’s equally ‘bad’ behaviour, but it seems that Ley was committed to misrepresenting the conduct of the latter to strengthen his rebuke of the former. Though the Judge had been ‘Chestertonian […] he recognized that the occasion was one of serious debate—legitimate literary debate.’45 Ley’s protestation of Chesterton’s seriousness is little supported by the evidence.

Both Ley and Cuming Walters decried the unfaithfulness of Sheridan Jones’s portrayal of Bazzard. Cuming Walters had every right to be annoyed by the flexibility with which Cecil Chesterton and Sheridan Jones had treated the rules, especially since, at other moments, they evoked them to strengthen their defence. In his article, Cuming Walters explains that his failure to protest during the trial was not the result of the inhibitive presence of an expectant audience, but rather a capitulation to the absurd turn that proceedings had taken.

[W]e were no longer discussing Dickens’s story but a new plot by Mr. Chesterton. […] I will not abuse Dickens’s name by taking part in a wild-goose chase after someone else’s unauthorized inventions.

Oblivious to the irony of his condemnation of ‘unauthorized inventions’, Cuming Walters continued by voicing his disgust at the movement away from the sober consideration of Dickens’s intentions, towards a spectacle in which Chesterton presided over the invention of, to his mind, less plausible alternatives than his own.

Of course, it was not Chesterton and Shaw’s jokes, but Cuming Walters’s faith in the trial—and, rather unfortunately, the general aim of his life’s work—that was absurd. If he had read Chesterton’s work on Dickens, he would have found an explanation as to why this was the case. In his chapter on Drood in Appreciations, Chesterton had discussed in depth the dominant theories about the conclusion of Dickens’s novel, including Cuming Walters’s account (though he erroneously refers to him as ‘Mr. Cumming Walters’ throughout). Chesterton is generally dismissive of Cuming Walters’s theory that Helena Landless is Datchery, describing it as ‘wild enough to be the centre of […] a harlequinade’ and, anyway, not a tale that would fit well with a title that placed Edwin Drood as the central character.

It was not the reasonableness of Cuming Walters’s theory that was the centre of Chesterton’s critique, however, but rather the reasonableness of the whole enterprise of second guessing the end of Drood.

[T]he whole conflict between a critic with one theory, like Mr. Lang, and a critic with another theory, like Mr. Cumming Walters [sic], becomes eternal and a trifle farcical. Mr. Walters says that all Mr. Lang’s clues were blinds; Mr. Lang says that all Mr. Walters’s clues were blinds. […] There seems no end to this insane process; anything that Dickens wrote may or may not mean the opposite of what it says.

To illustrate the absurdity of critics attempting to piece together clues from half a murder mystery, which, by its very nature, is full of red herrings, Chesterton provides his own theory. Miss Twinkleton, with the mercenary motive of keeping Rosa Budd paying her school fees, dressed up as Datchery to catch the murderous Drood before he can make the poor girl his wife.

This suggestion does not seem to me more humourous than Mr. Cumming Walters’s [sic] theory, yet either may certainly be true. Dickens is dead, and a number of splendid scenes and startling adventures have died with him. Even if we get to the right solution we shall not know it is right.

Unfortunately, unlike the creator of Father Brown, Cuming Walters did not fully appreciate that, for a mystery story to be worth the paper it is printed on, its conclusion must not be deducible from its opening acts. To an accomplished mystery writer like Chesterton, earnest attempts to find a correct solution to Drood were not just pointless, they were an insult to its author.

Apparently never having read Chesterton on Drood, Cuming Walters viewed the trial as professional failure on the part of Chesterton and Shaw, scornfully noting that ‘the most remarkable jury of literary experts ever collected have not delivered a definite verdict on a literary subject.’ Though they were the most vocal critics of Shaw and Chesterton’s behaviour, Ley and Cuming Walters were not alone in being disappointed by the trial’s verdict. A few months later, members of the Philadelphia branch of the Fellowship decided to hold their own trial. The published proceedings record an event held on 29 April at the Academy of Music. Heeding the problems the literary celebrities had caused in London, the Philadelphian Fellows invited an illustrious company of lawmen to adjudicate: Supreme Court Justice John P. Elkin ‘played’ judge; the Attorney General of Pennsylvania and a Judge of Common Pleas prosecuted; and the Congressman-at-Large for Pennsylvania defended. Despite their decision to keep literary men out of it, the outcome of the five-hour case was a hung jury, which, with a bit of unconstitutional baiting, was eventually transformed into eleven for acquittal and one against. It was not an outcome which lent weight to Ley’s assertion that the London jury, had Shaw not rudely spoken for them, would have condemned Jasper by a majority. Rather, it found in favour of Chesterton’s view that there would always be too much reasonable doubt to lock Jasper up.

By and large, the newspaper reports felt the trial had been a terrific success precisely because of Shaw and Chesterton’s showboating. The Daily Express dutifully detailed the trial proceedings, but lingered over Shaw’s jokes. Their account of the reception of Shaw’s verdict included no mention of the audience ‘outrage’ that Ley had described.

Mr. “G. B. S.” announced, amid loud laughter, that the jury had arranged the verdict during the luncheon interval. They found the prisoner guilty of manslaughter. (Loud laughter.)

The Pall Mall Gazette luxuriated in the evening’s humour, making the manslaughter verdict the central focus of their front-page article and noting that ‘[l]aughter was unblushingly encouraged. Everything was Gilbertian, especially Mr. Chesterton.’ Taking the ready opportunity to pun on Chesterton’s first name, the author of the article likened proceedings to W. S. Gilbert’s comic libretto for ‘Trial by Jury’. The Daily Telegraph also delighted in Shaw’s absurdity, calling the verdict a ‘triumphantly unreasonable conclusion’. The salient points of the trial are reported but, after lengthy quotation of the jokes, the paper concluded that ‘in the main, it must be confessed, the trial went dully.’55 What they meant was that the trial had needed more jokes, but had instead been blighted by the Dickens enthusiasts’ refusal to prioritise audience entertainment.

The British public would have to have gone to great lengths to read a newspaper report that picked up on the tension between the serious and comic aspects of the trial. The New Zealand Herald noted that, ‘[t]he whole affair was a strange medley of conscientious stage realism, of genuine desire in some quarters to get at a feasible solution to the Drood problem, and of mere brilliant fooling.’ The Daily Mail, meanwhile, had abandoned the idea of taking the trial seriously before it had even begun. On the morning of the trial they ran an article entitled ‘Who Killed Edwin Drood? Trial by a Jury of Authors. Mr. Chesterton’s Wig.’ They were not the only newspaper to worry about the prospect of Chesterton finding a judicial hairpiece large enough to fit over his famously unruly locks, but the Mail were the earliest to realise the pantomimic intentions of the trial’s main players.

On the day before the trial, the paper had printed an article by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, minister, journalist, and the founding editor of The Bookman. In 1912, Robertson Nicoll had made his own contribution to the Drood industry with a book which weighed up the historical evidence of Dickens’s intentions for the end of Drood. Relying upon an expectation about the nature of the trial that was different to both Cuming Walters’s and Chesterton’s, Robertson Nicoll provided some facts that he felt might be presented during the trial—the percentage of the book unwritten, the cover illustration, and the various hints that Dickens gave, and so forth. He concluded by stating his belief in Jasper’s guilt.

Robertson Nicoll was quickly disabused of his expectation that the trial would be more conference than farce, when Cecil Chesterton’s second, W. Walter Crotch, sent a letter to the paper which accused Robertson Nicoll of being in contempt of court, for having ‘tried the man and found him guilty.’ The newspaper later gleefully reprinted Cecil Chesterton’s repetition of the joke at trial, noting that ‘Mr. Cecil Chesterton […] said he had grave doubt whether he ought not ask the judge to commit for contempt of court a well-known writer and editor who had contributed an article on the case to The Daily Mail.’ Despite their efforts to set themselves up as the trial’s unofficial sponsors, Northcliffe’s pro-Tory paper could hardly overlook an opportunity to take aim at the ardently socialist Shaw. They did not attack his right to make jokes, however, but the quality of those he made—‘Mr. Shaw (who had from time to time made facetious remarks apparently under the impression he was expected to be funny)’. Like most of the newspapers, the Daily Mail still found Shaw’s verdict to be in keeping with the tone of the trial.

Notwithstanding Shaw and Chesterton’s attitude on the evening, the celebrity of the participants would have anyway precluded the possibility of serious debate. Sober, scholarly decorum could not go hand in hand with audience members clamouring after autographs and, despite their sporting adoption of period dress, the press gaggle lent an unavoidably amusing surreality to the proceedings.

[T]he foreman of the jury was about to take his seat again, when a flash of blinding light filled the court, and the crowded audience in King’s Hall roared with laughter as “G. B. S.” was “snapped” by the camera.

Thomas Seccombe, a regular contributor to Cecil Chesterton’s paper, New Witness, produced an article from the perspective of a juryman, in which he talks at length about the influence of the judge and jury foreman’s fame upon the trial. In sympathy with his editor, Seccombe states that he is convinced that, had Shaw not spoken for them, Cecil Chesterton’s prosecution would have resulted in a verdict of ‘not guilty’. Possibly reflecting Cecil’s own views on the trial, an event that his extensive preparation suggests he hoped would be an entertaining but competitive debate, Seccombe decides that Shaw’s arbitrary judgement had been a ‘disappointment’, since it meant that the trial could not arrive at ‘any semblance of a conclusion.’

Putting his disappointment to one side, Seccombe continues his article with an explanation of why it was inevitable that the event had turned out the way it did.

[P]eople who are represented in Madame Tussaud’s (Shaw already there, and the management pledged to include G. K. C. as soon as ever they can find room) cannot be expected to operate like ordinary mortals.64

For a public who would pay to see wax reproductions of people like Shaw and Chesterton, the trial’s importance was the opportunity it provided to see the celebrities in the flesh. For them, the real disappointment would have been if Shaw and Chesterton had assiduously taken up their character’s parts. As was expected of them by their public, ‘the judge and the foreman—two lions who the audience were anxious to behold […] remained themselves, and roared and functioned in a manner entirely independent.’ Which led Seccombe to his final conclusion, that the purpose of the trial had not been the solution of Dickens’s mystery by debate—‘[t]he raison d’être of the whole trial […] was, I suppose, to get G. K. C. upon the bench.’ The fundraising aims of the Dickens society and the expectations of the audience had been well met by Shaw and Chesterton’s celebrity sideshow, in which Dickens’s book had played only an ancillary role.

Without suggesting that Chesterton had the aim in mind when he agreed to take part in the trial, his performance as judge drew a line between he and Dickens. Though Shaw saved him the trouble of exercising it, Chesterton’s acceptance of the right to pronounce upon the dead author’s intentions created a strong impression among some members of the audience. As Seccombe put it, ‘[t]here might have been some transfusion of blood between him [G. K. Chesterton] and Dickens.’ Notwithstanding the wig and gavel, Chesterton’s celebrity and, specifically, the audience’s expectation that he would entertain them, created the impression that Chesterton had jostled with Dickens for centre stage. Journalists like Seccombe, who had asked themselves which novelist had won the fight for the limelight, might have imagined themselves holding up the sweaty arm of a victorious Chesterton over the recumbent body of Dickens.

There was, without doubt, some professional jealousy involved in Ley and Cuming Walters’s reaction to Shaw and Chesterton’s showboating. Nevertheless, the language that they employed—‘outrage’, ‘abuse’, ‘unauthorized’—suggests that they felt something more than their book sales had been put at risk on the night of the trial. Cuming Walters’s vision of how twentieth-century writers should conduct themselves was governed by a number of precepts, and Chesterton had contravened them all.

First and foremost, Cuming Walters believed in the unimpeachability of a corpus of dead writers, a canon that had been established by broad critical consensus in the legitimate literary press. In accordance with the pronouncements of The Times Literary Supplement, Cuming Walters felt that figures like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tennyson deserved to be treated with reverence. In 1892, for example, he had campaigned for Tennyson’s birthplace to be taken off the open market. The building, he felt, must be preserved for posterity, not rented out as shelter to ‘a peasant’s tribe of children.’ That a house in which Tennyson had grown up was being treated like any other residential building was an ignominious assault upon the late Laureate’s memory. In much the same way, Chesterton’s flippant attitude towards the trial had been an ‘abuse of Dickens’s name’. It had suggested that, far from being an otherworldly genius, Dickens had been a man and a writer much like Chesterton was today—a popular writer whose chief aim was entertainment.

In the eyes of Cuming Walters, Chesterton’s misbehaviour was symptomatic of a broader crisis in twentieth century letters. He felt that literature, criticism, and journalism were becoming trivial, cleaving to the profitable aim of providing pleasure to a public who, though they might not know it, were more in want of education. Neither was Cuming Walters at a loss about what action should be taken to pull literature back from the brink. In 1900, he had presented a paper to the Institute of Journalists, calling for the establishment of an entrance exam, in line with those undertaken by lawyers and accountants. If a licence was required to practice journalism, then it follows that writers who were found to be incompetent, unscrupulous, or improper in their conduct could have it taken away. Licensing would create a culture of personal accountability that would help to counterbalance the commercial interests of literary practitioners and the periodicals that employed them. Under Cuming Walters’s system, even celebrity journalists like Chesterton could be held to certain professional standards. If so-called literary ‘experts’ publicly shamed their profession by not providing ‘a definite verdict on a literary subject’ then, under Cuming Walters’s system, the Institute of Journalists would be able to enact their own trial.

Yet, if Cuming Walters’s bourgeois fantasy of administering literary production into a more serious phase was naïve, he was not the only writer to think that popular literature’s sickness was curable. Several days after the Trial of John Jasper, Ezra Pound staged his own public event. The occasion appears to have been an attempt to renegotiate the relationship between a group of writers and their public. It was not, as we might suspect, an attempt to demonstrate an elite group of experimentalists’ contempt for popularity. Rather, it was an attempt to revise the public role of the poet and the function of poetry, with no man, neither popular nor unpopular, to be left behind.