Original: Dickens Studies Annual

The Mystery of Edwin Drood has provoked an extraordinary range of critical reactions. To those who read Dickens for his characterizations and descriptions, his last, unfinished novel shows, if anything, an intensification of his powers. The old ability to create atmosphere and to conjure into existence characters who live in small fictional worlds of their own is as evident as ever, but suffused now with an additional imaginative power deriving from reminiscence of the Rochester of his youth. His daughter Kate said that her father's brain was "more than usually clear and bright" during its writing; a view which her brother later corroborated. Those who read Dickens primarily for his narrative, on the other hand, have been less satisfied. Wilkie Collins, for whom construction meant much, described the work privately as "Dickens's last laboured effort, the melancholy work of a worn-out brain." Few readers would go so far, but Collins's view does answer to a certain perfunctoriness in the plotting—involving less "mystery" than the title might lead one to expect.

It is this, one suspects that has led some later readers to look for a more complicated narrative than that which meets the eye. Otherwise, it is hard to see why they should be ready to discount the weight of evidence behind the account of the novel's plan as given by his friend and biographer, John Forster.

That particular account has often been quoted, but it will be as well, in view of the weight that must be attached to someone who knew Dickens so well and who commanded the confidence of his family, to repeat it once again. According to him, Dickens' first idea for his new story, communicated in mid-July 1869, was as follows:

Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate.

That was in mid-July. On 6 August he wrote to say,

I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have 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.

Forster continued:

The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which 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 temp-ted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon the commission of the deed: but the discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resist the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murder was to be identify but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it. So much was told to me before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer.

This last account seems highly plausible, in terms of the story as it re-mains, but the matter is not quite as simple as Forster suggests, since we now know that the plan he gives first, involving a betrothal and separation, was not a recent idea but had been planned (in precisely the same terms) in a notebook entry of nine years before—from which, indeed, Forster probably culled it. There is obviously some relationship between that story and Edwin Drood as published: Dickens had not in that sense "laid it aside"—and the longer timescale leaves room for more development between the original germ and its final form than Forster's account would suggest. (We may also note in passing that if Dickens' comment that his idea was "not communicable" is to be taken literally, it is presumably not to be found in Forster's summary of the plot.)

Such issues may seem purely academic, for the chief question about the plot, as most, if not all, critics have acknowledged, concerns the validity of Forster's main contention. Was Edwin Drood really dead, and if so, did John Jasper murder hiss? And the overwhelming testimony of those who knew Dickens best was that he was indeed dead and that he was murdered by his uncle. Charles Collins, first illustrator of the novel, claimed to have been told by Dickens that Edwin was murdered by Jasper. Luke Fildes, the second, was told that the scarf which Jasper was described as searing was to have been used by him to strangle Edwin; Charles Dickens Junior recalled a last walk with his father near Gad's Hill, when he asked him, "Of course, Edwin was murdered?"

Whereupon he turned upon me with an expression of astonishment at my having asked such an unnecessary question, and said: "Of course; what else do you suppose?"

Not only is this evidence, taken together, very impressive; it accords well with the novel as Dickens left it. Nor has it proved altogether difficult for later investigators to predict some of the later events. It seems likely that there would have been an unmasking scene in the Cathedral crypt, with the strong likelihood that Helena Landless would have appeared there, disguised as the young Edwin, in such a manner that an involuntary expression of his own guilt would have been wrested from Jasper when he came upon her. It is also likely that there would have been an exciting climax at the top of the cathedral tower, in the course of which Neville Land-less would have died, while Tartar (already revealed as possessing an extraordinary agility) would have been able to use his climbing skill to ad-vantage. Various conclusions to the story have in fact been constructed, in which such events are woven into a plausible whole. The reader who wishes to find a working out of the plot as Dickens might well have planned it need go no further than the recent version by Charles Forsyte, which has the further virtue of remaining true to Dickens' spirit while not endeavouring to ape those elements of style and detail which made him "the Inimitable."

Forsyte's reconstruction, which, like others that have been proposed, presents Jasper as the murderer throughout is ingenious, as we shall see, but leaves the central problem untouched. Why should the novel be regarded as a "mystery" in any but the most superficial sense that the reader cannot be quite sure of the manner of the denouement until he comes to it? From an early stage, everything points to Jasper as the murderer. And the fact is that Dickens at every point signposts the fact for his reader with extraordinary clarity. Another novelist might sell have left his reader in some doubt as to whether Neville, who had been shown to be subject to occasional ungovernable fits of temper, might not have yielded to his anger; Dickens, however, by relating not only Neville's movements but also his actual thoughts at the time of his arrest, gives the clearest indication of his innocence. At every point, likewise, he makes Jasper's guilt evident in his behavior. He works continually through calculation and plot. Even his surname, always the form used in describing him, corresponds to that of the conventional villain of stage melodrama: it would surely be an impercipient reader who did not pick up a sinister overtone from it, as from the opium-den and from the first description of his fellow cathedral-dignitaries as "rooks."

The question recurs: Where then the "mystery"? Mystery would suggest some kind of surprise for the reader at the end, some extraordinary unmasking or revelation of unexpected fact. Yet there seems to be nothing which could in logical terms seem very unexpected as against the fact of Drood's death and the fact of Jasper's guilt. Perhaps we derive a little suspense from the query as to whether Drood is still alive, but it is a poor kind of revelation which would consist simply in settling the matter by revealing that he is, after all, dead.

Faced with this problem, some critics have suggested that Dickens was intending a surprise denouement in which it would be revealed that Jasper was, in spite of all the indications, innocent. The boldest attempt to project a plan for the novel on these terms was provided in Felix Aylmer's The Drood Case. Reading the novel in the early years of this century and acting on the premise that in the average detective story the criminal is very unlikely to be the person who is suspected throughout, he worked on the assumption that Jasper was in fact innocent, and amassed over the years, in support of his unlikely hypothesis, an extraordinary amount of evidence. The chief strand in his argument was provided by the various associations with Egypt in the novel, which suggested the possibility that Drood was in fact at risk through a blood-feud which had involved his parents and those of Rosa Bud many years before. Jasper he supposed to be a party to this secret and to the fact that Edwin could be shielded from vengeance only so long as he remained betrothed to Rosa. Jasper's role was that of guardian, therefore, and his constant agitation for Drood's safety well founded.

There is much more that is ingenious and fascinating in Mr. Aylmer's theory, which has the striking virtue that if it, or another of the same kind, were to be well established, it would make the novel much more credible as a "mystery" in the common sense of the word: the shock to the reader on discovering that the Jasper whom he had suspected throughout was not after all guilty would be forceful. A theory which presupposes Jasper's innocence would not only make the story more interesting as a whole, it also would explain certain puzzling features. It seems very strange, for instance, that Dickens not only should have given to a villain a name commonly assigned to the villain in melodrama, but also should then have pointed up the fact still further by referring to him, throughout, as "Mr. Jasper." Would it not have been more natural to give him that name but to use it as sparingly as possible—leaving it merely buried as a hint? Something of the same sort may be said about the echoes of previous stories in the novel. Rosa Bud, we recognize, is a new version of Little Nell ("such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud," as Quilp saw her), while Jasper's projected confession in the condemned cell had been strongly foreshadowed, as Richard Baker has pointed out, by a short story which appeared in Master Humphreys Clock under the title "A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second." In this story, the narrator tells how he murdered the infant nephew who had been entrusted to his charge because he reminded him of his deceased sister, and pretended that he had been drowned, the body eventually being discovered buried in his garden. Baker is clearly right to connect this story with Drood, but it is hard to see why Dickens should have wished simply to repeat a previous story in so many details.

Much as one would like to believe some such theory as Aylmer's, on the other hand, it is very hard to return to the novel and read it as one of masked and misunderstood innocence. Dickens' later descriptions of Jasper are so firmly weighted in many places, indeed, that any reader who found him being presented as innocent at the end could justifiably complain that he had been wantonly misled. The most notable example is the scene between Jasper and Rosa by the sundial where Aylmer finds most difficulty in maintaining Jasper's innocence, as against the clear descriptions of his villainous behaviour and hypocrisy. His defence here is to argue that Jasper is indulging in deliberate burlesque in order to draw Rosa on and see what she suspects about him. One can only reply that if this were so he would still be guilty of wanton cruelty, in view of the effect of his behaviour. She is left in a state of collapse. This could hardly be regarded as the behaviour of a man who is fundamentally innocent and noble.

Although Aylmer's theories as a whole may seem exaggerated, how-ever, one of his initial points is very telling. In the very earliest chapters, at least, we have grounds for believing that we are dealing with a virtuous man. Aylmer draws attention to the look of Jasper when he turns his eye on Edwin Drood: "Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity—a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection—is always, now and ever afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this direction. And whenever it is so addressed, it is never, on this occasion or any other, dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated."

Aylmer shows in some detail how Dickens' corrections to this passage went to sharpen and emphasize the point—the "once for all" and "whenever" (for "when") being added to the original draft—and argues that Dickens would not have done this if he were planning to reveal Jasper later as the murderer. How, he asks, could he have murdered Edwin with a look of "hungry, exacting, watchful affection" on his face? In the remainder of the scene, also, we may notice, as he talks to his nephew of his sense of imprisonment in Cloisterham, he speaks with an honesty hardly to be expected from one who was primarily a calculating villain.

It is a similar puzzlement with this aspect of the novel, perhaps, that has prompted some critics to work from a slightly different angle and to ask themselves whether the "very strong" idea of the novel of which Dickens spoke might not have involved something more subtle than an unusual denouement. From an early stage, attention has been drawn to a statement in the published novel about the existence of different kinds of consciousness in the same individual. Introducing Miss Twinkleton, principal of the academy attended by Rosa Bud, he writes,

As in some cases of drunkenness and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness that 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 remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being.

By day Miss Twinkleton is a staid schoolmistress, at night a more romantic woman who discusses the scandal of the town and remembers her own past in glowing lights. In her, clearly, the phenomenon appears in a mild and innocuous form. But might it not be the case that the same phenomenon that presents itself so lightly here was also to be shown working more insidiously in the consciousness of the novel's "villain"? Those who explore this possibility point out that a similar device had recently been used in Wilkie Collins's novel, The Moonstone. In this the plot hinged upon the fact that a good man had stolen a jewel quite unconsciously, while under the influence of opium administered for medicinal reasons. The sequence of events is reconstituted, in the hope that when a further dose of opium is administered he will repeat the actions and reveal the hiding place of the jewel. The plot does not provide an altogether satisfactory parallel at this point, since the hero's innocence is more or less established, and he fails to indicate the place where the jewel is hidden. The novelty of the device might well have attracted Dickens, however, and given him at least one idea for his plot. Dickens had always been interested in the phenomena of animal magnetism, and had himself shown some powers as a hypnotist; perhaps Collins's device prompted him to explore the idea of "two states of consciousness" as the central theme of his new novel.

Edmund Wilson has given the most striking account of the novel in these terms. Drawing upon the theme of discovery through recreation of the original circumstances, he also pointed to two essays which, both appearing shortly, before his own study, had thrown new light on the plot. In the one, attention was drawn to various indications that John Jasper was practicing techniques of animal magnetism; in the other it was pointed out that many of the circumstances of the crime resembled those under which Thug devotees practiced their murders. Wilson believed that this apparatus was intended to present a man of double consciousness, "a respect-able and cultivated Christian gentleman living in the same soul and body with a worshipper of the goddess Kali." Dickens' aim was "to explore the deep entanglement and conflict of the bad and good in one man." Wilson's final analysis is still more subtle, drawing on the fact that Dickens, through his relationship with Ellen Ternan, had himself been forced into a hypocritical existence.

In this last moment, the old hierarchy of England does enjoy a sort of triumph over the weary and debilitated Dickens, because it has made him acceps its ruling that he is a creature irretrievably tainted; and the mercantile middle-class England has had its triumph, too. For the Victorian hypocrite has developed—from Pecksniff, through Murdstone, through Headstone, to his final transformation in Jasper—into an insoluble moral problem which is identified with Dickens' own.

One cannot readily believe that Dickens' self-identification with Jasper is complete: apart from anything else, that is not the way in which a great novelist normally goes to work in exploring autobiographical themes. But it can be agreed that Dickens had learned a good deal from the subterfuges and prevarications to which his relationship with Ellen Ternan had driven him. At the more mechanical level of plot, it is difficult to accept that Jasper was working so purely in terms of two distinct consciousnesses as Wilson suggests. When Jasper makes his nocturnal expedition with Durdles to explore the Cathedral, he makes sure that Durdles is so well furnished with liquor (probably drugged) that he falls asleep for some time, leaving Jasper to his own devices. There is no hint that Jasper himself is drugged at the time; indeed, when he drinks from the bottle, we are specifically told that he takes care to rinse his mouth only and then spit it out again.

More recently Charles Forsyte has proposed a more sophisticated theory, arguing that Jasper's murderous behaviour was not intended to be a direct effect of opium, but that the use of opium helped give expression to what was already at work. He points out that whereas in the novel the first fits which suggest the turning of Jasper's mind into its criminal phase take place under opium, later ones do not. On this reading, the role of the opium-scene in the opening chapter is rather like that on the heath in Macbeth. Opium, like the witches, helps to bring out the evil that is already there in the mind.

Forsyte goes on to maintain that Jasper is the victim of alternating states of consciousness, an innocent one which knows nothing of the other and a murderous one in which he knows both elements of himself, this being the "curious idea" which Dickens had in mind. Such a scheme would fall in with the projected scene described by Forster in which the murderer's career would be reviewed by himself, as if "not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted."

Forsyte's own version does not measure fully to its specification, how-ever, since he assumes that in the murderous state of mind Jasper still knows the whole consciousness and that it is only in his innocent phase that he is ignorant of the other side, whereas the idea reported by Forster would suggest mutually exclusive phases in which neither side knew of the other's nature. It must also be admitted that Dickens' own surviving text does not seem to follow out all the implications of such a principle. When Jasper visits the watch-maker, for example, and makes it clear that he knows every item of Drood's jewellery, this seems to come out of a long-standing process of cold-blooded calculation, far from any state of "second consciousness" which comes on only at certain times. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson was to solve the problem of alternating states of consciousness effortlessly, if simplistically, by the device of the potion. Dickens, by not using such a mechanical trick, makes it more difficult for his hero to move plausibly between different states of mind.

In spite of such objections, however, the discussions by Edmund Wilson and Charles Forsyte have a persuasive quality. Read alongside Sir Felix Aylmer's theories they leave the reader with a sense of questions unanswered.

Further oddities have emerged over the years, as more facts about the original composition of the novel have come to light. Several critics have drawn attention to the fact that during the gestation of Edwin Drood, Dickens accepted from Robert Lytton a story about John Ackland, a young man who had disappeared in Virginia and whose body had later been discovered in an its house, where his murderer, who was also his closest friend, had deposited it. Dickens then abruptly wound up the final chapters in condensed form, explaining to Lytton that he had heard from a correspondent that the story had been told before in another journal a few years previously. This behaviour strikes one as a little impetuous, considering how advanced the story already was, and the inference might be drawn that Dickens had become chary of presenting at greater length a story so like the one which he was currently writing.

If this is so, however, one may ask why Dickens should have accepted a story so like Edwin Drood in the first place. One may also ask why, in view of the resemblance, he should have taken steps to make Lytton's story more like his own. In a letter of 2 September 1869, Dickens accepted the story but said he thought that Lytton had "let the story out too much" prematurely, and that the title was open to the same objection: he there-fore proposed to substitute "The Disappearance of John Ackland": "This will leave the reader in doubt whether he really was murdered, until the end."

This is strange. We are to suppose, it seems, that at the very time when Dickens was planning a tale of murder by a close relative for which one projected title was "The Disappearance of Edwin Drood," he advised another author who had submitted a similar story to change his title to "The Disappearance of John Ackland" in order to help disguise the fact of the murder. Yet to do this was clearly to lessen any suspense created by the word "Mystery" for anyone who came to his own novel after reading Lytton's story in All the Year Round.

There is a further striking fact. Having taken steps to change the story of John Ackland so that too much of the story should not be "let out" at once, he then went on to write a story of his own in which he came to feel that he had made exactly the same error. To Fildes he said "something meaning he was afraid he was 'getting on too fast' and revealing more than he meant at that early stage." Charles Dickens Junior relates that on their last walk together, his father asked him whether he did not think that he had "let on too much of the story too soon" and that he assented to this.

Bearing in mind this apparent disquiet on Dickens' part, we may also look at a statement ascribed to Wills concerning Dickens' difficulties during the writing of the novel:

While in the midst of the serial publication of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" he altered the plot and found himself hopelessly entangled, as in a maze of which he could not find the issue. Mr Wills had no doubt that the anxiety and subsequent excitement materially contributed to his sudden and premature death.

Dickens himself is reputed to have told Boucicault that he did not know how to end the story; he also spoke to Georgina Hogarth of "some difficulty he was in with his work, without explaining what it was." That there were such difficulties is further suggested by the fact that his detailed notes for the novel had already given out two chapters before the end of the surviving fragment, and that he left no notes whatever for the remainder of the book.

Yet the idea that he simply did not know how to continue the plot is difficult to accept. The projected continuation described by Forster provides one perfectly workable conclusion; and there are others, as we have seen. Detailed examination of the monthly parts alongside the chapter plans suggests no serious discrepancies or changes of plan, moreover. In any case, it is inherently unlikely that a man of Dickens' inventiveness could not have extricated himself from any small difficulties of plot that might have presented themselves.

The theory I wish to pursue here is that the difficulties described by these three witnesses did indeed exist, but that they had to do, primarily, not with the plot but with the underlying "idea" of his novel. Before doing so, however, I should like to explore a further possibility, which to the best of my knowledge has never been examined. It is that Dickens may have made a radical change in his plot, not (as Lehmann reported at second hand) while the serial publication was in progress, but during his initial planning, and that this change then exacerbated the difficulties he experienced with the underlying idea. It is not necessary for the general interpretation later to be presented that this should be so, but it would help to explain Wills's remark; it might also throw light on some of the novel's puzzling features, which could then be seen as surviving from a rather earlier conception of it.

One reason why the possibility of change during the early stages of planning has not been examined previously may be Forster's statement, in presenting Dickens' plan for the completed novel, that it was described to him "immediately" after the letter of 6 August. This, if taken literally, would rule out the possibility of significant change after early August. On that supposition, however, the plot had been worked out in extraordinary detail by then, particularly given the recentness of Dickens' "very curious and new idea." And we saw at the outset that Forsyte's account of the first plan was inaccurate in its chronology. Another possibility should be considered, therefore: that Dickens did not relate his plot to Forster until just before he began writing in earnest—at the end of September, say.

Such a conjecture might not be worth pursuing were it not for the fact that there is further evidence to suggest that Dickens did not adopt the final version of his plot until late in September 1869. First we may look at the list of titles and characters which Dickens drew up on 20 August:

Friday Twentieth August, 1869.

Gilbert Alfred Edwin

Jasper Edwyn Michael Oswald Arthur

The loss of James Wakefield

Selwyn Edwyn Edgar

Mr Honeythunder

Mr Honeyblast

James's Disappearance

The Dean

Mrs Dean

Flight And Pursuit

Miss Dean

Sworn to avenge it

One Object in Life

A Kinsmen's Devotion

The Two Kinsmen

The Loss of Edwyn Brood

The loss of Edwin Brude

The Mystery in the Drood Family

The loss of Edwyn Drood

The flight of Edwyn Drood

Edwin Drood in hiding

The Loss of Edwin Drude

The Disappearance of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Dead? Or alive?

In this list the planning still seems to be in a fairly early state, since Dickens is trying out names for his central characters (let alone the minor ones mentioned by Forster). And the list of titles suggests that the plot, also, may not be firmly settled. It is hard to see how the plot of the novel as outlined to Forster could have given rise to titles such as "Flight and Pursuit," or "Edwin Drood in hiding." This looks more like planning at an early stage.

With this point in mind, we may also turn to some of the early illustrations. The cover produced by Luke Fildes for the monthly parts has been studied in search of light upon the possible progress of the plot. At the foot of the page on either side the old opium woman and a Chinaman are smoking opium pipes which reveal, above their smoke, scenes of the novel. Those on the left hand side are interspersed with budding foliage and seem "innocent"; those on the right are bordered by thorns and dominated by suggestions of movement and excitement. The two halves can also be read fairly simply. On the left-hand side Edwin Drood is leading out of church Rosa Bud, who is turning away from him in a manner that suggests lack of accord. Below, a young woman is looking at a poster which is headed LOST; beneath that again a young woman, perhaps the same, is being gallantly addressed by a young man on a garden-seat: he is kissing her hand while she sits aloof and toys with her hair. At the top of the right-hand side—which is, as a whole, more sinister in content—the choir is leaving the cathedral while a young man, presumably Jasper, looks musingly across at the couple who are leaving on the other side. Be-low, a chase which is evidently exciting but otherwise hard to interpret is taking place on a spiral staircase: presumably either the postern stair to Jasper's lodging or a stairway in the cathedral. Under the title there is a device consisting of crossed key and spade, with Durdles's dinner-bundle (probably) between. The foot of the page is dominated by a central scene, in which a grizzled man is opening a door and shining a lantern to discover a rather beautiful figure in male attire. A persuasive suggestion is that this figure is that of Helena Landless, who has disguised herself as Edwin for some purpose, probably to entrap Jasper. The figure who is shining the lantern looks older and different from that of Jasper, as depicted above.

It is not impossible to find an interpretation of these illustrations which runs with the novel as we have it and as Dickens projected it to Forster; critics have however commented on the fact that the incidents on the left hand side are not the ones which a reader would have expected to find. The scene on the garden seat hardly corresponds in mood with that of Jasper and Rosa in the garden in Chapter 19, and must presumably relate to some later love scene.

The problems increase, moreover, when one turns from this cover to the pencil version originally drawn by Charles Collins, before he was obliged to give up the project of illustrating the work as a whole owing to ill health. For here the figures on the stair are in two cases policemen, one with a drawn truncheon; in the scene at the foot of the page the man shining the lantern looks more like Jasper in the choir-procession, while the figure who is being discovered looks quite unfeminine, and more like an emaciated version of the Edwin who is leading out Rosa Bud at the top of the design. It may also be observed that the tone of the whole is consider-ably lighter: Jasper at the head of the page looks unvillainous and the young lady in the garden looks still more nonchalant as the man kneels at her feet: even the smoking figures, whose opium-pipes are producing these visions, seem a good deal less sinister than in the final version: that on the right is of a young man.

Although some critics have noticed that the left-hand figure in Collins's discovery scene looks more like Edwin Drood himself, little attention has been given to the point, presumably because Collins himself later claimed to know that Drood was to have been murdered: "Edwin Drood was never to reappear, he having been murdered by Jasper." The information that Drood was "not to reappear" would most naturally have been given when Dickens was discussing the early illustrations for the monthly parts, however, not when he was commissioning the original cover design. The possibility remains, therefore, that at the time when the first instructions were given to Collins in September Dickens was still working on a version of the plot which would have involved a reappearance of Drood and his discovery by Jasper; and that Collins's statement that Drood "was never to reappear" reflects a change of mind on the part of Dickens himself, after the first sketch was commissioned.

The existence of this important difference in the "discovery scene" as originally depicted by Collins, taken together with Dickens' strange behaviour over "John Ackland," suggests an interesting hypothesis: that for some time during the summer of 1869, including the period between 20 August, when he was trying out names and titles, and the occasion in September when he gave instructions to Collins for the first cover-sketch, Dickens was planning that his novel should revolve not around a murder but around a disappearance and rediscovery. As he set to work in earnest on the story (and probably late in September) he came to the conclusion that his original idea would not work well and that Edwin must actually be murdered. For this reason he eagerly seized on the excuse provided by the supposed previous treatment of the John Ackland story in order to wind up Lytton's tale more swiftly and redesigned his own plot according to the new idea.

There is a further small piece of evidence in favor of this idea. In 1906, the editor of The Dickensian reported the following comment by Edward J. Sharpe: "A friend of mine who was on intimate terms with Dickens, told me before the author's death that Dickens made no secret of the fate of Edwin Drood. He was not to die, but to confront his wicked uncle in the cathedral crypt, just as was indicated in the scene at the bottom of the monthly cover." If we are to give any credence to the story, it is conceivable that the friend had been told this by Dickens during an early stage of the planning.

For further clues to the ways in which Dickens' mind was working during the late summer of 1869, we should do well to look carefully at another story which he was publishing at that time in All the Year Round and which made a deep impression upon him. As has sometimes been pointed out, the very same letter in which he wrote to Forster about his "new idea" for the novel, which was to become Edwin Drood, contained a reference to this story which bore the title "An Experience":

I have a very remarkable story for you to read . . . A thing never to melt into other stories in the mind, but always to keep itself apart.

The story concerns a young hospital doctor who is visited by a woman and her child, who is lame. A new operation has recently been devised for this, and the doctor persuades both the woman and his colleagues to allow it to be performed by the surgeon concerned, despite the woman's threat that if the child dies she will curse the person responsible. The operation takes place and is successful, but soon afterwards the child dies unexpectedly.

The doctor, who has been overworked, suffers a breakdown, from which he comes round to find himself being nursed tenderly back to health by the woman, with whom he finds that he is falling in love. Eventually he proposes marriage and she accepts, but at the last moment tells him that she cannot proceed. She reveals that she had planned the whole nursing episode as a means of destroying him emotionally and to fulfilling her threat, but now finds herself incapable of administering the coup de grace.

The deep impression which the story made on Dickens was already evident in his letter of acceptance to the author, Emily Jolly:

It will always stand apart in my mind from any other story I ever read.

The idiosyncratic use of the word "apart" in both accounts is worth noting, particularly in view of Dickens' characterization of Jasper: "Impassive, moody, solitary, resolute, concentrated on one idea ... he lived apart from human life." We shall encounter it again.

Three days before his letter to Forster, Dickens sent his daughter Mamie the second and concluding part of the tale to read and offered a prize of six pairs of gloves.

... to whomsoever will tell me what idea in the second part is mine. ... You are all to assume that I found it in the main as you read it, with one exception. If I had written it, I should have made the woman love the man at last . ... But I didn't write it. So, finding that it wanted something, I put that something in. What was it?

What it was that Dickens inserted remains matter for debate. It is always more difficult than one might imagine to extricate the contributions of one writer from the work of another, and nothing in the second section has been shown to be indisputably Dickensian. There is, however, another element in the statement, introduced more casually and easily overlooked in our eagerness to answer Dickens' riddle. "If I had written it, I should have made the woman love the man at last." This suggests that the story had prompted some reflection upon his own tendencies in plot construction. It was not, after all, the case that he had an overwhelming propensity for happy endings: he had originally planned an unhappy ending to Great Expectations and only produced the one we have in response to others' persuasion. But in this story, at least, he felt that his own inclination would have been to end the relationship in love.

In Victorian terms the relationship depicted by Emily Jolly is unusually complex. The woman's behaviour towards the man is, apart from her final relenting, fiendish. She deliberately sets herself to woo his love with the express intention of destroying him. Yet for a Victorian reader, her behaviour could to some degree be explained by the death of her child. The grief this occasioned is seen as possessing an absolute power, in terms of which her unrelenting purpose may be, if not condoned, at least understood. That that purpose should eventually have been thwarted by actual love, intentionally set in motion in the man's mind and unintentionally in her own, is equally in tune with the spirit of the age. But the point which evidently struck Dickens was that Emily Jolly made that encounter between absolute love and absolute destructive intent result, not in the transformation of the intent into reconciliation and consummation of their growing love, but in a simple nullity. "I could have married you for hate," says the woman,

"but for such love as has arisen in my soul for you—if indeed it is love, or anything but compassion and kindness towards the poor wretch I have helped back to life—never!"

What the story suggests is the emergence of a curious simulacrum of love in her, created by her own acts of affection and tenderness towards him, and powered by her own demonic intent, yet, for all its power, something other than the kind of love which might have resulted in marriage. The darkness of her grief is too deeply rooted to give way before this new inspirited artifice.

This is the kind of issue, then, which Dickens reveals himself to have been pondering at the time when he was planning his new novel. And it is possible to project one possible train of thought about his new fiction, as follows: Dickens, we know, had thought first of portraying two young people who were pledged to one another and the vicissitudes through which they might pass during the years of their waiting before (we presume) they were finally united. But what kind of vicissitudes? It is hard to resist the idea that a major event in such a situation must be a powerful and passionate assault on the young lady's affections by another man and the problems she faces in trying to resist it.

From here it is easy to project a further element, which would complicate the problem of the pledged marriage. Suppose that at the time of the assault the heroine did not know whether her future husband were alive or dead. This would add considerably to the dramatic interest.

We may go further. Let us suppose that the man who is in love with her had actually arranged the disappearance, in order the better to gain his ends. Better still, let us suppose that the man who is in love with her actually stands in some kind of trust to her fiancé—a young uncle, say—but feels at the same time an impotent rage at seeing him make his way steadily towards a prize that he does not truly value or even really want. To have him disappear, presumed dead, he thinks, would provide an excellent opportunity for him to test the real emotions of the heroine and to see whether the affection which he might call forth by his more genuine passion might not prove to survive the later appearance of her pledged husband, making it essential for her to renounce the pledge.

In one sense this presents a series of beautifully strong possibilities, particularly at the point when the nephew is rediscovered and the uncle reveals what he has done. Yet certain difficulties also arise. If the young uncle's genuine passion is rejected, we are left with a conventional and somewhat dead plot. lf, on the other hand, it is accepted, the return of the nephew and the revelation of his uncle's "dirty trick" toot put the heroine in an impossible position: she must either turn her back on a genuine emotion of her own or, by accepting him, make herself party to the unsavory maneuver.

Unwilling to forsake the possibilities of the new idea, but aware of the problem which it creates, Dickens, we are to imagine, hits upon a "curious and new idea." Supposing that the disappearance of the nephew were to be engineered by his uncle not as a conscious maneuver to test the emotions of the pledged pair and give a chance for his own passion to declare itself, but through unconscious action on his part? Supposing that at the time when he caused his nephew to disappear he did not know what he was doing and was acting simply at the dictates of his own unconscious will? This would strengthen the plot tremendously, since it would leave his moral integrity unviolated at one level while revealing the depths of his unconscious desires at another. It would also make for a rich complexity at the moment when the nephew is rediscovered, and the uncle is forced to face the young man whom he loves and explain how he could have come to behave in such an extraordinary way towards him. A possible mechanism is available in the phenomenon which Dickens actually mentions in the finished novel: that of the "two states of consciousness." Perhaps the uncle caused the original disappearance by going with his nephew to the vault while under the influence of opium or magnetism and then "forgetting" that he was in the vault while it was being locked up again. Only later does he remember the incident, under the influence of further opium or magnetism. (Or perhaps it might be the stone-mason who left his dinner bundle in the vault on that occasion while drunk and then, when drunk again, remembers where he had left it—which device would have the virtue of providing the nephew with food while incarcerated.) The denouement, when the uncle again entered the crypt to find his beloved nephew there, must present even better opportunities for mixed emotion; while dramatic interest could be heightened if the uncle, or another character, were at that time under suspicion of having murdered his nephew, with the police in full cry, and if he in turn had sworn to avenge the "crime" and so was unwittingly leading the forces of justice towards himself. The heroine might at the end have continued to love the now remorseful uncle, or given her affections elsewhere, or simply withdrawn completely.

If the main lines, at least, of this conjecture seem plausible, it will be seen that this more fluid state of the plot is consonant both with the list of projected titles which Dickens drew up on August 26th, and with his acceptance of the story of John Ackland on September 1st, which would at that point appear as a story which, by involving actual murder, was at once complementary to, and less ingenious than, his own. This conception, we might further suppose, continued to dominate his planning for most of September, during which month he commissioned Collins as illustrator" and instructed him to show "Drood" as being rediscovered by Jasper. We may then imagine, on this theory, that in the course of further work on the plot he began to see the difficulties of the scheme as proposed, such as that of keeping the nephew incarcerated so long alive, or of creating a situation under which the uncle could have caused his nephew's disappearance without retaining any awareness of what might have happened. At this point, therefore, we may further hypothesize that he decided to make the disappearance the result not of an incarceration but of a murder; Jasper must in his passion actually carry out the deed, which had been prefigured by his subconscious in his opium dreams. The chief interest in the plot would thus consist in watching how a man who at one level bore devoted love to his nephew could at another bring himself to the point of murder. So, as Dickens drew up his scheme for the monthly parts, the opium element in the story was made more sinister and Jasper's behaviour more villainous.

When we turn to the latter scheme, certainly, the indications of murder are difficult to set aside. Even in the notes for the first number, there is an item, "Murder very far off", which points fairly clearly to what will take place. But it is worthwhile to cast an eye over the first sheet of plans for the novel, which precedes these:

Opium-Smoking

Touch the Key note

"When the Wicked Man"—

The Uncle and Nephew:

"Pussy's" Portrait

You won't take warning then?

Dean

Mr Jasper

Minor Canon. Mr Crisparkle

Verger

Uncle and Nephew

Peptune change to Tope

Gloves for the Nuns' House

Churchyard

Cathedral town running throughout

Inside the Nuns' House

Miss Twinkleton, and her double existence

Mrs. Tisher

Rosebud

The affianced young people. Every love scene of theirs, a quarrel more or less

Mr Sapsea Old Tory Jackass

His wife's Epitaph

Jasper and the Keys

Durdles down in the crypt and among the graves. His dinner bundle.

It will be observed that this outline (unlike the later drafts) could actually have been drawn up while Dickens was still planning a disappearance rather than a murder. The "sinister" notes in this version could be associated with the idea of an aggressive intent that was largely unconscious, while the few details that point to the crime, such as "Jasper and the Keys" or "Durdles down in the crypt and among the graves" could refer to the novelist's need to contrives disappearance in the crypt rather than to a murder. The theme of "two states of consciousness," also, is prominent in this draft. On either hypothesis, however, it is conceivable that Dickens had already planned a good deal of the "Rochester" element before he finally decided that it was to be the background for a murder rather than a disappearance.

If it is supposed that Dickens had at some stage been working on such a "lighter" version of his plot, some elements in the first part of the novel become distinctly more explicable. We mentioned earlier that Rosa Bud is a new version of Little Nell; but we should also notice how very fully the allusion of innocence is pointed by her name—so fully indeed that one may legitimately suspect Dickens of making that recognition no more than a starting point for his new creation. (And this in turn must force on our attention the degree to which the image of the young lady in the academy must necessarily have been affected in the Victorian reader's mind by Thackeray's picture of Becky Sharp in Miss Pinkerton's establishment at the opening of Vanity Fair.) We have already recognized how extraordinarily weighted the choice of name for John Jasper is. It points not only to villainy, but also to a stereotype of villainy. Again we are left asking whether Dickens did not originally intend this recognition to be a starting-point for interpretation of Jasper rather than a conclusion.

Jasper, we remember, is not only the stock name for a villain; it is also the name of a precious stone. In the New Testament it has an outstanding significance. The figure seen sitting on the throne in Revelation "was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone"; the light of the new Jerusalem "was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal"; the wall "was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass." One of the most haunting visions of the Old Testament is that contained in the prophecy to the King of Tyre who was "full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty." "Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee," says the prophet, who in describing his beauty mentions the jasper among the many precious stones that had been his covering. Ten chapters before there occur the words "When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness ... he shall save his soul alive," which, by way of their appearance as the opening words for the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, provide a key irony in the opening chapter of Dickens' novel; examination of the words in their fuller version suggests once again that Dickens may originally have had a less horrible form of the story in mind, which would have made it possible for Jasper to acknowledge his wickedness and turn from it.

Throughout his conception of Jasper, in other words, Dickens may have had in mind an ironic turn by which a man whose behaviour is increasingly a stereotype of villainy would later have been seen also as an ideal man fallen. (One may detect traces of a similar irony in the name of Rosa Bud, but this time pointing in a different direction. As a "giddy, wilful, winning little creature," she has the chance to blossom later into the fullness of the mature rose, but if she had remained Jack's "Pussy," she might have turned into something thorny and less pleasantly feline.)

For that now follows in my argument, it is not necessary to accept my theory that an original "lighter version" of the plot was originally in Dickens' mind. My point is simply that to suppose at would help to explain the means by which he arrived at certain apparent ambiguities in the plot as he left it. The ambivalence of opium deserves particular attention. Its darker implications are firmly established at the outset by the setting of the first chapter in the opium den, with all that that suggests of human degradation, but its general role seems less totally sinister. Angus Wilson sees the old crone who keeps the opium den, the "Princess Puffer," as appearing "on the side of Evil in the novel." Yet it is not altogether clear that the connection is so exclusive. However grotesque the guise, she often appears as an ancient nurse in the novel. And her moral role in the plot is equally ambiguous: her appearance in Cloisterham at the end of the fragment may be undertaken in order to blackmail Jasper, but she seems more like an avenging fury intent on unmasking him. So far as opium itself is concerned, it must be remembered that Dickens himself took the drug on medicinal grounds during his last years. He had frequent recourse to it on the American tour of 1867-68, for instance; in a letter of 1870, written while in the midst of composing Edwin Drood, he reported,

Last night I got a good night's rest under the influence of Laudanum but it hangs about me very heavily today.

To this extent, at least, the old woman's comment on the drug: "it's like a human creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but seldom what can be said in its praise" would seem to carry some endorsement from the author; indeed, the common medicinal use of opium in the nineteenth century made such a sense of its ambivalence almost inevitable. This would help to explain a point which puzzles Angus Wilson: the fact that the old lady smoking opium appears at the bottom of the cover for the monthly parts under the various scenes which reflect the "innocent" themes of the novel, indicated by a motif of leaves and flowers, while on the other side, reflecting the more sinister elements and ornamented by leaves and thorns, there appears another opium smoker, this time with the features of a Chinaman. Here the comments of the old opium woman may again be to the point:

Well there's land customers, and there's water customers. I'm a mother to both. Different from Jack Chinaman t'other side the court. He ain't a father to neither. It ain't in him. And he ain't got the true secret of mixing, though he charges as much as me that has.

This is not to suggest that Dickens thought the benefits of opium smoking mainly a matter of getting the right mix, but that he recognized the drug to have proper uses and regarded its evil effects as having more to do with the moral "set" of the individual concerned than with its own properties.

Much the same case may be made in terms of animal magnetism. Ever since the appearance of the article by Aubrey Boyd in 1921, and the greater publicity given to it subsequently by Edmund Wilson, it has been generally recognized that the phenomenon plays an important part in the novel. On the whole, however, that role has been seen as instrumental to Jasper's villainy—as, for example, one of the methods which he uses in order to dominate Rosa Bud. Any good role it might have is restricted to the suggestion that Helena Landless might have possessed the same powers and eventually have been able to turn them against him.

This is a pardonable interpretation, in view of the chief allusions in the novel, which involve Rosa's fears of Jasper's influence. Recently, however, further light has been thrown on the question by Fred Kaplan's study Dickens and Mesmerism. It is one of the chief virtues of this study that it brings to the foreground an aspect of the matter that in the past has been seen only as incidental: the fact that Dickens saw the use of animal magnetism primarily as a benevolent power, and practiced it himself, at times, to good effect. Professor Kaplan's book brings out the significance of the case in which Dickens used his powers most fully, that of Madame de la Rue, and it is of some interest that he was still brooding over the significance of it at the very time when he was writing Edwin Drood. A letter of 24 November 1869 at once shows this and provides a succinct account of the powers in himself which he had then discovered:

I think the enclosed letter will interest you, as showing how very admirably the story of Green Tea was told. It is from the lady I mentioned to you in a note, who has, for thirty or forty years been the subject of far more horrible spectral illusions than have ever, within my knowledge, been placed on record.

She is an English lady, married to a foreigner of good position, and long resident in an old Italian city—its name you will see on the letter—Genoa. I became an intimate friend of her husband's when I was living in Genoa five and twenty years ago, and, seeing that she suffered most frightfully from tic (I knew of her having no other disorder, at the time), I confided to her husband that I had found myself to possess some rather exceptional power of animal magnetism (of which I had tested the efficacy in nervous disorders), and that I would gladly try her. She never developed any of the ordinarily-related phenomena, but after a month began to sleep at night—which she had not done for years, and to change, amazingly to her own mother, in appearance. She then disclosed to me that she was, and had long been, pursued by myriads of bloody phantoms of the most frightful aspect, and that, after becoming paler, they had all veiled their faces. From that time, wheresoever I travelled in Italy, she and her husband travelled with me, and every day I magnetized her; sometimes under olive trees, sometimes in vineyards, sometime in the travelling carriage, sometime at wayside inns during the mid-day halt. Her husband called me up to her, one night at Rome, when she was rolled into an apparently impossible ball, by tic in the brain, and I only knew where her head was by following her long hair to its source. Such a fit had always held her before at least 30 hours, and it was so alarming to see that I had hardly arty belief in myself with reference to it. But in half an hour she was peacefully and naturally asleep, and next morning was quite well.

When I left Italy that time, the spectres had departed. They returned by degrees as time went on, and have ever since been as bad as ever. She has tried other magnetism, however, and has derived partial relief. When I went back to Genoa for a few days, a dozen years ago, I asked her should I magnetize her again? She replied that she felt the relief would be immediate; but that the agony of leaving it off so soon, would be so great, that she would rather suffer on.

As one reflects on this case, a sense of its importance for Dickens grows in the mind. It was not that he had then been dealing with the phenomenon of hypnotism for the first time; he had been deeply interested in it over a long period and knew Elliotson, its chief advocate and practitioner in London, well. What is striking about this case is the depth of his involvement. To be in such close and continual contact with another person and to see how someone quite normal to outward view might turn out to be haunted by the most extraordinary spectres, cannot but have affected Dickens' view of human nature deeply. And it would seem to be no accident that the apparent effects of such phenomena upon his work changed at this time. Professor Kaplan has shown that there are many touches in Oliver Twist which can be associated with Dickens' awareness of hypnotic powers, but there, we note, the powers work directly and in line with the settled tendencies of the characters concerned. What is new in Dickens' work after the experience with Madame de la Rue is a growing sense that things are not what they sects in human nature, that a person who presents one facet of his or her personality to the public may all unwillingly be harboring other forces beneath—and that this fact may have no necessary connection with conscious villainy, or with normal moral valuations.

It is hardly accidental, equally, that the long relationship with Madame de la Rue was the occasion of a growing alienation from his wife Catherine. Dickens found it difficult to forgive her for her suspicions of impropriety in the affair, and demanded that she apologize to the de la Rues. But the importance of the matter seems to have stretched much further, involving growing awareness of levels of communication between individuals which made those of his own married life seem superficial. From this time forward, certainly, Dickens became more divided in his nature, keeping up a surface play of high spirits while also brooding at a deeper 16761 0767 the mysteries of human nature.

One effect of this new turn in his career was to exacerbate a tendency to drive himself to extremes. In a letter which he sent to Catherine about the affair he wrote,

I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, have complete possession of me, make its own demands upon me, and sometimes for months together put everything from me. If I had not known long ago that my place could never be held unless I were at any moment ready to devote myself to it entirely, I should have dropped out of it very soon.

An early climax in this new tendency towards the cultivation of extreme experiences came a few years later with his production of The Frozen Deep, a dramatic production into which he threw himself with all his resources. It was a climactic experience in another sense, of course, since it was by his resulting association with the Ternan family that he came to know the young Ellen Ternan, who was to become the object of his intense love. Yet the indications are that his love for Ellen was by no means the most important aspect of the affair for him; rather that it grew naturally out of the more complex situation involved. For the contemporary records make it clear that Dickens was at this time in an unusual state of mind, and that The Frozen Deep helped to provide an escape from the miseries of his domestic life. The excitement of the performances, during which he "electrified" his audiences, was succeeded by a state of low spirits from which he roused himself to go on a walking tour with Wilkie Collins. Collins commented at this time on his extremism: "A man who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man." Dickens confirmed the impression:

... I have now no relief but in action. I am incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing ...

Seen against this background, the relationship with Ellen Ternan emerges partly as something which Dickens clutched at from a state of despair.

There is a further perspective to The Frozen Deep affair. The importance of the production for Dickens was not simply that in acting the part of the "villain" Richard Wardour he was enabled to forget himself temporarily but that he gained from it in a more intense form the pleasure which he normally derived from writing:

In that perpetual struggle after an expression of the truth ... the interest of such a character to me is that it enables me, as it were, to write a book in company instead of in my own solitary room, and to feel its effect coming freshly back upon me from the reader. ... I could blow off my superfluous fierceness in nothing so curious to me.

The creative and co-operative effect was matched by other intensities. Maria Ternan wept actual tears over him as he lay on the stage, and the total effect of the last scene was something to be recalled long afterwards:

All last summer I had a transitory satisfaction in rending the very heart out of my body by doing that Richard Wardour part. It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together in the palm of one's hand—as at Manchester—and to see the hardened Carpenters at the sides crying and trembling at it night after night.

The whole experience may be seen as a turning point, initiating the extraordinary urge which led him to endanger his health continually by the effort which he threw into his later public readings.

Those who knew Dickens at the end of his life commented on both sides of the complex character that resulted. He could be so strongly of a gay and sunny disposition that some who knew him well hardly suspected any other side to his character; yet he could also display an extraordinary daemonism. Gladys Storey sums up this aspect of him by saying that, for all the many-sidedness of his character,

the dominant characteristic lying behind every trait which, with hurricane force, swept through his entire mental and physical being, was his amazing energy, at times demoniacal in its fierceness.

Dickens could acknowledge the havoc wrought by such devotion to his inner energy, but he could not, after a certain point, bring himself to forego it. And there can be little doubt that in spite of the contradictions which it produced within him, it also provided a golden thread that made sense of various otherwise conflicting strains. It brought together his feelings about the necessity of benevolence and warmth of heart, for instance, into a single drive towards an ultimate experience which would make him at one with his audience, sharing a single intense emotion. But one also becomes aware of a growing division within him between the aimed at wide and discursive sympathy which could range freely over a whole society, placing each member of it in loving relationship with the whole, and the daemonic drive which underlay the whole enterprise.

And this division can still be traced as Dickens sets to work on Edwin Drood. From one point of view, this is an affectionate yet also penetrating picture of an English cathedral town which he knew well. Durdles was based on a figure familiar in its streets, Sapsea upon an auctioneer who had become mayor. Other characters also had original prototypes of one kind or another. What better than to set against that sleepy background the story of a man whose chief failing was to love too passionately? To show such a man torn between love for his nephew and love for his nephew's pledged bride would introduce a note of extremity into an otherwise ordered scene. It would also bring into the open something that was true of many of its inhabitants. Miss Twinkleton's "double life" is not an isolated phenomenon in the novel. Durdles (who often talks about himself in the third person) also was apt to get drunk and no longer to know his way home, so that when sober he was forced to pay a boy to stone him home when drunk. The very cathedral which dominates the community has its double life—full of life on a spring morning, at greyer times a reminder of death.

Several critics have drawn attention to the importance of Rochester as a presence in the novel, none more cogently than A. E. Dyson. Others have pointed out that Rochester had been the scene of some of Dickens' sunniest early scenes and that there is something particularly sombre therefore about making this the scene for a story of murder. It is not altogether uncommon, of course, for writers to return to such early scenes in their last works: one thinks of Byron's return to Newstead in the closing stanzas of Don Aunt, of Lawrence's accounts of Nottinghamshire in his late essays. Under Milk Wood, with its revelation of unexpected under-consciousnesses in the local inhabitants, provides some particularly telling parallels. It is unusual, however, for the writer's early vision to be reversed completely. And in fact Dyson points out that in the case of Dickens the change of mood is not so total as one slight as first think. There always was an element of somberness in Rochester; it was there that Mr. Pickwick met the dismal man, and there that David Copperfield passed through on his way to Dover; in Great Expectations, also, it was the scene of Pip's sadness as he sensed that Estella was lost.

Dyson rightly emphasizes the role played by the cathedral in this novel. It is a presence from the very first paragraph of the novel to the last chapter; it is more richly described than any single character. We may also draw attention to the role of the Gothic at the time. Dickens had lived through a period when the Gothic had come to be exalted as the major architectural style of Western Europe, and its use revived for many buildings which were not ecclesiastical. Yet the Gothic which Dickens knew in his childhood had been rather the Gothic of the Gothic novel, full of sinister implications; this aspect can also dominate, so soon as one's attention turns to the presence in its precincts of tombs and monuments, or to the omnipresent gloomy lights and dark hollows.

Seen from this point of view, the novel may be viewed as Dickens' last great story of the human heart. Looking at the town which he knows so well, he sees the lovable nature of its inhabitants but also sees something of their double life, their alternating states of consciousness and the darknesses which may lie hidden. Dickens here and there touches on the deadlines of life in such a town. One commentator has drawn attention to his criticism of the ways in which the service was performed at Canterbury during a visit in the Summer of 1869, the officiating clergymen going through their duties in a "mechanical and slipshod fashion." In the very first chapter we note the tardy arrival of the choristers and their "sullied white robes," while Jasper's music brings him, we learn later, into "mechanical harmony" with others, so that they exist together "in the nicest mechanical relations and unison."

Jasper himself, however, is not satisfied by that condition. Instead of yielding in compliance with the mechanical order around hits, he revolts against it. The driving force which impels him is—as, paradoxically, with Dickens' noblest characters—a driving force of the heart. It is in fact the misdirection of this force—and the subsequent need for relief that drives him to the opium den—that is responsible for the evil in the novel. Jasper puts the point explicitly when he says of the bored monk whom he imagines preceeding him long before,

"… 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 heart?"

The answer to his inturned, possessive love is provided by Crisparkle. From the moment when we see him taking his early morning exercise ("his radiant features teemed with innocence") he displays an outgoing love which expresses itself in such amiable behavior as supporting his old mother's good conceit of her failing eyesight by pretending that he himself cannot read without spectacles.

As one looks at the novel in this light, one can see how firmly one vision of love is being set against another—and surmise how in the end Crisparkle's love would be shown to be as central to the moral order as the sun which he enjoys is in the natural world, while Jasper's would correspond rather to the shadows that constantly engulf his own room.

Something more would be needed to establish that centrality, however, and that would no doubt have been furnished by Helena Landless, who was, according to Forster's account, intended to be Crisparkle's wife at the end. She has something more than innocence: a basic vitality, shared with her brother, which is the only force in the novel fully to match Jasper's and which is shown partly as animal energy—including "an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch, or a bound.""

Helena's central moral position in the novel is clear, both from her behavior throughout, which is never criticized, and from the explicit judgment of Crisparkle when he talks to the pair and urges her to help her brother. Helena asks,

... "What is my influence, or my weak wisdom, compared with yours," "You have the wisdom of Love", returned the minor Canon, "and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember,"

Dickens is here touching lightly upon a theme which he returns to from time to time in his more serious writings: his belief that religious wisdom consists in learning to guide oneself "by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its letter here or there"; that "half the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises ... from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testament as sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old Testament into alliance with it."

From this "objective" point of view, the moral purpose of the novel is plain enough. It is to set Crisparkle and Helena triumphant over the forces of darkness and a narrow ecclesiasticism, focusing the issues of the novel finally in the monologue of Jasper, as he brings to light the perversion of passion which could have led him, whether in his subconscious or in a single throttling act, to blot out the nephew whom he loved.

From this point of view, also, Dickens' method in the novel becomes clearer. Faced with such intricate issues, the fact of Jasper's guilt and how soon it should be revealed ceases to be paramount. What matters more is that his reader should be brought along steadily to the point where he should see how intricately the issues involved are intertwined in Jasper's consciousness.

Dickens had always been inclined to subordinate plot and suspense to other considerations. In October 1859 he wrote to Wilkie Collins, who had criticized the construction of A Tale of Two Cities and suggested an alternative method,

I do not positively say that the point you put might not have been done in your mariner; but I have a very strong conviction that it would have been overdone in that manner—too elaborately trapped, baited and prepared— in the main anticipated, and its interest wasted.

He then continued with a revealing passage about his aims and methods:

I think the business of art is to lay all that ground carefully, not with the care that conceals itself—to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to—but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation,

Dickens is here asserting that his favored method is not that of the "backward light" to beloved by his contemporary story-tellers, but of continual suggestions, leading to a point of fulfilment. And if we apply this statement to Edwin Drood, we may see a similar method of suggestion in action throughout, drawing the reader along toward final involvement in the contradictions of Jasper's consciousness.

Detailed examination of Dickens' statement reveals something else. The phrase "to by all that ground carefully" is precisely the one that is used in the drafts for Jasper, as he is described preparing for the murder: "Jasper lays his ground." Jasper, in planning the murder and creating a fiction about it which he expected others to believe, was himself having to show the same skills that Dickens employed as novelist.

There are other respects in which Jasper's actions appear like a dark parody of the novelist's art: the gap between conception and execution, for instance. When Jasper goes back to the opium-woman's den and is, apparently, recalling the moment of the murder, he is oppressed by the banality of the actual deed: he tries to recall the vision as it had presented itself to him earlier but finds the present version to be "the poorest of all": "No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty." What he had relished in the earlier visions, it seems, was the vertiginousness of the struggle, the sense of having a human being so closely in his power, locked literally in a life-and-death struggle.

This feeling corresponded to a state of mind that Dickens knew well: "It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together in the palm of one's hand." The difference, of course, was that the act in which he sought to achieve it would not be destructive but would evolve a communal opening of the heart in an outburst of emotion. Yet the paradox was that the means by which that state was to be brought on often involved representation of a murder: the projected murder of Frank by Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep; the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes which became the high point of the public readings. This latter part was one into which Dickens threw himself with extraordinary intensity. His son Charles was disturbed by the sound of violent wrangling outside the house one day and leapt to his feet when the noise swelled into an alternation of brutal yells and dreadful screams. At the other end of the meadow he found his father, murdering the imaginary Nancy with ferocious gestures.

The larger dimension of that particular affair is indicated, however, by a device invoked for the first, private presentation. A hundred friends were assembled in St. James's Hall, where curtains and screens directed the eye to a single figure in front. The audience, we are told, were reduced by the final murder scene to a state of white-faced horror, verging on hysteria. As soon as the reading was over, however, the screens were swept aside, to reveal a banqueting table ready to receive them. The urge to push his audience to an extreme and then to draw them into a renewed sense of their human unity could hardly be better manifested. Dickens could not do it, however, without drawing heavily upon his own daemonic powers and so coming to know more of their nature.

The point can be developed. Despite the expansiveness and humanity which separates him so widely from his villains, Dickens has one thing in common with them: a readiness to pursue his current obsessive purposes to an extreme. He himself described this tendency with some eloquence in a letter which he wrote to his wife when she was put out by the extent of his ministrations to Madame de la Rue:

You know my life and character, and what has had its part in making them successful; and the more you see of me, the better you may perhaps understand that the intense pursuit of any idea that takes complete possession of me, is one of the qualities that makes me different—sometimes for good, sometimes I dare say for evil—from other men.

A similar intensity is to be traced in his pursuit of Ellen Ternan; it is also, as we have seen, a feature of many other episodes in his life, including the efforts to reach an electrifying sense of unity with his audience in the public readings. Not only was the murder from Oliver Twist presented with extraordinary violence on his part; but the question of whether he should go on with it, in view of the possible effects on his health, simply induced further violence—as his manager found on trying to persuade him to cut them down:

Bounding up from his chair, and throwing his knife and fork on his plate (which he smashed to atoms), he exclaimed—"Dolby! your infernal caution will be your ruin one of these days!"

Immediately afterwards, he began to weep and told Dolby that he knew he was right.

In this vehemence Dickens shows himself to be the exact opposite of the Dean of Cloisterham in his own novel. Mr. Crisparkle says that he has stated emphatically that Neville will reappear in Cloisterham whenever any new suspicion or evidence may arise. The Dean comments,

... "And yet, do you know, I don't think," with a very nice and neat emphasis on these two words: "I don't think I would state it, emphatically. State it? Ye-e-es! But emphatically? No-o-o. I think not. In point of fact, Mr Crisparkle, keeping our hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy need do nothing emphatically."

In this matter, even if in no other, Jasper turns out to be on the side of Dickens himself.

The paradox tightens. For may it not have been that same "emphatic" quality in Dickens that led him to the decision (taken at whatever point in the planning) that Edwin Drood could not simply disappear, to be rediscovered at the end of the novel, but that he must be murdered? Yet in so deciding he was taking his plot out of the realm of Miss Twinkleton's "two states of consciousness" or Durdles's absences of self in drunkenness, and entering a country where murderous intent could break free from the opium fantasies where it had been cradled, to turn itself into actual, calculating murder—even if the act might still somehow contrive to exist side by side with a continuing love for the murdered man.

But such emphaticism then drives hard against any simple fulfilment of innocence in the novel. Jasper's power has an inner quality of its own, a daemonism like that of the novelist himself which may work in positive independence from the outer intent of the man, showing him new things. The effects upon Rosa of his power, for instance, have been too little considered. She may be afraid of him, but it is also clear that she is fascinated, and in some sense attracted. When Edwin and she are standing outside the cathedral, after she has bought herself "Lumps-of-Delight" at the local sweet-shop, they hear "the organ and the choir sound out sublimely." Drood is impressed by the sense of harmony:

"I fancy I can distinguish Jack's voice," is his remark in a low tone in connexion with the train of thought.

"Take me back at once, please," urges his Affianced, quickly laying her light hand upon his wrist. "They will all be coming out directly; let us go away. Oh, what a resounding chord, But don't let us stop to listen to it; let us get away!"

An open-minded reader might well infer from this behavior that Jasper was already regarded, and even partially accepted, by her as a serious rival to Edwin; and there are other ambiguous elements in her behavior, as Felix Aylmer has pointed out. To say that she even recognizes the nature of the attraction that she feels would be to go too far; the curious feature of the affair, however (and one which I think has not been remarked on) is the fact that Jasper's influence should have so powerful an effect in severing her from Edwin. Her fear of Jasper might be expected to drive her to greater dependence on her betrothed, as a refuge from the other man's attentions; yet the opposite is the case. One recalls Dickens' account of her elsewhere:

Possessing an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its sparkling waters had freshened and brightened the Nuns' House for years, and yet its depths had never yet been moved: what might betide when that came to pass; what developing changes might fall upon the heedless head, and light heart then; remained to be seen.

The depths have not been moved in any positive fashion, perhaps, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that they have been penetrated by Jasper's attentions in a manner that has revealed to her—even if quite incidentally—the shallowness of her relationship with Edwin. Since she has no psychic equipment with which to meet and organize this influence, however, the result is a pure fear, which intensifies as Jasper increases his pressure.

In the same way, Dickens notes with acumen that on the day when Jasper's murderous plans are to reach fruition, his skills as a musician are quickened:

Mr Jasper is in beautiful voice this day. In the pathetic supplication to have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite astonishes his fellows by his melodious power. ... His nervous temperament is occasionally prone to take difficult music too quickly; to-day his time is perfect.

The irony of the situation is exquisite, but it points in more than one direction. Satire of hypocrisy dominates, but the fact that Mr. Jasper's powers should be so fully brought out by his demonic intent is also matter for reflection. There are other signs that Dickens was thinking deeply about such strange interplays of power in the psyche at this time; on hearing of the death of his old friend Daniel Maclise in 1870, he wrote,

It has been only after great difficulty, and after hardening and steeling myself to the subject by at once thinking of it and avoiding it in a strange way, that I have been able to get any command over it or over myself.

Jasper's villainy called for supreme artistry, and Dickens was in a unique position to show how that artistry might work. But by the same token he was also in danger of allowing Jasper to steal the show. For it is difficult in a dramatic narrative to show innocence triumphing over the daemonic convincingly.

The attempt to do so would have placed an immense weight on the shoulders of Helena Landless. She must be at once innocent and vitally powerful; she must be, as it were, the moral equivalent of the gold ring which was to survive the quicklime and reveal the identity of the murdered Drood, by presenting a vital incorruptibility against which Jasper's powers would finally fall, vanquished. But she must also be seen to outlive, and, in a strict sense, overpower Jasper.

That Helena Landless bears some relation to Ellen Lawless Ternan can hardly be doubted: the resemblance of names cannot be accidental. But the exact manner in which Dickens' artistic and personal lives bear on each other here is more difficult to assess. His participation in the relationship with Ellen inevitably involved him in the intricate ways of secrecy and guilt. He must constantly have feared an unmasking of his double life and the consequent publicity (never more, perhaps, than in the moment when he found himself involved in the train crash near Sydenham while travelling with her.) To this degree he was in covert complicity with characters such as John Jasper.

Any attempt at a direct equation between Helena's relationship to Jasper and Ellen's to Dickens would be clumsy, however. What seems to be in question is something a good deal subtler. To keep a mistress in the terms that Ellen Ternan was kept was to involve another human being with himself at an unusually intense level. Normal sexual relationships, as in marriage, are linked with other social relationships. Each of the lovers has a public life as well as a private, which helps to modify and lighten the intricacies of the relationship itself. But to live with a mistress whose existence must be kept secret is to enter a relationship which has no public face: in its apartness from normal life, it is likely to become unusually intense. A woman of spirit will resent her dependence on the relationship even while she is enjoying its advantages: she will find herself in a condition which is unusually free and lawless yet also unusually servile. Her lover, in turn, if he is morally sensitive, will experience both guilt at her loss of freedom and an unusually high valuation of her further willingness to act so freely. The two lovers, exploring the intricacies of such a situation, may find themselves in unusual states of consciousness, "moving about in worlds not realized."

The exact truth of the relationship between Dickens and Ellen Ternan is probably lost forever, but it is not impossible to link the integrity, with its attendant aura of wildness, that marks Helena's actions, with Dickens' praise for the "pride and self-reliance" of Ellen "which (mingled with the gentlest nature) has borne her, alone, through so much." It is even more likely that the content, as well as the conditions, of the relationship had exacerbated the sense of living in two worlds which he had already discovered in experiences such as those of mesmerism.

In this century, the uncovering of any double world in Victorian England usually has been an occasion for reflections on Victorian hypocrisy. Dickens' love for Ellen Ternan is no exception. But such dualities could also have a creative role, alerting their participants to richer possibilities of human existence than were available in conventional life. Not everyone who lives a double life in Edwin Drood is a villain: Miss Twinkleton's nightly round of gossip is an innocent enough mode of rejuvenation. And Charles Forsyte has shown that in this novel duplicity can sometimes be richly comic, as in the case of the two waiters in Chapter 11: the "flying waiter," who is in a constant rush of activity to repair the omissions of the service, and the "immoveable waiter" who stands examining his work and criticizing him for omissions which are often his own, but himself doing nothing and so emphasizing his own superiority. Dickens himself draws a light social moral, but as Forsyte points out, the waiters also act out double elements which subsist in every human consciousness.

It may also be the case that, as he suggests, the scene of packing at Miss Twinkleton's academy is a caricature—the innocent version of a sinister packing in quicklime that is taking place elsewhere in Cloisterham that same night. I disagree, however, with his reading of Mr. Crisparkle's closet. This too, he points out, has a dual organization, intimated by the shutters which always hide one part of it. When the shutters are down, they reveal jams and pickles in the upper half; when up, oranges, biscuits and cake—with sweet wine and cordials in a leaden vault at the bottom. Despite the overtones of the last phrase, it is hard to see this closet as a simulacrum of Jasper and his sinister under-powers. The keynote is given rather by the closet's air "of having been for ages hummed through by the Cathedral bell and organ, until those venerable bees had made sublimated honey of everything in store." The relation to Jasper is one of contrast, showing the possibility of a duplicity which is simply self-reinforcing. Crisparkle embodies everything that is good in the cathedral, including the sounds of its bell and music; and the more one explored his depths the more one would discover, in successive layers of distillation, versions of qualities that are immediately evident on the surface.

Forsyte's point is by no means irrelevant, however, since his distaste for the passage would be shared by many twentieth-century readers, who would find the sweetness celebrated there cloying, and in no way compensated for by the celebration of medicinal nature in the herbal closet which is described immediately afterwards. It is an uneasiness or distaste which is experienced elsewhere in Dickens—often associated with his celebration of a rosy innocence that has long since gone out of fashion.

Even the Victorians, despite their general commitment to innocence, had difficulties in giving it the moral pre-eminence which, from their point of view, it should have commanded. Increasingly they tried to associate it with a healthful expenditure of energy (as in Crisparkle's sportsmanship) or even with a touch of wild nature (as in Helena Landless). What Dickens had come to see, however, was the dark potentiality of that invocation; energies, if once cultivated apart from human interchange, could not only exist side by side with the affections but begin to consume them and turn them to their own ends. We return to that description of Jasper which to impressed Felix Aylmer: "Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity—a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection—is always, now and ever afterwards on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this direction. And whenever it is to addressed, it is never, on this occasion or any other, dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated." The touches of the sinister in those words "hungry, exacting, watchful," focusing the intensity and concentration of Jasper's gaze, are reinforced by the strange impersonality of "the Jasper face," a face which is "addressed"—as if by some power beyond itself. (And that hint of an impersonal force is perhaps to be linked with Dickens' use of the present tense in the chapters which show Jasper being carried along to his deed, by comparison with his use of the past tense elsewhere, which allows us to relax into the comparative innocence of Cloisterham and its everyday charities.) What Dickens is trying to do in this story, if we accept the import of such hints, is to show how a man of intense drive could, by allowing that drive a life of its own, bring himself to the point of killing the very human being he loves with such affection.

With this idea in mind we may turn back to his first list of notes for the novel, drawn up before the details of the monthly parts, which opens as follows:

Opium-smoking

Touch the Key note

"When the Wicked Man"—

In general those critics who have seen the potential importance of the middle line have associated it with the third: they have therefore assumed the whole text (quoted earlier) to be the key to the whole novel, suggesting that Jasper is finally to be shown reaching the point of repentance—perhaps in the moment of death.

There is another possibility, however. It is not necessary to assume that "Touch the Key note" is to be associated with either the line before or the line after. Dickens might simply have been sketching out the successive elements for an opening chapter which would open with opium-smoking and conclude with the irony of Jasper entering the cathedral to the sound of the words "When the wicked man—." If that is so, we should look for the "Key note" neither at the beginning nor at the end but somewhere between. The chapter is not long, but there is one other incident which stands out: that in which the waking Jasper studies his still sleeping companions and asks himself what visions the opium woman might have beyond those of "many butchers' shops, and public houses, and much credit" or of her own surroundings made better. "What can she rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that!—Eh?" Then, as he watches the "spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face and limbs ... some contagion in them seizes upon hits," and he is forced to sit down, "until he has got the better of this unclean spirit of imitation."

If we look to this passage for the "Key note," we may be close to Dickens' purposes. Two points stand out: one being Jasper's evident belief that opium raises him to something higher than butchers' shops, public houses, and credit, the other the morality that evidently subsists in his wish to clear himself of the "unclean spirit of imitation" derived from the old opium woman's features, which have changed from her grotesque "nursing-mother" persona to resemble those of the cruel Lascar.

Where else in English literature have we come across such a situation, a character drawn towards the acting out of evil by imitation of a character who displays moral ambiguity? Apart from a touch of this in the opening scene of Macbeth (which gives the title to Chapter 14 in the novel), I can think of only one: Coleridge's "Christabel," which Dickens read in 1839. There Christabel's unconscious imitation of a lapse to the snake-like in Geraldine's features is a sign of danger for her. All the indications are, of course, that her ensuing struggle will, unlike Jasper's, be successful, a triumph of good over evil. Yet it can still be suggested that Coleridge's attempt to depict the encounter between good and evil in this subtle fashion is relevant to Dickens' novel as a whole, and that the accompanying problem of showing how innocence may triumph over evil without in some way assimilating itself to it is to be found in both works. Must not innocence engage with the dark as well as the light elements in human experience if it is not to become insipid?

If I am right about the nature of Dickens' "curious and new idea," the "difficulties" of which he spoke to his friends had to do with the problem of showing the triumph of good in his novel in ways which would not be overshadowed by the personality of John Jasper. "A strong idea," as he had said, "but difficult to work," it created problems in its development. "The originality ... 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." But how could the villain enter fully into the consciousness of his former innocence, even by proxy, without awakening the reader's sympathy? Yet to abandon the idea and present Jasper as one simply working maliciously would take away the "originality" of the plot, leaving it as a simple descent into evil. The reader would be left with simple John Jasper the villain: there would no longer be any hint of the translucent jasper which had imaged both heavenly man and heavenly city in the writings of St. John the Divine. Had Dickens been content to engineer a simple disappearance and rediscovery of Drood the way might have been open for Jasper to recollect his innocence in remorse, for the wicked man to turn away from his wickedness "and save his soul alive"; his decision that Drood was to be murdered removed such possibilities.

During that period Dickens was becoming increasingly obsessed by death and its implications. The contract for the novel included a special clause to deal with the possibility of his death while it was appearing. Even as he wrote it, he became estranged from his son-in-law Charles Collins, whose incapacitation through cancer had cut short his illustrating and brought him to a point where he could neither live nor die, making him increasingly a burden to Katey. A visitor recorded how Dickens' mind seemed "bent on the necessity of Charles Collins's death," so that even at table he had seen him "look at him as much as to say, 'Astonishing you should be here today, but tomorrow you out be in your chamber never to come out again.'"

While he contemplated that static death in life with such estranged intentness, Dickens was playing out his own hectic life in death. He threw himself into his readings until his pulse-rate reached 124; during intermissions he would retire into utter exhaustion and then revive himself with weak brandy and water, his doctor being always available in the audience. He was frequently in pain and would speak of "haemorrhage" and "irritability"—which yet had "not the slightest effect on toy general health that I know of." Meanwhile he worked on with intensity at his novel. His son is reported to have described, more than once, how on a country walk the question of Drood came up. "Almost as if he were talking to himself ... he described the murder, standing still and going through the scene in rapid action." The strange, impersonal energy of that scene exhibits just how close Dickens had come to the extremism of his chief character. And yet, we reflect, he was still telling his story as if, not he, but another man were at its center.

To say this is to remember Blake's remark that Milton, as a true poet, was of the devil's party without knowing it. His commitment to his own artistic energy had brought Dickens into a country where some criminals also walked, fascinating hits by their intensity and impersonal singlemindedness even as he recoiled from their acts. He give as the clue to his dilemma, perhaps, in a parenthetic remark towards the end of his unfinished novel where he comments, of Rosa's inability to understand Jasper,

(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) ...

Again that telling word "apart": the full resonance of the aside emerges as it is placed alongside those other statements which include the same phraseology—his description of Emily Jolly's story the previous summer as "a thing never to melt into other stories in the mind, but always to keep itself apart," coupled with his comment to the authoress herself—"It will always stand apart in my mind from any story I ever read"; or his remark eight years earlier to Bulwer Lytton about possible titles toes new story of his:

As to title, "Margrave, a Tale of Mystery", would be sufficiently striking. I prefer "Wonder" to "Mystery", because I think it suggests something higher and more apart from ordinary complications of plot, or the like, which "Mystery" might seem to mean.

The point which Dickens could not escape from was that the daemonic was intimately involved with "the wonderful" and that this applied to the demonic criminal as well. To enter into the consciousness of such a criminal, therefore, was to risk his dominating the reader's imagination, leaving the innocent forces somehow dwarfed.

To that extent, again, his dilemma was not unlike that of Coleridge, who had said some years before,

"The reason for my not finishing 'Christabel' is not, that I don't know how to do it—for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one."

Whether Dickens would in the event have finished Drood is hard to say. His inventiveness could certainly have found a way through the "mazes" he mentioned to Wills so far as they were simply matters of plotting, but his real problem would have been of the same order as Jasper's: to bring about a climax that would boots consummation of the idea and not leave him with a sense of disappointment. Once again the murderer, the man truly apart, is his dark fellow-traveller as artist.

Such a reading of the novel will not appeal to every reader. Philip Collins, for example, has rejected readings such as Edmund Wilson's, arguing with strong common sense that the plot makes sense on its own terms, and reflects Dickens' growingly conservative attitude towards crime. His presentation of Jasper was "standard melodramatics," reflecting little if anything of his own nature: "He was not a very self-critical, nor a self-aware, man." The novel can certainly be read in this way, just as A. E. Dyson is perfectly right to find in the final tableau in the cathedral, with Jasper officiating, the old opium woman shaking her rot at hits from behind a pillar and Datchery the easy buffer watching her with shrewd eyes, a "not unfitting conclusion" to the novel as it stands. For this is where the novel, regarded simply as a socially determined artifact, has inevitably led. This is the Dickens that many of his readers wanted to read and that he, in one mood, wanted to write. The discourse of the age is on its side. But I do not believe that his identity as a whole could ever have contained itself within such a tableau of watching and being watched—or for that matter that Dickens was not a self-aware man. The self-awareness was there, but did not project itself easily into conscious or rational presentation, working rather through dramatizations that sometimes reflected back upon themselves bewilderingly. While one side of his imagination could easily find rest in a morally acceptable stasis from which it was hard to advance again, the other was moving restlessly on and on in hungry and watchful affection for his "curious idea," an idea which reached to the very roots of his being. Perhaps Pansy Pakenham wrote better than she knew when she said that Edwin Drood was "not a riddle, but a labyrinth."

To say this is to do no more than confirm the judgment of Dickens' daughter, who remained equally faithful to Charles Collins, whom she nursed until his death, and to her father's memory. In her article on Edwin Drood, she maintained that her father "was quite as deeply fascinated by the criminal Jasper, as in the dark and sinister crime that has given the book its title," and that it was "not upon the Mystery alone that he relied for the interest and originality of his idea."

It was not, I imagine, for the intricate working out of his plot alone, that my father cared to write this story; but it was through his wonderful observation of character, and his strange insight into the tragic secrets of the human heart, that he desired his greatest triumph to be achieved.

To triumph completely would have involved reconciling the loving observation that could and should throw its light over the whole range of normal human character with a presentation of that daemonic force in the heart which was "a wonder apart." Perhaps he would have achieved it, and so turned the mystery into a wonder; we cannot know. We turn rather to Carlyle, who wrote some years after his death, that beneath Dickens' "sparkling, clear, and sunny utterance," beneath his "bright and joyful sympathy with everything around him," there were, "deeper than all, if one has the eye to see deep enough, dark, fateful silent elements, tragical to look upon, and hiding amid dazzling radiances as of the sun, the elements of death itself."

For Carlyle's "elements of death" we should perhaps read "the glare of a fixed daemonic energy"; but in either case the conclusion is the same. Whenever we approach the labyrinthine problems which made it hard for Dickens to finish Drood in the way that he planned, we find ourselves glimpsing contradictions that were deeply interwoven into his own personality, particularly as an artist, and which, at the time of his death, remained still unresolved.