First published in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 5 (1976)

“It might be worth while, sometimes, to inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural” — Dombey and Son

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The Mystery of Edwin Drood fascinates, in part, because of its very incompleteness. Since the publication in 1870 of the six monthly parts Dickens lived to complete, generations of readers have been tempted to concoct solutions to the various riddles posed by the novel. Both the common reader and the literary critic succumb: they puzzle over the identity of the theatrical Mr. Datchery; try to determine whether Edwin Drood is alive or dead; take their heated stand on the innocence or guilt of John Jasper. There are no answers to the riddles. If he had decided on the final shape of his mystery, Dickens’ death has forever cut us off from any sure knowledge of his plans. Reports by his son, Charles Dickens, jr., on the confident claims made by John Forster, in his role as literary executor and biographer, will satisfy no confirmed “Droodian,” with his own theories about the logical conclusion to the novel. There exists enough evidence — in articles, books and “continuations” of Edwin Drood — to indicate that the discussion will never end, the ingenious resolutions of the plot will continue to appear: each of us is determined to finish, if not to finish off, the work of the Inimitable.

Yet, this thoroughly enjoyable preoccupation with Edwin Drood as whodunit, finally, ceases to be harmless. All this speculation obscures the integrity of the fragment as it stands. It ignores Dickens’ systematic critique of the fictive world of Edwin Drood. The failure to acknowledge the novel’s autonomy only feeds that compulsion to complete it, or leads to the illuminating wrongheadedness of the two Leavises in Dickens the Novelist.

“The last novel, Edwin Drood, shows that though unfinished it was working up to a merely melodramatic exposure scene.

...There is certainly an undercurrent of heightened feeling in every part of the novel concerned with Jasper. This is associated ...with the tension set up between his public role of respectable choirmaster ...and his secret life in the underworld of opium-addiction and his privately fostered murderous enmity to his nephew.... The suggestion of moral interest here is minimal but what possibilities it had are not explored in the novel as it develops, we can see. Such a set-up can be only melodramatic in its working out and dénouement, and there is no reason to suppose that we have lost anything of value by The Mystery of Edwin Drood’s not having been revealed to us.”

But melodrama, as the Leavises surely know, is an inherent part of Dickens’ major novels. It becomes a characteristic element of that Gothic vision by which Dickens orders an otherwise bewildering urban landscape.

The London through which Dickens’ characters move threatens a terrible isolation; it harbors its own monsters in a gallery of grotesques and Gothic villains for whom the city is their natural setting. In this context, John Jasper should not be seen as the conventional villain of romance whose “moral interest” is, in the Leavises’ words, “minimal.” Neither the central situation nor the central character of Edwin Drood can be so easily dismissed. Edwin Drood and John Jasper involve the logical culmination of a lengthy process, Dickens’ urbanization of the Gothic. His novels attest to the continuity of Dickens’ preoccupation with the Gothic. Bleak House is, on one level, Dickens’ most satisfying reassessment of the “dead” forms of the Gothic novel. But Dickens never turned away from his reliance on those forms. He continued to work within them and to transform them into something new. The Gothic, with its emphasis on a sense of the foreignness of the world in which its characters appear, provides the novelistic frame Dickens needs.

Dickens’ “London" has its antecedents in De Quincey’s Confessions, in the haunted castle through which De Quincey, like a hero in a Gothic romance, searches for Ann of Oxford Street: “If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other — a barrier no wider in a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!” De Quincey’s rendering of the city is suggestive and Dickens exploits it, responding as early as Oliver Twist to historical London and to that metropolis of the imagination which is his special realm. In the Memorandum Book Dickens used from 1855 to 1865 there appears a series of entries which help to isolate, and to crystallize, the issue.

“The character of the real refugee — not the conventional; the real.

English landscape. The beautiful prospect, trim fields, clipped hedges, everything so neat and orderly — gardens, houses, roads. Where are the people who do all this? There must be a great many of them, to do it. Where are they all? And are they, too, so well kept and so fair to see?

Suppose the foregoing to be wrought out by an Englishman — say, from China — who knows nothing about his native country.”

The entries I have quoted appear in the midst of other memoranda clearly referring to Little Dorrit: several of them are followed by the bracketed words, “Done in Dorrit." But perhaps not just in Little Dorrit alone. The entries reveal that Dickens has only begun to explore in his own imagination De Quincey‘s opposition of the exoticism of Eastern realms, for which the Malay of the Confessions stands, and the conventional English landscape. Dickens thrusts into the essentially urban world of his novels a “foreigner," often from the East, who finds himself confused and alienated in the Gothic labyrinth of London.

In Little Dorrit, Arthur Clennam returns to England after twenty years in China. His experience is that of the “real refugee" because he discovers his own alienation from the social and religious values of his nominal native land. He undergoes a process of disorientation like that of Charles Darnay upon his return to France in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens' concern lies not with the literal refugee, but with the spiritual refugee lost in a landscape he no longer unquestioningly accepts. It is in Our Mutual Friend, through a figure like John Harmon, that Dickens most conspicuously picks up again the motif of the “real refugee." There is a much quoted passage in the Memorandum Book which suggests how the quiet rebellion of an Arthur Clennam becomes the curious strategem of a John Harmon: “LEADING INCIDENT FOR A STORY. A man — young and eccentric — feigns to be dead, and is dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for years retains that singular vein of life and character." Harmon, “anathematized” by his father, flees and returns to England fourteen years later, after his father’s death. Disguised as Julius Handford, Harmon is literally and figuratively “lost": a stranger in the city he has not seen for years; a stranger to his own self, which he is in the process of reconstructing, first as Julius Handford, then as John Rokesmith. This feigned death, a motif central to A Tale of Two Cities, suggests the radical nature of the refugee‘s plight and the extremity to which he resorts to salvage himself.

But, in the novels written in the last two decades of his life, Dickens deals with those refugees of the spirit who have never left the apparently familiar streets of London, or the deceptively reassuring English countryside. They experience exactly that disorientation afflicting Arthur Clennam and John Harmon. They awaken to a new vision of a world they have previously failed to question. What Dickens wants to capture appears in yet another entry in the Memorandum Book, another testament to the centripetal force of his imaginative concerns: “Representing London — or Paris, or any other great place — in the new light of being actually unknown to all the people in the story, and only taking the color of their fears and fancies and opinions — so getting a new aspect and being unlike itself. An odd unlikeness of itself.”

Once more the emphasis is upon the state of foreignness: the city is a mystery, perhaps permanently unintelligible. The ambiguous word in the passage is the adverb, “actually.” Dickens may be musing about the situation of the literal stranger. Capturing the city through the experience of someone new to it reveals the subjective state of the character and illuminates the city itself in new ways. In Great Expectations Pip, wandering in Smithfield on his first day in London, turns into a street and sees “the great black dome of Saint Paul’s bulging at [him] from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison." The moment reveals Pip’s state of mind, the characteristic sense of guilt and imminent punishment with which he lives. But it also tells us something crucial about the paradox which is London: Saint Paul’s and Newgate merge into a single entity, an image of a brutalizing society masked by religious rectitude.

Pip is understandably bewildered and threatened by the London to which he is introduced. But London may be “actually unknown” even to those most habituated to it. There is a sense in which the city never exists independently of the consciousness of each of its denizens. The passages in the Memorandum Book, taken as a “cluster” of ideas, indicate Dickens’ lively awareness of this. He knows that a sudden wrenching of perspective can create that sense of foreignness he wants to depict. A character awakens to a city he has never “seen" before. In Our Mutual Friend Fascination Fledgeby encounters the crippled Jenny Wren in Riah’s rooftop garden. Ignorant of the world he thinks he knows, and controls, Fledgeby meets someone who has experienced London in a “new" way. He is deaf to jenny’s cry, “Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!” He returns, unthinkingly, to the “close dark streets" in which “you hear the people who are alive, crying, and working, and calling to one another." He descends into those narrow streets, the communal grave of those Londoners caught in the stasis of death-in-life.

Fascination Fledgeby accepts his condition. Others in Our Mutual Friend do not. They may not achieve Jenny Wren’s clarity of vision, leading to the complete inversion of conventional notions of life and death. But they resist, chafe, pursue strategies for survival in a world whose hostility they sense, however vaguely. In the process they, too, become Dickensian refugees: “not the conventional; the real." Their situations lead — I would like to claim, inexorably — to the kind of isolation in which John Jasper exists in Edwin Drood. But, with the evidence available to us both in the Memorandum Book and the novels, it is reasonable to argue that in the last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, Dickens has moved at least to the threshold of Edwin Drood. Both in Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, Dickens captures the disorientation accompanying an emerging estrangement from one’s society and oneself. Wrayburn first appears in the novel, “buried alive in the back of his chair,” at the Veneerings’ preposterous dinner party. He has adopted a second self, languid and bitterly self-ironic, in response to a father who seems intent on choosing both a career and a wife for him. He responds to John Harmon’s story and to the coercive intent of the Harmon Will because he sees in the situation a variation of his own. But in the society in which he and his friend, Lightwood, live, they dare not show their feelings.

Instead, Wrayburn adopts the role of the bored parasite, and embraces paralysis. He scorns conventional notions of “Energy,” because energetic commitment involves risk, especially to his carefully cultivated “second nature” of “lassitude and indifference." He may echo Lightwood’s claim that if he is shown "something really worth being energetic about," he will “show you energy.” But this is a ruse, a communal fiction the two sustain to hide from themselves the state of despair in which they contrive to live. At best, Wrayburn and Lightwood, like the corpses in the Thames, “float with the stream." They preserve a fragile sense of integrity by disowning the masks they turn to society: yet the mask effectively subverts any real life they may still possess.

Wrayburn’s counterpart in Our Mutual Friend is Bradley Headstone. The two inhabit different social worlds. Wrayburn’s studied nonchalance seems the antithesis of Headstone’s habitual self-repression, which affects his demeanor, his every movement. But the two establish a peculiar bond whose basis is more than their attraction to Lizzie Hexam. Wrayburn and Headstone are two versions of that condition R. D. Laing has called the “unembodied self”: “The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being. Instead of being the core of his true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied “inner,’ ‘true’ self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be.“

Headstone, whose decent and conventional clothing is worn with a total “want of adaptation between him and it", is the unembodied self. As such he becomes, like Wrayburn, an “onlooker at all the body does, [engaging] in nothing directly.” Headstone has suppressed whatever vitality he does possess, but he has not extinguished it. Lizzie Hexam threatens Headstone’s detached, inner self, which remains vulnerable to the sexual and imaginative depths within even Headstone. Headstone is confronted with a loss of self-control as he opens himself up to the influence of another human being.

Headstone — Dickens originally toyed with the name “Deadstone" — has figuratively turned part of himself into a monument to his suppressed self.lo Wrayburn, in his own way, is buried alive in his proto-Wildean stance. Each has created a bulwark behind which they hide from an alien world. But the self behind the bulwark becomes increasingly impoverished. Wrayburn and Headstone long for fulfilled lives through genuine relationships with others: each fears the exposure of his inner need. Headstone reacts uneasily when Charley Hexam speaks of his sister‘s habit of staring into the fire, “full of fancies." Wrayburn has become an “embodied conundrum” to himself. His perplexity intensifies as he wavers indecisively between seducing Lizzie Hexam and establishing her as his mistress, or courting her in a manner which acknowledges the value of her sexual and personal integrity.

The “secret, sure perception” which passes between the two during their first encounter in the room shared by Wrayburn and Lightwood involves more, then, than an acknowledgment of sexual rivalry. It reveals, at the same time, each man's dimly felt awareness that his “second nature" is crumbling under the pressure of the need each feels for Lizzie. Wrayburn taunts Headstone with his “perfect placidity" until “Bradley [is] well-nigh mad" (289). He looks at Headstone “as if he found him beginning to be rather an entertaining study” because Headstone is a version of himself: someone driven to madness or despair by a passion he cannot control. Through that “curious monomaniac," as he calls Headstone, Wrayburn can study himself. It is the mark of Wrayburn’s dislocation that he remains indifferent to Headstone’s pain. Wrayburn has not, as he claims, ceased toying with that “troublesome conundrum long abandoned”, the riddle posed by his self. Rather, he determines to experiment upon Headstone, to discover through him to what frenzied ends a commitment to Lizzie Hexam may lead.

Out of their shared malaise emerges one of the remarkable achievements of Our Mutual Friend: that “chase” in which Wrayburn and Headstone participate as hunter and hunted, victim and victimizer. Their roles are not static. They shift and vary as each man tries to lay to rest forever that “unspeakable desire” to track out Matthew Arnold’s “buried life” which still exists within each man. It stirs, it possesses an ambiguous life of its own. But it apparently cannot express itself through love, through a commitment to Lizzie Hexam. Rather, the buried self emerges in the ritual of the “chase.” Wrayburn’s account of it reveals how each man invests it with meaning, however perverse.

“Then soberly and plainly, Mortimer, I goad the schoolmaster to madness. I make the schoolmaster so ridiculous, and so aware of being made ridiculous, that I see him chafe and fret at every pore when we cross one another. The amiable occupation has been the solace of my life.... I do it thus: I stroll out after dark, stroll a little way, look in at a window and furtively look out for the schoolmaster. Sooner or later, I perceive the schoolmaster on the watch.... Having made sure of his watching me, I tempt him on, all over London. One night I go east, another night north, in a few nights I go all round the compass. Sometimes, I walk; sometimes, I proceed in cabs, draining the pocket of the schoolmaster, who then follows in cabs. I study and get up abstruse No Thoroughfares in the course of the day. With Venetian mystery I seek those No Thoroughfares at night, glide into them by means of dark courts, tempt the schoolmaster to follow, turn suddenly, and catch him before he can retreat. Then we face one another, and I pass him as [if] unaware of his existence, and he undergoes grinding torments.... Night after night his disappointment is acute, but hope springs eternal in the scholastic breast, and he follows me again to-morrow. Thus I enjoy the pleasures of the chase, and derive great benefit from the healthful exercise."

These are the words of a man driven to a final act of desperation. Balked and confused by Lizzie’s disappearance, Wrayburn lives out his despair in this Gothic novel of his own making. London, as in De Quincey’s Confessions, becomes a haunted castle of labyrinthine mazes, subterranean cells, dungeons without means of egress. Wrayburn peoples it with Headstone and himself. Together they seem to be engaged in the eternal quest for the inviolable maiden of Gothic romance. In fact, they become the Gothic hero and his mysterious double discovering their kinship to each other. Wrayburn’s disorientation expresses itself in this compulsive patterning of his nocturnal existence: he lives out the nightmare which would otherwise disturb his sleep. In creating the labyrinth for Headstone, in seeking out so consciously the No Thoroughfare which permits him to goad Headstone “to madness" and revenge, Wrayburn constructs his own dead end. The artistry employed in his creation of his own “Venetian mystery" becomes ultimately self-destructive.

The high point of the chase, for both men, occurs with their face-to-face confrontation, in which Wrayburn refuses to acknowledge Headstone’s existence. And Headstone, undergoing “grinding torments," acquiesces in the act. Wrayburn confirms Headstone’s own sense that he is socially and psychologically a nullity. But, as he wields the Medusa’s head of his own consciousness, turning Headstone more truly into stone, Wrayburn reveals his own potential nothingness. Behind the languid mask of the careless solicitor there may be no authentic self at all: there may be only perversity or a void. The “chase” reveals how fully Dickens anticipates the intersubjective psychology of the twentieth century. In The Divided Self R. D. Laing, writing within that tradition, claims that “the sense of identity requires the existence of another by whom one is known; and a conjunction of this other person’s recognition of one’s self with self — recognition." Both Wrayburn and Headstone have tentatively pursued this sense of identity in their unsatisfactory relationships with Lizzie: and both have pulled back. In “the chase” they act out the consequences of their failure. Wrayburn withholds that recognition by another which Headstone needs and fears. And Wrayburn’s gesture exposes the fragility of his own sense of himself. He withholds himself from Lizzie and from Headstone. In his chosen isolation, Wrayburn consolidates his sense of defeat: he will not participate in that dialectic which admits that one’s own identity is necessarily grounded in “the existence of another by whom one is known.” In the words of J. Hillis Miller, “When God vanishes, man turns to interpersonal relations as the only remaining arena of the search for authentic selfhood. Only in his fellow men can he find ... a presence in the world which might replace the lost divine presence."

When Wrayburn and Headstone pass in the night, we see two crippled selves, each encountering its mirror image. The London they now inhabit has taken on “the color of their fears and fancies and opinions — so getting a new aspect and being unlike itself.” The maze Wrayburn has created, out of his imagination, possesses a Minotaur at its center which is a version of Wrayburn himself. Wrayburn’s “healthful exercise” demonstrates that whatever level of himself he studies in Bradley Headstone is not to be denied. His recurring act of denial becomes a plea to Headstone to rise up against his oppressor and destroy him. The depersonalization of the self, which both men practice, wreaks its own havoc. Wrayburn and Headstone are involved in a process of self-annihilation. The fragile, and dishonest, structure of their lives, based on Wrayburn’s lassitude and Headstone’s self-repression, has crumbled. The final refuge for each is the ease of death, and the chase is subtly devised, by both, to assure it.

This implicitly suicidal pact between the insulted and the injured leads to the explicit doubling of Headstone that has always been inherent in the precarious organization of his self. The “performance of his routine of educational tricks" becomes unbearable: “Under his daily restraint, it was his compensation, not his trouble, to give a glance towards his state at night, and to the freedom of its being indulged." Headstone eagerly awaits that “perverse pleasure akin to that which a sick man sometimes has in irritating a wound upon his body." He consciously prepares for the moment when he will no longer acquiesce to “being made the nightly sport of the reckless and insolent Eugene." Headstone becomes a haggard, disembodied head, suspended in air “like the spectre of one of the many heads erst hoisted upon neighbouring Temple Bar.” The murder of Eugene Wrayburn will answer Wrayburn’s own deep longing to die; and it will lead to Headstone’s own inevitable execution. The moment in which, under the eyes of Rogue Riderhood, Headstone erases his name from the blackboard, and ceases to possess a name, has been long in the making. Headstone has been seeking dissolution, and release, before Riderhood appears to haunt him.

Dickens’ own sure perception of the function of the chase is dramatized on one of those nights when Riderhood encounters Headstone on watch outside Wrayburn’s chambers. Riderhood knows neither Wrayburn’s name nor Headstone’s: for him Wrayburn is the “T’other Governor" and Headstone the “T‘otherest Governor." For Riderhood, for us, the nameless two become one. Headstone’s wraithlike face floats through the London streets or up the stairs to the door of Wrayburn’s chambers: two heads become, as is so often the case in dreams, superimposed upon a single body. Headstone, like Sydney Carton, becomes a “Double of coarse deportment" to Wrayburn's Charles Darney. They coexist in the same dream, the shared nightmare of their despair.

Dickens’ own description of Headstone, in the public house with Riderhood, becomes strangely inappropriate. Headstone enters the tavern where “fowls of a beery breed, and certain human night-birds fluttering home to roost, were solacing themselves after their several manners; and where not one of the night-birds hovering about the sloppy bar failed to discern ...in the passion-wasted night-bird with respectable feathers, the worst night-bird of all." The sudden moralizing is out of place, because Headstone cannot be equated with those other derelicts of the night. Dickens here does violence to his own precisely rendered psychological study of Headstone and Wrayburn. He has shown the two engaged in a dance of death. Its horror and its power lie in the reality of the human waste involved. Eugene Wrayburn, like the Steerforth of whom he is a diminished echo, possesses the capacity to achieve creative integration. The paralysis which now torments him has been engendered by a society indifferent to the integrity of those within it. And Bradley Headstone, slow-witted as he seems to be, has, or had, an animal vitality within him that could have found expression in a life of physical exertion and challenge. In the tangled fates of the solicitor and the schoolmaster we see Dickens' indictment of a society whose primary concern is “Dust," the pursuit of the filthy lucre of the pound in the barren landscape of the urban desert.

Although The Mystery of Edwin Drood is not simply a continuation of Our Mutual Friend, it does clearly emerge out of those recurring concerns revealed in the Memorandum Book and especially in the last completed novel. One thing is crucial. The chase sequence of Our Mutual Friend becomes internalized within the consciousness of John Jasper. Wrayburn and Headstone, the T’other and the T’otherest, are collapsed into a single figure who reenacts an even more bizarre version of their shared malaise. Wrayburn and Headstone come to live for the pleasures of the chase, however perverse. John Jasper lives for his expeditions to London or for those opium journeys in his own chambers when he “lights his pipe, and delivers himself to the Spectres it invokes at midnight." Those spectres are curiously akin to the ritual engaged in by Wrayburn and Headstone. As Jasper explains to the Princess Puffer, each opium dream involves “a hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where a slip would be destruction.” The journey involves, always, an unsuspecting fellow traveller who has no awareness he is a fellow traveller. It culminates in an act performed “hundreds of thousands of times," indeed, “millions and billions of times," an act which, when done in fact, seems hardly worth the doing. Yet, this obscure act which may involve the unwitting fellow traveller serves, in the dream if not in life, as the necessary prelude to some kind of release, followed by “changes of colors and ...great landscapes and glittering processions,” the exotic dream-scape with which the novel begins. The fate, even the identity of the fellow traveller who “went the journey, and never saw the road” remains unknown, part of those many riddles whose solutions were lost to us with the death of Dickens on 9 June 1870. But the dream and its structure recall the “Venetian mystery” so carefully orchestrated by Eugene Wrayburn. For the chase, like Jasper’s dream journey, ends in an act of violence and potential release: Headstone’s attack upon Wrayburn. The “time” and the “place” of Jasper‘s dream suggest just such a moment; the “fellow traveller” seems just such a potential victim.

Jasper’s conscious decision to resort to opium and to indulge in the reveries it produces is based in the same need for escape from himself and his circumstances that has driven both Wrayburn and Headstone to what Wrayburn calls their “healthful exercise." Jasper, early in the novel, advises his nephew that he has “been taking opium for a pain — an agony — that sometimes overcomes [him]." He tells the Princess Puffer, “Yes, I came on purpose. When I could not bear my life, I came to get the relief, and I got it. It WAS one! It WAS one!” It is “the relief” so consciously sought out by Jasper that links him, as much as the texture of the dream itself, to the self-destructive activities of those trapped within the claustrophobic London of Our Mutual Friend. But the fact that the dream journey is an internalization of the chase is significant. Wrayburn and Headstone exist as distinct, in some ways antithetical figures, united by a common despair; they are further evidence of the degree to which Dickens relies upon and exploits the Doppelgänger relationship. In Edwin Drood Dickens chooses to collapse Wrayburn and Headstone into a single figure whose solitary consciousness becomes the focal point of the novel. There occur fewer temptations to acquiesce to the possibilities for circumspection, if not outright contradiction, which the use of the double, at least in Dickens’ hands, seems to offer. In its initial conception Edwin Drood does not appear to be locked into the structure of A Tale of Two Cities in which Sydney Carton bides his, or Dickens’, time until he can step forward to die for Charles Darnay, resolving complex psychological and moral issues with the fall of the guillotine’s blade.

Doubles continue to appear in The Mystery of Edwin Drood: in many ways the novel offers a proliferation of double relationships unusual even in Dickens’ novels. But John Jasper, although he seeks out, and even creates, his own counterpart, needs none. The fellow traveller of his dreams may be Edwin Drood or himself. No other character necessarily exists to embody that part of himself with which Jasper, like Wrayburn or Headstone, must contend. Yet, in Edwin Drood, self-division, which the Doppelgänger can so fully explore, especially as a form of extreme dislocation, has become almost the norm. The pressures of Victorian civilization compel Wrayburn, Harmon, Headstone, and others to become “unembodied," cut off from themselves and their activities, living in the presence of an alien being who has come to occupy the same body. The characters who inhabit the Cloisterham and London of Edwin Drood seem, rather, to have accepted the psychological bifurcation urged upon them by their milieu. It is John Jasper, the opium addict, who has rejected as inadequate the conventional ways by which those who surround him have adapted to their world.

Jasper takes refuge neither in the pious calisthenics of the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle nor in that state of mind which seems applicable only to Miss Twinkleton, as headmistress of the Nuns‘ House, but which, in fact, is the psychic stratagem to which so many in the novel turn.

“As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. Every night, the moment the young ladies have retired to rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up her eyes a little, and become a sprightly Miss Twinkleton whom the young ladies have never seen. Every night, at the same hour, does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night, comprehending the tenderer scandal of Cloisterham, of which she has no knowledge whatever by day.”

Readers determined to solve the novel’s “mystery" have seized upon this apparently lighthearted passage either to convict or acquit Jasper of what is, at best, a hypothetical murder: whatever has occurred following the Christmas Eve dinner has taken place, according to various theories, while Jasper has given himself to the demons of opium. In his daylight role as choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral, he is unconscious either of his guilt or his innocence. The passage cries out for speculations like these because of its similarity to a passage in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone which had appeared in serialized form in Dickens’ own All the Year Round. Collins devises a rather clever expedient by which to recover the Moonstone. He returns Franklin Blake to an opium-induced state of unconsciousness in which he reenacts the theft he has unknowingly committed. But Edwin Drood is far too ambitious a work to rely upon a plot device already exploited by someone so closely associated in the imagination of the reading public with the Master himself. Neither the exoticism nor the psychological theorizing, which abounds in The Moonstone contributes to the kind of integrated social and psychological insight of which Dickens had proved himself capable in even his earliest novels. Collins’ implicit allusions and explicit references to De Quincey, to Sir John Elliotson, and to W. B. Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology remain at best useful indications of the sophisticated psychological theorizing which intrigued both Dickens and Collins. But what for Wilkie Collins is psychological dabbling in a vacuum becomes for Dickens a rich and suggestive substratum upon which to erect the world of Cloisterham and London in Edwin Drood. Dickens perceives in The Moonstone potentialities of which Collins seems unaware. In the mysterious Ezra Jennings, Wilkie Collins settles for De Quincey’s most obvious contribution to the literature of the age: the opium-addicted pariah. But Dickens does not. He is far too aware of the origins of that addiction which De Quincey explores in the Confessions, and he pursues the implications of the figure of the “opium-eater” in John Jasper.

One of the sources of Jasper's discontent, the “pain" for which he has been taking opium, is his very inability to maintain Miss Twinkleton’s “two states of consciousness” which seem to exist in total separation. Jasper suffers because his two states of consciousness have collapsed into a single, anguished entity. Only the greatest act of will and his ambivalent devotion to his nephew permit him to maintain, for ever shorter periods of time, the separation between his two selves. As the successor both to Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn, he shares their fate: once his self-command is weakened, each yearns for the freedom yielded him by the night. However, most of the characters in Edwin Drood, like Miss Twinkleton, are protected from the violent collision between their two states of being, the conventional public self and the other, “truer" self to which even Miss Twinkleton harmlessly turns at night. They exist apparently without the need to seek some kind of reunification of their halved beings. Within each character a dialogue of sorts, implicit or explicit, is established. The dialogue is sometimes objectified through the existence of another character representing one half of the divided self. Always the states of being interact, impinge upon each other. But for Jasper the interaction is more violent and sustained, in part because it is more clearly within him: and, finally, as in the cases of Wrayburn and Headstone, it proves uncontrollable.

Even within the context of the fragmentary Edwin Drood, john Jasper, then, is never a “horrible wonder apart,” as Rosa Bud comes to perceive him. He is another Dickensian refugee. His isolation and his suffering proclaim a twisted expression of his integrity; they are the inevitable consequences of a society which refuses to acknowledge the expression of that ambiguous “Energy” haunting Wrayburn and Lightwood in Our Mutual Friend. This energy can be sublimated into art: as a choirmaster Jasper is an artist of sorts. But the sanctioned channels for human energies, amorphous and self-contradictory as they are, only heighten the frustration of Jasper, so acutely aware of the inadequacies of the society in which he finds himself. His musical art is as mechanical as his relationships with those around him. Jasper, like Headstone before him, pursues an essentially lifeless activity which he manages only to endure. Forced to deny at least one half of himself, possessed of energies far more intense than those influencing the lives of all others but the Landlesses, he turns to opium and the fantasies which provide temporary relief from the paralysis of his life.

The opium dream with which the novel opens reveals at once the fragmented consciousness of Jasper and the ambiguities inherent in his situation.

“An ancient English Cathedral Town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What IS the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors, and infinite in number and attendants. Still, the Cathedral tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike.”

Within this highly erotic fantasy Dickens initiates us into an awareness of the inevitable conflict between Miss Twinkleton’s two states of consciousness, into the underworld of vitality upon which the Cathedral Town erects itself. And within it the two, perhaps illusory, halves of John Jasper are “fantastically pieced" together in a Blakean revelation, in an irrefutable marriage of Heaven and Hell. The generalized Eastern setting, with its Sultan and his harem, coexists with the intimidating massiveness of the grey tower of Cloisterham Cathedral which is the emblem of that most representative of English institutions, the Anglican church and all the values for which it stands. Jasper, the dreamer, is caught, suspended, between two worlds. The sinister spike, in reality a rusty spike upon a bedpost, is simultaneously a part of both worlds. It belongs to the world of the Sultan, to that erotic realm in which conventional restraints become meaningless: the Sultan is as savage in his defense of his harem as the “Turkish robbers” who seem intent upon ravishing the dancing-girls swirling through the dream. But, as an instrument of punishment, the spike also suggests the dreamer’s consciousness that the world to which the tower belongs punishes, just as remorselessly, those who defy its mores and conventions. The massive tower has been erected to deny the legitimacy, even the existence, of impulses sustained by an energy quite different from the conventional energy from which Lightwood and Wrayburn have recoiled.

Within and beyond the context of this dream, John Jasper plays many, clearly contradictory, roles. He is at once the Sultan jealously guarding his female chattels from the robbers, eager to see them die “one by one" upon the spike. He is also the potential intruder, the “writhing figure,” soon to be impaled upon the waiting stake. The dream reflects Jasper’s confusion about his relationships to society, to his nephew Edwin Drood, and to himself. Jasper experiences a version of that disorientation which De Quincey describes in an account of one of his dreams in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. De Quincey speaks of the “unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery, and mythological tortures, impressed upon me.... I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan." Both dreams make use of “Eastern” landscapes, both fix the dreamer in a condition of excruciating disorientation in which he is by turns “the idol ...the priest ...[the] worshipped ...[the] sacrificed." For Jasper the disorientation is rooted in his attitudes toward Edwin Drood. In his dual role as Drood's legal guardian and his sexual rival, John Jasper is the father and the son, the Sultan and the Turkish renegade. He is guilty of that desire at which even the creatures encrusted with De Quincey’s “Nilotic mud" might tremble.

The true nature of the relationship between the uncle and the nephew becomes almost casually defined in their chatty interchange in the early pages of the novel which conclude with Drood’s casual outburst, “‘And some uncles, in large families, are even younger than their nephews. By George, I wish it was the case with us!’". The opium dream and Drood’s comment define Jasper’s personal and social predicaments: the two reflect each other. In his relationship with Drood, Jasper is torn by the conventional affection of an uncle for a nephew and by his hatred of the youth who would, in his own words, prefer to be older than his own uncle. Simultaneously, Jasper is at war with the society in which he finds himself. That bizarre and elusive relationship between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, with its muted Oedipal implications, recurs here. To rebel against society is always, metaphorically, to rebel against the father, or someone who replaces the father in the rebel’s imagination. Bradley Headstone’s determination not to strike until he sees Lizzie and Wrayburn together in a moment of ambiguous intimacy, his vision of Wrayburn as a paternal specter come to haunt him, so close to Wrayburn's vision of his own “M.R.F.," suggest the nature of Headstone’s motives. Drood’s whimsical desire to be older than “Jack" ironically coincides with one of the ways in which Jasper, in his fantasy, perceives him; for “Ned” is the Sultan, the father, of the opium dream, as well as the son seeking to displace the father.”

Out of the Oedipal center of the dream landscape, which serves to disclose the multiplicity of his “criminal” desires, emerges Jasper’s need to punish and be punished: he both fears and desires the stake. Jasper‘s rebellion involves his rejection of the values of Cloisterham and his conscious pursuit of those fantasies he finds in the liberating influence of opium. But he has already been led to a punishment more terrible than the physical torture of the dream. The spike is embedded in Jasper’s consciousness, itself; it produces a relentless sense of guilt and anxiety. Ironically, the title of Bazzard’s unproduced “tragedy," The Thorn of Anxiety, becomes a not-so-comic parody of Jasper's situation. The thorn of anxiety exerts its pressure upon Jasper; he writhes because of its existence.

The opium dream has revealed the extent to which Jasper's consciousness is no longer safely compartmentalized into autonomous and discrete parts. He may flee the opium den, and London itself, with the coming of the dawn, but he cannot leave behind the fantasies of his dreams. Dickens is now consciously working with a Romantic conception of the mind like that which De Quincey describes in his Confessions.

“Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may, and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil — and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.”

Those stars which shine at night with such intensity, like the red glow of the Princess’ opium pipe, continue to exert their influence: “There is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.” Jasper may return to the Cathedral world of Cloisterham, but he brings with him the dreams which no longer remain in another realm of experience. The veil of sunlight, that fragile illusion obscuring “the secret inscriptions on the mind," waits only to be torn by the “accidents” of life, by the oppressive atmosphere of the Cathedral town which denies the existence of the night and its stars and yet forever reminds us, and Jasper, of its enduring presence.

When he dons his sullied white robes, Jasper reenters the world which grates on his ever more irritable nerves. Once again he must cope with the obsequiousness of a Crisparkle; he must endure the enervating boredom of the “Alternate Musical Wednesdays," that obligatory gesture to polite culture which Cloisterham routinely makes. This is the mundane reality pressing in upon him, compelling him to reveal his hopelessness to the surprised Drood.

“I hate it [my life]. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain, How does our service sound to you?"

“Beautiful! Quite celestial."

“It often sounds to me quite devilish. I am so weary of it!"

Jasper’s opium dreams reflect the confinement that he feels, the searing awareness that the art which he pursues is neither a true vocation nor an authentic expression of his private self. The gargoyles which decorate the old Cathedral at least provided release for the wretched monks. Victorian England denies Jasper even that outlet. In response to such a world a Eugene Wrayburn adopts, if unsuccessfully, a “second nature” of lassitude. For Jasper that is not enough. He furtively turns to opium and the fantasies it offers as a substitute for the open acknowledgment of the repressed energies of his life. He has been deprived of that unified life of self-fulfillment which exists, at best, as a hypothetical norm in the novel. Jasper, in “carving [demons] out of [his] heart," has become, as his name and manner suggest, a living gargoyle.

Jasper‘s consolation, and his punishment, lies in his twisted love for Rosa Bud, who is so alien to the life of intensity of which he, apparently, was once capable. The unfinished portrait of Rosa, endowed by Drood with a “beauty remarkable for a quite childish, almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself”, presides over Jasper’s chambers like the image of an impish, secular madonna. Dickens’ allusion to Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, to Ambrosio’s reverence of the portrait of Matilda as the Virgin Mary, seems explicit. Ambrosio and Jasper share a common fate: they are reduced, one unconsciously, the other consciously, to the futile worship of the inviolable virgin as a direct consequence of their entombment within a dead institution. They have both experienced a process of repression which leads, in Matthew Lewis’ words, to a separation between the “real and [the] acquired character” so that “the different sentiments with which education and nature had inspired him [Ambrosio in this case], were combating in his bosom: it remained for his passions, which as yet no opportunity had called into play, to decide the victory.” Matilda, the temptress in league with the devil, arouses those passions, seduces Ambrosio and decides the battle in passion’s favor.

Dickens’ re-creation of a situation so recognizably analogous to that in The Monk reveals again his debt to the Gothic tradition. It also further illuminates the new use of the Gothic in Dickens’ hands, the new vision of the traditional villain. The change in language alone is significant. The “passions" of Matthew Lewis, and the eighteenth century, have become the “energy” of Dickens’ late novels. The words are not simply synonymous. “Passion” immediately suggests its traditional antithesis, “reason"; the psychic battle is essentially bipolar. We are in the realm of Doctor Johnson’s Rasselas, in which the ascendance of reason over passion is the norm. “Energy,” the term to which Dickens, George Eliot, and other nineteenth-century novelists turn so often, suggests an amorphous reservoir of vitality, perhaps the source of consciousness itself. In such a perspective the psyche becomes at once more complex, less easily defined in reductive moral language. But Dickens modifies eighteenth-century Gothicism in other ways. He rejects, as he has in previous novels, a central Gothic tactic: the use of an explicitly Roman Catholic setting, distant in time and place. The Gothic novel ordinarily titillates the curiosity of a Protestant audience and moderates implicit challenges to contemporary mores. In The Monk, Matthew Lewis chooses Madrid in the time of the Inquisition as his setting, and panders to the voyeuristic interests of his audience, to that itch to know what must go on behind monastic and conventual walls. He, also, protects himself from the outrage of people who might see in his tale of terror an embryonically coherent critique of English society in the 1790s. In The Monk even Lewis’ own obsessions undermine any claim to seriousness the novel might pose. The exotic, Poe-esque elements of The Monk — the necrophilia, the fetishism, the barely concealed homosexuality — threaten to reduce the novel to the status of a clinical document.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood the diversionary tactics are gone. The critique of conventional rationalism and bourgeois society ceases to be disguised and intermittent. Dickens exploits the Gothic, not to obscure the thrust of his critique, but to establish causal relations between the individual predicament and the environment. The London of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend is a Gothic castle haunted by incubi and grotesques of various kinds, expressing the social and psychological terrors of Victorian society. The Cloisterham of Edwin Drood is that analogue of the haunted castle, the monastery of the Gothic tradition. But it is the monastery transformed. There is no evasive distinction between the suspect values of the Cloister and the saner values of a secular society. Instead, the secular world becomes permeated with the values which repress and destroy Matthew Lewis’ Ambrosio. And although the concern with repressed sexuality remains a predominant issue in Edwin Drood, the novel encompasses, often indirectly and by implication, the full complexity of the indivudual’s situation in nineteenth-century England: the quest for the unified self is the core of the novel. The spirit of Silas Wegg, in pursuit of his amputated leg, presides over both Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood. His anxious complaint to Mr. Venus is a credo, of sorts, for both novels: “I shouldn‘t like — I tell you openly I should not like ... to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person." It is a moment of high comedy and terrible seriousness. The dispersal of the self seems the inevitable fate for the inhabitants of London and Cloisterham.

At last, London, “the great black city [which casts] its shadow on the waters, [with] its dark bridges [spanning] them as death spans life" (197), merges into the superficially distinct world of Cloisterham. There is no longer the seemingly inviolable separation between the city and the serene Canterbury of David Copperfield. The provincial Cathedral town, in the green garden of the countryside, becomes undeniably an extension of the city of death. The Cathedral itself is sepulchral, rising above the crypts beneath it. The town’s inhabitants are strangely cut off from nature and change: for them time has stopped. Although Cloisterham “was once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another," and to the Saxons and Normans by even other names, the townspeople “seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come." The reality of past change and the violence which has preceded the current peacefulness have disappeared from the collective consciousness of those in Cloisterham. For Dickens, the recognition of change is not designed to celebrate continuity, but to assert the need for that necessary change which the town of Cloisterham resists as if it were its raison d’étre. This, in spite of the fact that daily “the Cloisterham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields” grinds the bones of “once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops and such-like" to make his bread. The past does not contribute as it should to the enduring life of the town, providing the dust in which to fertilize new life. Instead, the past reinforces the “oppressive respectability” of the town. Its weight lies heavy upon the people of Cloisterham, imposing upon them the outmoded values of another time: “In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham.” The town is the past. It impinges upon the present architecturally by incorporating its “fragments" into surviving buildings. But it has also insinuated itself into the consciousness of its inhabitants. The past exists through those "jumbled notions . . incorporated into many of its citizens minds."

The Cathedral is the dominant landmark, the ultimate emblem of the sway of the past. And another landmark of bygone days remains in use to remind us that apparently long — forgotten atrocities are even now perpetrated upon unwitting victims: “In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns‘ House; a venerable brick edifice whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses." But the Nuns’ House, now a Seminary for Young Ladies, serves the same unnatural functions it once served. The zealous abbess out of the pages of The Monk has been replaced by the innocuous Miss Twinkleton. Her scrupulous observation of existing proprieties makes her the unconscious spokesman of notions persisting from an age supposedly less enlightened than that of Victorian England. The Nuns’ House is clearly a pale, but very real, reflection of a severer time: “Whether the nuns of yore ...were ever walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building for having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them which has kept the fermenting world alive ever since; these may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton’s half-yearly accounts." Miss Twinkleton may forget the past and its relevance to the present, but Dickens cannot. John Jasper is the Ambrosio of Edwin Drood: he has taken “to carving demons" out of his own psyche. The girls of the Nuns’ House are its trapped novitiates, direct descendants of Agnes in The Monk. Agnes, in her time, succumbs to that “ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature” in her and, like the storied nuns of Cloisterham, is “walled up alive” amidst the decaying corpses in the vaults beneath the abbey of Saint Clare. The students of the Nuns’ House remain metaphorically buried alive, encircled by the chaste admonitions of a Miss Twinkleton, who inevitably refrains from the use of the all-too-suggestive word, “bosoms,” substituting in its place the far more delicate and genteel euphemism, “hearts.” Even as she reads aloud to Rosa Bud from the romantic novels fashionable in the thirties and forties, Miss Twinkleton bowdlerizes them in a way initially comic, but finally grotesque. The romantic drivel which she finds so offensive is no less untrue to human realities than the “interpolated passages” she creates to celebrate the “pious frauds" of a bourgeois conception of domestic bliss in a “suburban establishment," sanctioned by the consent of “papa" and “the silver-haired rector." The sterility of Miss Twinkleton’s, and society’s, vision of marriage is as stifling as the religious asceticism of old. The domestic arrangement of which she speaks sentences even someone like Rosa, still a child, yet possessing potentialities for sexual and emotional fulfillment, to a version of that ancient punishment reserved for the nuns who would not deny their own natures. Ultimately, no one in The Mystery of Edwin Drood remains untouched by obsolete values and conventional expectations which perpetuate themselves almost unchallenged. Edwin Drood, with his condescending and proprietary attitude toward Rosa, with his airy confidence in his ability “to wake up Egypt a little," epitomizes the conventional self. His predicament, of which he seems so unconscious, is another version of John Harmon’s and Eugene Wrayburn’s in Our Mutual Friend. All three must contend with fathers, living or dead, who try to control the shape of their sons’ lives. Rosa Bud has been willed to Drood, in the words of Bella Wilfer, “like a dozen of spoons, with everything cut and dried beforehand, like orange chips.” But Drood, Miss Twinkleton and society as a whole acquiesce without question to the absurdity of the will which shapes, or distorts, both his life and Rosa’s. Drood, young English gentleman that he is, accepts the stifling role that society and a dead father have fashioned for him. He is not even stirred by the sense of uneasiness that Eugene Wrayburn responds to in analogous circumstances.

In this context, Jasper’s revelation to Drood that he hates “the cramped monotony of [his] existence," makes his accompanying warning particularly ambiguous. Drood should realize that “even a poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music — in his niche — may be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?” Jasper relishes his own ironic use of the word, “niche.” In using Drood's own phrase, Jasper implies Drood is implicitly responsible for his suffering. And, yet, his avowal of his discontent is to be taken “as a warning." In part, Jasper implies that even the confident Drood may find himself forced to “subdue" himself to a career and a life that have become a yoke. It is Drood‘s youthful lack of imagination which makes it impossible for him to conceive that he, too, might awaken one day to a sense of his life's meaninglessness. His uncle’s suffering is his first exposure to a certain potentiality within himself.

Nor can Drood possibly understand the more insidious warning, that Jasper’s “ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction,” may involve a direct threat to his own life. He cannot imagine that he stands between his uncle and Rosa Bud. The ambiguity of this warning is not the conscious dissembling of a Gothic villain. It expresses Jasper’s own confusion about his motives and intentions, for his commitment to his nephew is a real one. The look that Jasper ordinarily casts upon Drood is necessarily enigmatic: “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 [Drood's] direction." The “Jasper face" is more than an allusion to the gargoyle Jasper has become. The phrase points to the mask of stone which conceals Jasper’s deeper feelings. The intensity of his look as it feeds upon Drood suggests the latent homosexuality which has become another element in his already complex relationship to him.

Jasper’s consuming interest in his nephew’s well-being, rooted in his own conflicting desires, is an acknowledged fact of his life. The diary which Jasper keeps is, as he admits to Crisparkle, “in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too.” What he records there are not simply the events of his routine life or the conventional milestones in Drood’s. The entries reveal his internal struggle, his ongoing debate about himself and Drood: they become a dialogue between the conventional self and its rebelling counterpart. Jasper is full of love and concern for his “dear boy," now almost a man; he is, simultaneously, jealous, perhaps murderous, in his lust for Rosa Bud. When he warns Drood and is reassured to learn that Drood “can’t be warned,” Jasper has not yet made the choice between his nephew and Rosa Bud. So, on one night of many such nights, John Jasper stands with a “peculiar-looking pipe," filled with something that is not tobacco, and gazes into one of the two bedrooms in his set of chambers where “his nephew lies asleep, calm and untroubled." He contemplates the sleeping Drood, that avowedly “shallow, surface kind of fellow" who has not yet responded to the violation of his own integrity which his engagement to Rosa poses. Jasper passes from Drood’s room to his own, from a shallow realm to the depths inhabited by “Spectres” which have yet to disturb Drood’s sleep. He has discarded an obsolete part of himself and slipped into the kingdom of dreams incessantly whispering to him.

It is no accident that Dickens moves from this nocturnal scene to the daylight world and the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle performing his daily calisthenics. Cloisterham’s world of walls, gates, and locks now has its Minotaur in the form of John Jasper. The oppressiveness of the Cathedral town produces the need for the affirmation of some norm which embodies a compromise between the claims of human energy and the entrenched proscriptions of society. Crisparkle would seem to be living proof of a viable accommodation between “oppressive respectability” and the fermenting vitality of the human spirit. But just as the city of London casts its shadows on the waters of the Thames, the past and present cast their shadows upon the life of the Minor Canon. Like so many characters in Dickens’ novels who seem to be offered as moral and psychological touchstones, Crisparkle provides no real alternative to the predicament of John Jasper. His association with the Anglican Church and his dependence on the patronage which has led to his present position compel us to take an ironic view of what he does and what he stands for. For Crisparkle’s “contented and boy-like" satisfaction with “his present Christian beat” is based all too clearly on his total incapacity for entertaining an ironic vision of himself or others. Jasper, so acutely sensitive to the affectations of those around him, inevitably smiles when the ingenuous Crisparkle pointedly emphasizes that he is inquiring about the choirmaster's health at the express wishes of the Dean: he, at least, is aware of the Dean’s hypocrisy and patronizing manner, if Crisparkle is not.

But it is primarily the exaggerated physical well-being and self-satisfaction of Crisparkle, and the ways in which they are achieved and at what cost, that Dickens knowingly dwells upon. To come upon Crisparkle in the midst of his morning exercises is to learn the nature of his limitations. We find Crisparkle, after “having broken the thin morning ice near Cloisterham Weir with his amiable head,” in the act of “assisting his circulation by boxing at a looking — glass with great science and prowess." While John Jasper grapples with his private demons, Septimus Crisparkle is free to feint and dodge before his own benevolent reflection, enjoying his skill and his mastery over a nonexistent opponent. His limitations are his blessing: he is as innocent of any knowledge of the depths that Jasper has plumbed as he is of the glaring pomposity of the Dean. His “soft-hearted benevolence" is the fruit of a naiveté initially as appealing as his “radiant features." But the looking-glass suggests the superficiality of his achievement. Crisparkle, like the Veneerings and Podsnaps of Our Mutual Friend, mirrored in the two-dimensional realm of “the great looking-glass,” dwells upon the surface of life. This is the basis of his health, mental and physical. The domestic arrangements in Minor Canon Corner, the very nature of the tranquillity which reigns there, reveal the extent of Crisparkle’s retreat from life. The Mrs. Crisparkle with whom he lives is, as Dickens rather too pointedly observes, the “mother, not [the] wife, of the Reverend Septimus.” As the old lady stands to say the Lord’s Prayer before their breakfast, the Minor Canon also stands “with bent head to hear it, he being within five years of forty: much as he had stood to hear the same words from the same lips when he was within five months of four."

Time has stopped for Septimus Crisparkle, much as it seems to have stopped for Cloisterham and for Minor Canon Corner.

“Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping and raving about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries of drudging and dying there, and powerful monks had had their centuries of being sometimes useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were all gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better. Perhaps one of the highest uses of their ever having been there, was, that there might be left behind, that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded Minor Canon Corner.”

The passage, which reads like a burlesque of evolutionary platitudes, teems with an animus barely under Dickens’ control. The old savagery, brutality, and energy appear to be gone, banished from the earth, “and so much the better.” They seem expressly to have become extinct to make way for a higher order of existence, for that fragile, dainty world inhabited by the “china shepherdess" and her compliant son. The “blessed air of tranquillity,” the “serenely romantic state of ... mind," which is theirs to enjoy is the product of volcanic eras of violence and suffering. Implicitly, the passage asks why these two people, harmless, perhaps even generous and kind, should be the beneficiaries of those centuries of turbulence. They have not quelled the violence and engendered order; they have only inherited it. But the bitterness of Dickens’ vision lies finally in the reference to the past as “a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic play that is played out.” The ramping, the raving, the drudging, the dying are not things of the past. John Jasper haunts the quiet of Cloisterham and Minor Canon Corner. The young Deputy, with the peculiar “object” Durdles has provided him as a channel for his energies, roams the streets of Cloisterham, as do other young present-day savages, victims of ignorance and neglect. As the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle benevolently walks his Christian beat, Cloisterham seethes with Jasper’s frustrated passion and the malignant, but justified, resentment of ferocious boys, like Deputy, who are destroyers for want of what Durdles calls “an enlightened object." The value of Crisparkle’s benevolence and the validity of the conventional wisdom for which he stands are circumscribed by the reality of his limitations. The world of Minor Canon Corner becomes a fragile ark in a sea of dark and unacknowledged forces.

There is, in fact, no one to whom the reader can imaginatively turn in the opening pages of Edwin Drood. Dickens has created a hypothetical No Thoroughfare in which each of the major figures of the novel exists. The individual and the social predicament is one of acute crisis, awaiting only one of those De Quinceian “accidents" to rend the veil of normality. With the appearance of Helena and Neville Landless the veil is torn: the exotic and savage Orient erupts upon the illusory tranquillity of Cloisterham. John Jasper no longer indulges his fantasies in furtive and guilt-ridden isolation. The world of his dreams manifests itself, alive and undeniable, in the forms of the two youths, incongruous in the midst of the Cathedral and the monastery ruins, “much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild tropical dominion,” as Crisparkle observes to himself. They pose a striking contrast to the shallowness of Drood, to the domesticated vitality of Crisparkle and to the distorted energies of a Deputy or a Jasper: “An unusually handsome lithe young fellow. and an unusually handsome lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in color; she, of almost the gipsy type; something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers.”

These splendid creatures, as yet untouched by the “oppressive respectability” of Cloisterham, possess intact that elusive and indefinable vitality which the walls of the Cathedral, the monastery, and the Nuns’ House have been built to channel into the narrowest of conduits. Their very presence in Cloisterham serves to remind us, once again, that the psychic and physical qualities they possess cannot be walled in without disastrous consequences for the individual and society. The Landlesses, “slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant," suggest undifferentiated energy itself, reasserting its primacy, challenging the jumbled notions of a culture which has tried to turn away from the human questions such energy poses.

In a stroke the brother and sister reassert the continuity between Edwin Drood and De Quincey’s Confessions. For Dickens, the Landlesses and the Ceylon from which they come possess that aura of mystery, revelation, and potential terror which echoes De Quincey’s ambivalent response to those Eastern images which finally dominate his dreams. The Malay, real or imaginary, who appears at De Quincey’s cottage in the Lake Region eventually represents everything that is alien and un-English in De Quincey himself, everything that is somehow taboo and to be denied at all costs. Within the Confessions the incident has far-reaching consequences. The Malay becomes the physical manifestation of De Quincey’s guilt, the living expression of those desires which, in the elaborate mythology of opium addiction, are unleashed through the agency of the drug. The Malay, by reappearing in his dreams, becomes the medium through whom De Quincey is initiated even further into a knowledge of the unspeakable.

“The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. I have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep; and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations.”

Through his identification with the Malay, De Quincey can express the horror, and the appeal, of those potentialities which southern Asia, “as the cradle of the human race,” holds for him. The feeling of abhorrence is intensified by the undeniable lure of “the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan". The “barrier” of terror which protects De Quincey from the savagery and fecundity of the Orient is far more fragile than he would like to admit.

The Ceylon from which Dickens brings the Landlesses is deeply rooted in this De Quinceian vision of the East, “the seat of awful images and associations," as well as of “a dim and reverential feeling." It possesses a special charge because of the literary tradition to which it belongs. The Landlesses, like De Quincey’s Malay, are from “the cradle of the human race”; they, too, are De Quincey’s “antediluvian man renewed," dark but beautiful emissaries from a realm fermenting with life, savagery, and passion. There man loses his very individuality: he becomes a “weed,” only one more manifestation of life in its bewildering variety. Neville and Helena Landless assert the enduring presence of the violent centuries which only seem to be of the past. They are the warning, and the promise, that the creative potentialities of such energies have not forever been lost to the people of the sepulchral Cathedral town. The Landlesses, however mysterious and volatile, are the harbingers of life in the midst of unambiguous death. The question remains whether such exotic and sensuous beings, who even communicate by a mysterious process of intuition or telepathy, will be permitted to survive intact, or whether they will be so directed and improved by the well-meaning Crisparkle that they will lose the vitality they possess.

The Landlesses introduce alternative, and alien, modes of being into Cloisterham. They also act as catalytic agents, like the opium Jasper smokes. Their presence tends to break down the elaborate social and psychic barriers which have, so far, provided that illusory separation between Crisparkle‘s innocuous daylight world and the midnight world into which Jasper flees for refuge and release. With their appearance Jasper’s already disintegrating command of himself undergoes further erosion. He begins to communicate more explicitly and urgently his repressed desires.

Rosa Bud is already troubled by Jasper’s passion for her. She is woman enough to have felt the intense sexual desire he expresses through his music and his singing. However, she does not understand that her fear is also based on some vaguely stirring response to Jasper within herself. On the night of the Crisparkles’ dinner party, which welcomes the Landlesses to Cloisterham, Rosa finds herself submitting to the inevitable performance required of a young lady at such a party. Jasper accompanies her on the piano: “The song went on. It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and the fresh young voice was very plaintive and tender. As Jasper watched the pretty lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself, the voice became a little less steady, until all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: ‘I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!’ ”

Of all those in the drawing room only Helena, Rosa, and Jasper understand what lies behind the girl’s outcry. The intense eroticism of the proceedings, the subtle violation of Rosa, as Jasper “[hints] the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself,” has gone unnoticed by the others. But Helena, who possesses a sexual awareness banned from the respectable parlors of respectable people, understands the implications of Jasper’s attentiveness. She stands beside Rosa, “intent" upon Jasper. While Edwin Drood unperceptively assumes that “Jack’s” conscientiousness has intimidated Rosa, Helena knows the real basis of Rosa’s terror. And knowing it, possessing the knowledge of that sexuality Victorian society denies, she would not be afraid of Jasper "under any circumstances.”

In Helena Landless, Rosa finds her antithesis. Rosa calls herself a “mite of a thing," while Helena is “womanly and handsome," with “resolution and power enough to crush” the less confident Rosa. Her own remarks suggest that Rosa, “wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish,” has willed her innocence and passivity, as well as her denial of her own sexual nature. Characteristically, when she and Edwin Drood agree to break their engagement, Rosa wants to think of him as a brother. But Helena Landless inhabits a different psychic realm. She has already seen that Jasper lusts after Rosa. She even understands the deception underlying Rosa’s idea of herself as a helpless victim of a force thoroughly beyond her control: “He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat.” The act of compulsion, from Rosa’s perspective, seems all on the part of Jasper, yet Rosa’s susceptibility to his presence, to his every gesture, reveals the extent to which she is not merely a slave to her music master but an unconscious partner in an intensely charged exchange. There is a certain thrill behind her confession that on this night, “It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t bear it, but cried out.” Her shame and terror do not proceed only from Jasper's violation, as Drood’s “uncle,” of the primal taboo against incest. In a milieu in which Miss Twinkleton must speak of “the future wives and mothers of England" in a lowered voice, lest the company be shocked by even the most veiled allusion to the sexual act, Rosa has been denied the capacity to accept her own sexuality. She is, necessarily, drawn to a Helena Landless who can ask, quite directly, “You do not love him [Jasper]? ...You know that he loves you?”, because she has not yet fallen victim to Cloisterham's crippling inhibitions. But in embracing Helena, Rosa has turned to someone whose vision of her plight must be different from her own. Helena’s “wild black hair [falls] down protectingly over [Rosa’s] childish form": “There was a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were then softened with compassion and admiration." Here Rosa is lost in an embrace as potentially sexual as any Jasper might offer. One wonders what can be the source of Helena’s compassion or admiration for this childish creature, unless it is pity for Rosa’s weakness and curiosity in her lack of self-knowledge.

But the evening is not over. The gates of the Nuns’ House close upon Rosa and Helena, but the forces that have been released have not yet played themselves out. As Rosa and Helena are brought together by the fascination which opposites hold for each other, Edwin Drood and Neville Landless are drawn together, not by the power of love, but by that of mutual contempt, even hatred. Drood has already been moved by the sensual intensity of the dark-complexioned Helena, just as Landless has responded to the fragile, childlike beauty of Rosa. Each seeks out, intuitively, an opposite to complement his own nature. Their unexpressed desires help to create the antagonism they feel for each other. It is intensified by that casual sense of superiority which Drood exudes as the anointed Westerner ready to bring the wonders of technology to Egypt, and as Rosa’s fiancé with his infuriatingly proprietary attitude. Landless’ own feeling of racial inferiority, his acute sensitivity to the most casual slight, adds the final measure of provocation. He lacks that easy ability to mask his emotions Drood has inherited, as he has inherited Rosa, without that all-important knowledge that his mannerisms are at best only a fragile veneer. Drood’s genteel composure has so maddened Landless that only the sudden intervention of Jasper prevents a violent quarrel. He appears, as it were, out of the darkness, to lay a “startling right hand” on Drood’s shoulder and to stand between the two, at once separating and joining them, as he places his left hand on the “inner shoulder” of Landless. In the darkness of the tranquil Cloisterham night John Jasper has encountered the externalized manifestation of his own warring states of mind.

The following scene in Jasper’s chambers reveals the extent to which Jasper’s private dream-world now impinges more and more upon the world of conventional reality. As Eugene Wrayburn finds in Bradley Headstone an “entertaining study” and incorporates the schoolmaster into a version of his own Gothic novel through “the chase,” John Jasper presides over the dramatic reenactment, before his very eyes, of the conflicts dominating his dreams. He casually calls attention to the unfinished portrait of Rosa Bud, hanging in its central place over the chimneypiece. This act, alone, rekindles the quarrel he has apparently tried to halt. When he turns his back upon the two young men to prepare a jug of “mulled wine" before the fire, “it seems to require much mixing and compounding." On this evening Jasper has found an intriguing substitute for his usual means of escape. If he has, in fact, drugged the wine, he has created the conditions under which all that he has so long repressed can be exposed without risk to himself. In the opium den of the Princess Puffer and in his own bedchamber, Jasper has repeatedly undertaken, in the company of an unsuspecting fellow traveller, that perilous dream journey, “over abysses where a slip would be destruction.” Jasper has before him, now, Drood and Landless, each a “traveller,” each a potential threat to the other. As a spectator, he momentarily possesses even that illusion of distance and self-command which enables Eugene Wrayburn to sleep so soundly after the healthful rigors of the chase.

As he goads Landless to renewed fury, Jasper participates in the frustration and envy lying behind it. He speaks of Drood’s prospects, of the world before him, of the marriage which is his legacy, and then exposes his own resentment, carefully screened by his bantering manner: “You [Landless] and I have no prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and excitement, or of domestic ease and love. You and I have no prospect ...but the tedious, unchanging round of this dull place.” Under other circumstances Jasper has revealed his sense of alienation and frustration to Drood; he has seemed to understand that his nephew might well find himself in a “niche" like his own. But now he is free, under the aegis of Landless’ presence, to express obliquely that envy of his nephew that has become inextricably bound to his own discontent. Drood justifiably protests that his situation is not as comfortable, as free of restraints, as it seems: both he and Rosa have begun to perceive the absurdity of their engagement, the element of coercion behind the benevolence of two dead fathers and the unthinking acquiescence of society. But Drood’s emerging awareness of the violation of his integrity by the will lies temporarily beyond the comprehension of either Landless or Jasper. Neither can understand Drood’s apparent lack of commitment, his maddening indifference to the tempting “golden fruit that hangs ripe on the tree for him." Drood‘s pose, so akin to the adopted languor of Eugene Wrayburn, is his muted protest to the circumstances into which he has been born. But his “air of leisurely patronage and indifference” as he speaks of the unfinished portrait of Rosa as a “joke, sir, a mere joke” is enough to madden Landless and Jasper. Jasper has identified himself with Landless: both are dark, alien young men, with “no prospect[s]," taunted by Drood’s easy self — assurance. The man who stands before them is not simply a sexual rival: he represents a state of consciousness the two abhor.

Jasper’s self-possession throughout the intensifying quarrel resembles the passivity of the dreamer who observes the landscape and the flow of events passing before him. But, like the dreamer, Jasper participates in all that happens, for without him there is nothing. His consciousness is the ultimate ground of this scene; all the characters are versions of his multifaceted self. Throughout the dreamlike quarrel which follows Jasper plays many roles. Through Landless he is the enraged son rebelling against Drood, the patronizing father. In his efforts to calm Landless and Drood, he becomes the father intervening to protect the son he loves. Even through the words of Drood, a part of Jasper reveals itself.

When he responds to Drood’s annihilating condescension with the observation, ”I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to account for it" (59), Landless unwittingly expresses Jasper’s own sense of foreignness. Both belong to the same part of the world, a metaphorical Ceylon like De Quincey‘s southern Asia, that “seat of awful images and associations.” Drood’s contemptuous response to Landless is his confession that he has acquiesced more than he knows to his conventional world: “Only there? ...A long way off, I believe? Yes; I see! That part of the world is at a safe distance” (59). But that “part of the world" is in Jasper‘s chambers this night, in defiance of the walls of Cloisterham and the social taboos designed to exclude it.

Drood’s claim that Landless is “no judge of white men” is the final thrust. Like Wrayburn’s calculated denial of Headstone’s existence, Drood’s comment exiles Landless, and the dark Jasper, from the civilized island world of England, from that socially defined reality to which the two men pose a challenge. Drood’s racism is only another version of the enduring attempt of society to shut out alternative visions of reality. At this point, only Jasper’s intervention prevents a struggle between two modes of being. The nightmare has almost worked itself out to its logical conclusion, but Jasper‘s intercession imposes, once again, the barriers separating not only Landless and Drood, but the conflicting parts of Jasper’s own consciousness. The two apparently distinct states of mind reassert their primacy. Landless finds himself in the dark, standing “with a bare head in the midst of a bloodred whirl, waiting to be struggled with, and to struggle to the death". But the time, place, and fellow-traveller of Jasper’s endlessly repeated dream journey are not yet at hand. At this moment Jasper is prepared for the “struggle to the death" neither with Drood nor with himself. The crisis has not come; the choice between who is to live and who is to die, if only figuratively, is still to be made. And Jasper, speaking to Crisparkle of the events of the evening, reveals more completely than he realizes his own confusion and anxiety: “I shall never know peace of mind when there is danger of those two coming together with no one else to interfere”. The two parts of the divided self are held, literally and figuratively, at arms’ length by an interceding agent. For the moment Jasper himself is the agent. Even in his desperation he cannot as yet contemplate the destruction of the nephew who is like a son to him, because he is a part of himself. But that separation of the two bedrooms, reflecting the artificial compartmentalizing of Jasper’s psyche, has run its course as a strategem for survival.

His urgent need to reconcile, if possible, the fragmented parts of his own consciousness impels Jasper to turn to Septimus Crisparkle. The diary entry he shows Crisparkle, expressing his concern over “the demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object”, is a confession of guilt and a plea for help. Jasper accepts Crisparkle’s efforts to affect a reconciliation between Landless and Drood because it raises the possibility of some resolution to his own anguish. The Christmas Eve dinner party for three offers a chance for that reunification of his own psyche which Jasper still seeks.

The prospects for an enduring reconciliation, either between Drood and Landless or within Jasper himself, are undermined from the start by the fact that it is Crisparkle who has taken the initiative in the affair. Crisparkle, far more than Drood, remains the voice of conventional morality at its most blatant throughout the novel. He continues to present its positive qualities and its inherent inadequacy. When he comes upon Helena and Neville Landless in their usual solitary walk beside the river, Crisparkle‘s attempts to pacify Landless’ intensity reveal once more how alien and incomprehensible real energy and intensity are to him. To ask Landless to take the first step and to apologize to Drood is a violation of Landless’ integrity. He almost pleads with Crisparkle, “My nature must be changed before I can do so, and it is not changed". But this is precisely Crisparkle‘s intent: to alter the nature of Neville Landless, to draw over his intensity the veil of social convention. Crisparkle is the social conscience in its most gentle and attractive form. But beneath the gentleness it remains unrelenting in its determination to reduce other modes of being to its own constricted state. So Crisparkle gently rebukes Landless for his clenched hands and responds with deadening gravity to Landless’ open admission of his admiration for Rosa Bud. As he reminds Landless that Rosa is “shortly to be married" and that his “admiration" for her is “outrageously misplaced," Crisparkle reveals his acceptance of the bizarre situation in which Drood and Rosa find themselves. He defends the socially sanctioned, if anachronistic, betrothal with a solemnity worthy of the Dean himself. He proves himself less imaginative, less compassionate, than even that most angular of men, Mr. Grewgious. For Crisparkle the antidote to emotions which defy socially acceptable limits is a regimen of physical fitness or an exhausting walking tour: he is the quintessential headmaster of a boys’ school.

With this perspective, Crisparkle lapses into a condescension which exposes his willingness to play unthinkingly with Landless’ life. He chooses to treat Landless’ response to Rosa as a mere infatuation, a “fancy of the moment." This is a classic instance of the invalidation of another’s experience. There is no mistaking Crisparkle’s conviction that he knows the true state of Neville’s feelings: his tone exudes it. Crisparkle tells Landless what he ought to feel, what others in similar situations have felt. He imposes upon the orphaned twins a conception of individual experience sanctioned by the conventional wisdom of which he is a spokesman. He subverts Landless’ experience in the name of social stability. Crisparkle performs his social obligation with a sense of complete benevolence. It is his duty to deny the validity of Landless’ “world,” his Ceylon, and to assert the conventional claims of those in Cloisterham.

Surprisingly, Helena and Neville Landless humble themselves before Crisparkle. Suddenly, neither has the ability to penetrate Crisparkle’s self-satisfied facade. Even Helena, who has understood at once the relationship of Jasper to Rosa, accepts Crisparkle’s advice. As the three separate, Helena takes the hand Crisparkle offers her “and gratefully and almost reverently [raises] it to her lips". It is an outrageous gesture on the part of both. It seals the first stage in the socialization of the Landlesses, that moment in which they are, in the words of Laing, “tricked and [have] tricked [themselves] out of [their] minds, … out of [their] own personal worlds of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially [they] may endow the external world.” The only “Heaven” a Crisparkle can offer the Landlesses is the secular sterility of Minor Canon Corner. The brother and sister, so like “beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild tropical dominion," have bowed before the civilizing touch of the Minor Canon: they have violated all that has made them “slender, supple, quick of eye and limb." When he acquiesces to the pledge of silence exacted by Crisparkle, Landless accepts, at his sister‘s urging, what for him may prove to be a death sentence. He has been asked to do the impossible: to erase from his consciousness not just a specific feeling for Rosa, but also the sources of that feeling. He is now alienated from himself, potentially another John Jasper.

But Crisparkle has affected at best a temporary, if not altogether illusory, restoration of peace to Cloisterham. He lacks the power to heal the disorder from which Jasper and the Cathedral town suffer. The novel moves toward Christmas Eve and that violent storm which is to dissipate forever the aura of tranquility in which Cloisterham takes refuge. There are omens warning that some final eruption of long suppressed forces must take place. In spite of the “veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind" which Crisparkle tries to reestablish, the “obscuring daylight" of which De Quincey speaks in the Confessions will withdraw to reveal the ineradicable nature of those inscriptions. Under the aegis of the red light burning steadily in his gatehouse chambers, the chaotic forces within john Jasper are released from their habitual bondage on that Christmas Eve: they are free to rage without the threat of restraint. In the midst of the turbulent darkness of the storm, the persistence of the steady burning of Jasper's lamp assumes a sinister significance. John Jasper presides over the violence that thunders along the empty streets at midnight, “rattling at all the latches, and tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to get up and fly with it". He is, figuratively, the source, if not the master, of all that is released. For the same red light glowed throughout Jasper’s midnight ramble with Durdles and the confrontation with Deputy. It has burned during all the lonely vigils when Jasper has delivered himself to his midnight “Spectres." And its reflection has appeared in the cupped hands of the Princess Puffer as she nurses the “red spark of light" emanating from the bowl of the opium pipe. The red light unifies Jasper’s existence: it is the spark of consclousness.

The storm whose ground is Jasper’s consciousness succeeds in obliterating time itself on this most un-Dickensian of Christmas Eves. On the Christmas morning which follows the storm, “it is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that lead from the roof has been stripped away; ...and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great tower". But the tower remains, the hands of the clock will be replaced. As in Jasper’s recurring dream, the tower seems indestructible. Perhaps time has been momentarily denied, or transcended. But the moment of transcendence passes. With the return of day, the obscuring veil of light returns. The storm, “like a wounded monster," finally drops, sinks, and dies. The Minotaur has had its moment of ambiguous freedom; now time and the values of society reassert themselves, as they always must.

The storm manifests the violence behind Jasper’s self-conscious constraint. It also obscures forever those events which occur while it rages on. The vexing impenetrability of events remains an inherent part of Edwin Drood. Jasper, like De Quincey, might well claim adherence to “the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member — the alpha and the omega". But as a communicant in that church which inverts the values of a Christianity he only routinely observes, john Jasper writhes in the power of a god beyond his control. He cannot know whether the ritual he performs has culminated only in his erotic, narcissistic visions or in an act of perverse religious devotion, the sacrificial murder of his nephew, and necessarily, of part of himself. Nor can we.

Jasper’s behavior after the disappearance of his “dear boy" is intelligible only within this context of pure ambiguity. In the last chapter of the fragment as we have it, “The Dawn Again," Jasper returns to the opium den of the Princess Puffer. For months he has been preparing his own opium in spite of the bags proud claim that only she has “the real receipt for mixing it”. The possibility exists that the effects of the drug upon Jasper’s consciousness have become unpredictable. The glowing red lamp visible during the storm suggests that he has once again taken refuge in his visionary world before Drood’s return from the river bank: he has prepared himself to meet the “fellow-traveller” of the dream journey. But the complexity of Jasper‘s psychological situation becomes as labyrinthine as the novel itself. If a murder has been committed, it may have been assimilated into the journey Jasper has relived “millions and billions" of times. But the “murder” may be only a dream, a dream taking on the appearance of reality. Jasper’s ravings in the presence of the Princess only reveal his total disorientation. The enigmatic “it" which “comes to be real at last,” but which “is so short that it seems unreal for the first time”, need not be the act itself. Dickens offers no clues as to whether it is a real or a visionary murder which has failed to satisfy Jasper. There is only Jasper’s conviction that the enigmatic “it" must have occurred because his dreams now offer “no struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty," because some ill-defined “that” has appeared for the first time in the panorama of the dream-scape.

In either case the confused and shaken Jasper moves more than ever under the sway of conflicting and elusive motivations. The disappearance of Drood is a wrenching blow to the uncle who has taken an almost womanish interest in him: “It would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed with horror and amazement: Neville Landless, or John Jasper". If Edwin Drood is dead, Jasper must struggle with the remorse which overwhelms him, for he has lived through Drood in spite of his envy and resentment of him. At the same time, on some level of his wracked consciousness, his jealousy of Drood — his nephew, his “son" — asserts itself, and he is tormented by an excruciating guilt. But it cannot be directed toward himself. In his diary Jasper has evaded the full impact of his own feelings by concentrating upon the tableau of violence, involving Drood and Landless, which he has so artfully contrived. Once again his guilt is displaced onto Landless, who conveniently embodies both the creative and destructive potentialities of his oppressed self. The mechanisms of the dreamworld usurp the order of reality. Innocent or guilty of the enigmatic act itself, John Jasper will pursue a murderer because he must: he stalks himself in the form of Neville Landless. Like Oedipus, he proclaims judgment on himself. Deputy’s defiant challenge, “I'll blind yer, s’elp me! I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me! If I don’t have your eyesight, bellows me!”, suggests the validity of the analogy. In this complex way Dickens remains true to the psychological bonds established between the uncle and the nephew who has become his double.

The Doppelgänger is a figure appearing repeatedly in the Gothic tradition and in Dickens’ novels. The Doppelgänger relationship becomes an inherent part of Dickens‘ mature novels: it often determines their structure and the complicated, and apparently artificial, ways in which they characteristically end. With the dragging of the river and the futile search along the riverbanks, Edwin Drood returns to familiar images and motifs, to David Coppeifield, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, and to the recurring theme of death-by-water: “All the livelong day, the search went on. ... Even at night, the river was specked with lanterns, and lurid with fires; far-off creeks, into which the tide washed as it changed, had their knots of watchers, listening to the lapping of the stream, and looking out for any burden it might bear; ... but no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of the sun”. The quintessential Dickens ritual has begun anew. The living may recoil from the dead, with that “innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it, from dust out of which the breath of life has passed", but they struggle to retain their hope that an individual can defy death’s power. As those who watch and yearn for Rogue Riderhood’s return to life become a part of his solitary struggle in Our Mutual Friend, the inhabitants of Cloisterham participate in the search for Drood. They listen and they gaze with that same rapt suspense which possesses those who gather at the foot of Eugene Wrayburn’s sickbed after he has been attacked by Bradley Headstone: “This frequent rising of a drowning man from the deep, to sink again, was dreadful to the beholders". The watchers at the bedside are held there by that almost involuntary denial of the reality of death which makes life possible.

The fate of Edwin Drood is never clearly revealed within the uncompleted novel. In Our Mutual Friend Eugene Wrayburn’s psychological dilemma is far more severe than Drood‘s. But Wrayburn, convinced of the necessity of his own death, as he confesses to Lizzie, is reprieved and undergoes a process of rebirth. Wrayburn’s marriage to Lizzie has its analogy in Drood’s decision to break the engagement with Rosa Bud. Both Wrayburn and Drood defy their fathers, living or dead, and challenge the seemingly inflexible demands of the past. Wrayburn does so with an almost miraculous impunity from the usually formidable sanctions of the father and society. When he releases Rosa from her engagement, Drood shows the promise that has only been latent in him until that moment. For him to die, in a Dickensian state of grace, would seem implausible. He has made the choice both John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn have made before him: he has refused to acquiesce in outmoded notions, to the view of an “other" as his rightful property. Edwin Drood, too, has chosen life.

The rhythm of the novel, of all Dickens‘ later novels, almost dictates Drood's survival of whatever ordeal he has experienced, as well as his inevitable return to Cloisterham. The river fails to yield its burden to the watchers, not because Drood’s corpse is hidden in the Cathedral crypt or the Sapsea monument, but because there may be no burden to yield. If he is alive, Drood has, like other Dickensian heroes, experienced a life-renewing, baptismal ritual. Mr. Peggotty’s words, spoken at the foot of Barkis’ deathbed in David Coppeifield, inform this novel as they have earlier ones: “ ‘People can’t die, along the coast,’ said Mr. Peggotty, 'except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it's pretty nigh in — not properly born, till flood’ ”. Edwin Drood may have been plunged into the waters of the river and delivered back to life through its transforming power: out of the potent mud of the river, as opposed to the sterile dust of Cloisterham and the grit of London, comes life. The storm which objectifies Jasper’s destructive energies may serve to heal the dislocation of Drood, as Headstone’s attack upon Wrayburn serves to resolve the “crisis,” the state of indecision, in which Wrayburn finds himself just before “the reflected night [turns] crooked, flames [shoot] jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars [come] bursting from the sky”.

Edwin Drood’s fate must remain a matter for speculation. So must John Jasper’s, although his role as nemesis, like Bradley Headstone’s, suggests what may lie in store for him. He, too, is one of the avid searchers, cruising the river in barge and boat, “or tramping amidst mud and stakes and jagged stones in low-lying places." The foreign, muddy world of the Thames calls to him, also. He returns to his gatehouse, “unkempt and disordered, bedaubed with mud that had dried upon him, and with much of his clothing torn to rags". He has emerged from the primal ooze, like Fagin, Magwitch, and Gaffer Hexam, like Pip, John Harmon, and Eugene Wrayburn. He is the archetypal Dickens father who haunts his son; the son who must acknowledge a stratum of human consciousness forever subject to abuse, forever undeniable; the recurring Doppelgänger who descends into the depths, like Steerforth, Carton, and Headstone, never to return alive, but to die in the violence of a storm off Yarmouth or “under the ooze and scum behind one of the rotting gates” of a Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. Jasper has made his own descent into the regions of the godlike river. His reemergence from it indicates that, like Riderhood or Wrayburn, he has been granted the opportunity to deny or to accept the potentiality for change within him.

It is in this state of exhaustion and disorientation that Jasper must encounter the calculated insensitivity of Mr. Grewgious as he persists in his slow, provoking revelation of the broken engagement. The solicitor’s callousness suggests that he already suspects Jasper of something. He remorselessly puts Jasper to the test and watches the “ghastly figure throw back its head, clutch its hair with its hands, and turn with a writhing action from him," until at last Jasper utters his shriek of horror and is reduced to “nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor”. Jasper undergoes a process of total disintegration. His identity, fragile and confused as it is, has been defined by the bizarre triangle uniting Rosa, Drood, and himself, just as Headstone has defined himself in his relationship to Wrayburn and Lizzie. With the disappearance of Drood and with the breaking of his engagement to Rosa, the entire construct, so inverted, fantastic and self-destructive, collapses. Jasper’s apparently guilt — revealing collapse proves that without both Drood and Rosa his own existence is imperiled. With the loss of those relationships by which he has defined himself, Jasper becomes a nullity, a heap of clothes upon the floor, and no more. What the unmoved, and unmoving, Grewgious gazes upon is the remnant of Jasper's extinguished self, like that “cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal,” which is the only remnant of the spontaneously combusted Krook in Bleak House.

The failure of the attack upon Wrayburn and the marriage of Wrayburn and Lizzie lead to Bradley Headstone’s willed self-extinction. When he erases his name from the blackboard, he accepts his own dissolution and prepares for the suicidal struggle with Rogue Riderhood, at best a poor substitute for the one he sought to have with Wrayburn. But the closing chapters of Edwin Drood as we possess them constitute, in part, Jasper’s attempt to reconstruct an identity. It is not, as it might have been, a Carlylean rebirth. Jasper, caught in a No Thoroughfare at least partially of his own making, chooses stasis, not growth. He seeks to recapture a state of being not unlike the one he has known for so long. That multifaceted, but fixated, role he has forged for himself in response to an oppressive society has made him its captive. Unerringly, he begins to reconstruct another version of that fantasy which has sustained, and tortured, him. Drood may not be the real barrier which separates him from Rosa Bud. There may be a part of Jasper which withholds itself from a final commitment to the girl. In the fantasy, then, Drood plays the convenient role of son and father, just as Rosa becomes both maiden and mother; doubly tempting, doubly inviolable, because of her contradictory status in the choirmaster’s distorted scheme of things.

This explains Jasper‘s eager grasping at the fact of the broken engagement, once he has recovered from the original impact of Grewgious‘ news. He is free to reassure himself that Drood is not dead, that he has chosen to disappear. But in the process of spinning out this hypothesis, Jasper traps Crisparkle into revealing Landless’ infatuation with Rosa. If he has not already sensed this, Jasper receives from the Minor Canon the hint he has needed. With the recovery of Drood’s watch and shirt-pin, Jasper begins to weave anew the old fantasy by which he has managed to live. The diary which was to have been destroyed upon the New Year, and which Jasper has called a record of Drood’s life, also has a new use. For Jasper himself has a new “life,” a new reason for living, and another person who can become the object of Jasper’s obsessive attention: “I now swear and record the oath on this page, ... that I will fasten the crime of the murder of my dear dead boy, upon the murderer. And that I devote myself to his destruction”. Jasper has had to disguise, even from himself, his attitude toward Drood, “[his] dear dead boy." But he feels no such constraint in the case of Neville Landless, who, like the convenient stepparent in the fairy tale, can be loathed without remorse, without guilt. And by fastening his attention upon Landless, Jasper does not have to forego the dream journey, the exquisite thrill of destroying the fellow-traveller as the prelude to the moment of erotic release. The original dream begins to lose at least some of its ambiguity. Unlike Bradley Headstone, who works on obsessed with the idea that the “instrument might have been better, the spot and the hour might have been better,” Jasper creates another opportunity to strike: he begins to shape another time, another place, another fellow-traveller.

When he finds Rosa Bud in the garden of the Nuns‘ House, John Jasper, as in the opening dream of the novel, is once again in the process of piecing together his scattered consciousness. In the midst of summer and renewed life, Jasper obeys his old impulses by forcing himself upon Rosa. The course of action he pursues, consciously or not, terrifies the girl and causes her to recoil with repugnance. Love, apparently, is no longer what Jasper needs, if he has ever sought it. He finds other emotions more pleasing, and less immediately threatening, however sterile and self-destructive they may prove to be. He now prefers the illusory pleasures of the dreamworld, just as Headstone comes to relish the masochistic pleasures of the chase. Jasper’s words and actions frustrate any possibility of satisfaction within the context of reality; and they protect him from a rejection he would find intolerable. He will be driven back to the world of opium, away from the living. But the fantasy, with the Sultan and the dancing-girls, relies on images incorporated into the dream landscape, static images of real persons. Jasper has returned to the enduring triangle, to the dreamlike figures locked in yet another dance of death.

Behind the melodramatic words and gestures of Jasper in the interview with Rosa lies this psychological reality. As he leans so casually upon the sundial, another emblem of that time he is trying to deny, Jasper engages in a remarkable tour de force. He directs his performance both at anyone who might glance out from the windows of the house and at Rosa, who finds herself once again within his power, compelled by the intensity of his voice to listen, transfixed, to a confused torrent of love and hate: “In the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly”. The melodramatic cadences of the speech obscure the insinuations with which it is charged. If Jasper has been false to Drood, so has Rosa in her inability to love him “quite in the right way." If Drood has been unworthy of her, Rosa has proved unworthy of the “Paradises and Hells" into which Jasper has rushed for her sake. Any guilt which Jasper feels must be shared by Rosa: her indifference to his devotion and to Drood makes her a secret partner in whatever crimes Jasper has committed or has dreamed of committing. And Rosa, however appalled, must respond to this man, apparently in spite of herself: “Her panting breathing comes and goes as if it would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her bosom, she remains”.

The conventionalized language, the predictable gestures of the Gothic villain, and the responses of the immaculate virgin in this scene cannot dissipate the reality of the energy produced in their confrontation. As Rosa is reduced, perhaps through the pressure of literary convention, to calling Jasper “a bad, bad man," the futility of Jasper’s attempts to incorporate Rosa into the visionary Paradises and Hells of which he speaks becomes apparent. Rosa may unwillingly respond to Jasper‘s intensity as she has done “that night at the piano," she may fail in her attempt to deny her own sexuality, but she is not Helena Landless. The disparity between the eroticism of Jasper’s dreams and Rosa's bland timidity becomes undeniable. She has no place in such dreams; she has not known the intensity of such feelings as Jasper’s. She had become aware of the ethical and psychological absurdity of her engagement to Edwin Drood. But she remains a stranger to man’s capacity for frustration and to the refuge offered by perversity. For her Jasper must remain a “horrible wonder apart”; her ignorance is the seal of her innocence.

But the real Rosa Bud has ceased to be the object of Jasper’s obsession. He lusts now for the exotic, sensual dancing-girls of his dreams. He may feed upon Rosa’s hatred and exultingly claim that Rosa is “more beautiful in anger than in repose," that he wants not her love, but her “pretty rage ... [and] enchanting scorn". But this is a lie. Rosa is now only the occasion for his feverish reveries. Her abhorrence is the sought-for check: it prevents Jasper from experiencing the emptiness of his vision of her. Rosa becomes the final version of the Dickens heroine; even her name harkens back to Rose Maylie. Through her, Dickens acknowledges the fundamental limitations of the innocent creatures he has so often, and so ambivalently, celebrated. It is Helena Landless, like Sikes’ Nancy, who possesses the intensity commensurate with the hunger Jasper feels. But Helena is a dark and alien creature from the East, thrust into the cloistered, suffocating world of England where she cannot flourish. And Jasper can no longer respond to a real woman.

Edwin Drood’s disappearance eliminates the barrier to his own desires upon which Jasper has relied. Now Jasper must re-create the eternal triangle of his dreams: Rosa will remain the inviolable object, both desired and hated for her inviolability; Neville Landless will replace Drood and become the necessary barrier to the consummation of his desires. Jasper hopes to fix Rosa in her former role by threatening Landless‘ life. He offers to relinquish his vindictive pursuit of Landless, and “henceforth to have no object in existence" but Rosa. But the girl cannot submit to such coercion. The savagery of Jasper’s words insures her moral revulsion: “There is my past and my present wasted life. There is the desolation of my heart and my soul. There is my peace; there is my despair. Stamp them into the dust, so that you take me, were it even mortally hating me!”. Jasper has not made a proposal. He has suggested a twisted compact designed to fix himself and Rosa in a timeless and mutually destructive hell. The scene is a far darker version of the one in which Bradley Headstone proposes to Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend. Headstone sees Wrayburn as a real rival whom he cannot hope to defeat. Jasper creates a fictive rival in the form of Neville Landless. Both men succeed in driving the women they “love" into flight. In Headstone's case this leads to the suicidal chase. In Jasper‘s it affects his final isolation from everything, from everyone, around him. The revulsion he has so artfully, compulsively, aroused in Rosa is a reflection of his own self-abhorrence: he has become the outcaste, the De Quinceian pariah, he has long felt himself to be.

John Jasper has reached that narcissistic cul-de-sac which has been his aim from the first. The windows of the Nuns’ House, looking out upon the garden, become mirrors as well as windows. Jasper is acutely aware of them as such: “ ‘I do not forget how many windows command a view of us,’ he says, glancing towards them. ‘I will not touch you again, I will come no nearer to you than I am. Sit down, and there will be no mighty wonder in your music-master’s leaning idly against a pedestal and speaking with you, remembering all that has happened and our shares in it. Sit down, my beloved’ ". The windows protect both Jasper and Rosa. They are his pretext for his immobility, his pose of idleness. The intensity of his voice, the workings of his features and hands, complement his attitude of ease to reveal the completeness of Jasper’s division from himself. But he revels in this moment of stasis, although it exposes the untenable nature of his situation. Jasper is aware of his consummate performance, of the incongruity of his ferocity masked by his languid posture: it is an artistic achievement, however inverted. He smiles and folds his hands upon the sundial “so that his talk would seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go there) to be of the airiest and playfullest”. This incredible self-consciousness leads to the playing of a role within a role; it exposes the condition to which Jasper’s life and art have been reduced. He has become the unembodied self for whom there are no authentic gestures, but only further means of disguising the real self, hidden behind layers of posturing.

The novel has come full circle; to some extent it has never left the opium den of the opening pages. The spike which fused the world of the Town with that of the Sultan reappears in the form of the sundial upon which Jasper has impaled himself. He has not transcended his situation, or time. He has made a futile gesture to perpetuate an impasse, to stop time. He is fixed, in De Quincey's words, at the summit: he is the idol, the priest, the worshipped, and the worshipper. He shrinks from reciprocal commitments to others. His only “object” in life has become himself and his dreams. He fails to lock Rosa Bud into the narcissistic fantasy sustaining his precarious identity: but he has successfully fixed himself within it. In the season of growth and maturation, with its natural movement toward the harvest, Jasper has chosen to deny his own participation in the process of change. He leaves the garden of the Nuns’ House “with no greater show of agitation than is visible in the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father opposite". He has fulfilled the omen inherent in his name: he has become an effigy of himself, a stone man. It is to this state that the Dickens “hero” has been reduced.

With Rosa’s flight to London, a disquieting, and familiar, movement begins in the novel. The Mystery of Edwin Drood has moved from the start toward the dead end in the garden scene. Now, the inevitable gathering together of the good-of-heart usurps the rhythm of the fragment. With the appearance of Tartar we confront a figure from the realm of fairy tales, the bronzed and healthy ruler of a “beanstalk country" which he has created in the heart of gritty, begrimed London. His presence in the novel is a far more serious threat to its integrity than the element of melodrama which has been so central to it. Tartar reveals an attempt to retract what has been acknowledged, to erase that volatile energy which expresses itself through Jasper. Tartar presides over his “garden in the air" in a set of chambers described in language which could be a self-parody of an earlier style: his “chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the best ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars”. Dickens himself openly points to the Shandean quality of Tartar’s domestic arrangements: “When a man rides an amiable hobby that shies at nothing and kicks nobody, it is always agreeable to find him riding it with a humorous sense of the droll side of the creature". Apparently, Tartar’s ironic awareness of himself is akin to Dickens’ ironic stance toward his own character. But however fanciful in conception Dickens recognizes him to be, Tartar still exists as the figurative antidote to the darkness of Jasper. The sunburned, blue-eyed Tartar and his man, Lobley, “the dead image of the sun in old woodcuts," are to penetrate the walls of Cloisterham and London with the light and the life that have been systematically excluded.

But there is no place for fairy tales, even “jack and the Beanstalk," in the world of Edwin Drood. The incongruity of Tartar and Lobley in the midst of the other characters emphasizes Dickens' success in capturing the repressive atmosphere pervading England. Even Helena and Neville Landless belong to this world in a way that Tartar and Lobley do not. Their fierce beauty and their instinctive knowledge of primal states of consciousness dramatize the fascination and terror generated in others who may, or may not, possess the untamed life of the orphaned twins. They pose, as much as John Jasper, the dilemma of man in society: they explain the walls as they defy them. Tartar presents the recurring efforts of civilizations, and of authors, to deny a fundamental implacability within the irrational. He stands for man's efforts to convince himself there are no inner demons to conquer, no wild spirits to tame and domesticate. Tartar‘s shipshape chambers, immaculately neat, ingeniously organized, become the highest expression of man’s use of his own energies. He is civilization without its discontents.

In one sense Tartar is not the complete intrusion I have claimed him to be. He is an integral part of those foreshadowings of rebirth and renewal so central to all of Dickens' later novels. From the beginning the promise of regeneration has been implicit in Edwin Drood. In the first chapter John Jasper returns from the opium den in time for evening service which begins when the “intoned words, ‘WHEN THE WICKED MAN — ' rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered thunder.” The verse is from Ezekiel 18:27, “Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall have his soul alive.” The Christian perspective implicit in the allusion stands in tension with the subversive vision of the Gothic. The Cathedral with its “massive grey square tower" is repeatedly juxtaposed to a vital world of nature beyond its sepulchral interior, a nature quite different from the exotic landscape of Jasper’s dreams. Mr. Grewgious, looking into the Cathedral on an autumn afternoon, can only sigh, “It’s like looking down the throat of Old Time”. The Cathedral, sign of a bankrupt Christianity and of repressive, life-denying institutions, is always distinguished from “the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales ... reddened by the sunset”. The Cathedral still stands, still holds sway. It subdues the “sea of music" which “rose high, and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower.” The resurgent sea of sound, of human aspiration, presses rhythmically, persistently, against unyielding Cathedral walls. There is a question of how long the Cathedral can defy time and the cycles of the seasons. The novel opens upon an autumnal day presaging winter and death. It ends, in its fragmentary form, upon a summer day on which the sun shines, trees wave in the balmy air, birds sing, and “scents from gardens, woods, and fields — or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life”. The island pulsates with harbingers of life. But the harvest toward which the novel seems to move must also exact its ritualistic sacrifices.

For John Jasper the Resurrection and the Life preached by “the whole cultivated island" are unattainable illusions. His psychic terrain has become that of the Landlesses, a Ceylon indebted to De Quincey's southern Asia, cut off from the pastoral order of rural England. He must writhe upon the spike of which he has dreamt, impaled there both by a world hostile to a version of “nature" alien to its own and by his own obsessive seeking out of that triangular constellation which constitutes his identity. He reeks of the taint of the eternal scapegoat, a role he compulsively pursues. If Deputy‘s words are oracular, if he is a diminutive Tiresias to Jasper‘s Oedipus, the blight which has fallen upon this garden of England will be removed only with the eradication of its apparent source. But Jasper is not a source, a cause. He is the logical culmination of a far too narrow vision of human potentialities, rejecting multiplicity of expression in the name of order and “cultivation." Nevertheless, Jasper seems doomed to the ritualistic death of a Bradley Headstone and a Rogue Riderhood.

In Our Mutual Friend Dickens imagines an impasse like Jasper’s in Edwin Drood. The pose which has become Eugene Wrayburn’s imprisoning “second nature" is not easily cast off. It is so much a part of himself that, if it is to die, the whole man must risk death too. The second nature is not to be shrugged off like a knapsack nor is it to be amputated like a diseased limb so that the organism as a whole may live. It is because it is so deeply intertwined with the authentic self that Wrayburn has remained for so long, even to himself, an “embodied conundrum.” As the “T'Otherest,” as the most prominent of the repressed, unembodied selves in Our Mutual Friend, it is Bradley Headstone, Wrayburn’s double, whose death will save Wrayburn as George Radfoot’s saved John Harmon.

In Our Mutual Friend, as in Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens seeks to integrate his major characters into the society he has been criticizing. He consigns Headstone and Riderhood to the depths of the river, to the primal ooze from which all life comes. He purges the world of the novel of their twisted expressions of human potentialities. In the process, a force, a power, an energy, is forever lost. Both John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn come to grips with the past; both exorcise the power their fathers’ wills have seemed to possess. John Harmon finds a new father in the form of Mr. Boffin: he accepts his inheritance not from the dead father, but from a surrogate who removes the tarnish from the Harmon gold so that it may be used creatively. Eugene Wrayburn confronts his living father, to find that the man who has seemed such a tyrant “is a much younger cavalier” than Wrayburn himself. This is a new version of M.R.F., previously more incubus than father, who has supposedly attempted to dictate the shape of his son’s life. Once Wrayburn is convinced that his father, in his unique way, has offered what is “tantamount — in him — to a paternal benediction on our union, accompanied with a gush of tears," his ghost can be forever laid to rest, like that of Old Harmon. M.R.F., a comic version of the ghost of King Hamlet, “will continue to saunter through the world with his hat on one side," unperturbed by his son‘s unconventional marriage. Wrayburn is free at last to become himself. The state of paralysis and despair has passed. Wrayburn has been freed from the straightjacket of his acquired self as Bradley Headstone has escaped, if only through death, from his respectable suit of clothes and his respectable life.

In this manner Our Mutual Friend affirms the viability of the integrated self and its participation in a meaningful communal life. It involves a turning back to A Tale of Two Cities and to the death of Sydney Carton. Bradley Headstone, like Sydney Carton, becomes the traditional scapegoat. They share the same shadowy past, freeing each of them from any specific history which might undermine their usefulness as vicarious atoners for collective and individual guilt. The death of each involves an attempt on Dickens’ part to evade the very psychological and moral dilemma he has posed; he banishes it from the world of the novel. just as Carton’s execution is inadequate as a means of restoring Charles Darnay to the condition of happiness he enjoys at the end of the novel, for Darnay has been guilty of crimes against the French people, Headstone’s death cannot miraculously restore Wrayburn to the psychic wholeness he possesses at the end of Our Mutual Friend. Regeneration involves personal loss as well as gain. Neither Harmon nor Wrayburn should be expected, within the boundaries of the fictional worlds they inhabit, to escape so totally unscarred by the past which has almost destroyed them, Bradley Headstone’s own failure to achieve the personal and social integration of Harmon and Wrayburn should not be forgotten. It exists to remind us how tenuous and fragile such integration has become within the confines of a society perceived in the image of the haunted castle of the Gothic tradition.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is also resonant with echoes of these works which have preceded it. The recurrent patterns of Dickens’ imagination operate strongly within the novel as we have it. The willed urge for integration which controls the conclusion of Our Mutual Friend has been an inherent part of all the great novels. It is present in this last, uncompleted work, but it should not blind us to the implications of John Jasper’s dilemma. The thorn of anxiety is deeply imbedded in his consciousness. His discontent with his sense of confinement in the “dull place” of Cloisterham which offers no prospect “of stirring work and interest, ... of change and excitement, ... of domestic ease and love” becomes an indictment of a civilization. It leads to that awful moral and psychological isolation which cuts him off from “accordance or interchange" with anything around him.

Through Jasper, the full nature of discontent becomes coherently articulated. His confession to Edwin Drood, that he hates “the cramped monotony of [his] existence,” is the cry of a suffering and cornered human being whose alienation from himself and society is a mark of his humanity.“ His death alone will neither heal the society in general, nor implement, even ritualistically, the rebirth of a few isolated individuals. There can be no redemption even for the few, through the death of the Minotaur: the labyrinth which created him must fall, the walls of Cloisterham must crumble in some cataclysmic moment akin to the upheaval in A Tale of Two Cities.

John Jasper, superficially beyond the pale of sympathy, reveals the extent to which human energy may be twisted and inverted. He lives out before our eyes that desperation of which Dostoevsky’s underground man speaks with such grotesque eloquence. Jasper has created his own underground world which dramatizes, implicitly, what Dostoevsky’s antihero, with his infinite capacity for talk, chooses to tell us.

“We are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at times a sort of loathing for real “living life,” and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real “living life” as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse, and why do we ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves.”

The essence of Jasper’s challenge to those around him who have accepted the self-division inherent in Miss Twinkleton’s “two distinct and separate phases of being” which never clash lies in the claim of the underground man: “So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.” Jasper’s rebellion takes the form of perversity and self-absorption. He has chosen this as the only mode of self-expression appropriate in a world whose values, as perpetuated by Miss Twinkleton and Septimus Crisparkle, are so inadequate to man‘s psychological and moral predicament. In creating John Jasper, Dickens explores the ambiguities of human consciousness denied by a society no longer understanding itself or the human beings for whom it exists. Dickens’ Gothicism becomes essential to the expression of this vision.

In his hands the Gothic vision forges the link between an Ambrosio, John Jasper, and the underground man. Once Byronic rebellion ceases to be possible and self-consciousness leads to the impasse in which one does “not know how to become anything: neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect", a John Jasper becomes inevitable. He turns, as a last resort, inward upon himself, carving demons out of his own soul. In the words of the underground man, “it is just in that cold, abominable half-despair, half-belief, in that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underground, ... in that acutely recognized and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined forever and repented of again a minute later — that the savor of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies". This impasse is part of Dickens' multifaceted legacy to the twentieth century. His Gothicism becomes the means of exploring the nature of unconscious forces and their elusive, often indefinable, manifestations in the ultimate Gothic castle, modern consciousness itself. This is the realm Charles Dickens understood: it is the realm he charted so well and bequeathed to us who still inhabit it.