This is the last night I have to live, and I will set down the naked truth without disguise. I was never a brave man, and had always been from my childhood of a secret, sullen, distrustful nature. I speak of myself as if I had passed from the world; for while I write this, my grave is digging, and my name is written in the black-book of death.

⯎ ⯎ ⯎

The foregoing quotation might well have been taken from the end of the second part of The Mystery of Edwin Drood — that never-to-be-written portion of the novel that Charles Dickens carried with him to the grave. It suggests also the beginning of the review of John Jasper’s career as outlined briefly by John Forster in his remarks concerning the novelist’s disclosure to him of the plot for his last unfinished work. Actually, however, the sentences form the second paragraph of a short story appearing in Master Humphrey’s Clock.

Published as a serial in eighty-eight weekly issues from April 4, 1840, to November 27, 1841, this lesser-known collection of sketches and stories served as a framework for The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. The short story in question bears the title, “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second”; it is worth considering because it has so many resemblances to the fragment left by the novelist at his death. And these resemblances are so striking that I am forced to the conclusion that “A Confession” was the germ that ultimately developed into the story we know today as The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

John Jasper, Edwin Drood’s uncle and probable murderer, is not unlike the unknown author of “A Confession,” whom I shall call the Narrator, and who describes himself as “of a secret, sullen, distrustful nature” Dickens, painting on a broader canvas with greater detail when he came to his last creative work, says of Jasper: “impassive, moody, solitary, resolute, so concentrated on one idea, and on its attendant fixed purpose, that he would share it with no fellow-creature, he lived apart from human life.” Jasper was a lone wolf on a larger scale than the Narrator of “A Confession”; that is the only essential difference between the two men.

Both became guardians of their nephews, and the nephew of each was an orphan. The Narrator held a trust over a child of four; Edwin Drood was a young man approaching his majority.

Because the boy resembled his deceased mother, whom the Narrator hated, the latter gradually conceived a plan for murdering him. This plan, as he explains, coming by slow stages “to be part and parcel — nay nearly the whole sum and substance — of my daily thoughts, and resolving itself into a question of means and safety; not of doing or abstaining from the deed,” grew in the Narrator’s mind to the proportion of an idée fixe. John Jasper might in like fashion have echoed these words when he finally revealed his carefully matured design to do away with his “dear Ned,” the only obstacle standing between him and Rosa Bud, the object of his passion.

“I never could bear that the child should see me looking at him, and yet I was under a fascination which made it a kind of business with me to contemplate his slight and fragile figure and think how easily it might be done. Sometimes I would steal upstairs and watch him as he slept.” Thus wrote the Narrator, meditating upon his projected murder. John Jasper was equally fascinated by Edwin Drood, for whom he had what his nephew termed an almost womanish concern. Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity — a look of hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection — is always, now and ever afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this direction.” And the Narrator’s habit of stealing upstairs to watch the boy in slumber is perfectly matched by Jasper when he returns from the home of Minor Canon Crisparkle on the night of the famous quarrel between Edwin Drood and Neville Landless. “His nephew lies asleep, calm and untroubled. John Jasper stands looking down upon him, his unlighted pipe in his hand, for some time, with a fixed and deep attention.”

The Narrator of “A Confession” murders his nephew when the child goes to a deep sheet of water to sail a toy boat — a lure fashioned by his uncle to entice the boy to this secluded spot. Having slain the child with his sword, he resolves to bury the body in his garden.

“I had no thought that I had failed in my design, no thought that the water would be dragged and nothing found.” In like manner Jasper had no idea that his murder plan had failed solely because of the ring of diamonds and rubies carried by Edwin upon his person — the ring about which Jasper knew nothing, but which was destined in the end to bind and drag him to his doom. He had no idea that the river and its adjoining banks would be vainly searched for days, although he realized at once that no body would be forthcoming. The absence of a corpus delicti made Jasper’s position desperate, since it enforced the eventual release from custody of Neville Landless, upon whom Jasper had worked long and craftily to fasten suspicion.

“I must encourage the idea that the child was lost or stolen,” wrote the Narrator. “All my thoughts were bound up and knotted together in the absorbing necessity of hiding what I had done.” How equally do those statements apply to Jasper, after old Hiram Grewgious had told him that Edwin and Rosa had broken off their engagement on amicable terms, agreeing to be to each other thereafter no more than brother and sister! To avert suspicion from himself, the wretched choirmaster was compelled to suggest that his nephew had gone away of his own volition.

“How I felt when they came to tell me that the child was missing, when I ordered scouts in all directions, when I gasped and trembled at every one’s approach, no tongue can tell or mind of man conceive,” the Narrator continued. For “scouts” we have only to substitute the “placards and advertisements” that “should be widely circulated imploring Edwin Drood, if for any unknown reason he had withdrawn himself from his uncle’s home and society, to take pity on that loving kinsman’s sore bereavement and distress, and somehow inform him that he was still alive.” Jasper likewise, when the murder of his nephew was no more than the product of his feverish dreams, betrayed an anxiety similar to that of the Narrator. Minor Canon Crisparkle is our witness to this fact:

“Long afterwards he had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: ‘What is the matter? Who did it?’”

The Narrator of the “Clock” story was sitting with his chair actually upon the grave of his dead nephew on the fourth night after the murder when he was visited by one who had served with him abroad, accompanied by a brother officer. Their conversation was soon interrupted by the appearance of two bloodhounds, which tried to tear up the ground beneath the seat occupied by the murderer. His visitors called upon him to move, but he refused, ordering them to draw their swords and cut the dogs to pieces. At once the officer sensed some mystery; the two men set upon the murderer and forced him away, although he “fought and bit and caught at them like a madman.”

“What more have I to tell ?“ the Narrator concluded. “That I fell upon my knees, and with chattering teeth confessed the truth, and prayed to be forgiven. That I have since denied, and now confess to it again. That I have been tried for the crime, found guilty, and sentenced. That I have not the courage to anticipate my doom, or to bear up manfully against it. That I have no compassion, no consolation, no hope, no friend. — That I am alone in this stone dungeon with my evil spirit, and that I die tomorrow.”

Again, these closing words might have been uttered by John Jasper, who — according to information given John Forster by Dickens himself — was to have made a confession of his crime while in the condemned cell.

It is my contention that “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second,” written when Dickens was a comparatively young man, has all the essential features of the fragment he left us at his death: the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the secret burial of the body; a psychological similarity in the thoughts and actions of the murdering agents. In the monthly parts which were never to be written, we would undoubtedly have had the tracking down of the murderer of Edwin Drood, his capture, and his confession to the crime given from the death cell. The bloodhounds of the “Clock” manuscript have been replaced by the activities of Dick Datchery; the ring of diamonds and rubies delicately set in gold would have identified what remained of Edwin Drood’s body. I have not the slightest doubt that, consciously or subconsciously, Charles Dickens had in mind this earlier product of his pen when he constructed his plot for The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Thomas Wright states with reference to a story by Percy Fitzgerald, a young contemporary of Dickens and the novelist’s friend:

“Dickens thought as highly of Fitzgerald’s work as he did of Mrs. Trollope’s. He indeed, according to Mr. Kitton, altered the plot of Edwin Drood entirely, after reading An Experience, a story which Fitzgerald contributed to All the Year Round. ‘It is,’ says Dickens, on 19 August 1869, ‘according to my thinking, one of the most remarkable pieces I ever saw!’ — Whoever, therefore, wants to understand Edwin Drood and Dickens’s attitude to it should not neglect Percy Fitzgerald’s An Experience.”

Since I have been endeavoring over a period of years to fathom and understand the mysteries of the novel and Dickens’s attitude toward it, I have read and studied this story in two chapters which appeared in All the Year Round: No. 37, New Series, on Saturday, August 14, and Saturday, August 21, 1869. These dates are not without their significance, as will be seen from what follows. However, either Mr. Kitton or Mr. Wright (or possibly both) was in error when he stated that “An Experience” was written by Percy Fitzgerald. I am justified in making such an assertion by a letter Dickens addressed to Miss Emily Jolly, authoress of Mr. Ark and several other novels:

Office of Alt the Year Round

Thursday, Twenty-second July, 1869

Dear Miss Jolly, — Mr. Wills has retired from here (for rest and to recover his health), and my son, who occupies his place, brought me this morning a story [“An Experience”] in MS., with a request that I would read it. I read it with extraordinary interest, and was greatly surprised by its uncommon merit. On asking whence it came, I found that it came from you!

You need not be told, after this, that I accept it with more than readiness. If you will allow me I will go over it with great care, and very slightly touch it here and there. I think it will require to be divided into three portions. You shall have the proofs and I will publish it immediately. I think SO VERY highly of it that I will have special attention called to it in a separate advertisement. I congratulate you most sincerely and heartily on having done a very special thing. It will always stand apart in my mind from any other story I ever read. I write with its impression newly and strongly upon me, and feel absolutely sure that I am not mistaken. — Believe me, faithfully yours always.

That Dickens was indeed tremendously impressed by “An Experience” seems evident not only from what he wrote Miss Jolly but also from additional letters which I shall soon have occasion to reproduce. First of all, however, it would be well to remember that he had already turned his mind to the problem of Edwin Drood, if we are to believe John Forster when he says that “in the middle of July” he received the following query: “What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way? — Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years — at the end of the book? The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate?“ “In the middle of July” certainly implies a date prior to the 12d, when Dickens first read Miss Jolly’s manuscript.

It is unlikely that Miss Jolly declined the novelist’s suggestion that he “touch” her story “here and there,” for he wrote to his daughter Mary:

Office of All the Year Round

Tuesday, Third August, 1869

My dearest Mamie, — I send you the second chapter of the remarkable story. The printer is late with it, and I have not had time to read it, and as I altered it considerably here and there, I have no doubt there are some verbal mistakes in it. However, they will probably express themselves.

But I offer a prize of six pairs of gloves — between you, and your aunt, and Ellen Stone, as competitors — to whomsoever will tell me what idea in this second part is mine. I don’t mean an idea in language, in the turning of a sentence, in any little description of an action, or a gesture, or what not in a small way, but an idea, distinctly affecting the whole story as I found it. You are all to assume that I found it in the main as you read it, with one exception. If I had written it, I should have made the woman love the man at last. And I should have shadowed that possibility out, by the child’s bringing them a little more together on that holiday Sunday.

But I didn’t write it. So, finding that it wanted something, I put that some thing in. What was it? — Your affectionate Father.

With his own novel still in mind, Dickens made a sportive little mystery of his addition to the story affecting him so strongly. And although there is no date for the ensuing brief note to W. H. Wills, he must have written it soon after the letter addressed to his daughter:

26 Wellington Street, Strand, London, W. C.

My dear Wills, —

All goes well here. I have been “at it” considerably. Look at a very remarkable story in 2 chapters, An Experience, which begins next week.

Finally, on August 6, he wrote to John Forster the famous letter in which he spoke of the change made in what was to become The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Forster does not reproduce — except as a footnote — the introductory part of this letter in his Life of Charles Dickens; since it contains an additional reference to Miss Jolly’s story, I include it here:

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

— I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work.

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

It will be helpful to keep this summary of the plot of Edwin Drood in mind as we examine “An Experience.” In view of Forster’s account, I am inclined to believe that the novelist had all the essential features of the plot for his narrative well within his mental grasp before he read Miss Jolly’s manuscript; certainly there is nothing in her story remotely touching upon the Datchery assumption, for example. Nor is there anything in it bearing upon the main theme of the Drood novel: the study of the mentality and character of a rebel against society who becomes a murderer. But we shall find that certain situations of “An Experience” have more or less definite resemblances to episodes in Edwin Drood. Since it is impossible to ascertain just what parts of Miss Jolly’s narrative represent Dickens’s alterations, and these were considerable, there is no justification for assuming that he borrowed this or that situation similar to happenings in his own work. That he contributed a certain idea to the second chapter of the tale is evident from the letter to his daughter. I would infer that Dickens absorbed its atmosphere; that recollections of certain passages or situations, for which he may himself have been responsible, colored his treatment of the plot he had already evolved for Edwin Drood.

“An Experience” is told in the first person by one Bertram Dowlass, an ambitious, iron-nerved, hardheaded and hardhearted young surgeon. He is no sentimentalist, but boasts of his brain; he is proud of the fact that he has read hard and worked hard.

On an early June afternoon he meets in his consulting room, for the first time, a woman of corpselike pallor, with dark eyebrows, who is accompanied by a little girl some two or three years old. The child is lame. Although the woman complains that Dowlass is young to be a surgeon, he assures her that the child, whose eyes have an unusual effect upon him, can be cured. He advises the use of chloroform in the operation he considers necessary to effect the cure, but he is by no means certain that Dr. Fearnwell, his superior, will permit it. Dr. Fearnwell might tell the mother that her daughter’s lameness would not kill, whereas the cure might very well be fatal. Dowlass assures her that the operation, if undertaken at all, will be performed within the week. The mother suggests that Dr. Fearnwell need not see her. Dowlass says that in any event the child must be examined by a council of surgeons.

Dr. Fearnwell is of the opinion that the child is too delicate for the proposed operation. Dowlass wins his point, however, by concealing the whole truth about the child, and the operation is scheduled for 11:00 A.M. on a Monday. The mother dreads the coming ordeal; her daughter is all she has left from the past. If death comes to her child, she will curse the hand of God or of the man who took her.

Dowlass has learned that the mother is a Mrs. Rosscar, and he is by no means impervious to her extreme beauty. Thinking of the coming operation, he takes a boat trip on the Sunday before the day when it is to be performed. On the boat he meets Mrs. Rosscar and the child; the mother informs him that she is taking the excursion to give her daughter fresh air. Dowlass offers to squire her. She accepts, telling him she will try to love God when her child walks again. He notes that Mrs. Rosscar is in mourning, but that her bearing is regal. They go out in a rowboat and dine together. Dowlass observes that Mrs. Rosscar is a woman and a lady.

“I believe,” he says, “that, just at the time when I first met her, my brain was on the point of giving-in, and of resenting the strain of some years.” He is unconsciously falling in love with Mrs. Rosscar.

The operation is performed upon the child, and is successful. Dr. Fearnwell, taking stock of Dowlass, tells him that he is overdoing things, and that he should go away on a vacation.

“I knew that late that day,” Dowlass muses, “when I first saw Mrs. Rosscar after the operation, her expression of her passionate joy and gratitude made me half delirious with an uncomprehended feeling — and that part of it was fear.”

The child is placed in a ward, where Mrs. Rosscar watches over it night and day. “The more radiant the mother’s face was, and the more entirely all seemed well, the more I felt afraid.

On the third day after the operation, the child sinks and dies in its sleep. There was no reason why the little girl should not have lived, Dowlass declares, even though dominated by her mother.

“I resolved that I would not meet her eyes,” he says, “but she was the stronger willed, and our eyes did meet. I shrank; I shivered; I looked, I know, abject, craven, self-convicted. I felt I was the murderer she thought me.”

“As her lips opened, to give utterance to the first words of her curse, I, lifting my own arms, as if to ward off from my head an imminent blow (they told me afterwards of these things), and struggling for power to articulate some deprecation — I, meeting her eyes with unspeakable horror in my own, staggered a moment, then fell, as if she had struck me down.”

This is the climax of the first chapter, and it inevitably suggests the dramatic moment in Edwin Drood when Hiram Grewgious informs Jasper that his nephew and Rosa had broken off their engagement prior to Edwin’s disappearance. What follows will illustrate the parallelism. “Mr. Grewgious saw a ghastly figure rise, open-mouthed, from the easy-chair, and lift its outspread hands towards its head.” “Mr. Grewgious saw the ghastly figure throw back its head, clutch its hair with its hands, and turn with a writhing action from him.” “Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor.”

There is indeed a similarity between the two situations, but the superior power and artistry of Dickens are immediately apparent.

At the beginning of the second chapter of “An Experience,” Dowlass regains consciousness only to find himself in his own rooms. It is nighttime, he notices, and still summer. A woman sits by him, sewing; somehow he senses that she is Mrs. Rosscar.

“That he may not die, great God, that he may not die!” Dowlass hears her pray, whereupon he knows fear.

“Why was I given over to her?” is the question that torments his mind.

She tells him that he has been ill for a month; he has been suffering from congestion of the brain. She has been nursing him ever since her child was buried. Dowlass again lapses into unconsciousness, remaining in that state for another week.

“For some time after I had got on a good way towards recovery,” he says later, “I talked and thought of myself as ‘that sick man’: seemed to watch what was done for me, as if it were being done to some other person.” Here is a striking parallelism to a part of Forster s remarks forming a commentary to the letter Dickens wrote him on August 6 — the part in which he states that the originality of Edwin Drood “was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.”

On one of his visits to the sick man, Dr. Fearnwell informs Dowlass that he owes his life to his nurse. Later, Mrs. Rosscar tells her patient to call her “Huldah”; only one person has called her by that name since her childhood.

Speaking of his attitude toward the woman he now loves, Dowlass remarks: “I was under a spell of fascination not devoid of fear.” His feeling, as quoted in his own words, is not at all unlike that entertained by Rosa Bud for John Jasper.

“I loved her with a desperate sort of passion,” Dowlass exclaims as he probes his emotions more deeply. “A love far more of the senses than the heart.”

“It was the beauty of her presence that so grew upon me: of her whole physical self, as it were. Of her mind and heart I knew nothing.”

John Jasper might have said something very like this in analyzing his passion for Rosa; he too felt the appeal to the senses made by a lovely body. Did he not cry out to her as he stood by the sun dial in the garden of the Nuns’ House: “How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.”

At last Dr. Fearnwell becomes impatient because Dowlass does not get well. He plans to remove the sick man to a farm where he will have a better opportunity to recover. At this point Mrs. Rosscar feels that she has to leave, but she promises to rejoin Dowlass later, at the farm, if he will not again expose her to Dr. Fearnwell’s re marks. She suggests that she may appear there as Dowlass’s sister.

She comes to him on the afternoon of the second day after his removal to the farm. Dowlass finally tells her of his love for her, then asks her to marry him.

“That I should love you!” she cries. “Is it credible ?“

Later on she calls him in to the house. “My patient, you must come in, the dew begins to fall.”

“Somehow,” Dowlass confesses, “the way that hand touched my shoulder, and the slight accentuation on that word ‘my,’ made me shudder.” Some recollection of that avowal may have found its way to Dickens’s mind when he wrote the chapter describing the unaccountable nocturnal expedition made by Jasper and Durdles to the cathedral crypt and the great tower. Before the two men ascend the stairs leading to the summit of the tower, the stonemason tells Jasper how he sought refuge in the cathedral from some town boys who had set upon him when he was celebrating the holiday season on the night of December 24. “And here I fell asleep,” he says. “And what woke me up? The ghost of a cry. The ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog: a long, dismal, woeful howl, such as a dog gives when a person’s dead. That was my last Christmas Eve.”

On the following day, Dowlass and Mrs. Rosscar are outdoors, seated in some warm hay. Presently Dowlass falls asleep and has a weird dream. “My hand went quickly to my throat when I awoke, and there lay across it — nothing dreadful — only a heavy tress of Mrs. Rosscar’s hair, which, slipping loose, had uncoiled itself as she bent over me.”

There is undoubtedly a suggestion of strangulation in the sen tence just quoted; the “heavy tress” of hair may have transformed itself at a later date into Jasper s great black scarf.

The two go into the house. Dowlass suggests that they visit the grave of Mrs. Rosscar’s child. Here I may say that I am inclined to consider this visit to be the idea introduced by Dickens — the idea to which he referred in his letter to his daughter Mary. The influence produced by the graves of little children had a great effect upon Dickens; witness the amount of space he gives to the vigil kept by Little Nell’s grandfather at her place of burial.

Mrs. Rosscar says she will accompany Dowlass to her daughter’s grave only when she becomes his wife. Despite every argument she raises to the contrary, Dowlass insists upon marrying her.

The day is finally set for their marriage, but she bursts into tears when he pours out his passion for her before the fire.

They go to the child’s grave. Once there, the mother in her will not let her carry out her plan.

“That evening she told me her history, and what had been her proposed revenge. She had designed to make me love her madly. That she had done. She had designed to let me marry her, who had been a mother and not a wife. She had designed, as the wife of my infatuated love and unspeakable passion, to have cursed me as her child’s butcher, at her child’s grave. She had designed — or was the nameless dread and horror of my illness taking this terrific form in its flight ? — when she had thus slowly ground down my heart to its last grain of misery and grief, to murder me in my bed.”,

There is m the proposal just outlined a faint foreshadowmg of Jasper’s relentless dogging of Neville Landless. And does not Helena Landless say to Rosa, when they are together in Tartar’s rooms after Rosa’s flight to Hiram Grewgious, her guardian: “If Neville s movements are really watched, and if the purpose really is to isolate him from all friends and acquaintance and wear his daily life out grain by grain (which would seem to be the threat to you), does it not appear likely — that his enemy would in some way communicate with Mr. Tartar to warn him off from Neville?”

The rather unusual use of the word “grain,” present in both works, strikes me as significant.

“I could have married you for hate,” Mrs. Rosscar finally tells Dowlass; “but for such love as has arisen in my soul for you — if indeed it is love, or anything but compassion and kindness towards the poor wretch I have helped back to life — never!”

She leaves him; Dowlass never sees her again.

It seems evident that “An Experience” impressed Dickens strongly enough to have exerted some influence, at least, on the plot development of Edwin Drood, as I have endeavored to show by the comments punctuating my brief summary of Miss Jolly’s story. Coupled with the basic idea of “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second,” it enhanced the psychological and emotional setting of the unfinished novel. The spell of fascination tinged with fear exercised over Bertram Dowlass by Mrs. Rosscar foreshadows the hint of animal magnetism or hypnotism introduced now and again in Edwin Drood; I am convinced that Dickens meant to employ this phenomenon with even greater emphasis in the latter half of the work now existing only as a fragment. Such resemblances as exist between “An Experience” and the novel arc not surprising when we recall that Dickens touched up or rewrote certain parts of the story, thereby making it in some degree his own creation.

Before he had begun the actual composition of Edwin Drood, Dickens had accepted for publication in All the Year Round a story by Robert Lytton. The following letter gives further evidence of the novelist’s tendency to rewrite or touch up manuscripts scheduled to appear in his magazine — a tendency justified not only by his position as editor, but by the fact that articles and stories printed in his publication did not bear their authors’ signatures.

Thursday, Second September, 1869

My dear Robert Lytton, — John Acland [sic] is most willingly accepted, and shall come into the next monthly part. I shall make bold to condense him here and there (according to my best idea of storytelling), and particularly where he makes the speech: — And with the usual fault of being too long, here and there, I think you let the story out too much — prematurely — and this I hope to prevent arthilly. I think your title open to the same objection, and therefore propose to substitute:

The Disappearance of John Acland.

This will leave the reader in doubt whether he really was murdered, until the end.

Lytton’s story — in thirteen chapters — began in All the Year Round on Saturday, September i8, 1869, when chapter i was published. Its official title was: The Disappearance of John Ackland. A True Story. Subsequent installments of the tale appeared as follows:

Saturday, September 25, chapters ii, iii, iv; Saturday, October 2, chapters v, vi, vii, viii; Saturday, October 9, chapter ix; Saturday, October 16, chapters x, xi, xii, xiii. As one may readily deduce from this schedule, the manuscript had been subjected to a great amount of compression. We shall soon learn that it underwent a sweeping condensation as well. The reason for the hurried presentation of this story is made clear by the letter Dickens wrote to Lytton:

Friday, October 1, 1869

My dear Robert Lytton, — I am assured by a correspondent that “John Acland” has been done before. Said correspondent has evidently read the story — and is almost confident in “Chambers’s Journal.” This is very unfortunate, but of course cannot be helped. There is always a possibility of such a malignant conjunction of stars when the story is a true one.

In the case of a good story — as this is — liable for years to be told at table — as this was — there is nothing wonderful in such a mischance. Let us shuffle the cards, as Sancho says, and begin again.

You will of course understand that I do not tell you this by way of complaint. Indeed, I should not have mentioned it at all, but as an explanation to you of my reason for winding the story up (which I have done to-day) as expeditiously as possible. You might otherwise have thought me, on reading it as published, a little hard on Mr. Doily [sic]. I have not had time to direct search to be made in “Chambers’s”; but as to the main part of the story having been printed somewhere, I have not the faintest doubt. And I believe my correspondent to be also right as to the where. You could not help it any more than I could, and therefore will not be troubled by it any more than I am.

The more I get of your writing, the better I shall be pleased.

Do believe me to be, as I am,

Your genuine admirer and affectionate friend.

J. Cuming Walters, in The Complete Mystery of Edwin Drood, makes the following comment on the letter given above and the situation leading Dickens to write it:

Dickens, in a letter written by him as editor of All the Year Round, explained to the Hon. Robert Lytton why he could not continue the publication of his story John Acland as originally projected. Dickens’s letter was peculiarly apologetic in tone, and manifestly he desired to salve Lytton’s wounded feelings; though obviously he had no alternative but to discontinue a story which he discovered “had been done before.” But here follows the bewildering series of facts. The story of John Acland, begun in 1869, was of a man mysteriously murdered by his closest friend, his body untraced, his probable reappearance in the flesh suggested, the corpse ultimately discovered in an ice-house, and identity established by means of a watch. It is at once apparent that this plot closely resembles in outline the plot of Edwin Drood. Yet Dickens, finding the story had been “done before,” stopped Lytton’s story in 1869, and six months later began a similar one himself! On this the following queries arise: —

1. What was the original story that was so like Lytton’s John Acland, and where is it to be found?

2. Are the parallels such as to suggest that Lytton copied them from that story, or are they merely coincidences?

3. Has any explanation been given why Dickens, knowing Lytton’s work and aware of its similarity to another story, should at a later period decide to deal with the same theme?

In a previous study of The Mystery of Edwin Drood — “Who Was Dick Datchery?“ — I referred to this “John Ackland” episode, basing my remarks on the passage quoted at length from Mr. Walters. At that time I was not familiar with the second letter written by Dickens to Robert Lytton, nor had I read the latter’s story as it was published in All the Year Round. Now that I have read both letter and story, I find Mr. Walters somewhat misleading — to say the least — in his treatment of the whole situation. As I have already indicated, John Ackland was published as a complete narrative in five successive issues of Dickens’s magazine, although its thirteen chapters were manifestly much condensed from their original form. When Walters says, “he could not continue the publication of his story John Acland as originally projected,” the reader naturally infers that publication of the story was somehow suspended. And when Walters goes on to state that “he had no alternative but to discontinue a story which he discovered ‘had been done before,” the reader’s inference that John Ackland was suspended is strengthened. Finally, when Walters asserts: “Yet Dickens... stopped Lytton’s story in 1869,” the reader is certain that the tale was broken off before reaching its logical end. The truth of the matter was otherwise. Lytton’s story was actually completed, so far as develop ment of its plot through the denouement was concerned, even though it was undoubtedly rewritten and compressed.

There are other parts of Walters’s passage which are likewise misleading. I do not agree with his assertion that the second letter to Lytton is “peculiarly apologetic” in tone. It is what Dickens himself would have called a “manly” letter, had he read it over the signature of another person. It is indicative of his greatness of heart that he, a busy editor in failing health, should have taken the time to write in a vein so considerate and reassuring. No doubt the letter did salve Lytton’s wounded feelings — if indeed he felt wounded. I feel, however, that Dickens went out of his way to explain his justifiable action as editor, and that he did so because it was not in his nature to hurt anyone needlessly.

When Walters deals with the actual plot of John Ackland, he is more than misleading. He states that Ackland’s body was “ultimately discovered in an ice-house, and identity established by means of a watch.” He implies, of course, a parallelism with Edwin Drood’s gold watch and chain, apparently flung into Cloisterham Weir to prevent identification of the young man’s body by its means, and later found caught among the stakes of the weir by Minor Canon Crisparkle. The statement Walters makes is correct only in part. John Ackland — I have been using the spelling of the name as it appeared in All the Year Round — was indeed murdered and his body concealed beneath cakes of ice in an underground icehouse on a Virginia plantation. The murderer had shot him in the head, but his features were not mutilated; when his body — frozen and preserved — was finally brought to light, it was instantly recognized. His identity was not established by means of a watch, as Walters asserts. In point of fact, it was the murderer who was identified by Ackland’s special chronometer, which he had stolen from the body of his victim and given to his daughter.

It is of course obvious that the plot of John Ackland bears some resemblance to that of Edwin Drood, just as the plots of both stories bear a resemblance to that of “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second.” But the latter antedates John Ackland, and no charge of plagiarism can logically be brought against an author who redevelops and amplifies a plot he has himself evolved years before. Furthermore, there is good reason for believing that Dickens must have had the essential features of the plot of Edwin Drood well in mind before he received from Robert Lytton the manuscript of John Ackland. It must have reached him shortly before September 2, when he wrote his letter of acceptance, whereas it was on Friday, August 6, 1869, that he wrote to John Forster about the “very curious and new idea for my new story.” And Forster adds to his quotation from this letter the valuable information that he “learnt immediately afterward” what amounts to a résumé of all the salient points — minus the Datchery assumption — in the story of Edwin Drood. Any author who has ever attempted to write in the exacting medium of the detective story — or what the French call so picturesquely le roman policier — realizes full well that he can make no headway whatsoever unless he has at his fingers’ tips and in chronological order every detail of his plot, intricate or otherwise. The final chapter, in which the detecting personality usually reveals how the murder, be it one or many, was committed and who was the guilty agent, must be distinctly present in his mind before he puts down his opening sentence. So must Dickens have had Edwin Drood in mind.

My reading of John Ackland convinces me that it had no real influence on the writing of Edwin Drood, and that its plot impressed Dickens far less than that of “An Experience.” Take for example the second letter that Dickens wrote to Lytton on John Ackland. As editor of All the Year Round he had, for a legitimate reason, cut, condensed, and perhaps rewritten a good portion of the original manuscript. Yet he does not reproduce the chief character’s name as it appeared in the proof sheets. Nor does he recall the correct spelling of the name of the watchmaker who acts as the detective in the Lytton narrative. He refers to him as “Mr. Doily,” whereas the text in All the Year Round has “D’Oiley,” an oleaginous name far more in keeping with its owner’s trade — and less suggestive of a table mat. I have not overlooked the obvious fact that both “D’Oiley” and “Datchery” begin with a “D” and end with a “y,” but I attribute it to coincidence and not to intent.

Lastly, we learn from Forster's Life that Dickens finished his first number of Edwin Drood in the third week of October, and on the 26th read it at my house with great spirit.” Now Dickens could not have received the manuscript of John Ackland much before September 2, as I have said before. Whatever influence Lytton’s story is presumed to have had on Edwin Drood must have made itself felt within the space of some eight weeks. Within this time Dickens would have been obliged not only to alter his plot as already outlined to Forster soon after August 6, but also to write on an entirely new basis the first monthly installment of his novel. Edwin Drood proves conclusively that no such procedure actually took place.

If any further evidence is needed to prove that Dickens was well aware of the plot for his last novel long before his acceptance of Lytton’s manuscript, I submit an excerpt from a letter addressed to Sir Arthur Helps. The fact that it is dated Saturday, March 26, 1870, does not alarm me, for my contention that an author of mystery stories must know his entire plot before starting to write still holds.

I send you for Her Majesty the first number of my new story which will not be published till next Thursday, the 31st. Will you kindly give it to the Queen with my loyal duty and devotion? If Her Majesty should ever be sufficiently interested in the tale to desire to know a little more of it in advance of her subjects, you know how proud I shall be to anticipate the publication.

To the first two questions raised by Walters at the end of the passage I have quoted from him, I have no positive answers. Like Dickens, I have not had time to search for the original story so like John Ackland, a story supposed to be in Chambers’s Journal. There fore I am in no position to state whether the parallels are such as to suggest that Lytton copied from the story, or whether they are merely coincidences. With regard to the third question, I object first of all to the way in which it is framed. I do not admit that Dickens in Edwin Drood is dealing with the same theme as that employed by Lytton in John Ackland. It is true that both men wrote of the murder of a person whose body could not be found over a long period of time; so of both stories the inevitable question was raised: Was the man who had disappeared dead or alive? Indeed, there have been (and no doubt still are) some enthusiastic followers of Edwin Drood who believe that he was not murdered, and that he would have returned to confront his wicked uncle had Dickens only lived to finish the novel. We know that John Ackland actually was murdered, whereas we can never know with absolute certainty that Edwin Drood met a like fate. But apart from this similarity in plot which, to my way of thinking, lies “in the public domain,” the finished John Ackland and the unfinished Edwin Drood are as antipodal as night and day. As between John Ackland and “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second,” Dickens’s incomplete fragment more nearly resembles the latter, his own creation. Perhaps Dickens himself realized this fact, and it is altogether possible that he shortened the original version of John Ackland and hurried its publication because it bore a certain resemblance to his plot for Edwin Drood, upon which he was even then at work. I say “possible” as a mere conjecture — but not probable, for I believe that his second letter to Lytton expresses the whole truth of the matter. I have not answered Walters’s question as he framed it, but I have tried to give him my explanation of the situation.

It might be well to consider at this point the selection of the title for the novel whose inception we are considering, since it has, in my opinion at least, some bearing on the plot. Dickens was always in some degree of torment until he had decided upon a definite title for a new story. Forster gives much interesting information about his difficulties in naming some of the earlier novels, but we must turn to the few private notes for Edward Drood, discovered after Dickens’s death, to find the list of tentative titles jotted down by the novelist for his last work. They are as follows, under date of Friday, August 20, 1869.

1. The Loss of James/ Edwyn Wakefield.

2. James’s Disappearance.

3. Flight and Pursuit.

4. Sworn to Avenge It.

5. One Object in Life.

6. A Kinsman's Devotion.

7. The Two Kinsmen.

8. The Loss of Edwyn Brood.

9. The Loss of Edwin Brude.

10. The Mystery in the Drood Family.

11. The Loss of Edwyn Drood.

12. The Flight of Edwyn Drood.

13. Edwin Drood in Hiding.

14. The Loss of Edwin Drude.

15. The Disappearance of Edwin Drood.

16. The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

17. Dead? or Alive?

The word “loss” occurs in five out of the seventeen tentative titles, “disappearance” twice, and “mystery” twice. if Dickens had any conception of what his plot was like before he listed these possible titles for his new book — and he must have had, in view of the date assigned to his notes, — then it would seem evident that Edwin Drood (to use his name in its final form) was destined to be lost. The word “disappearance” likewise bears out such a conclusion, although perhaps the sense of finality is not so great. It may be remembered that, in his first letter to Lytton, Dickens suggested that the “disappearance” of John Ackland would prevent readers from discovering whether he really was murdered until the end. The word “mystery,” ultimately a part of the title chosen by the novelist, is the vaguest and least revealing of the three; it does, however, succeed more adequately in challenging the reader’s interest. And in a letter to Bulwer Lytton, dated Monday, May 20, 1861, Dickens said something pertinent with reference to this word “mystery,” the one he himself finally used: “As to title, ‘Margrave, a Tale of Mystery,’ would be sufficiently striking. I prefer ‘Wonder’ to ‘Mystery,’ because I think it suggests something higher and more apart from ordinary complications of plot, or the like, which ‘Mystery’ might seem to mean.” Certainly The Mystery of Edwin Drood has a complicated plot; so we may consider Dickens’s final choice of key word a fitting one.

The third title in the list would seem to refer to Rosa’s flight from Jasper, after he had revealed his passion for her in the garden at the Nuns’ House, and to Jasper’s pursuit of her and Neville Landless. Dickens may have rejected this entry because it dealt with too restricted a part of his story.

Titles 4, 5, and 6 tend to bear upon John Jasper, and all three of them — especially the last two — have a slightly ironical twist of meaning.

Number is rather colorless; it lacks the startling quality which Dickens may well have desired in the title of a novel such as he intended Edwin Drood to be.

Numbers 12 and 13 are undoubtedly the ones dearest to the hearts of those Droodians who insist that Edwin was not murdered, and that he was to reappear and confront Jasper. And yet the key word of number 12 might refer to the soul’s flight — Dickens used three quotations from Macbeth in his novel, — while “in hiding” admits of an interpretation favorable to the belief that young Drood was murdered. If Jasper had chosen a burial place for the reception of his nephew’s body with such skill that it was beyond all possibility of being discovered, then his victim would assuredly have been “in hiding” for all time.

I do not mean to imply by my comments that anything in the way of a definite solution to the riddles in Edwin Drood may be deduced from these tentative titles, of which only the sixteenth was actually chosen, but I do believe that they reflect to some degree the workings of Dickens’s mind as he formulated his plot. Some of them clearly indicate the “loss” or “disappearance” of Edwin Drood, without, however, revealing Dickens’s meaning of the terms; whereas others hint at the importance of John Jasper’s role in the story. I have not as yet mentioned the seventeenth entry; but corning at the last, as it does, it puts strikingly the very question that Dickens undoubtedly wanted his readers to ask themselves: Was Edwin Drood really murdered, or did he survive? Dickens alone could have answered this query, but death intervened before he was ready to do so. As long as the fragment he left is read and studied, that question will always arise.

It so happens that there is something else to consider in the genesis of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and this I now give to the reader for what it is worth. Again I turn to J. Cuming Walters and to his book entitled Clues to Dickens’s ‘Mystery of Edwin Drood.” In it we find Walters saying:

As further bearing out the fact that it was actual murder that was to be the basis of the plot, and not an attempt at murder that failed, it should be remembered that in Rochester itself, which is Cloisterham, a real event is believed to have provided Dickens with his idea. The story is given in W. R. Hughes’s “Week’s Tramp in Dickens-land.” A well-to-do person, a bachelor, was the guardian and trustee of a nephew (a minor), who was the inheritor of a large property. The nephew went to the West Indies and returned unexpectedly. He suddenly disappeared, and was thought to have gone on another voyage. The uncle’s house was near the site of the Savings Bank in High Street, and when excavations were made years later the skeleton of a young man was discovered. The local tradition is that the uncle murdered the nephew, and thus concealed the body. Here is the germ of the plot of “Edwin Drood,” and the mystery is not so much the nature of the crime as its concealment and eventual detection.

The result of such research as I have made is now before the reader. There are, as possible influences on the plot development of Edwin Drood, “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second,” “An Experience,” The Disappearance of John Ackland, and the Rochester tradition. It might almost seem time to raise the old cry, “You pays your money and you takes your choice — yet there is something more to he said. For there is still one last factor to be considered, one of greater importance than any number of literary influences: the creative genius of Charles Dickens.

He was fifty-seven and a half years old when he began to work out the plot of what proved to be his last novel, and he was to leave that novel an unfinished fragment and an abiding mystery. Broken in health, haunted by approaching paralysis, weakened by the cumulative strain of more than four hundred public readings at home and abroad, with their attendant difficulties of almost constant travel under arduous circumstances, he yet had the driving urge to create something new in the way of literary art, whose devoted servant he had been for so many years. Miss Gladys Storey penetrates to the heart of the matter in her fascinating book of reminiscences, Dickens and Daughter, when she says:

Those who have studied the character of Charles Dickens in all its varying phases and moods, where strength, weakness, tenderness, severity, generosity and carefulness are revealed, and take their places beside other traits of character in this so extraordinary and wonderful a man, will recognize that the dominant characteristic lying behind every trait which, with hurricane force, swept through his entire mental and physical being, was his amazing energy, at times demoniacal in its fierceness.

And this energy found its highest form of expression in the exacting field of literary creation. Dickens himself acknowledged this fact in these words:

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

And so, driven by the power of this amazing creative energy, he began The Mystery of Edwin Drood under most adverse conditions of health and physical well-being. That there was in his own mind a recognition of the fact that he was entering a race against the shadow of death is manifest from the unusual clause he caused to be inserted in the contract for his last novel.

That if the said Charles Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, or shall otherwise become incapable of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq., one of Her Majesty’s Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, then to such a person as shall be named by Her Majesty’s Attorney-General for the rime being, to determine the amount which shall be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors, or administrators, to the said Frederic Chapman as a fair compensation for so much of the said work as shall not have been completed for publication.

Despite his poor health, be was handling a theme big in scope, and handling it in masterly fashion. The story was, I believe, in some ways to suggest The Moonstone, which Dickens meant to rival and surpass. It was to suggest Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug, which Dickens had read. But above all, it was to contain something unusual and surprising — ”a very curious and new idea.” The reader’s interest was to be aroused not only by the mystery of Edwin Drood’s disappearance and the Datchery enigma, but also by the riddle of the nature of John Jasper himself.

Now Dickens had always been fascinated by murderers; he gave himself wholly to his portrayal of Bill Sikes in his reading — or rather enacting — of the housebreaker’s brutal murder of Nancy. Even against the advice of both friends and physicians, he made that gruesome and frightfully realistic portrayal a part of his reading program again and again, until at last he was forced by failing health to abandon the platform forever.

But his fascination for murderers still persisted, and of all those he created — Bill Sikes, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mr. Rudge, and Bradley Headstone, to mention but a few — John Jasper is by far the most absorbing. And just as he went back to Oliver Twist for the reading that offered the greatest challenge to his tremendous energy and drained it most, so I believe he turned to the story from Master Humphrey’s Clock to find the initial inspiration for the development of his plot for Edwin Drood. The vast difference between “A Confession found in a prison in the time of Charles the Second” and the unfinished last novel is a true measure of the steady growth of his creative genius.

The very heart and soul of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is, in the last analysis, John Jasper himself. In essence, the novel is a study of the warped mentality of a rebel against society, a rebel with whom Dickens associated himself. I make this statement out of my firm conviction that Dickens in his later years had come to feel that he was a lone individual who somehow stood outside the social frame work and moral code which we term Victorian. After extolling the solid virtues of normal family life, he had put away his wife and broken up his own home. Hoping for a kind of companionship he had never known, he had fallen desperately in love with an eighteen-year-old actress, Ellen Lawless Ternan, who became his mistress after the formal deed of separation from his wife had been put into effect. He had been almost ruthless in his endeavor to capture a fresh lease on life and love, but the realization of his impetuous desire fell short of what he had anticipated. All that we need to know about this tragic episode in the life of Dickens has been revealed in Thomas Wright’s biography and in Miss Gladys Storey’s Dickens and Daughter. As Miss Storey says, quoting Mrs. Perugini (Kate Dickens): “My father was like a madman when my mother left home; this affair brought out all that was worst — all that was weakest in him. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.” And we read, farther on: “Everybody and everything became subservient to the furtherance of the object he had irrevocably set out to accomplish, which sad business took eight months to complete, from the day of the final performance of the play at Manchester. In his anguish, Dickens wrote to Wilkie Collins: ‘I have not known a moment’s peace or contentment, since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do not suppose that there ever was a man so seized and rendered by one spirit.”

He had sinned against the moral code of the social class in which he had moved, although he was not by birth one of its members, as one to the manner born, esteemed and respected. Ever conscious of the dark period of poverty, menial labor, and practically no prospect of further education which had wrung his soul in childhood, always fearful lest he should not earn enough money to maintain himself and his large family in a style befitting the position he had achieved, he had acted circumspectly until his affair with Miss Ternan. When he became a selfmade rebel against the prevailing conventions of his day, he must indeed have felt alone. And so he lost himself in the characters of his own creation, and poured out his waning energy in his portrayals of those intensely real though fictitious men, women, and children who had brought laughter to the lips and tears to the eyes of his hosts of readers. At the end of his robust life, when he began the writing of Edwin Drood, he was to plumb the emotional depths of a man who had killed the thing he loved, even as he himself had destroyed something once very dear to him. John Jasper, too, was “seized and rendered by one spirit” : his passion for Rosa Bud. So intense was that passion that he swore he would pursue the object thereof even “to the death.” In like manner Dickens had pursued the object of his passion to the death of all that might otherwise have made him the happiest of mortals. Therefore I cannot escape the conviction that John Jasper and Charles Dickens are, in a sense, one person by virtue of the same sort of literary sublimation that had made David Copperfield the alter ego of his creator.

In his presentation of the choirmaster, lay precentor, and opium addict whom we know as John Jasper, Dickens was attempting a psychological study more penetrating than any he had previously undertaken, because it was a searching of his own soul. John Jasper is the Narrator of the Clock manuscript, broadened, deepened, and intensified to the utmost degree by the strong emotions which Dickens had himself experienced. The short story, written so many years before, is but a faint, melodramatic foreshadowing of the greater and more human opus, so tragically cut in half by its author’s untimely death.