A famous English novelist, recently dead, used to describe devotees of games and puzzles as mental perverts who preferred playing with their minds to using them upon some constructive pursuit. Doubtless this harsh judgment might also be made to take in those who devote their intellectual energies to insoluble literary riddles like "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." On this basis many bookish people are going to find it very hard to be saved.

Richard M. Baker provides a fascinating review of previous investigations and offers interesting new conjectures. He is convinced that Drood was murdered by Jasper. Datchery is not, therefore, in his eyes a masquerading Edwin; neither is he Helena Landless nor Bazzard nor Tartar nor yet a new character. Rather, he is Hiram Grewgious. Mr. Baker finds the beginnings of the Drood story in Dickens's own sketch "A Confession in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second" (in "Master Humphrey's Clock"), and he discusses it also in connection with both Emily Jolly's (not Percy Fitzgerald's) "An Experience," which Dickens printed in All the Year Round, and Robert Lytton's serial "The Disappearance of John Ackland." He believes that Jasper was ultimately to confess his crime under hypnotic influence and that the confession was to be drawn from him by Helena Landless, disguised in her brother's clothes. This, he thinks, was the "very curious and new idea" of which Dickens wrote to Forster.

Being myself quite uncommitted to any Droodian hypothesis I am like the heretic who reads all schools of controversial divinity with equal pleasure and relish. So long as he confines himself to purely literary matters Mr. Baker shows ingenuity and common sense. I find him equally entertaining whether he is demolishing the airy structures of others or raising his own. Even his naive and confidential way of talking about himself —of how he made his "discoveries" and how he felt about it all —adds to the fun.

But when he attempts ambitiously to make a scholar of himself and to "interpret" "Edwin Drood" for the light it sheds on the soul of Dickens he comes a terrible cropper. Whatever may be the value of Freudian methods as applied by trained investigators in the psychiatric sphere, all competent judges are agreed that some of the worst writing of our time is being done by litterateurs who catch what they vaguely suppose to be Freudian notions out of the air and forthwith proceed to apply them to the study of literature. Mr. Baker elects to go off the deep end with the assumption that Dickens identified himself with Jasper and thereupon proceeded to make his last novel a form of autobiography! Murder separates Jasper from his kind; Dickens became a lone wolf when he threw over his wife for Ellen Ternan!

I am getting a little tired of devoting half of what I write about Dickens to explaining to writers who can't read that the novelist's famous "liaison" with Ellen Ternan is theory, not established fact, and that whoever states it as fact is guilty of an offense against both scholarship and morals. Unfortunately, the matter is too complicated to describe here. I went into it first in a long letter published in SRL January 25, 1941. Later, in an article called "Dickens and the Scandalmongers," in College English, April 1950, I subjected all the evidence then available to a careful examination. There are a few minor errors in that article, but none of them has been pointed out by the people who have promised to overwhelm me with fresh "evidence." Neither has the "evidence" itself appeared. All we get is renewed assertion and even inference without evidence as in Mr. Baker's text and in Bradford Booth's introduction to it.

I am always ready to be convinced — but not on the Hitler principle that if you say it often enough it becomes true.

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Edward Wagenknecht, professor of English at Boston University, is the author of "The Man Charles Dickens."