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Title: The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot


Author: Andrew Lang



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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUZZLE OF DICKENS'S LAST
PLOT***


Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                              THE PUZZLE OF
                           DICKENS’S LAST PLOT


                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                               ANDREW LANG

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                           CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
                                   1905




INTRODUCTION


FORSTER tells us that Dickens, in his later novels, from _Bleak House_
onwards (1853), “assiduously cultivated” construction, “this essential of
his art.”  Some critics may think, that since so many of the best novels
in the world “have no outline, or, if they have an outline, it is a
demned outline,” elaborate construction is not absolutely “essential.”
Really essential are character, “atmosphere,” humour.

But as, in the natural changes of life, and under the strain of restless
and unsatisfied activity, his old buoyancy and unequalled high spirits
deserted Dickens, he certainly wrote no longer in what Scott, speaking of
himself, calls the manner of “hab nab at a venture.”  He constructed
elaborate plots, rich in secrets and surprises.  He emulated the manner
of Wilkie Collins, or even of Gaboriau, while he combined with some of
the elements of the detective novel, or _roman policier_, careful study
of character.  Except _Great Expectations_, none of his later tales
rivals in merit his early picaresque stories of the road, such as
_Pickwick_ and _Nicholas Nickleby_.  “Youth will be served;” no sedulous
care could compensate for the exuberance of “the first sprightly
runnings.”  In the early books the melodrama of the plot, the secrets of
Ralph Nickleby, of Monk, of Jonas Chuzzlewit, were the least of the
innumerable attractions.  But Dickens was more and more drawn towards the
secret that excites curiosity, and to the game of hide and seek with the
reader who tried to anticipate the solution of the secret.

In April, 1869, Dickens, outworn by the strain of his American readings;
of that labour achieved under painful conditions of ominously bad
health—found himself, as Sir Thomas Watson reported, “on the brink of an
attack of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of apoplexy.”  He
therefore abandoned a new series of Readings.  We think of Scott’s
earlier seizures of a similar kind, after which _Peveril_, he said,
“smacked of the apoplexy.”  But Dickens’s new story of _The Mystery of
Edwin Drood_, first contemplated in July, 1869, and altered in character
by the emergence of “a very curious and new idea,” early in August, does
not “smack of the apoplexy.”  We may think that the mannerisms of Mr.
Honeythunder, the philanthropist, and of Miss Twinkleton, the
schoolmistress, are not in the author’s best vein of humour.  “The
Billickin,” on the other hand, the lodging-house keeper, is “in very
gracious fooling:” her unlooked-for sallies in skirmishes with Miss
Twinkleton are rich in mirthful surprises.  Mr. Grewgious may be
caricatured too much, but not out of reason; and Dickens, always good at
boys, presents a _gamin_, in Deputy, who is in not unpleasant contrast
with the pathetic Jo of _Bleak House_.  Opinions may differ as to Edwin
and Rosa, but the more closely one studies Edwin, the better one thinks
of that character.  As far as we are allowed to see Helena Landless, the
restraint which she puts on her “tigerish blood” is admirable: she is
very fresh and original.  The villain is all that melodrama can desire,
but what we do miss, I think, is the “atmosphere” of a small cathedral
town.  Here there is a lack of softness and delicacy of treatment: on the
other hand, the opium den is studied from the life.

On the whole, Dickens himself was perhaps most interested in his plot,
his secret, his surprises, his game of hide and seek with the reader.  He
threw himself into the sport with zest: he spoke to his sister-in-law,
Miss Hogarth, about his fear that he had not sufficiently concealed his
tracks in the latest numbers.  Yet, when he died in June, 1870, leaving
three completed numbers still unpublished, he left his secret as a puzzle
to the curious.  Many efforts have been made to decipher his purpose,
especially his intentions as to the hero.  Was Edwin Drood killed, or did
he escape?

By a coincidence, in September, 1869, Dickens was working over the late
Lord Lytton’s tale for _All The Year Round_, “The Disappearance of John
Ackland,” for the purpose of mystifying the reader as to whether Ackland
was alive or dead.  But he was conspicuously defunct!  (_All the Year
Round_, September-October, 1869.)

The most careful of the attempts at a reply about Edwin, a study based on
deep knowledge of Dickens, is “Watched by the Dead,” by the late
ingenious Mr. R. A. Proctor (1887).  This book, to which I owe much aid,
is now out of print.  In 1905, Mr. Cuming Walters revived “the auld
mysterie,” in his “Clues to Dickens’s Edwin Drood” (Chapman & Hall and
Heywood, Manchester).  From the solution of Mr. Walters I am obliged to
dissent.  Of Mr. Proctor’s theory I offer some necessary corrections, and
I hope that I have unravelled some skeins which Mr. Proctor left in a
state of tangle.  As one read and re-read the fragment, points very dark
seemed, at least, to become suddenly clear: especially one appeared to
understand the meaning half-revealed and half-concealed by Jasper’s
babblings under the influence of opium.  He saw in his vision, “_that_, I
never saw _that_ before.”  We may be sure that he was to see “_that_” in
real life.  We must remember that, according to Forster, “such was
Dickens’s interest in things supernatural that, but for the strong
restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the
follies of spiritualism.”  His interest in such matters certainly peeps
out in this novel—there are two specimens of the supernormal—and he may
have gone to the limited extent which my hypothesis requires.  If I am
right, Dickens went further, and fared worse, in the too material
premonitions of “The Signalman” in _Mugby Junction_.

With this brief preface, I proceed to the analysis of Dickens’s last
plot.  Mr. William Archer has kindly read the proof sheets and made
valuable suggestions, but is responsible for none of my theories.

                                                              ANDREW LANG.

ST. ANDREWS,

      _September_ 4, 1905.




THE STORY


DRAMATIS PERSONÆ


FOR the discovery of Dickens’s secret in _Edwin Drood_ it is necessary to
obtain a clear view of the characters in the tale, and of their relations
to each other.

About the middle of the nineteenth century there lived in Cloisterham, a
cathedral city sketched from Rochester, a young University man, Mr. Bud,
who had a friend Mr. Drood, one of a firm of engineers—somewhere.  They
were “fast friends and old college companions.”  Both married young.  Mr.
Bud wedded a lady unnamed, by whom he was the father of one child, a
daughter, Rosa Bud.  Mr. Drood, whose wife’s maiden name was Jasper, had
one son, Edwin Drood.  Mrs. Bud was drowned in a boating accident, when
her daughter, Rosa, was a child.  Mr. Drood, already a widower, and the
bereaved Mr. Bud “betrothed” the two children, Rosa and Edwin, and then
expired, when the orphans were about seven and eleven years old.  The
guardian of Rosa was a lawyer, Mr. Grewgious, who had been in love with
her mother.  To Grewgious Mr. Bud entrusted his wife’s engagement ring,
rubies and diamonds, which Grewgious was to hand over to Edwin Drood, if,
when he attained his majority, he and Rosa decided to marry.

Grewgious was apparently legal agent for Edwin, while Edwin’s maternal
uncle, John Jasper (aged about sixteen when the male parents died), was
Edwin’s “trustee,” as well as his uncle and devoted friend.  Rosa’s
little fortune was an annuity producing £250 a-year: Edwin succeeded to
his father’s share in an engineering firm.

When the story opens, Edwin is nearly twenty-one, and is about to proceed
to Egypt, as an engineer.  Rosa, at school in Cloisterham, is about
seventeen; John Jasper is twenty-six.  He is conductor of the Choir of
the Cathedral, a “lay precentor;” he is very dark, with thick black
whiskers, and, for a number of years, has been a victim to the habit of
opium smoking.  He began very early.  He takes this drug both in his
lodgings, over the gate of the Cathedral, and in a den in East London,
kept by a woman nicknamed “The Princess Puffer.”  This hag, we learn, has
been a determined drunkard,—“I drank heaven’s-hard,”—for sixteen years
_before_ she took to opium.  If she has been dealing in opium for ten
years (the exact period is not stated), she has been very disreputable
for twenty-six years, that is ever since John Jasper’s birth.  Mr. Cuming
Walters suggests that she is the mother of John Jasper, and, therefore,
maternal grandmother of Edwin Drood.  She detests her client, Jasper, and
plays the spy on his movements, for reasons unexplained.

Jasper is secretly in love with Rosa, the _fiancée_ of his nephew, and
his own pupil in the musical art.  He makes her aware of his passion,
silently, and she fears and detests him, but keeps these emotions
private.  She is a saucy school-girl, and she and Edwin are on
uncomfortable terms: she does not love him, while he perhaps does love
her, but is annoyed by her manner, and by the gossip about their
betrothal.  “The bloom is off the plum” of their prearranged loves, he
says to his friend, uncle, and confidant, Jasper, whose own concealed
passion for Rosa is of a ferocious and homicidal character.  Rosa is
aware of this fact; “a glaze comes over his eyes,” sometimes, she says,
“and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream, in which he
threatens most . . . ”  The man appears to have these frightful dreams
even when he is not under opium.



OPENING OF THE TALE


The tale opens abruptly with an opium-bred vision of the tower of
Cloisterham Cathedral, beheld by Jasper as he awakens in the den of the
Princess Puffer, between a Chinaman, a Lascar, and the hag herself.  This
Cathedral tower, thus early and emphatically introduced, is to play a
great but more or less mysterious part in the romance: that is certain.
Jasper, waking, makes experiments on the talk of the old woman, the
Lascar and Chinaman in their sleep.  He pronounces it “unintelligible,”
which satisfies him that his own babble, when under opium, must be
unintelligible also.  He is, presumably, acquainted with the languages of
the eastern coast of India, and with Chinese, otherwise, how could he
hope to understand the sleepers?  He is being watched by the hag, who
hates him.

Jasper returns to Cloisterham, where we are introduced to the Dean, a
nonentity, and to Minor Canon Crisparkle, a muscular Christian in the
pink of training, a classical scholar, and a good honest fellow.  Jasper
gives Edwin a dinner, and gushes over “his bright boy,” a lively lad,
full of chaff, but also full of confiding affection and tenderness of
heart.  Edwin admits that his betrothal is a bore: Jasper admits that he
loathes his life; and that the church singing “often sounds to me quite
devilish,”—and no wonder.  After this dinner, Jasper has a “weird
seizure;” “a strange film comes over Jasper’s eyes,” he “looks
frightfully ill,” becomes rigid, and admits that he “has been taking
opium for a pain, an agony that sometimes overcomes me.”  This “agony,”
we learn, is the pain of hearing Edwin speak lightly of his love, whom
Jasper so furiously desires.  “Take it as a warning,” Jasper says, but
Edwin, puzzled, and full of confiding tenderness, does not understand.

In the next scene we meet the school-girl, Rosa, who takes a walk and has
a tiff with Edwin.  Sir Luke Fildes’s illustration shows Edwin as “a lad
with the bloom of a lass,” with a _classic profile_; _and a gracious head
of long_, _thick_, _fair hair_, long, though we learn it has just been
cut.  He wears a soft slouched hat, and the pea-coat of the period.



SAPSEA AND DURDLES


Next, Jasper and Sapsea, a pompous ass, auctioneer, and mayor, sit at
their wine, expecting a third guest.  Mr. Sapsea reads his absurd epitaph
for his late wife, who is buried in a “Monument,” a vault of some sort in
the Cathedral churchyard.  To them enter Durdles, a man never sober, yet
trusted with the key of the crypt, “as contractor for rough repairs.”  In
the crypt “he habitually sleeps off the fumes of liquor.”  Of course no
Dean would entrust keys to this incredibly dissipated, dirty, and
insolent creature, to whom Sapsea gives the key of his vault, for no
reason at all, as the epitaph, of course, is to be engraved on the
outside, by Durdles’s men.  However, Durdles insists on getting the key
of the vault: he has two other large keys.  Jasper, trifling with them,
keeps clinking them together, so as to know, even in the dark, by the
sound, which is the key that opens Sapsea’s vault, in the railed-off
burial ground, beside the cloister arches.  He has met Durdles at
Sapsea’s for no other purpose than to obtain access at will to Mrs.
Sapsea’s monument.  Later in the evening Jasper finds Durdles more or
less drunk, and being stoned by a _gamin_, “Deputy,” a retainer of a
tramp’s lodging-house.  Durdles fees Deputy, in fact, to drive him home
every night after ten.  Jasper and Deputy fall into feud, and Jasper has
thus a new, keen, and omnipresent enemy.  As he walks with Durdles that
worthy explains (in reply to a question by Jasper), that, by tapping a
wall, even if over six feet thick, with his hammer, he can detect the
nature of the contents of the vault, “solid in hollow, and inside solid,
hollow again.  Old ’un crumbled away in stone coffin, in vault.”  He can
also discover the presence of “rubbish left in that same six foot space
by Durdles’s men.”  Thus, if a foreign body were introduced into the
Sapsea vault, Durdles could detect its presence by tapping the outside
wall.  As Jasper’s purpose clearly is to introduce a foreign body—that of
Edwin who stands between him and Rosa—into Mrs. Sapsea’s vault, this
“gift” of Durdles is, for Jasper, an uncomfortable discovery.  He goes
home, watches Edwin asleep, and smokes opium.



THE LANDLESSES


Two new characters are now introduced, Neville and Helena Landless, {11}
twins, orphans, of Cingalese extraction, probably Eurasian; very dark,
the girl “almost of the gipsy type;” both are “fierce of look.”  The
young man is to read with Canon Crisparkle and live with him; the girl
goes to the same school as Rosa.  The education of both has been utterly
neglected; instruction has been denied to them.  Neville explains the
cause of their fierceness to Crisparkle.  In Ceylon they were bullied by
a cruel stepfather and several times ran away: the girl was the leader,
always “_dressed as a boy_, _and showing the daring of a man_.”  Edwin
Drood’s air of supercilious ownership of Rosa Bud (indicated as a fault
of youth and circumstance, not of heart and character), irritates Neville
Landless, who falls in love with Rosa at first sight.  As Rosa sings, at
Crisparkle’s, while Jasper plays the piano, Jasper’s fixed stare produces
an hysterical fit in the girl, who is soothed by Helena Landless.  Helena
shows her aversion to Jasper, who, as even Edwin now sees, frightens
Rosa.  “You would be afraid of him, under similar circumstances, wouldn’t
you, Miss Landless?” asks Edwin.  “Not under any circumstances,” answers
Helena, and Jasper “thanks Miss Landless for this vindication of his
character.”

The girls go back to their school, where Rosa explains to Helena her
horror of Jasper’s silent love-making: “I feel that I am never safe from
him . . . a glaze comes over his eyes and he seems to wander away into a
frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most,” as already quoted.
Helena thus, and she alone, except Rosa, understands Jasper thoroughly.
She becomes Rosa’s protectress.  “_Let whomsoever it most concerned look
well to it_.”

Thus Jasper has a new observer and enemy, in addition to the omnipresent
street boy, Deputy, and the detective old hag of the opium den.

Leaving the Canon’s house, Neville and Edwin quarrel violently over Rosa,
in the open air; they are followed by Jasper, and taken to his house to
be reconciled over glasses of mulled wine.  Jasper drugs the wine, and
thus provokes a violent scene; next day he tells Crisparkle that Neville
is “murderous.”  “There is something of the tiger in his dark blood.”  He
spreads the story of the _fracas_ in the town.



MR. GREWGIOUS


Grewgious, Rosa’s guardian, now comes down on business; the girl fails to
explain to him the unsatisfactory relations between her and Edwin:
Grewgious is to return to her “at Christmas,” if she sends for him, and
she does send.  Grewgious, “an angular man,” all duty and sentiment (he
had loved Rosa’s mother), has an interview with Edwin’s trustee, Jasper,
for whom he has no enthusiasm, but whom he does not in any way suspect.
They part on good terms, to meet at Christmas.  Crisparkle, with whom
Helena has fallen suddenly in love, arranges with Jasper that Edwin and
Landless shall meet and be reconciled, as both are willing to be, at a
dinner in Jasper’s rooms, on Christmas Eve.  Jasper, when Crisparkle
proposes this, denotes by his manner “some close internal calculation.”
We see that he is reckoning how the dinner suits his plan of campaign,
and “_close_ calculation” may refer, as in Mr. Proctor’s theory, to the
period of the moon: _on Christmas Eve there will be no moonshine at
midnight_.  Jasper, having worked out this problem, accepts Crisparkle’s
proposal, and his assurances about Neville, and shows Crisparkle a diary
in which he has entered his fears that Edwin’s life is in danger from
Neville.  Edwin (who is not in Cloisterham at this moment) accepts, by
letter, the invitation to meet Neville at Jasper’s on Christmas Eve.

Meanwhile Edwin visits Grewgious in his London chambers; is lectured on
his laggard and supercilious behaviour as a lover, and receives the
engagement ring of the late Mrs. Bud, Rosa’s mother, which is very dear
to Grewgious—in the presence of Bazzard, Grewgious’s clerk, a gloomy
writer of an amateur unacted tragedy.  Edwin is to return the ring to
Grewgious, if he and Rosa decide not to marry.  The ring is in a case,
and Edwin places it “in his breast.”  We must understand, in the
breast-pocket of his coat: no other interpretation will pass muster.
“Her ring—will it come back to me?” reflects the mournful Grewgious.



THE UNACCOUNTABLE EXPEDITION


Jasper now tells Sapsea, and the Dean, that he is to make “a moonlight
expedition with Durdles among the tombs, vaults, towers, and ruins
to-night.”  The impossible Durdles has the keys necessary for this,
“surely an unaccountable expedition,” Dickens keeps remarking.  The moon
seems to rise on this night at about 7.30 p.m.  Jasper takes a big
case-bottle of liquor—drugged, of course and goes to the den of Durdles.
In the yard of this inspector of monuments he is bidden to beware of a
mound of quicklime near the yard gate.  “With a little handy stirring,
quick enough to eat your bones,” says Durdles.  There is some
considerable distance between this “mound” of quicklime and the crypt, of
which Durdles has the key, but the intervening space is quite empty of
human presence, as the citizens are unwilling to meet ghosts.

In the crypt Durdles drinks a good deal of the drugged liquor.  “They are
to ascend the great Tower,”—and why they do that is part of the Mystery,
though not an insoluble part.  Before they climb, Durdles tells Jasper
that he was drunk and asleep in the crypt, last Christmas Eve, and was
wakened by “the ghost of one terrific shriek, 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.”  Durdles has made inquiries and, as no one else heard the
shriek and the howl, he calls these sounds “ghosts.”

They are obviously meant to be understood as supranormal premonitory
sounds; of the nature of second sight, or rather of second hearing.
Forster gives examples of Dickens’s tendency to believe in such
premonitions: Dickens had himself a curious premonitory dream.  He
considerably overdid the premonitory business in his otherwise excellent
story, _The Signalman_, or so it seems to a student of these things.  The
shriek and howl heard by Durdles are to be repeated, we see, in real
life, later, on a Christmas Eve.  The question is—when?  More probably
_not_ on the Christmas Eve just imminent, when Edwin is to vanish, but,
on the Christmas Eve following, when Jasper is to be unmasked.

All this while, and later, Jasper examines Durdles very closely, studying
the effects on him of the drugged drink.  When they reach the top of the
tower, Jasper closely contemplates “that stillest part of it” (the
landscape) “which the Cathedral overshadows; but he contemplates Durdles
quite as curiously.”

There is a motive for the scrutiny in either case.  Jasper examines the
part of the precincts in the shadow of the Cathedral, because he wishes
to assure himself that it is lonely enough for his later undescribed but
easily guessed proceedings in this night of mystery.  He will have much
to do that could not brook witnesses, after the drugged Durdles has
fallen sound asleep.  We have already been assured that the whole area
over which Jasper is to operate is “utterly deserted,” even when it lies
in full moonlight, about 8.30 p.m.  “One might fancy that the tide of
life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s own gate-house.”  The people of
Cloisterham, we hear, would deny that they believe in ghosts; but they
give this part of the precinct a wide berth (Chapter XII.).  If the
region is “utterly deserted” at nine o’clock in the evening, when it lies
in the ivory moonlight, much more will it be free from human presence
when it lies in shadow, between one and two o’clock after midnight.
Jasper, however, from the tower top closely scrutinizes the area of his
future operations.  It is, probably, for this very purpose of discovering
whether the coast be clear or not, that Jasper climbs the tower.

He watches Durdles for the purpose of finding how the drug which he has
administered works, with a view to future operations on Edwin.  Durdles
is now in such a state that “he deems the ground so far below on a level
with the tower, and would as lief walk off the tower into the air as
not.”

All this is apparently meant to suggest that Jasper, on Christmas Eve,
will repeat his expedition, _with Edwin_, whom he will have drugged, and
that he will allow Edwin to “walk off the tower into the air.”  There are
later suggestions to the same effect, as we shall see, but they are
deliberately misleading.  There are also strong suggestions to the very
opposite effect: it is broadly indicated that Jasper is to strangle Edwin
with a thick black-silk scarf, which he has just taken to wearing for the
good of his throat.

The pair return to the crypt, Durdles falls asleep, dreams that Jasper
leaves him, “and that something touches him and something falls from his
hand.  Then something clinks and gropes about,” and the lines of
moonlight shift their direction, as Durdles finds that they have really
done when he wakens, with Jasper beside him, while the Cathedral clock
strikes two.  They have had many hours, not less than five, for their
expedition.  The key of the crypt lies beside Durdles on the ground.
They go out, and as Deputy begins stone-throwing, Jasper half strangles
him.



PURPOSE OF THE EXPEDITION


Jasper has had ample time to take models in wax of all Durdles’s keys.
But he could have done that in a few minutes, while Durdles slept, if he
had wax with him, without leaving the crypt.  He has also had time to
convey several wheelbarrowfuls of quicklime from Durdles’s yard to Mrs.
Sapsea’s sepulchre, of which monument he probably took the key from
Durdles, and tried its identity by clinking.  But even in a Cathedral
town, even after midnight, several successive expeditions of a lay
precentor with a wheelbarrow full of quicklime would have been apt to
attract the comment of some belated physician, some cleric coming from a
sick bed, or some local roysterers.  Therefore it is that Dickens insists
on the “utterly deserted” character of the area, and shows us that Jasper
has made sure of that essential fact by observations from the tower top.
Still, his was a perilous expedition, with his wheelbarrow!  We should
probably learn later, that Jasper was detected by the wakeful Deputy, who
loathed him.  Moreover, next morning Durdles was apt to notice that some
of his quicklime had been removed.  As far as is shown, Durdles noticed
nothing of that kind, though he does observe peculiarities in Jasper’s
behaviour.

The next point in the tale is that Edwin and Rosa meet, and have sense
enough to break off their engagement.  But Edwin, represented as really
good-hearted, now begins to repent his past behaviour, and, though he has
a kind of fancy for Miss Landless, he pretty clearly falls deeper in love
with his late _fiancée_, and weeps his loss in private: so we are told.



CHRISTMAS EVE


Christmas Eve comes, the day of the dinner of three, Jasper, Landless,
and Edwin.  The chapter describing this fateful day (xiv.) is headed,
_When shall these Three meet again_? and Mr. Proctor argues that Dickens
intends that _they shall_ meet again.  The intention, and the hint, are
much in Dickens’s manner.  Landless means to start, next day, very early,
on a solitary walking tour, and buys an exorbitantly heavy stick.  We
casually hear that Jasper knows Edwin to possess no jewellery, except a
watch and chain and a scarf-pin.  As Edwin moons about, he finds the old
opium hag, come down from London, “seeking a needle in a bottle of hay,”
she says—that is, hunting vainly for Jasper.

Please remark that Jasper has run up to town, on December 23, and has
saturated his system with a debauch of opium on the very eve of the day
when he clearly means to kill Edwin.  This was a most injudicious
indulgence, in the circumstances.  A maiden murder needs nerve!  We know
that “fiddlestrings was weakness to express the state of” Jasper’s
“nerves” on the day after the night of opium with which the story opens.
On December 24, Jasper returned home, the hag at his heels.  The old
woman, when met by Edwin, has a curious film over her eyes; “he seems to
know her.”  “Great heaven,” he thinks, next moment.  “Like Jack that
night!”  This refers to a kind of fit of Jasper’s, after dinner, on the
first evening of the story.  Edwin has then seen Jack Jasper in one of
his “filmy” seizures.  The woman prays Edwin for three shillings and
sixpence, to buy opium.  He gives her the money; she asks his Christian
name.  “Edwin.”  Is “Eddy” a sweetheart’s form of that?  He says that he
has no sweetheart.  He is told to be thankful that his name is not Ned.
Now, Jasper alone calls Edwin “Ned.”  “‘Ned’ is a threatened name, a
dangerous name,” says the hag, who has heard Jasper threaten “Ned” in his
opium dreams.

Edwin determines to tell this adventure to Jasper, _but not on this
night_: to-morrow will do.  Now, _did_ he tell the story to Jasper that
night, in the presence of Landless, at dinner?  If so, Helena Landless
might later learn the fact from Neville.  If she knew it, she would later
tell Mr. Grewgious.

The three men meet and dine.  There is a fearful storm.  “Stones are
displaced upon the summit of the great tower.”  Next morning, early,
Jasper yells to Crisparkle, who is looking out of his window in Minor
Canon Row, that Edwin has disappeared.  Neville has already set out on
his walking tour.



AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE


Men go forth and apprehend Neville, who shows fight with his heavy stick.
We learn that he and Drood left Jasper’s house at midnight, went for ten
minutes to look at the river under the wind, and parted at Crisparkle’s
door.  Neville now remains under suspicion: Jasper directs the search in
the river, on December 25, 26, and 27.  On the evening of December 27,
Grewgious visits Jasper.  Now, Grewgious, as we know, was to be at
Cloisterham at Christmas.  True, he was engaged to dine on Christmas Day
with Bazzard, his clerk; but, thoughtful as he was of the moody Bazzard,
as Edwin was leaving Cloisterham he would excuse himself.  He would
naturally take a great part in the search for Edwin, above all as Edwin
had in his possession the ring so dear to the lawyer.  Edwin had not
shown it to Rosa when they determined to part.  He “kept it in his
breast,” and the ring, we learn, was “_gifted with invincible force to
hold and drag_,” so Dickens warns us.

The ring is obviously to be a _pièce de conviction_.  But our point, at
present, is that we do not know how Grewgious, to whom this ring was so
dear, employed himself at Cloisterham—after Edwin’s disappearance—between
December 25 and December 27.  On the evening of the 27th, he came to
Jasper, saying, “I have _just left Miss Landless_.”  He then slowly and
watchfully told Jasper that Edwin’s engagement was broken off, while the
precentor gasped, perspired, tore his hair, shrieked, and finally
subsided into a heap of muddy clothes on the floor.  Meanwhile, Mr.
Grewgious, calmly observing these phenomena, warmed his hands at the fire
for some time before he called in Jasper’s landlady.

Grewgious now knows by Jasper’s behaviour that he believes himself to
have committed a superfluous crime, by murdering Edwin, who no longer
stood between him and Rosa, as their engagement was already at an end.
Whether a Jasper, in real life, would excite himself so much, is another
question.  We do not know, as Mr. Proctor insists, what Mr. Grewgious had
been doing at Cloisterham between Christmas Day and December 27, the date
of his experiment on Jasper’s nerves.  Mr. Proctor supposes him to have
met the living Edwin, and obtained information from him, after his escape
from a murderous attack by Jasper.  Mr. Proctor insists that this is the
only explanation of Grewgious’s conduct, any other “is absolutely
impossible.”  In that case the experiment of Grewgious was not made to
gain information from Jasper’s demeanour, but was the beginning of his
punishment, and was intended by Grewgious to be so.

But Dickens has been careful to suggest, with suspicious breadth of
candour, another explanation of the source of Grewgious’s knowledge.  If
Edwin has really escaped, and met Grewgious, Dickens does not want us to
be sure of that, as Mr. Proctor was sure.  Dickens deliberately puts his
readers on another trail, though neither Mr. Walters nor Mr. Proctor
struck the scent.  As we have noted, Grewgious at once says to Jasper,
“_I have just come from Miss Landless_.”  This tells Jasper nothing, but
it tells a great deal to the watchful reader, who remembers that Miss
Landless, and she only, is aware that Jasper loves, bullies, and insults
Rosa, and that Rosa’s life is embittered by Jasper’s silent wooing, and
his unspoken threats.  Helena may also know that “Ned is a threatened
name,” as we have seen, and that the menace comes from Jasper.  As Jasper
is now known to be Edwin’s rival in love, and as Edwin has vanished, the
murderer, Mr. Grewgious reckons, is Jasper; and his experiment, with
Jasper’s consequent shriek and fit, confirms the hypothesis.  Thus
Grewgious had information enough, from Miss Landless, to suggest his
experiment—Dickens intentionally made that clear (though not clear enough
for Mr. Proctor and Mr. Cuming Walters)—while his experiment gives him a
moral certainty of Jasper’s crime, but yields no legal evidence.

But does Grewgious know no more than what Helena, and the fit and shriek
of Jasper, have told him?  Is his knowledge limited to the evidence that
Jasper has murdered Edwin?  Or does Grewgious know more, know that Edwin,
in some way, has escaped from death?

That is Dickens’s secret.  But whereas Grewgious, if he believes Jasper
to be an actual murderer, should take him seriously; in point of fact, he
speaks of Jasper in so light a tone, as “our local friend,” that we feel
no certainty that he is not really aware of Edwin’s escape from a
murderous attack by Jasper, and of his continued existence.

Presently Crisparkle, under some mysterious impression, apparently
telepathic (the book is rich in such psychical phenomena), visits the
weir on the river, at night, and next day finds Edwin’s watch and chain
in the timbers; his scarf-pin in the pool below.  The watch and chain
must have been placed purposely where they were found, they could not
float thither, and, if Neville had slain Edwin, he would not have stolen
his property, of course, except as a blind, neutralised by the placing of
the watch in a conspicuous spot.  However, the increased suspicions drive
Neville away to read law in Staple Inn, where Grewgious also dwells, and
incessantly watches Neville out of his window.

About six months later, Helena Landless is to join Neville, who is
watched at intervals by Jasper, who, again, is watched by Grewgious as
the precentor lurks about Staple Inn.



DICK DATCHERY


About the time when Helena leaves Cloisterham for town, a new character
appears in Cloisterham, “a white-headed personage with black eyebrows,
_buttoned up in a tightish blue surtout_, with a buff waistcoat, grey
trowsers, and something of a military air.”  His shock of white hair was
unusually thick and ample.  This man, “a buffer living idly on his
means,” named Datchery, is either, as Mr. Proctor believed, Edwin Drood,
or, as Mr. Walters thinks, Helena Landless.  By making Grewgious drop the
remark that Bazzard, his clerk, a moping owl of an amateur tragedian, “is
off duty here,” at his chambers, Dickens hints that Bazzard is Datchery.
But that is a mere false scent, a ruse of the author, scattering paper in
the wrong place, in this long paper hunt.

As for Helena, Mr. Walters justly argues that Dickens has marked her for
some important part in the ruin of Jasper.  “There was a slumbering gleam
of fire in her intense dark eyes.  Let whomsoever it most concerned look
well to it.”  Again, we have been told that Helena had high courage.  She
had told Jasper that she feared him “in no circumstances whatever.”
Again, we have learned that in childhood she had dressed as a boy when
she ran away from home; and she had the motives of protecting Rosa and
her brother, Neville, from the machinations of Jasper, who needs
watching, as he is trying to ruin Neville’s already dilapidated
character, and, by spying on him, to break down his nerve.  Really, of
course, Neville is quite safe.  There is no _corpus delicti_, no carcase
of the missing Edwin Drood.

For the reasons given, Datchery might be Helena in disguise.

If so, the idea is highly ludicrous, while nothing is proved either by
the blackness of Datchery’s eyebrows (Helena’s were black), or by
Datchery’s habit of carrying his hat under his arm, not on his head.  A
person who goes so far as to wear a conspicuous white wig, would not be
afraid also to dye his eyebrows black, if he were Edwin; while either
Edwin or Helena _must_ have “made up” the face, by the use of paint and
sham wrinkles.  Either Helena or Edwin would have been detected in real
life, of course, but we allow for the accepted fictitious convention of
successful disguise, and for the necessities of the novelist.  A tightly
buttoned surtout would show Helena’s feminine figure; but let that also
pass.  As to the hat, Edwin’s own hair was long and thick: add a wig, and
his hat would be a burden to him.

What is most unlike the stern, fierce, sententious Helena, is Datchery’s
habit of “chaffing.”  He fools the ass of a Mayor, Sapsea, by most
exaggerated diference: his tone is always that of indolent mockery, which
one doubts whether the “intense” and concentrated Helena could assume.
He takes rooms in the same house as Jasper, to whom, as to Durdles and
Deputy, he introduces himself on the night of his arrival at Cloisterham.
He afterwards addresses Deputy, the little _gamin_, by the name “Winks,”
which is given to him by the people at the Tramps’ lodgings: the name is
a secret of Deputy’s.



JASPER, ROSA, AND TARTAR


Meanwhile Jasper formally proposes to Rosa, in the school garden:
standing apart and leaning against a sundial, as the garden is commanded
by many windows.  He offers to resign his hopes of bringing Landless to
the gallows (perhaps this bad man would provide a _corpus delicti_ of his
own making!) if Rosa will accept him: he threatens to “pursue her to the
death,” if she will not; he frightens her so thoroughly that she rushes
to Grewgious in his chambers in London.  She now suspects Jasper of
Edwin’s murder, but keeps her thoughts to herself.  She tells Grewgious,
who is watching Neville,—“I have a fancy for keeping him under my
eye,”—that Jasper has made love to her, and Grewgious replies in a parody
of “God save the King”!

    “On Thee his hopes to fix
       Damn him again!”

Would he fool thus, if he knew Jasper to have killed Edwin?  He is not
certain whether Rosa should visit Helena next day, in Landless’s rooms,
opposite; and Mr. Walters suggests that he may be aware that Helena,
dressed as Datchery, is really absent at Cloisterham.  However, next day,
Helena is in her brother’s rooms.  Moreover, it is really a sufficient
explanation of Grewgious’s doubt that Jasper is lurking around, and that
not till next day is a _private_ way of communication arranged between
Neville and his friends.  In any case, next day, Helena is in her
brother’s rooms, and, by aid of a Mr. Tartar’s rooms, she and Rosa can
meet privately.  There is a good deal of conspiring to watch Jasper when
he watches Neville, and in this new friend, Mr. Tartar, a lover is
provided for Rosa.  Tartar is a miraculously agile climber over roofs and
up walls, a retired Lieutenant of the navy, and a handy man, being such a
climber, to chase Jasper about the roof of the Cathedral, when Jasper’s
day of doom arrives.



JASPER’S OPIUM VISIONS


In July, Jasper revisits the London opium den, and talks under opium,
watched by the old hag.  He speaks of a thing which he often does in
visions: “a hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where a slip
would be destruction.  Look down, look down!  You see what lies at the
bottom there?”  He enacts the vision and says, “There was a fellow
traveller.”  He “speaks in a whisper, and as if in the dark.”  The vision
is, in this case, “a poor vision: no struggle, no consciousness of peril,
no entreaty.”  Edwin, in the reminiscent vision, dies very easily and
rapidly.  “When it comes to be real at last, it is so short that it seems
unreal for the first time.”  “And yet I never saw _that_ before.  Look
what a poor miserable mean thing it is.  _That_ must be real.  It’s
over.”

What can all this mean?  We have been told that, shortly before Christmas
Eve, Jasper took to wearing a thick black-silk handkerchief for his
throat.  He hung it over his arm, “his face knitted and stern,” as he
entered his house for his Christmas Eve dinner.  If he strangled Edwin
with the scarf, as we are to suppose, he did not lead him, drugged, to
the tower top, and pitch him off.  Is part of Jasper’s vision
reminiscent—the brief, unresisting death—while another part is a separate
vision, is _prospective_, “premonitory”?  Does he see himself pitching
Neville Landless off the tower top, or see him fallen from the Cathedral
roof?  Is Neville’s body “_that_”—“I never saw _that_ before.  Look what
a poor miserable mean thing it is!  _That_ must be real.”  Jasper “never
saw _that_”—the dead body below the height—before.  _This_ vision, I
think, is of the future, not of the past, and is meant to bewilder the
reader who thinks that the whole represents the slaying of Drood.  The
tale is rich in “warnings” and telepathy.



DATCHERY AND THE OPIUM WOMAN


The hag now tracks Jasper home to Cloisterham.  Here she meets Datchery,
whom she asks how she can see Jasper?  If Datchery is Drood, he now
learns, _what he did not know before_, _that there is some connection
between Jasper and the hag_.  He walks with her to the place where Edwin
met the hag, on Christmas Eve, and gave her money; and he jingles his own
money as he walks.  The place, or the sound of the money, makes the woman
tell Datchery about Edwin’s gift of three shillings and sixpence for
opium.  Datchery, “with a sudden change of countenance, gives her a
sudden look.”  It does not follow that he is _not_ Drood, for, though the
hag’s love of opium was known to Drood, Datchery is not to reveal his
recognition of the woman.  He does what any stranger would do; he “gives
a sudden look,” as if surprised by the mention of opium.

Mr. Walters says, “Drood would not have changed countenance on hearing a
fact he had known six months previously.”  But if Drood was playing at
being somebody else, he would, of course, give a kind of start and stare,
on hearing of the opium.  When he also hears from the hag that her former
benefactor’s name was Edwin, he asks her how she knew that—“a fatuously
unnecessary question,” says Mr. Walters.  A needless question for
Datchery’s information, if he be Drood, but as useful a question as
another if Drood be Datchery, and wishes to maintain the conversation.



DATCHERY’S SCORE


Datchery keeps a tavern score of his discoveries behind a door, in
cryptic chalk strokes.  He does this, says Mr. Walters, because, being
Helena, he would betray himself if he wrote in a female hand.  But nobody
would _write_ secrets on a door!  He adds “a moderate stroke,” after
meeting the hag, though, says Mr. Walters, “Edwin Drood would have
learned nothing new whatever” from the hag.

But Edwin would have learned something quite new, and very important—that
the hag was hunting Jasper.  Next day Datchery sees the woman shake her
fists at Jasper in church, and hears from her that she knows Jasper
“better far than all the reverend parsons put together know him.”
Datchery then adds a long thick line to his chalked score, yet, says Mr.
Walters, Datchery has learned “nothing new to Edwin Drood, if alive.”

This is an obvious error.  It is absolutely new to Edwin Drood that the
opium hag is intimately acquainted with his uncle, Jasper, and hates
Jasper with a deadly hatred.  All this is not only new to Drood, if
alive, but is rich in promise of further revelations.  Drood, on
Christmas Eve, had learned from the hag only that she took opium, and
that she had come from town to Cloisterham, and had “hunted for a needle
in a bottle of hay.”  That was the sum of his information.  Now he learns
that the woman knows, tracks, has found, and hates, his worthy uncle,
Jasper.  He may well, therefore, add a heavy mark to his score.

We must also ask, How could Helena, fresh from Ceylon, know “the old
tavern way of keeping scores?  Illegible except to the scorer.  The
scorer not committed, the scored debited with what is against him,” as
Datchery observes.  An Eurasian girl of twenty, new to England, would not
argue thus with herself: she would probably know nothing of English
tavern scores.  We do not hear that Helena ever opened a book: we do know
that education had been denied to her.  What acquaintance could she have
with old English tavern customs?

If Drood is Datchery, then Dickens used a form of a very old and
favourite _ficelle_ of his: the watching of a villain by an improbable
and unsuspected person, in this case thought to be dead.  If Helena is
Datchery, the “assumption” or personation is in the highest degree
improbable, her whole bearing is quite out of her possibilities, and the
personation is very absurd.

Here the story ends.




THEORIES OF THE MYSTERY


FORSTER’S EVIDENCE


WE have some external evidence as to Dickens’s solution of his own
problem, from Forster. {48}  On August 6, 1869, some weeks before he
began to work at his tale, Dickens, in a letter, told Forster, “I have a
very curious and new idea for my new story.  Not communicable (or the
interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though
difficult to work.”  Forster must have instantly asked that the
incommunicable secret should be communicated to _him_, for he tells us
that “_immediately after_ I learnt”—the secret.  But did he learn it?
Dickens was ill, and his plot, whatever it may have been, would be
irritatingly criticized by Forster before it was fully thought out.
“Fules and bairns should not see half-done work,” and Dickens may well
have felt that Forster should not see work not even begun, but merely
simmering in the author’s own fancy.

Forster does not tell us that Dickens communicated the secret in a
letter.  He quotes none: he says “I was told,” orally, that is.  When he
writes, five years later (1874), “Landless was, _I think_, to have
perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer,”
he is clearly trusting, not to a letter of Dickens’s, but to a defective
memory; and he knows it.  He says that a nephew was to be murdered by an
uncle.  The criminal was to confess in the condemned cell.  He was to
find out that his crime had been needless, and to be convicted by means
of the ring (Rosa’s mother’s ring) remaining in the quicklime that had
destroyed the body of Edwin.

Nothing “new” in all this, as Forster must have seen.  “The originality,”
he explains, “was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career by
himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if,
not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.”

But all this is not “hard to work,” and is not “original.”  As Mr.
Proctor remarks, Dickens had used that trick twice already.  (“Madman’s
Manuscript,” _Pickwick_; “Clock Case Confession,” in _Master Humphrey’s
Clock_.)  The quicklime trick is also very old indeed.  The disguise of a
woman as a man is as ancient as the art of fiction: yet Helena _may_ be
Datchery, though nobody guessed it before Mr. Cuming Walters.  She ought
not to be Datchery; she is quite out of keeping in her speech and manner
as Datchery, and is much more like Drood.



“A NEW IDEA”


There are no new ideas in plots.  “All the stories have been told,” and
all the merit lies in the manner of the telling.  Dickens had used the
unsuspected watcher, as Mr. Proctor shows, in almost all his novels.  In
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, when Jonas finds that Nadgett has been the watcher,
Dickens writes, “The dead man might have come out of his grave and not
confounded and appalled him so.”  Now, to Jasper, Edwin _was_ “the dead
man,” and Edwin’s grave contained quicklime.  Jasper was sure that he had
done for Edwin: he had taken Edwin’s watch, chain, and scarf-pin; he
believed that he had left him, drugged, in quicklime, in a locked vault.
Consequently the reappearance of Edwin, quite well, in the vault where
Jasper had buried him, would be a very new idea to Jasper; would
“confound and appall him.”  Jasper would have emotions, at that
spectacle, and so would the reader!  It is not every day, even in our age
of sixpenny novels, that a murderer is compelled to visit, alone, at
night, the vault which holds his victim’s “cold remains,” and therein
finds the victim “come up, smiling.”

Yes, for business purposes, this idea was new enough!  The idea was
“difficult to work,” says Dickens, with obvious truth.  How was he to get
the quicklime into the vault, and Drood, alive, out of the vault?  As to
the reader, he would at first take Datchery for Drood, and then think,
“No, that is impossible, and also is stale.  Datchery cannot be Drood,”
and thus the reader would remain in a pleasant state of puzzledom, as he
does, unto this day.

If Edwin is dead, there is not much “Mystery” about him.  We have as good
as seen Jasper strangle him and take his pin, chain, and watch.  Yet by
adroitly managing the conduct of Mr. Grewgious, Dickens persuaded Mr.
Proctor that certainly, Grewgious knew Edwin to be alive.  As Grewgious
knew, from Helena, all that was necessary to provoke his experiment on
Jasper’s nerves, Mr. Proctor argued on false premises, but that was due
to the craft of Dickens.  Mr. Proctor rejected Forster’s report, from
memory, of what he understood to be the “incommunicable secret” of
Dickens’s plot, and I think that he was justified in the rejection.
Forster does not seem to have cared about the thing—he refers lightly to
“the reader curious in such matters”—when once he had received his
explanation from Dickens.  His memory, in the space of five years, may
have been inaccurate: he probably neither knew nor cared who Datchery
was; and he may readily have misunderstood what Dickens told him, orally,
about the ring, as the instrument of detection.  Moreover, Forster quite
overlooked one source of evidence, as I shall show later.



MR. PROCTOR’S THEORY


Mr. Proctor’s theory of the story is that Jasper, after Edwin’s return at
midnight on Christmas Eve, recommended a warm drink—mulled wine,
drugged—and then proposed another stroll of inspection of the effects of
the storm.  He then strangled him, somewhere, and placed him in the
quicklime in the Sapsea vault, locked him in, and went to bed.  Next,
according to Mr. Proctor, Durdles, then, “lying drunk in the precincts,”
for some reason taps with his hammer on the wall of the Sapsea vault,
detects the presence of a foreign body, opens the tomb, and finds Drood
in the quicklime, “his face fortunately protected by the strong silk
shawl with which Jasper has intended to throttle him.”



A MISTAKEN THEORY


This is “thin,” very “thin!”  Dickens must have had some better scheme
than Mr. Proctor’s.  Why did Jasper not “mak sikker” like Kirkpatrick
with the Red Comyn?  Why did he leave his silk scarf?  It might come to
be asked for; to be sure the quicklime would destroy it, but why did
Jasper leave it?  Why did the intoxicated Durdles come out of the crypt,
if he was there, enter the graveyard, and begin tapping at the wall of
the vault?  Why not open the door? he had the key.

Suppose, however, all this to have occurred, and suppose, with Mr.
Proctor, that Durdles and Deputy carried Edwin to the Tramps’ lodgings,
would Durdles fail to recognize Edwin?  We are to guess that Grewgious
was present, or disturbed at his inn, or somehow brought into touch with
Edwin, and bribed Durdles to silence, “until a scheme for the punishment
of Jasper had been devised.”

All this set of conjectures is crude to the last degree.  We do not know
how Dickens meant to get Edwin into and out of the vault.  Granting that
Edwin was drugged, Jasper might lead Edwin in, considering the licence
extended to the effects of drugs in novels, and might strangle him there.
Above all, how did Grewgious, if in Cloisterham, come to be at hand at
midnight?



ANOTHER WAY


If I must make a guess, I conjecture that Jasper had one of his “filmy”
seizures, was “in a frightful sort of dream,” and bungled the murder:
made an incomplete job of it.  Half-strangled men and women have often
recovered.  In Jasper’s opium vision and reminiscence there was no
resistance, all was very soon over.  Jasper might even bungle the locking
of the door of the vault.  He was apt to have a seizure after opium, in
moments of excitement, and _he had been at the opium den through the
night of December_ 23, for the hag tracked him from her house in town to
Cloisterham on December 24, the day of the crime.  Grant that his
accustomed fit came upon him during the excitement of the murder, as it
does come after “a nicht wi’ opium,” in chapter ii., when Edwin excites
him by contemptuous talk of the girl whom Jasper loves so furiously—and
then anything may happen!

Jasper murders Edwin inefficiently; he has a fit; while he is unconscious
the quicklime revives Edwin, by burning his hand, say, and, during
Jasper’s swoon, Edwin, like another famous prisoner, “has a happy
thought, he opens the door, and walks out.”

Being drugged, he is in a dreamy state; knows not clearly what has
occurred, or who attacked him.  Jasper revives, “look on’t again he dare
not,”—on the body of his victim—and _he_ walks out and goes home, where
his red lamp has burned all the time—“thinking it all wery capital.”

“Another way,”—Jasper not only fails to strangle Drood, but fails to lock
the door of the vault, and Drood walks out after Jasper has gone.  Jasper
has, before his fit, “removed from the body the most lasting, the best
known, and most easily recognizable things upon it, the watch and
scarf-pin.”  So Dickens puts the popular view of the case against Neville
Landless, and so we are to presume that Jasper acted.  If he removed no
more things from the body than these, he made a fatal oversight.

Meanwhile, how does Edwin, once out of the vault, make good a secret
escape from Cloisterham?  Mr. Proctor invokes the aid of Mr. Grewgious,
but does not explain why Grewgious was on the spot.  I venture to think
it not inconceivable that Mr. Grewgious having come down to Cloisterham
by a late train, on Christmas Eve, to keep his Christmas appointment with
Rosa, paid a darkling visit to the tomb of his lost love, Rosa’s mother.
Grewgious was very sentimental, but too secretive to pay such a visit by
daylight.  “A night of memories and sighs” he might “consecrate” to his
lost lady love, as Landor did to Rose Aylmer.  Grewgious was to have
helped Bazzard to eat a turkey on Christmas Day.  But he could get out of
that engagement.  He would wish to see Edwin and Rosa together, and Edwin
was leaving Cloisterham.  The date of Grewgious’s arrival at Cloisterham
is studiously concealed.  I offer at least a conceivable motive for
Grewgious’s possible presence at the churchyard.  Mrs. Bud, his lost
love, we have been told, was buried hard by the Sapsea monument.  If
Grewgious visited her tomb, he was on the spot to help Edwin, supposing
Edwin to escape.  Unlikelier things occur in novels.  I do not, in fact,
call these probable occurrences in every-day life, but none of the story
is probable.  Jasper’s “weird seizures” are meant to lead up to
_something_.  They may have been meant to lead up to the failure of the
murder and the escape of Edwin.  Of course Dickens would not have treated
these incidents, when he came to make Edwin explain,—nobody else could
explain,—in my studiously simple style.  The drugged Edwin himself would
remember the circumstances but mistily: his evidence would be of no value
against Jasper.

Mr. Proctor next supposes, we saw, that Drood got into touch with
Grewgious, and I have added the circumstances which might take Grewgious
to the churchyard.  Next, when Edwin recovered health, he came down,
perhaps, as Datchery, to spy on Jasper.  I have elsewhere said, as Mr.
Cuming Walters quotes me, that “fancy can suggest no reason why Edwin
Drood, if he escaped from his wicked uncle, should go spying about
instead of coming openly forward.  No plausible unfantastic reason could
be invented.”  Later, I shall explain why Edwin, if he is Datchery, might
go spying alone.

It is also urged that Edwin left Rosa in sorrow, and left blame on
Neville Landless.  Why do this?  Mr. Proctor replies that Grewgious’s
intense and watchful interest in Neville, otherwise unexplained, is due
to his knowledge that Drood is alive, and that Neville must be cared for,
while Grewgious has told Rosa that Edwin lives.  He also told her of
Edwin’s real love of her, hence Miss Bud says, “Poor, poor Eddy,” quite
_à propos de bottes_, when she finds herself many fathoms deep in love
with Lieutenant Tartar, R.N.  “‘Poor, poor Eddy!’ thought Rosa, as they
walked along,” Tartar and she.  This is a plausible suggestion of Mr.
Proctor.  Edwin, though known to Rosa to be alive, has no chance!  But,
as to my own remark, “why should not Edwin come forward at once, instead
of spying about?”  Well, if he did, there would be no story.  As for “an
unfantastic reason” for his conduct, Dickens is not writing an
“unfantastic” novel.  Moreover, if things occurred as I have suggested, I
do not see what evidence Drood had against Jasper.  Edwin’s clothes were
covered with lime, but, when he told his story, Jasper would reply that
Drood never returned to his house on Christmas Eve, but stayed out,
“doing what was correct by the season, in the way of giving it the
welcome it had the right to expect,” like Durdles on another occasion.
Drood’s evidence, if it was what I have suggested, would sound like the
dream of an intoxicated man, and what other evidence could be adduced?
Thus I had worked out Drood’s condition, if he really was not killed, in
this way: I had supposed him to escape, in a very mixed frame of mind,
when he would be encountered by Grewgious, who, of course, could make
little out of him in his befogged state.  Drood could not even prove that
it was not Landless who attacked him.  The result would be that Drood
would lie low, and later, would have reason enough for disguising himself
as Datchery, and playing the spy in Cloisterham.

At this point I was reinforced by an opinion which Mr. William Archer had
expressed, unknown to me, in a newspaper article.  I had described
Edwin’s confused knowledge of his own experience, if he were thoroughly
drugged, and then half strangled.  Mr. Archer also took that point, and
added that Edwin being a good-hearted fellow, and fond of his uncle
Jasper, he would not bring, or let Grewgious bring, a terrible charge
against Jasper, till he knew more certainly the whole state of the case.
For that reason, he would come disguised to Cloisterham and make
inquiries.  By letting Jasper know about the ring, he would compel him to
enter the vault, and then, Mr. Archer thinks, would induce him to “repent
and begin life afresh.”

I scarcely think that Datchery’s purpose was so truly honourable: he
rather seems to be getting up a case against Jasper.  Still, the idea of
Mr. Archer is very plausible, and, at least, given Drood’s need of
evidence, and the lack of evidence against Jasper, we see reason good, in
a novel of this kind, for his playing the part of amateur detective.



DICKENS’S UNUSED DRAFT OF A CHAPTER


Forster found, and published, a very illegible sketch of a chapter of the
tale: “How Mr. Sapsea ceased to be a Member of the Eight Club, Told by
Himself.”  This was “a cramped, interlined, and blotted” draft, on paper
of only half the size commonly used by Dickens.  Mr. Sapsea tells how his
Club mocked him about a stranger, who had mistaken him for the Dean.  The
jackass, Sapsea, left the Club, and met the stranger, _a young man_, who
fooled him to the top of his bent, saying, “If I was to deny that I came
to this town to see and hear you, Sir, what would it avail me?”
Apparently this paper was a rough draft of an idea for introducing a
detective, as a _young_ man, who mocks Sapsea just as Datchery does in
the novel.  But to make the spy a _young_ man, whether the spy was Drood
or Helena Landless, was too difficult; and therefore Dickens makes
Datchery “an elderly buffer” in a white wig.  If I am right, it was
easier for Helena, a girl, to pose as a young man, than for Drood to
reappear as a young man, not himself.  Helena _may_ be Datchery, and yet
Drood may be alive and biding his time; but I have disproved my old
objection that there was no reason why Drood, if alive, should go spying
about in disguise.  There were good Dickensian reasons.



A QUESTION OF TASTE


Mr. Cuming Walters argues that the story is very tame if Edwin is still
alive, and left out of the marriages at the close.  Besides, “Drood is
little more than a name-label, attached to a body, a man who never
excites sympathy, whose fate causes no emotion, he is saved for no useful
or sentimental purpose, and lags superfluous on the stage.  All of which
is bad art, so bad that Dickens would never have been guilty of it.”

That is a question of taste.  On rereading the novel, I see that Dickens
makes Drood as sympathetic as he can.  He is very young, and speaks of
Rosa with bad taste, but he is really in love with her, much more so than
she with him, and he is piqued by her ceaseless mockery, and by their
false position.  To Jasper he is singularly tender, and remorseful when
he thinks that he has shown want of tact.  There is nothing ominous about
his gaiety: as to his one fault, we leave him, on Christmas Eve, a
converted character: he has a kind word and look for every one whom he
meets, young and old.  He accepts Mr. Grewgious’s very stern lecture in
the best manner possible.  In short, he is marked as faulty—“I am young,”
so he excuses himself, in the very words of Darnley to Queen Mary! (if
the Glasgow letter be genuine); but he is also marked as sympathetic.

He was, I think, to have a lesson, and to become a good fellow.  Mr.
Proctor rightly argues (and Forster “thinks”), that Dickens meant to kill
Neville Landless: Mr. Cuming Walters agrees with him, but Mr. Proctor
truly adds that Edwin has none of the signs of Dickens’s doomed men, his
Sidney Cartons, and the rest.  You can tell, as it were by the sound of
the voice of Dickens, says Mr. Proctor, that Edwin is to live.  The
impression is merely subjective, but I feel the impression.  The doom of
Landless is conspicuously fixed, and why is Landless to be killed by
Jasper?  Merely to have a count on which to hang Jasper!  He cannot be
hanged for killing Drood, if Drood is alive.



MR. PROCTOR’S THEORY CONTINUED


Mr. Proctor next supposes that Datchery and others, by aid of the opium
hag, have found out a great deal of evidence against Jasper.  They have
discovered from the old woman that his crime was long premeditated: he
had threatened “Ned” in his opiated dreams: and had clearly removed
Edwin’s trinkets and watch, because they would not be destroyed, with his
body, by the quicklime.  This is all very well, but there is still, so
far, no legal evidence, on my theory, that Jasper attempted to take
Edwin’s life.  Jasper’s enemies, therefore, can only do their best to
make his life a burden to him, and to give him a good fright, probably
with the hope of terrifying him into avowals.

Now the famous ring begins “to drag and hold” the murderer.  He is given
to know, I presume, that, when Edwin disappeared, he had a gold ring in
the pocket of his coat.  Jasper is thus compelled to revisit the vault,
at night, and there, in the light of his lantern, he sees the long-lost
Edwin, with his hand in the breast of his great coat.

Horrified by this unexpected appearance, Jasper turns to fly.  But he is
confronted by Neville Landless, Crisparkle, Tartar, and perhaps by Mr.
Grewgious, who are all on the watch.  He rushes up through the only
outlet, the winding staircase of the Cathedral tower, of which we know
that he has had the key.  Neville, who leads his pursuers, “receives his
death wound” (and, I think, is pitched off the top of the roof).  Then
Jasper is collared by that agile climber, Tartar, and by Crisparkle,
always in the pink of condition.  There is now something to hang Jasper
for—the slaying of Landless (though, as far as I can see, _that_ was done
in self-defence).  Jasper confesses all; Tartar marries Rosa; Helena
marries Crisparkle.  Edwin is only twenty-one, and may easily find a
consoler of the fair sex: indeed he is “ower young to marry yet.”

The capture of Jasper was fixed, of course, for Christmas Eve.  The
phantom cry foreheard by Durdles, two years before, was that of Neville
as he fell; and the dog that howled was Neville’s dog, a character not
yet introduced into the romance.



MR. CUMING WALTERS’S THEORY


Such is Mr. Proctor’s theory of the story, in which I mainly agree.  Mr.
Proctor relies on a piece of evidence overlooked by Forster, and
certainly misinterpreted, as I think I can prove to a certainty, by Mr.
Cuming Walters, whose theory of the real conduct of the plot runs thus:
After watching the storm at midnight with Edwin, Neville left him, and
went home: “his way lay in an opposite direction.  Near to the Cathedral
Jasper intercepted his nephew. . . . Edwin may have been already
drugged.”  How the murder was worked Mr. Cuming Walters does not say, but
he introduces at this point, the two sounds foreheard by Durdles, without
explaining “the howl of a dog.”  Durdles would hear the cries, and Deputy
“had seen what he could not understand,” whatever it was that he saw.
Jasper, not aware of Drood’s possession of the ring, takes only his
watch, chain, and pin, which he places on the timbers of the weir, and in
the river, to be picked up by that persistent winter-bather, Crisparkle
of the telescopic and microscopic eyesight.

As to the ring, Mr. Cuming Walters erroneously declares that Mr. Proctor
“ignores” the power of the ring “to hold and drag,” and says that potent
passage is “without meaning and must be disregarded.”  Proctor, in fact,
gives more than three pages to the meaning of the ring, which “drags”
Jasper into the vault, when he hears of its existence. {74}  Next, Mr.
Cuming Walters supposes Datchery to learn from Durdles, whom he is to
visit, about the second hearing of the cry and the dog’s howl.  Deputy
may have seen Jasper “carrying his burden” (Edwin) “towards the Sapsea
vault.”  In fact, Jasper probably saved trouble by making the drugged
Edwin walk into that receptacle.  “Datchery would not think of the Sapsea
vault unaided.”  No—unless Datchery was Drood!  “Now Durdles is useful
again.  Tapping with his hammer he would find a change . . . inquiry must
be made.”  Why should Durdles tap the Sapsea monument?  As Durdles had
the key, he would simply walk into the vault, and find the quicklime.
Now, Jasper also, we presume, had a key, made from a wax impression of
the original.  If he had any sense, he would have removed the quicklime
as easily as he inserted it, for Mr. Sapsea was mortal: he might die any
day, and be buried, and then the quicklime, lying where it ought not,
would give rise to awkward inquiries.

Inquiry being made, in consequence of Durdles’s tappings, the ring would
be found, as Mr. Cuming Walters says.  But even then, unless Deputy
actually saw Jasper carry a man into the vault, nobody could prove
Jasper’s connection with the presence of the ring in the vault.
Moreover, Deputy hated Jasper, and if he saw Jasper carrying the body of
a man, on the night when a man disappeared, he was clever enough to lead
Durdles to examine the vault, _at once_.  Deputy had a great dislike of
the Law and its officers, but here was a chance for him to distinguish
himself, and conciliate them.

However these things may be, Mr. Cuming Walters supposes that Jasper,
finding himself watched, re-enters the vault, perhaps, “to see that every
trace of the crime had been removed.”  In the vault he finds—Datchery,
that is, Helena Landless!  Jasper certainly visited the vault and found
somebody.

            [Picture: The cover of The Mystery of Edwin Drood]



EVIDENCE OF COLLINS’S DRAWINGS


We now come to the evidence which Forster strangely overlooked, which Mr.
Proctor and Mr. Archer correctly deciphered, and which Mr. Cuming Walters
misinterprets.  On December 22, 1869, Dickens wrote to Forster that two
numbers of his romance were “now in type.  Charles Collins has designed
an excellent cover.”  Mr. C. A. Collins had married a daughter of
Dickens. {77}  He was an artist, a great friend of Dickens, and author of
that charming book, “A Cruise on Wheels.”  His design of the paper cover
of the story (it appeared in monthly numbers) contained, as usual,
sketches which give an inkling of the events in the tale.  Mr. Collins
was to have illustrated the book; but, finally, Mr. (now Sir) Luke Fildes
undertook the task.  Mr. Collins died in 1873.  It appears that Forster
never asked him the meaning of his designs—a singular oversight.

The cover lies before the reader.  In the left-hand top corner appears an
allegorical female figure of joy, with flowers.  The central top space
contains the front of Cloisterham Cathedral, or rather, the nave.  To the
left walks Edwin, with hyacinthine locks, and a thoroughly classical type
of face, and Grecian nose.  _Like Datchery_, _he does not wear_, _but
carries his hat_; this means nothing, if they are in the nave.  He seems
bored.  On his arm is Rosa; _she_ seems bored; she trails her parasol,
and looks away from Edwin, looks down, to her right.  On the spectator’s
right march the surpliced men and boys of the Choir.  Behind them is
Jasper, black whiskers and all; he stares after Edwin and Rosa; his right
hand hides his mouth.  In the corner above him is an allegorical female,
clasping a stiletto.

Beneath Edwin and Rosa is, first, an allegorical female figure, looking
at a placard, headed “LOST,” on a door.  Under that, again, is a girl in
a garden-chair; a young man, whiskerless, with wavy hair, kneels and
kisses her hand.  She looks rather unimpassioned.  I conceive the man to
be Landless, taking leave of Rosa after urging his hopeless suit, for
which Helena, we learn, “seems to compassionate him.”  He has avowed his
passion, early in the story, to Crisparkle.  Below, the opium hag is
smoking.  On the other side, under the figures of Jasper and the Choir,
the young man who kneels to the girl is seen bounding up a spiral
staircase.  His left hand is on the iron railing; he stoops over it,
looking down at others who follow him.  His right hand, the index finger
protruded, points upward, and, by chance or design, points straight at
Jasper in the vignette above.  Beneath this man (clearly Landless)
follows a tall man in a “bowler” hat, a “cut-away” coat, and trousers
which show an inch of white stocking above the low shoes.  His profile is
hid by the wall of the spiral staircase: he might be Grewgious of the
shoes, white stockings, and short trousers, but he may be Tartar: he
takes two steps at a stride.  Beneath him a youngish man, in a low, soft,
clerical hat and a black pea-coat, ascends, looking downwards and
backwards.  This is clearly Crisparkle.  A Chinaman is smoking opium
beneath.

In the central lowest space, a dark and whiskered man enters a dark
chamber; his left hand is on the lock of the door; in his right he holds
up a lantern.  The light of the lantern reveals a young man in a soft hat
of Tyrolese shape.  His features are purely classical, his nose is
Grecian, his locks are long (at least, according to the taste of to-day);
he wears a light paletot, buttoned to the throat; his right arm hangs by
his side; his left hand is thrust into the breast of his coat.  He calmly
regards the dark man with the lantern.  That man, of course, is Jasper.
The young man is EDWIN DROOD, of the Grecian nose, hyacinthine locks, and
classic features, as in Sir L. Fildes’s third illustration.

Mr. Proctor correctly understood the unmistakable meaning of this last
design, Jasper entering the vault—

    “_To-day the dead are living_,
       _The lost is found to-day_.”

Mr. Cuming Walters tells us that he did not examine these designs by Mr.
Collins till he had formed his theory, and finished his book.  “On the
conclusion of the whole work the pictures were referred to for the first
time, and were then found to support in the most striking manner the
opinions arrived at,” namely, that Drood was killed, and that Helena is
Datchery.  Thus does theory blind us to facts!

Mr. Cuming Walters connects the figure of the whiskerless young man
kneeling to a girl in a garden seat, with the whiskered Jasper’s proposal
to Rosa in a garden seat.  But Jasper does not kneel to Rosa; he stands
apart, leaning on a sundial; he only once vaguely “touches” her, which
she resents; he does not kneel; he does not kiss her hand (Rosa “took the
kiss sedately,” like Maud in the poem); and—Jasper had lustrous thick
black whiskers.

Again, the same whiskerless young man, bounding up the spiral staircase
in daylight, and wildly pointing upwards, is taken by Mr. Cuming Walters
to represent Jasper climbing the staircase to reconnoitre, at night, with
a lantern, and, of course, with black whiskers.  The two well-dressed men
on the stairs (Grewgious, or Tartar, and Crisparkle) also, according to
Mr. Cuming Walters, “relate to Jasper’s unaccountable expedition with
Durdles to the Cathedral.”  Neither of them is Jasper; neither of them is
Durdles, “in a suit of coarse flannel”—a disreputable jacket, as Sir L.
Fildes depicts him—“with horn buttons,” and a battered old tall hat.
These interpretations are quite demonstrably erroneous and even
impossible.  Mr. Archer interprets the designs exactly as I do.

As to the young man in the light of Jasper’s lamp, Mr. Cuming Walters
says, “the large hat and the tightly-buttoned surtout must be observed;
they are the articles of clothing on which most stress is laid in the
description of Datchery.  But the face is young.”  The face of Datchery
was elderly, and he had a huge shock of white hair, a wig.  Datchery wore
“a tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and grey trousers; he had
something of a military air.”  The young man in the vault has anything
but a military air; he shows no waistcoat, and he does not wear “a
tightish blue surtout,” or any surtout at all.

                        [Picture: Under the trees]

The surtout of the period is shown, worn by Jasper, in Sir L. Fildes’s
sixth and ninth illustrations.  It is a frock-coat; the collar descends
far below the top of the waistcoat (buff or otherwise), displaying that
garment; the coat is tightly buttoned beneath, revealing the figure; the
tails of the coat do not reach the knees of the wearer.  The young man in
the vault, on the other hand, wears a loose paletot, buttoned to the
throat (vaults are chilly places), and the coat falls so as to cover the
knees; at least, partially.  The young man is not, like Helena, “very
dark, and fierce of look, . . . of almost the gipsy type.”  He is blonde,
sedate, and of the classic type, as Drood was.  He is no more like Helena
than Crisparkle is like Durdles.  Mr. Cuming Walters says that Mr.
Proctor was “unable to allude to the prophetic picture by Collins.”  As a
fact, this picture is fully described by Mr. Proctor, but Mr. Walters
used the wrong edition of his book, unwittingly.

Mr. Proctor writes:—“Creeping down the crypt steps, oppressed by growing
horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered
by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper
opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the
thought of what it may reveal to him.

“And what sees he?  Is it the spirit of his victim that stands there, ‘in
his habit as he lived,’ his hand clasped on his breast, where the ring
had been when he was murdered?  What else can Jasper deem it?  There,
clearly visible in the gloom at the back of the tomb, stands Edwin Drood,
with stern look fixed on him—pale, silent, relentless!”

         [Picture: Durdles Cautions Mr. Sapsea against Boasting]

Again, “On the title-page are given two of the small pictures from the
Love side of the cover, two from the Murder side, and the central picture
below, which presents the central horror of the story—the end and aim of
the ‘Datchery assumption’ and of Mr. Grewgious’s plans—showing Jasper
driven to seek for the proofs of his crime amid the dust to which, as he
thought, the flesh and bones, and the very clothes of his victim, had
been reduced.”

There are only two possible choices; either Collins, under Dickens’s oral
instructions, depicted Jasper finding Drood alive in the vault, an
incident which was to occur in the story; or Dickens bade Collins do this
for the purpose of misleading his readers in an illegitimate manner;
while the young man in the vault was really to be some person “made up”
to look like Drood, and so to frighten Jasper with a pseudo-ghost of that
hero.  The latter device, the misleading picture, would be childish, and
the pseudo-ghost, exactly like Drood, could not be acted by the
gipsy-like, fierce Helena, or by any other person in the romance.



MR. WALTERS’S THEORY CONTINUED


Mr. Cuming Walters guesses that Jasper was to aim a deadly blow (with his
left hand, to judge from the picture) at Helena, and that Neville “was to
give his life for hers.”  But, manifestly, Neville was to lead the hunt
of Jasper up the spiral stair, as in Collins’s design, and was to be
dashed from the roof: his body beneath was to be “_that_, I never saw
before.  _That_ must be real.  Look what a poor mean miserable thing it
is!” as Jasper says in his vision.

Mr. Cuming Walters, pursuing his idea of Helena as both Datchery and also
as the owner of “the _young_ face” of the youth in the vault (and also of
the young hands, a young girl’s hands could never pass for those of “an
elderly buffer”), exclaims: “Imagine the intense power of the dramatic
climax, when Datchery, the elderly man, is re-transformed into Helena
Landless, the young and handsome woman; and when she reveals the
seemingly impenetrable secret which had been closed up in one guilty
man’s mind.”

The situations are startling, I admit, but how would Canon Crisparkle
like them?  He is, we know, to marry Helena, “the young person, my dear,”
Miss Twinkleton would say, “who for months lived alone, at inns, wearing
a blue surtout, a buff waistcoat, and grey—”  Here horror chokes the
utterance of Miss Twinkleton.  “Then she was in the vault in _another_
disguise, not more womanly, at that awful scene when poor Mr. Jasper was
driven mad, so that he confessed all sorts of nonsense, for, my dear, all
the Close believes that it _was_ nonsense, and that Mr. Jasper was
reduced to insanity by persecution.  And Mr. Crisparkle, with that
elegant dainty mother of his—it has broken her heart—is marrying this
half-caste gipsy _trollop_, with her blue surtout and grey—oh, it is a
disgrace to Cloisterham!”

The climax, in fact, as devised by Mr. Cuming Walters, is rather too
dramatic for the comfort of a minor canon.  A humorist like Dickens ought
to have seen the absurdity of the situation.  Mr. Walters _may_ be right,
Helena may be Datchery, but she ought not to be.



WHO WAS THE PRINCESS PUFFER?


Who was the opium hag, the Princess Puffer?  Mr. Cuming Walters writes:
“We make a guess, for Dickens gives us no solid facts.  But when we
remember that not a word is said throughout the volume of Jasper’s
antecedents, who he was, and where he came from; when we remember that
but for his nephew he was a lonely man; when we see that he was both
criminal and artist; when we observe his own wheedling propensity, his
false and fulsome protestations of affection, his slyness, his subtlety,
his heartlessness, his tenacity; and when, above all, we know that the
opium vice is _hereditary_, and that a _young_ man would not be addicted
to it unless born with the craving; {91} then, it is not too wild a
conjecture that Jasper was the wayward progeny of this same opium-eating
woman, all of whose characteristics he possessed, and, perchance, of a
man of criminal instincts, but of a superior position.  Jasper is a
morbid and diseased being while still in the twenties, a mixture of
genius and vice.  He hates and he loves fiercely, as if there were wild
gipsy blood in his veins.  Though seemingly a model of decorum and
devoted to his art, he complains of his “daily drudging round” and “the
cramped monotony of his existence.”  He commits his crime with the
ruthlessness of a beast, his own nature being wholly untamed.  If we
deduce that his father was an adventurer and a vagabond, we shall not be
far wrong.  If we deduce that his mother was the opium-eater, prematurely
aged, who had transmitted her vicious propensity to her child, we shall
almost certainly be right.”



WHO WAS JASPER?


Who was Jasper?  He was the brother-in-law of the late Mr. Drood, a
respected engineer, and University man.  We do not know whence came Mrs.
Drood, Jasper’s sister, but is it likely that her mother “drank
heaven’s-hard”—so the hag says of herself—then took to keeping an opium
den, and there entertained her son Jasper, already an accomplished
vocalist, but in a lower station than that to which his musical genius
later raised him, as lay Precentor?  If the Princess Puffer be, as on Mr.
Cuming Walters’s theory she is, Edwin’s long-lost grandmother, her
discovery would be unwelcome to Edwin.  Probably she did not live much
longer; “my lungs are like cabbage nets,” she says.  Mr. Cuming Walters
goes on—

“Her purpose is left obscure.  How easily, however, we see possibilities
in a direction such as this.  The father, perhaps a proud, handsome man,
deserts the woman, and removes the child.  The woman hates both for
scorning her, but the father dies, or disappears, and is beyond her
vengeance.  Then the child, victim to the ills in his blood, creeps back
to the opium den, not knowing his mother, but immediately recognized by
her.  She will make the child suffer for the sins of the father, who had
destroyed her happiness.  Such a theme was one which appealed to Dickens.
It must not, however, be urged; and the crucial question after all is
concerned with the opium woman as one of the unconscious instruments of
justice, aiding with her trifle of circumstantial evidence the Nemesis
awaiting Jasper.

“Another hypothesis—following on the Carker theme in ‘Dombey and Son’—is
that Jasper, a dissolute and degenerate man, lascivious, and heartless,
may have wronged a child of the woman’s; but it is not likely that
Dickens would repeat the Mrs. Brown story.”

Jasper, _père_, father of John Jasper and of Mrs. Drood, however
handsome, ought not to have deserted Mrs. Jasper.  Whether John Jasper,
prematurely devoted to opium, became Edwin’s guardian at about the age of
fifteen, or whether, on attaining his majority, he succeeded to some
other guardian, is not very obvious.  In short, we cannot guess why the
Princess Puffer hated Jasper, a paying client of long standing.  We are
only certain that Jasper was a bad fellow, and that the Princess Puffer
said, “I know him, better than all the Reverend Parsons put together know
him.”  On the other hand, Edwin “seems to know” the opium woman, when he
meets her on Christmas Eve, which may be a point in favour of her being
his long-lost grandmother.

Jasper was certainly tried and condemned; for Dickens intended “to take
Mr. Fildes to a condemned cell in Maidstone, or some other gaol, in order
to make a drawing.” {96}  Possibly Jasper managed to take his own life,
in the cell; possibly he was duly hanged.

Jasper, after all, was a failure as a murderer, even if we suppose him to
have strangled his nephew successfully.  “It is obvious to the most
excruciatingly feeble capacity” that, if he meant to get rid of proofs of
the identity of Drood’s body by means of quicklime, it did not suffice to
remove Drood’s pin, watch, and chain.  Drood would have coins of the
realm in his pockets, gold, silver, bronze.  Quicklime would not destroy
these metallic objects, nor would it destroy keys, which would easily
prove Drood’s identity.  If Jasper knew his business, he would, of
course, rifle _all_ of Edwin’s pockets minutely, and would remove the
metallic buttons of his braces, which generally display the maker’s name,
or the tailor’s.  On research I find “H. Poole & Co., Savile Row” on my
buttons.  In this inquiry of his, Jasper would have discovered the ring
in Edwin’s breast pocket, and would have taken it away.  Perhaps Dickens
never thought of that little fact: if he did think of it, no doubt he
found some mode of accounting for Jasper’s unworkmanlike negligence.  The
trouser-buttons would have led any inquirer straight to Edwin’s tailor; I
incline to suspect that neither Dickens nor Jasper noticed that
circumstance.  The conscientious artist in crime cannot afford to neglect
the humblest and most obvious details.




CONCLUSION


ACCORDING to my theory, which mainly rests on the unmistakable evidence
of the cover drawn by Collins under Dickens’s directions, all “ends
well.”  Jasper comes to the grief he deserves: Helena, after her period
of mourning for Neville, marries Crisparkle: Rosa weds her mariner.
Edwin, at twenty-one, is not heart-broken, but, a greatly improved
character, takes, to quote his own words, “a sensible interest in works
of engineering skill, especially when they are to change the whole
condition of an undeveloped country”—Egypt.

These conclusions are inevitable unless we either suppose Dickens to have
arranged a disappointment for his readers in the _tableau_ of Jasper and
Drood, in the vault, on the cover, or can persuade ourselves that not
Drood, but some other young man, is revealed by the light of Jasper’s
lantern.  Now, the young man is very like Drood, and very unlike the dark
fierce Helena Landless: disguised as Drood, this time, not as Datchery.
All the difficulty as to why Drood, if he escaped alive, did not at once
openly denounce Jasper, is removed when we remember, as Mr. Archer and I
have independently pointed out, that Drood, when attacked by Jasper, was
(like Durdles in the “unaccountable expedition”) stupefied by drugs, and
so had no valid evidence against his uncle.  Whether science is
acquainted with the drugs necessary for such purposes is another
question.  They are always kept in stock by starving and venal
apothecaries in fiction and the drama, and are a recognized convention of
romance.

So ends our unfolding of the Mystery of Edwin Drood.

                                * * * * *

                                 THE END

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

     PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SON, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.




FOOTNOTES


{11}  Landless is not “Lackland,” but a form of de Laundeles, a Lothian
name of the twelfth century, merged later in that of Ormistoun.

{48}  _Life of Dickens_, vol. iii. pp. 425–439.

{74}  J. Cuming Walters, p. 102; Proctor, pp. 131–135.  Mr. Cuming
Walters used an edition of 1896, apparently a reprint of a paper by
Proctor, written earlier than his final book of 1887.  Hence the error as
to Mr. Proctor’s last theory.

{77}  Mrs. Perugini, the books say, but certainly a daughter.

{91}  What would Weissmann say to all this?

{96}  So Mr. Cuming Walters quotes Mr. Hughes, who quotes Sir L. Fildes.
_He_ believes that Jasper strangled Edwin with the black-silk scarf, and,
no doubt, Jasper was for long of that opinion himself.




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