The Mystery of Charles Dickens

by A. N. Wilson

  Although the mental processes that lead to these identifications are easily traceable – and Dickens positively encouraged them, as we have seen, pointing out the site of Dr Strong’s school at Canterbury, or the staircase in the Temple where Magwitch visits Pip – this seems an odd way of reading both geography and fiction. Within months of Dickens’s death, the Gradgrindian Dickensians were out in the streets of Rochester with their notebooks. Pass a generation, and the whole of the novel had been mapped out, with almost reproving attention to the alterations made by the primary imagination of a novelist to the topographical facts. In Chapter 4 of Drood, for example, we encounter the gloriously absurd figure of the local auctioneer Mr Sapsea, the ‘purest Jackass in Cloisterham’, who thinks of himself as a distinguished appendage to the Dean and Chapter and concludes the auction-sales ‘with an air of bestowing a benediction on the assembled brokers, which leaves the real Dean – a modest and worthy gentleman – far behind’. [MED 4] Sapsea lives in lodgings over the High Street in an old building near Nuns’ House, where Rosa Bud goes to school. ‘Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, about half life-size, representing Mr Sapsea’s father, in a curly wig and toga, in the act of selling.’ [MED 4] The second issue of The Dickensian (1906) contains an article by Mr Woodford Sowray, which informed readers that ‘there was a figure in Rochester; but I found that it did not stand over the doorway of the ancient three-gabled house in the High Street, as described in Edwin Drood, but that its actual position was over the door of a house further on in the direction of Chatham… that the house when the story was written was occupied by a Mr Batten, a builder (now dead) who was at one time mayor of the city and that in the course of alterations to the house the effigy was removed’. [SJ p. 304] Arthur J. Cox, who edited the Penguin edition of the novel in 1974, pointed out that Dickens claimed this ‘ancient three-gabled house’ as Uncle Pumblechook’s premises in Great Expectations. As we noted when Dickens was showing his American publishers the Inns of Court, Canterbury and Rochester, he himself enjoyed this tracing of the Dickensian ‘originals’ and the ‘actual’ sites of his stories.

  In a sense, the ‘real’ wooden figure, however, and the ‘real’ three-gabled house ceased to exist even before they were demolished, not as physical entities, of course, but as Dickensian originals.

  The antiquarian, faddist interest in identifying individual buildings or streets in Rochester that might have been ‘used’ in the composition of the novel only, in any event, go a little way to helping us understand why Rochester, a city just down the road from Gad’s Hill where the book was being composed, should have any significance in our reading of the story at all.

  The question is not whether this wooden figure, or that house, can be identified as the models for Cloisterham, Dickens’s imagined city. The question is where all this stuff is coming from – what are the wells from which he is drawing water? Cloisterham is the Rochester of Dickens’s childhood. In Chapter 3 he informed us that ‘For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old cathedral town.’ [MED 3] It is the world as he knew it before he was transported to the hell of premature adulthood in London and had to confront his father’s bankruptcy, the debtors’ gaol, the blacking factory, the London crowds, the Fall. But it is also a story that concerns itself with the problems of personal identity. At the beginning of the story, Jasper is ‘the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together’ [MED 1] as he comes round from an opium trip. The stonemason who teaches him how to bury and dispose of human remains ‘often speaks of himself in the third person; perhaps, being a little misty as to his own identity’. [MED 4] The young people are still finding themselves, and the older figures in the book – except those such as the jackass Sapsea, who are fixed, like so many Dickensian characters, in caricatures of themselves – dance in a disturbing state of flux. They are by no means who they appear to be.

  The story takes place before the railway came to ‘Cloisterham’ (that is, pre-1840), in the benevolent prelapsarian world of Mr Pickwick and his friends, who visited Rochester in 1837.

  In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, however, the imagination of Dickens was moving in other directions. It is a story of murder, sexual jealousy, hatred.

  Dickens had told his friend Forster, ‘I 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.’26 Many theories have been propounded, both about what Dickens intended to be ‘very curious and new’ about his story, and about how the plot would have evolved, had he lived to complete the story. ‘Datchery’, the stranger who arrives in Chapter 18 in the old cathedral town, with his shock of white (in a later chapter, grey) hair and his clear intention to investigate John Jasper’s activities, will surely turn out to be someone in disguise?

  The ‘curious and new’ fantasy was fed with the knowledge of Dickens’s own approaching death. When he died, he would lose control over Nelly. Her young body would become the possession of another man. Dickens could not guess that Nelly herself would concoct the most stupendous of fictions out of her own life, re-creating herself aged thirty as a woman of eighteen, marrying a young man and bearing his children, and recalling Dickens, as she brazenly did, as a man who had befriended her when she was a mere child.

  When Princess Puffer, the mysterious old proprietress of the opium den, meets her client John Jasper after a long gap, a gap in which Edwin Drood has supposedly been murdered, she ask shim:

  ‘Who was they as died, deary?’

  ‘A relative.’

  ‘Died of what, lovey?’

  ‘Probably, Death.’ [MED 23]

  That was what was staring Dickens in the face as he wrote this last, triumphant chapter. A resurrection chapter for, in the previous hundred pages, he and the book had already died, and it was only in this final chapter – writing, writing, writing in the Swiss chalet in that last week of his life – that from a dull day and a grey sky had suddenly flared a glory.

  The death certificate tells us that Dickens died on 9 June 1870. Readers of The Mystery of Edwin Drood could see that he had actually died several months earlier.

  The novel had been a new departure. In July 1869, Dickens had written to Forster, ‘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 several ways and the impossibility of what will be done with the impending fate.’27

  Had he written this book, Dickens would indeed have been changing course quite dramatically as a novelist. For such a story to succeed, he would have needed to trace the inner life of the characters; and to tell the inner life, moreover, not of a child, or of one of his self-projections, such as David Copperfield or Pip, but of two people, one of them a woman, exploring their emotions. George Eliot could have written that book, but it is so different in theme from any of Dickens’s previous imaginative interests that one wonders where such an idea could have come from. Nelly?

  A month later, Dickens had changed his idea. Forster reveals to us that the idea was the story of a man murdering his nephew. By the time Dickens set to work, the two themes – the young people, committed by some arrangement to be married, but both unwilling; and the uncle-murderer – have melded, and we have the story that occupies the opening instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. John Jasper, the lugubrious twenty-six-year-old opium addict, who works as the director of music in a cathedral town, is the uncle of the scarcely younger Edwin Drood. Drood, twenty, destined for a career in business in Asia, not unlike Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, is betrothed to Rosa Bud, Jasper’s pupil, and, as we discover, is the object of Jasper’s fervent and quite unwanted desire.

  It would seem that Dickens had seldom, if ever, plotted his novels in advance in this way. The
re had never, therefore, been a novel that depended so much upon plot. We have already explored two of the ways in which Dickens was going to handle the double plot: it was to be by making John Jasper a mesmerist. By setting himself the task of telling the story twice, first as a narrative of his own, and then again, in the words of Jasper in his prison cell, Dickens was plotting a modernist, almost Nabokovian narrative structure, which would indeed have been something quite new in his fiction.

  He was exhausted, ill and dosing himself frequently with laudanum throughout the period of the novel’s planning and composition. I am completely convinced by Robert Tracy’s analysis:

  Lay Precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral and opium addict John Jasper’s art is music, but he is also inventing a plot and writing a book about a murder that has not yet taken place. As a character in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he is writing a variorum version of the novel in which he appears, attempting to control its plot and define some of its characters. Jasper as novelist is a projection of Dickens himself, who has imagined so many crimes and murdered so many characters in so many novels.28

  Anxiety that he was not going to be able to pull off the feat of writing Jasper’s final version of the story contributed to Dickens’s illness, there is no doubt. W. H. Wills wrote, ‘The anxiety (about the novel) and excitement materially contributed to his sudden and premature death.’29

  Jasper had planned the murder from before the beginning of the novel. His expressions of love and affection for his beloved Ned are the merest hypocrisy. His obsession with Rosa Bud means that he is determined to possess her and, even if this proves impossible, to prevent Ned from doing so. The crucial plot detail here is Jasper’s ignorance of the fact that Rosa and Edwin have in fact agreed that they should not become lovers, still less get married, but they have decided to keep this fact a secret.

  The arrival of Neville Landless allows Jasper the chance to create an even more complicated plot for his ‘novel’, as well as yet another subject for his evil mesmeric machinations. In the scene where Edwin Drood and Landless quarrel, we can watch Jasper actually manipulating the row, charging their glasses with what they believe to be mulled wine. After they have quarrelled and then fought, and Landless has staggered out into the night, he tells Canon Crisparkle, truthfully, ‘I have had a very little indeed to drink.’ [MED 8] We have noted – what was unseen by the two young men – that Jasper had prepared them mulled wine: ‘It seems to require much mixing and compounding.’ [MED 8] Clearly, from the moment Landless arrived at Cloisterham and displayed his fiery temperament, Jasper sees that he can use him. He works his mesmeric powers on Landless, either to commit the murder himself, or to believe that he has done so with his heavy stick. Quite how the plot would have been explained, had Dickens lived to write the confession in the prison cell, we do not know.

  In any event, the novel begins to unravel. The unravelling happens after Jasper writes to Canon Crisparkle, ‘My dear boy is murdered.’ [MED 16] In precisely the same way that Webster reacted to the murder of George Parkman, Jasper expresses himself determined to unmask the murderer. We must assume either that he is simply lying or that, as a divided self, he does not fully appreciate whereof his opium-crazed self is capable.

  Dickens must have realized with a panicking, sinking heart that he has written only four parts of a twelve-part serial, and most of the story has already been told. He had killed Edwin Drood off much too early. Unless he were to be writing a Wilkie Collins-type mystery novel, or a modern detective story – which he surely was not trying to do – Edwin Drood should have stayed around much longer. How on earth is Dickens going to bulk out his story for eight more episodes?

  From now onwards, we see the novel disintegrate. He resorts to the feeble device of making a mysterious stranger arrive in Cloisterham. Datchery is clearly someone in disguise – perhaps Bazzard, the law clerk who is working for Mr Grewgious – though some ingenious readers suppose he is actually Helena Landless. Not for one moment, not for one sentence, does the ‘character’ of Datchery ring true, and ‘his’ arrival, even more than the sudden change in Mr Boffin’s character in Our Mutual Friend, seems like one of those lurching plot-reversals that Dickens intruded into sagging narratives, rather as a desperate cook, preparing mayonnaise, watches the mixture curdle beneath his spoon and must resort to beating up a new egg yolk and adding the mixture as before.

  The mixture as before, in the case of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is tired, sad stuff. By the time Rosa Bud has run away to London and the quarters of Mr Grewgious, she finds herself, not in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but in London’s legal quarter, wandering at large in a Dickens-land, in what could be discarded pages of Bleak House. The disgruntled old landlady Mrs Billickin (‘Unless your mind is prepared for the stairs, it will lead to inevitable disappointment’ [MED 22]) is simply a rent-a-Dickens character, devoid of true comedy or interest. He was writing on autopilot when he came up with her. The writing is flat, the story is going nowhere, and any reader by the time they have reached Chapter 22 of the story would have the sense that the author had in fact already died.

  But then came the prophetically entitled Chapter 23, ‘The Dawn Again’. Jasper renews his acquaintance with Princess Puffer, and in his opium dream, like Macbeth or Raskolnikov, he revisits his crimes. ‘“I did it here hundreds of thousands of times. What do I say? I did it millions and billions of times. I did it so often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when it was really done, it seemed not worth the doing, it was done so soon.”’ [MED 23]

  Like Durdles, the boozy stonemason, Dickens was ‘perhaps a little misty as to his own identity’. [MED 4] Jasper and Dickens together arrive in an opium-crazed climax to a horrified contemplation of their past. In the final pages that Dickens was writing in the chalet in those last days, our belief in the novel revives. We glimpse something of the masterpiece that was lost when he died. Jasper returns to Cloisterham, leaving behind his other self in the opium den, but Princess Puffer, on this occasion, pursues him. She meets the improbable Datchery and is directed into the old cathedral.

  All unconscious of her presence, he [Jasper] chants and sings. She grins when he is most musically fervid, and – yes, Mr Datchery sees her do it! – shakes her fist at him behind the pillar’s friendly shelter.

  Mr Datchery looks again, to convince himself. Yes, again! As ugly and withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under brackets of the stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One, as hard as the big brass eagle holding the sacred books upon his wings (and, according to the sculptor’s representation of his ferocious attributes, not at all converted by them), she hugs herself in her lean arms, and then shakes both fists at the leader of the Choir.

  In that last hour in the chalet, Dickens had returned to form. The glorious sunset, as red as his favourite flower, the potted scarlet geranium, blazed in the heavens.

  Atmospherics and character are two of the ingredients we encounter in all the great Dickensian fictions. I use the word ‘atmospherics’ to convey the mise en scène, the weather, the language-music in which the whole is described, a language that is playful, intense, observant and always in control. The characters who burst into the scene, in any of the great novels and stories, all speak in their own highly distinctive language, but they cannot escape being described by the Dickensian voice, which is so much a part of our reading experience. This is true even in Bleak House where there are two narrative voices, Esther Summerson’s and Dickens’s own, and where, so often, Esther finds her pen being guided by Dickens, creating turns of phrase and perceptions of which the somewhat vapid Esther would never, herself, have been capable.

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood is strong in atmosphere and it has a small but powerful set of characters. Because Dickens died before he finished writing it – died twice, in my submission, Dickens the writer dying several weeks before Dickens the man – it has been inevitable that so many attempts have been made to propose for the novel. For a certain type of reader, the
plot predominates, and the question of whether John Jasper did or did not kill his nephew – and if he did not, who did – becomes the method not merely of creating a plausible ending for the novel, but also of reading that part of it which we have received from Dickens’s own hand.

  Now, although Dickens’s novels do have story-lines and plots, and they need the plots to stop them being mere series of incidents, like The Pickwick Papers, we do not particularly care about their plot-lines as such. The extraordinarily improbable series of coincidences, for example, that enable Oliver Twist, after a stray encounter in the street with an old man whose pocket he was supposed to be picking on Fagin’s behalf, to find that the old man is Mr Brownlow, who keeps a drawing of Oliver’s mother hanging on his walls – she having been the love of his life. Quite how Oliver relates to Mr Brownlow or, even more improbably, to Monks, the villain who is trying to kill him (in fact, his brother), is not what we remember when we have closed the book. We remember the Artful Dodger, Fagin’s lair, and Nancy and Bill Sikes. And the same is true of all the books, even those stories such as Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities where so very much hangs on the plot. (Charles Darnay who loves Lucie Manette is really the Marquis St Evrémonde – but what we remember is Dr Manette’s obsessive inability to escape his time in the Bastille; and Mme Defarge’s knitting as the tumbrils roll through Paris.)