The Unsolved Mystery of Mr. Dickens
by SEAN FITZPATRICK
June 9, 1870. Charles Dickens sat writing at his desk. He had been laboring more than was his custom on his latest book. Though the story was progressing well, Mr. Dickens was not feeling well. His left hand clawed at the air. His left foot dragged on the ground. And though he had recently retired from public performances with a final reading from Pickwick, his pen scarcely ceased its scratching. A profound and perplexing mystery was unfolding beneath that pen and Mr. Dickens’ knew it well. If only his readers might know it as well.
It had been five years to the very day since the Staplehurst train wreck and Charles Dickens had never quite recovered from the accident. After rescuing terrified victims from derailed carriages and desperately trying to help people who died in his arms, the great novelist was driven to a nervous state of deterioration that could not keep up with his feverish work habits as England’s favorite author. But he was bringing an exciting story to life. A book he called “very curious and new.”
It was not finished yet, but what were the effects of exhaustion and oncoming cerebral hemorrhage to Charles Dickens? The book was not yet finished. And it would be finished, sir, or he would die writing it. He would. Nevertheless, even he had a mysterious premonition of death and—as he would have done if he had been a character in one of his novels—he added a foreboding clause to his contract which he had never done before, making provision if the said Charles Dickens should die before the said work was completed.
Visibly and admittedly ill on that June evening after writing throughout the day, Mr. Dickens rose from the dinner table. His sister-in-law suggested that he lie down on the sofa. Turning as if to do so, he collapsed. “On the ground,” he said. Charles Dickens, aged fifty-eight years, was placed in the ground at Westminster Abbey without uttering another word, much less writing another word. When news of Dickens’ tragic death reached American shores, his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “I hope his book is finished… It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand and left it incomplete.” The book was not finished. The manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained on his desk as he had left it, incomplete.
Charles Dickens gave the world fourteen novels and one mystery, and that mystery is worth reading—eminently worth reading. It is one of the few stories whose ending cannot be given away. Instead, the ending, or the dying point, leaves every reader with their own catharsis. It is a story about death in a delightfully dark Dickensian town; a story that is more about death than Dickens knew—or did he? Cloisterham, with its great gothic cathedral, sets the strange gothic scene for the sinister, opium-smoking organist John Jasper and the strangling relationship he has with his nephew, the young architect, Edwin Drood.
So the mystery unfolds. Jasper confesses the torments of unrealized aspirations. Drood releases his betrothed, Rosa Budd. Minor Canon Crisparkle accepts custody over the wayward orphans Neville and Helena Landless from the misanthropic philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder. Mr. Sapsea, the most self-important ass in the entire Dickens canon since Mr. Pecksniff, reveals his lofty epitaph. Durdles, the dusty and bedraggled stone mason, shows his skill sounding for hidden graves in the cathedral crypt to a keen Mr. Jasper. Mr. Grewgious, the jittery lawyer whose manner and speech are punctuated by a paralytic caution, produces a wedding ring for Edwin. The Princess Puffer, or Opium Sal, the dreadful drab who supplies Jasper with his drugs, harbors a violent vendetta. Then, on a stormy Christmas Eve, after an argument with Neville Landless, Edwin Drood disappears. Landless leaves Cloisterham. Drood’s pocket watch is found in the river weir. Suspicions fly. Jasper is desperately beside himself, torn by something in between love and hate, between justice and guilt. Grewgious begins asking veiled questions. Princess Puffer begins making veiled accusations. And Dick Datchery, the bespectacled stranger with wild white hair who never wears his hat, appears in Cloisterham to rend the veil for all.
But the veil remains intact. The pen of Dickens fell on the ground with its master. Why did Edwin Drood disappear? And where? Was it murder? As Andrew Lang said, “If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him.” And thus the theories over the existing portion of the novel and the fate, and even the future, of Edwin Drood abound and are a joy to peruse. They present a literary pleasure that only an unfinished work can offer, though it comes with a degree of pain that is deeply meaningful. Sunt lacrimae rerum.
June 9, 1870. Charles Dickens sat writing at his desk. He had been laboring more than was his custom on his latest book. Though the story was progressing well, Mr. Dickens was not feeling well. His left hand clawed at the air. His left foot dragged on the ground. And though he had recently retired from public performances with a final reading from Pickwick, his pen scarcely ceased its scratching. A profound and perplexing mystery was unfolding beneath that pen and Mr. Dickens’ knew it well. If only his readers might know it as well.
It had been five years to the very day since the Staplehurst train wreck and Charles Dickens had never quite recovered from the accident. After rescuing terrified victims from derailed carriages and desperately trying to help people who died in his arms, the great novelist was driven to a nervous state of deterioration that could not keep up with his feverish work habits as England’s favorite author. But he was bringing an exciting story to life. A book he called “very curious and new.”
It was not finished yet, but what were the effects of exhaustion and oncoming cerebral hemorrhage to Charles Dickens? The book was not yet finished. And it would be finished, sir, or he would die writing it. He would. Nevertheless, even he had a mysterious premonition of death and—as he would have done if he had been a character in one of his novels—he added a foreboding clause to his contract which he had never done before, making provision if the said Charles Dickens should die before the said work was completed.
Visibly and admittedly ill on that June evening after writing throughout the day, Mr. Dickens rose from the dinner table. His sister-in-law suggested that he lie down on the sofa. Turning as if to do so, he collapsed. “On the ground,” he said. Charles Dickens, aged fifty-eight years, was placed in the ground at Westminster Abbey without uttering another word, much less writing another word. When news of Dickens’ tragic death reached American shores, his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “I hope his book is finished… It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand and left it incomplete.” The book was not finished. The manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood remained on his desk as he had left it, incomplete.
Charles Dickens gave the world fourteen novels and one mystery, and that mystery is worth reading—eminently worth reading. It is one of the few stories whose ending cannot be given away. Instead, the ending, or the dying point, leaves every reader with their own catharsis. It is a story about death in a delightfully dark Dickensian town; a story that is more about death than Dickens knew—or did he? Cloisterham, with its great gothic cathedral, sets the strange gothic scene for the sinister, opium-smoking organist John Jasper and the strangling relationship he has with his nephew, the young architect, Edwin Drood.
So the mystery unfolds. Jasper confesses the torments of unrealized aspirations. Drood releases his betrothed, Rosa Budd. Minor Canon Crisparkle accepts custody over the wayward orphans Neville and Helena Landless from the misanthropic philanthropist, Mr. Honeythunder. Mr. Sapsea, the most self-important ass in the entire Dickens canon since Mr. Pecksniff, reveals his lofty epitaph. Durdles, the dusty and bedraggled stone mason, shows his skill sounding for hidden graves in the cathedral crypt to a keen Mr. Jasper. Mr. Grewgious, the jittery lawyer whose manner and speech are punctuated by a paralytic caution, produces a wedding ring for Edwin. The Princess Puffer, or Opium Sal, the dreadful drab who supplies Jasper with his drugs, harbors a violent vendetta. Then, on a stormy Christmas Eve, after an argument with Neville Landless, Edwin Drood disappears. Landless leaves Cloisterham. Drood’s pocket watch is found in the river weir. Suspicions fly. Jasper is desperately beside himself, torn by something in between love and hate, between justice and guilt. Grewgious begins asking veiled questions. Princess Puffer begins making veiled accusations. And Dick Datchery, the bespectacled stranger with wild white hair who never wears his hat, appears in Cloisterham to rend the veil for all.
But the veil remains intact. The pen of Dickens fell on the ground with its master. Why did Edwin Drood disappear? And where? Was it murder? As Andrew Lang said, “If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him.” And thus the theories over the existing portion of the novel and the fate, and even the future, of Edwin Drood abound and are a joy to peruse. They present a literary pleasure that only an unfinished work can offer, though it comes with a degree of pain that is deeply meaningful. Sunt lacrimae rerum.
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