By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870, having completed only half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which he had imagined as a twelve-part novel. Contemporary readers in England and all over Europe who were admirers of the most successful Victorian novelist were, no doubt, jarred by his sudden death. A roaring cataract had dried up overnight.
Not only the reading public, but even children who could have read little or nothing written by Dickens, felt bereaved. Prof. Monica Feinberg Cohen writes in her Introduction to the novel (Barnes & Noble edition, 2012): "When she heard of his death, a London street urchin cried, "Then will Father Christmas die, too?” When this child was born, Dickens had been famous for twenty years in England.
Dickens was born on February 7, 1812. He became nationally known at twenty-five, with the publication of Pickwick Papers. He was celebrated for his magnificent imagination, his power of expression, and his ability to record the humor, spite, and nippy scrimmage which in real life are rarely subdued by calamity. Dickens had personal experience of hardship and humiliation, and he wrote again and again about the precarious existence of the poor. It is noteworthy that he was among the fundraisers for The Hospital for Sick Children, which opened in 1852. Catherine and Charles Dickens themselves lost their seven-month-old baby, Dora Anne, in April 1851. Catherine found it difficult to overcome her grief. At the time, there was no other children’s hospital in London. Children were not treated at general hospitals either.
A century and a half after the year Dickens died leaving his readers stranded in the middle of a "mystery”, one picks up The Mystery of Edwin Drood with a different sort of interest. The novel has 23 chapters and is only 263 pages long in the Barnes & Noble edition. You might say The Mystery of Edwin Drood is Dickens Lite. A reader who, in this Age of Tweets and Memes, is perhaps intimidated by the word counts of the other Dickens novels, might want to start with this book, which races to its unintended end.
Dickens was in poor health in his mid-fifties. He was worn out and often ill. A decade had passed since his scorn and possible infidelity finally drove Catherine to leave him. Their eldest son went with her. The other eight children stayed on with him and were looked after by Catherine’s younger sister, Georgiana Hogarth. By 1868 one son was dead and everyone except his eldest daughter Mamie had moved out. Katey, the second daughter, had married, four sons were overseas, and another son, Henry, was a Math student at Cambridge University. In other words, Dickens was virtually an empty nester at his posh estate, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, England. He was rumored to be in love with a woman who was young enough to be his daughter. She did not live in Kent.
Home may have been quiet, but life was not. Dickens was often on tour, giving public readings from his novels. It was a way to make money. He may have understood that death was imminent. There were numerous bequests to sustain. Dickens went all in. He read the most emotionally saturated passages, the popular ones. The people got their money’s worth.
Under those circumstances, another highly successful writer might have chosen not to work on a 12-part novel. Not Dickens. However, he invented a Lite version of himself for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He had already written reams about crime and the deadly sins in his sweeping masterpieces. Centering a novel around a single disappearance, possibly a murder, must have been a walk in the park. After fitting whole worlds into his novels, accommodating scores of motives and impulses and accidents and opportune sins, after creating innumerable characters and observing them over years, a few from birth onwards, Dickens now settled for what in comparison is a closed-door crime, although the milieu is a small town, not a room or even a house. The very name "Cloisterham”, which he chose for the cathedral town where Edwin Drood disappears suggests a closed pen of a place.
Here is how Dickens describes Cloisterham:
“An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with hankerings after the noisy world. A monotonous, silent city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its cathedral crypt, and so abounding in vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like the attention which the ogre in the story book desired to render to his unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.”
Dicken’s lines above recall Hamlet’s observations on mortality in the scene from the Churchyard at Elsinore, just before he learns that Ophelia is dead:
HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?
HORATIO ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.
HAM. No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough and likelihood to lead it; as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam (whereto he was converted) might they not stop a beer barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw!”
- Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1
Dickens has death, mortality, and burial on his mind early in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. There are clues that "Stony” Durdles is an important piece of the puzzle of Edwin Drood’s disappearance. As may be guessed, Durdles is a graveyard stonemason. More importantly for the plot, he knows the cathedral crypt like the back of his hand. The four journeymen who work robotically under his direction are, Dickens writes, like "mechanical figures emblematic of Time and Death”.
The abodes of the characters press against one another. There are no sanctuaries, and no one is safe around the Cathedral where John Jasper leads the choir. The Mystery of Edwin Drood has far fewer characters than one expects to meet in Dickens novels, and up to the point of Edwin’s disappearance, we are only allowed to watch those characters as if through a smoke screen. Dickens was experimenting, unwilling to illuminate more than necessary. We never see the characters without the feeling that someone else is also watching them, evaluating how he may use their stupidity or integrity or innocence to achieve his ends. The characters are like puppets on the claustrophobic box-stage of John Jasper’s mind.
Even consanguinity comes across as stifling, whether between mother and son, brother and sister or uncle and nephew.
"Stony" is more than a sobriquet for a stonemason. Dickens paints an enervated little society in Cloisterham. No one, not even Miss Twinkleton, who runs the "Seminary for Young Ladies", notices anything amiss about the music master's attentions towards the orphan Rosa Bud. Miss Twinkleton herself, Dickens writes, "has two distinct and separate phases of being." John Jasper is not the only person in Cloisterham who is bored out of his mind. A band of nameless waifs is growing up working at the Travellers' Twopenny, quite close to the Cathedral. In their spare time, the little boys (every one of them is called "Deputy") have no more interesting amusement or occupation than pelting stones. The sweet, devoted mother of Minor Canon Septimus Crisparkle (Septimus was her seventh son, the only one to survive infancy) is in danger of turning into an ornamental Dresden doll. Her skills and her Christian goodness remain hidden in Minor Canon Corner. The townspeople are stony in their attitudes. A white man raised in Ceylon attracts racial prejudice. Mayor Sapsea’s wife was never so forgotten in life as she is in the inscription with which the widower wishes to adorn her memorial:
ETHELINDA,
Reverential Wife of
MR. THOMAS SAPSEA,
AUCTIONEER, VALUER, ESTATE AGENT, &c.,
OF THIS CITY,
Whose Knowledge of the World,
Though somewhat extensive,
Never brought him acquainted with
A SPIRIT
More capable of
LOOKING UP TO HIM.
STRANGER, PAUSE
And ask thyself the Question,
CANST THOU DO LIKEWISE?
If Not,
WITH A BLUSH RETIRE.
To clever, talented and poor John Jasper Cloisterham offers only a monotonous life and a dead-end job. Unlike his young nephew, the engineer Edwin Drood, John Jasper cannot look forward to sailing to Africa for work. Nor can he woo Rosa Bud, who is to marry Edwin. One wonders if he is obsessed with Rosa only because she is to marry Edwin. John Jasper occasionally takes the omnibus to London, where, high on opium, he dreams up sinister plots.
I feel grateful that out of all the Dickens novels, the "mystery” remained uncompleted. Had the other novels, such as Bleak House, come down to us half-finished, even 150 years could not have prepared us to be stoical. A mystery, on the other hand, may be solved with a half a book of clues.
One hardly remembers that The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a work of the Victorian period except in the London phase at the end when Dickens induces a sugar coma and only Miss Twinkleton's presence suggests that Rosa may not be in a safe house.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
With an Introduction by Monica Feinberg Cohen
Barnes & Nobles, 2012
Originally published in 1870
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