The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot Part 1

The Puzzle of d.i.c.kens's Last Plot.

by Andrew Lang.

INTRODUCTION

FORSTER tells us that d.i.c.kens, in his later novels, from _Bleak House_ onwards (1853), "a.s.siduously 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 d.i.c.kens, 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 d.i.c.kens 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 antic.i.p.ate the solution of the secret.

In April, 1869, d.i.c.kens, 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 d.i.c.kens'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 d.i.c.kens, 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, d.i.c.kens 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, d.i.c.kens 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 d.i.c.kens, 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. c.u.ming Walters revived "the auld mysterie," in his "Clues to d.i.c.kens'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 d.i.c.kens'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, d.i.c.kens went further, and fared worse, in the too material premonitions of "The Signalman" in _Mugby Junction_.

With this brief preface, I proceed to the a.n.a.lysis of d.i.c.kens'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 PERSONae

FOR the discovery of d.i.c.kens'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. c.u.ming 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 _fiancee_ of his nephew, and his own pupil in the musical art. He makes her aware of his pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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 p.r.o.nounces 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 nonent.i.ty, and to Minor Canon Crisparkle, a muscular Christian in the pink of training, a cla.s.sical 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 ill.u.s.tration shows Edwin as "a lad with the bloom of a la.s.s," with a _cla.s.sic 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 a.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 circ.u.mstances, wouldn't you, Miss Landless?" asks Edwin. "Not under any circ.u.mstances," 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 gla.s.ses 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 a.s.surances 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 pa.s.s muster.

"Her ring-will it come back to me?" reflects the mournful Grewgious.