The Puzzle Of Dickens's Last Plot - free ebook by Andrew Lang

THE PUZZLE OF DICKENS’S LAST PLOT

BY ANDREW LANG LONDON CHAPMAN &amp; HALL, LD. 1905...

5 minute read

Read Chapter

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 a

4 minute read

Read Chapter

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 f

2 minute read

Read Chapter

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

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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, a

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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

3 minute read

Read Chapter

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 precento

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 w

2 minute read

Read Chapter

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

4 minute read

Read Chapter

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 r

2 minute read

Read Chapter

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 Edwi

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 en

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 o

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 da

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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

1 minute read

Read Chapter

“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 h

2 minute read

Read Chapter

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

32 minute read

Read Chapter

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 t

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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

5 minute read

Read Chapter

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 t

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 m

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 Edwi

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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.”

2 minute read

Read Chapter

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

7 minute read

Read Chapter

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 ide

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 heart

1 minute read

Read Chapter

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 Walt

3 minute read

Read Chapter

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

1 minute read

Read Chapter