Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 595
These are the arguments, or the main ones, which have convinced most students of the problem that Drood is certainly and finally dead.
Now in a subjective matter of this sort no one must dare to dogmatize. Too much depends upon the feeling or idea which the work conveys to the individual mind. But one may at least say, in all humility, that he cannot bring his mind to the idea of Edwin’s death. If Dickens killed him, then the story is, in its essence, commonplace. The mystery is merely a mystery as to where a dead body is hid. Dickens has indicated Jasper as the murderer as clearly as if he had written it on a placard. The motive is there, the method is there, everything. If it turns out that Drood is murdered, then it turns out that every reader knew it all along, and that the only mystery lies in the fact that the other characters did not know it, Surely this is but a poor sort of art. Say what one will, or rather what John Forster will, about the originality and interest of Jasper’s confession, one cannot but feel that the story, with its preconceived conclusion, would run lamely to its end.
No, no, Dickens meant something better than that; and what is more, — we (that is, all the readers of the right school) know that he did.
What, then, was to be the sequel? Let us first clear our minds of the idea mentioned above, that there is no place left for Drood to come back to. This is wrong. Drood falls in love with Helena Landless. Dickens practically says so. In Chapter VIII he tells us that ‘Edwin Drood is already enough impressed by Helena to feel indignant that Helena’s brother should dispose of him so coolly, and put him out of the way so entirely.’
Will the reader please note the word already which is set in italics above? It seems to come, consciously or unconsciously, straight out of Dickens’s knowledge of the conclusion.
And notice what follows in Chapter XIII, where Edwin and Rosa are breaking their engagement:
‘And yet there was one reservation on each side: on hers that she intended through her guardian to withdraw herself immediately from the tuition of her music master; on his, that he did already entertain some wandering speculations whether it might ever come to pass that he would know more of Miss Landless.’
And again in the next chapter, in describing Edwin Drood’s last day on earth — his last day, that is, according to the murder theory:
‘Though the image of Miss Landless still hovers in the background of his mind, the pretty, little, affectionate creature (Rosa), so much firmer and wiser than he had supposed, occupies its stronghold. It is with some misgivings of his own unworthiness that he thinks of her, and of what they might have been to one another, if he had been more in earnest some time ago. . . . And still for all this, and though there is a sharp heartache in all this, the vanity and caprice of youth sustain that handsome figure of Miss Landless in the background of his mind.
Now if Edwin Drood is really and truly to be murdered that very night, if this is really the last of him on earth, can anything be more inharmonious, more inartistic, more repellent than this introduction of Helena Landless? It is not only pointless, but it is execrable.
But if Drood is not to die, if he escapes from Jasper’s hands, to play his part in running Jasper down, and if in the sequel a ‘place’ is needed for Drood, here it is already prepared.
It is said by some of the critics that Helena marries Crisparkle. But is this so? Of Helena’s esteem and admiration for the clergyman (about sixteen years older than herself) there is no doubt, nor of her gratitude for his kindness to her brother. And Crisparkle may, or he may not, fall in love with Helena. But if so, he is destined to step aside in self-forgetting sacrifice; his is the part assigned in Bleak House to Mr. Jarndyce in his love for Esther, a part dear to Dickens’s heart. A marriage between Crisparkle and Helena does not seem fitted for the needs of romance. The clergy (be it said in all reverence) are too ‘tame’ to make the kind of marriages that novelists must use.
Drood, then, as we see it, was not murdered, but lived to marry Helena, and to be great friends, undoubtedly, with Mr. and Mrs. Tartar — the Rev. Mr. Crisparkle and his delightful old mother being always welcome guests at both establishments.
How, then, did Drood escape? What happened? And why did he not declare himself?
Here we come to the ‘murder’ itself, and here, of course, one must remind the reader we are stepping out on the open ground of conjecture with absolute certainty left behind.
Now the trouble with the Drood murder is that there is too much of it. It is too well prepared. Jasper is a man of evil hatreds and is in love with Rosa. That is enough of itself to make him kill Drood. Jasper is also an opium fiend, a man of disturbed brain, who lies in an opium den, with a homicidal dream in his heart, rehearsing a hundred times his crime. That is enough to make him kill anybody.
As to the mechanism of the murder, there is too much of it again. Every critic has found here an embarras de richesse in the material prepared. We can never know just how the killing of Drood was planned or done, because there was enough mechanism ready to kill him two or three times. Jasper can strangle him to death with the scarf, either drugged or not drugged (for we know that Jasper is by way of drugging his friends); he can throw him off the stairway of the tower to the stone floor of the crypt below, or he can kill him, either drugged or not, in the crypt itself. Then he can dispose of the body in lime in the crypt, or drag it out to the vault in the graveyard of which he has the key, and there bury it in lime. With such a wealth of material, no one can say just what Jasper did.
To this will the reader please add that Jasper may be, and is, at any moment in the book, taken with a strange maniacal seizure due to his opium, in which a film comes over his eyes, his brain reels and his consciousness of what he does is lost.
Here, then, as many of us see it, comes in the ‘curious and new idea’ that Dickens wished to work out.
Jasper takes Drood at midnight to the crypt and up the stair. There he drugs and strangles him and, as he thinks (he has rehearsed the thing in his opium dreams a thousand times) hurls him over the railing of the stair to the stone floor below. He drags the body (so he thinks) to the vault and, with hideous maniacal eagerness, shovels in the lime upon it, the storm howling about the madman as he works. But at some point Drood has escaped his hands; drugged, half-conscious, unknowing what is happening, unable to believe that Jasper has attacked him, Drood has escaped death. There is no need to ask at what precise point, for half a dozen points would do; nor to ask whether Jasper drags an empty coat, or merely empty air — for Jasper is mad. No need to ask why Drood does not arrest Jasper. He recovers consciousness. He makes his way from the scene. He cannot believe that his clouded memory of Jasper’s sudden attack is true; he has a dim memory, as he clings to the rail of the stairway, of Jasper looking into the abyss below, shaking his fists in frenzied rage at something that he seems to see lying there. Jasper descends the stair. He does not come back; in his insane fancy he is burying Drood in the vault. Drood escapes, either at once, or after hours of unconsciousness, it does not matter. What is he to do? He hardly knows what has happened.
He sees no one. He goes at once to Mr. Grewgious in London for advice and help. Grewgious is in no doubt as to what has happened. But he tells Drood that they must wait. There is no proof — no evidence. Drood is to remain in hiding, and a watch must be set on Jasper, till they gather the details that will convict him of his murderous assault and intended crime.
Let the reader, if he will, turn to the chapter where Grewgious comes from London and interviews Jasper, and see how intensely full of meaning it becomes, if we can believe that Grewgious has meantime seen Drood, and that he knows.
A watch is set on Jasper, — and the watch is Datchery, who is perhaps Drood himself, or perhaps Grewgious’s clerk Bazzard, though this is an independent and secondary matter.
How, then, does the ring enter into the story? Why, under the supposition above, it becomes the vital clue by which Jasper’s guilt is fastened upon him. In the hands of Grewgious, Drood, Landless, Bazzard and the group of associates who are on Jasper’s trail — and of whom we may think Helena Landless is certainly one, as this brings her into close connection with Drood — the evidence accumulates. At this stage, be it observed, it is not murder which they hope to fasten upon Jasper, but only a maniacal attempt on Drood’s life. Owing to Drood’s uncertainty as to what has happened, they have no exact proof. But they piece the facts together. The street urchin who figures in the story under the nickname of ‘Deputy’, and who haunts the cathedral grounds at night, has certainly, so every reader of the novel admits, seen something of what happened on the night of the crime. The little note that Dickens wrote for himself— ‘Keep the boy suspended’ — would, of itself, indicate this. Probably what Deputy saw was Jasper coming from the crypt and going to the vault, opening its door with furtive glances and maniacal mutterings, and then shovelling in the lime. His testimony makes clear to the confederates Jasper’s plan for the disposal of the body. They know now why the watch and chain were taken from Drood while he was unconscious.
Jasper does not know about the ring. The confederates let him know that Drood carried it on the fatal night. This means, to Jasper, that the ring must be lying still uncorroded in the lime. He must secure it. He does just as they suspect. He visits the vault at night. Lantern in hand, he opens the door. To his horror he sees before him the figure of Edwin Drood. So has Dickens planned it with his characteristic love of the extreme of melodramatic sensation, and here is the explanation of the picture at the foot of the wrapper which has puzzled every student of the problem.
Jasper, insane with horror, rushes upon Drood. But Landless, who has followed close behind, is too quick for him, and seizes him. There is a desperate struggle, and in the struggle Landless is killed. John Forster, in his recollections of what Dickens told him, said that he thought he recalled the statement that Landless is killed by Jasper in the attempt to apprehend him. He was quite right. And here, too, is the explanation of the mystic sentence, ‘When shall we three meet again’, with which Dickens headed the chapter where Drood, Landless and Jasper dine together on the night of the crime. They do meet again. They meet in the vault where Jasper thought to find only the charred bones and the dust of Edwin Drood.
Jasper is tried for the murder and for the homicidal attempt on his nephew’s life. He is condemned. From his cell is given his confession. But the confession is not ‘the new and curious idea’. This phrase refers to the idea that an opium fiend who has rehearsed his crime a thousand times may be hallucinated with the idea that he is committing it.
The story ends, as Dickens loves, with wedding bells and children’s faces in the perspective of the future. Drood marries Helena. Tartar marries Rosa. The Rev. Mr. Crisparkle stands aside, disregarding his own feelings, as becomes a well-bred clergyman. No one dances more gayly at the weddings than he. Nor is there any merrier friend and playmate of the little Droods and the little Tartars, than the cheery Crisparkle, a little grey about the temples, but as ruddy and as much addicted to cold water and long walks as ever; no merrier playmate, unless, perhaps, it be an odd, angular man of the name of Grewgious, who ——
But there, the ending has now become too easy. There is nothing to do but to call up the Brattleborough Spirit, and ask it how the matter stands.
EPILOGUE
THE NEWS OF the death of Charles Dickens came to the people of England with something like the shock of a national disaster. It was without warning. Those immediately associated with him knew under what a great strain he had been living, and were aware of the dangers that it might imply. But for the world at large, Dickens at fifty-eight years of age was still at the height of his energy and activity. His elastic step, his keen eye, his well-knit figure, — steel and whipcord as some one called it at the time, — showed to the casual eye no sign of the ravages of age.
The blow when it fell came with the added weight of the unexpected. All London was affected by it as by some grave national calamity. ‘The crowds,’ wrote an American visitor, ‘seemed to walk the streets with muffled feet.’ The London Times chronicled the death of Dickens in a noble tribute to the genius and his place in the heart of the people. ‘Charles Dickens is no more. The loss of such a man makes the ordinary expression of regret seem cold and conventional. It will be felt by millions as nothing less than a personal bereavement.’
The wish was universally expressed that Dickens should be laid in Westminster Abbey. The Dean of Westminster, Dean Stanley, whose office carried with it the necessary authority, offered to the son Charles Dickens, Junior, the privilege of burying his father’s body among England’s greatest dead. But a difficulty arose in that such a burial was directly contrary to the views that Dickens himself had repeatedly expressed, and which he had embodied in his will. He had a horror of the trappings and the pageantry of death, the false pomp that mocks the silent reality. Years before he had written in Household Words (1852) an article on ‘Trading in Death’, denouncing the repulsive finery and display of the undertaker. The summer before his death he had refused, on grounds of opinion, to deliver a graveyard speech at the inauguration of a monument.
A compromise, however, was made by the extreme simplicity with which the remains of Charles Dickens were borne to the grave, — without pomp and with no other ceremonial than the plain ritual of the burial service. The grave, left open that the thousands of his admirers might pay a last tribute to his memory, was filled with the flowers cast into it.
Charles Dickens left behind him a very considerable family, for all whose wants his means were ample to provide. To his wife, as indicated already, he left an annuity of £300. To his sister-in-law Miss Hogarth he left £8,000, together with all his papers, and he made John Forster the executor and administrator of the estate. Apart from a special legacy of £1,000 to his daughter Mary and various small benefactions, his estate by his will was to be divided among his children as they attained their majority. The entire estate was valued at about £93,000.
All of Dickens’s ten children survived him except two, — Dora Annie, who died as an infant, and Walter, the soldier son, who died at Calcutta, December 31, 1863.
The eldest son, Charles, continued the publication of All the Year Round. But the magazine was the work of Dickens, his father, and of Dickens alone. After it came to an end, Charles Dickens, Junior, conducted the printing firm of Dickens and Evans, and was afterwards, as a reader, connected with the Macmillans. In 1887 he made a tour of the United States reading, with no little success, from his father’s books. He edited a complete edition of his father’s works in 1892-3, and died in 1896. His sister Mary, who died only a few days later, left behind her a little volume of reminiscences, — My Father, — to which reference has been already made. Kate Dickens, after the death of her first husband, Charles Collins, married again and became Mrs. Perugini. She died in 1929.
Francis Dickens, the third son, went to the north-west of Canada, and became an officer in The Mounted Police. He was at Battleford during the rebellion of 1885; a diary written by him at the time has since been published. The sailor son, the little admiral of the wistful eyes, did not long survive his father. He was taken ill, was invalided home and died at sea on the way to England in 1872. The eighth child, Henry Fielding Dickens, the Cambridge scholar, had a distinguished career at the Bar and was knighted in 1922. He published in 1929 a little memorial, Memories of my Father, a charming reminiscence and tribute.
No writer in the world’s history has had so wide a public as Charles Dickens. His books have penetrated where Shakespeare is unknown and where the Bible is not accepted. We are told, by those who know, that the works of Charles Dickens are at the present time the ‘best sellers’ in the world.
In the United States and in the British colonies the name of Dickens became and remained the same household word as in his mother country. For all the English-speaking world Pickwick and Mrs. Gamp and such are as real as the people next door — and better known.
The prices paid for first editions are no real evidence of the value of a book or the eminence of the author. Indeed the ‘first edition hobby’ is one of the minor forms of mental derangement, seldom ending in homicide and outside the scope of the law. But it may be noted for what it is worth, that among the treasures of that market are the first editions of Dickens — especially in the form of the monthly instalments in which most of the books appeared. In 1927 a copy of Pickwick in this form was sold for $16,300, and a still higher figure was reached in 1929 when the Kern copy of Pickwick was sold for $28,000.
Still more valuable, of course, are the manuscripts of Dickens’s works, which would represent, if valued in their entirety, a colossal fortune. But the great bulk of them have passed into national and other institutions, where they are not for sale. The great bulk of these manuscripts passed into the hands of John Forster, some in Dickens’s lifetime and the rest by the terms of his will. On Forster’s death in 1876 they were left to the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington, where they still are. But the list does not include Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Uncommercial Traveller, Great Expectations, or Our Mutual Friend. Of Pickwick there exist thirty-seven pages of manuscript. Dr. Rosenbach of Philadelphia bought the pages of the Pickwick manuscript in separate lots. For a lot of five pages sold at auction in London in 1928 he paid £7,000. A few days before, a page and a half were sold in Philadelphia for $9,000. The rest of the Pickwick manuscript is still outstanding, — destroyed or lying unknown in a lumber-room. Dr. Rosenbach also acquired 161 pages of Nicholas Nickleby. The Uncommercial Traveller manuscript is lost from sight. The Great Expectations manuscript was given as a present by Dickens to a friend, and is now in the Wisbeck Museum in England. It came to it as a gift of Chauncey Townsend of the ‘Religious Opinions’ mentioned in a previous chapter. Dickens presumably gave it to him. The manuscript of Our Mutual Friend came into the possession of G. W. C. Drexel, editor of the Philadelphia Ledger, who gave it to the Drexel Institute. Its preceding migrations are not accurately known. Of the lesser pieces, outside of the novels, the Pierpont Morgan collection has the Christmas Carol, The Cricket on the Hearth, and the Battle of Life.
