The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot

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Lang Andrew. The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot

INTRODUCTION

THE STORY

Dramatis Personæ

Opening of the Tale

Sapsea and Durdles

The Landlesses

Mr. Grewgious

The Unaccountable Expedition

Purpose of the Expedition

Christmas Eve

After the Disappearance

Dick Datchery

Jasper, Rosa, and Tartar

Jasper’s Opium Visions

Datchery and the Opium Woman

Datchery’s Score

THEORIES OF THE MYSTERY

Forster’s Evidence

“A New Idea”

Mr. Proctor’s Theory

A Mistaken Theory

Another Way

Dickens’s Unused Draft of a Chapter

A Question of Taste

Mr. Proctor’s Theory Continued

Mr. Cuming Walters’s Theory

Evidence of Collins’s Drawings

Mr. Walters’s Theory Continued

Who was the Princess Puffer?

Who was Jasper?

CONCLUSION

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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 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.

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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.

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