The Puzzle of Dickenss Last Plot | Page 2

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three completed numbers still unpublished, he left his secret as a puzzle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, Dickens 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 Dickens, 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. Cuming Walters revived "the auld
mysterie," in his "Clues to Dickens'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 Dickens'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, Dickens went
further, and fared worse, in the too material premonitions of "The
Signalman" in Mugby Junction.

With this brief preface, I proceed to the analysis of Dickens'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 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.
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 pounds 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