These Three, Met Again: The Real Resurrection of Edwin Drood

Abstract

These Three, Met Again: The Real Resurrection of Edwin Drood Carra Glatt (bio) Despite a comparatively recent flourishing of postcolonial readings of the novel, criticism of The Mystery of Edwin Drood has been focused predominantly on John Jasper, the respected choir-master and outwardly doting uncle whose opium-fueled fantasies lead, to all appearances, to an earnest, seemingly successful attempt on his nephew’s life. Seething with resentment and frustrated passion, Jasper is a figure of doubleness and repression whose depiction reflects an emerging Victorian interest in the unconscious mind; several biographers and critics have read him as a refracted mirror into Dickens’s own troubled psyche.1 Far less attention has been paid to the eponymous Edwin himself. A self-confessed “shallow, surface kind of fellow” whose early death seems in any case to remove him from the narrative economy (11; ch. 2), Edwin proves less compelling than his tormented uncle. Yet Edwin, I will argue, lies at the center of the novel’s exploration of proto-Freudian notions of consciousness and selfhood. Representative of a character type far more typical of Dickens’s earlier novels, Edwin, in death, suggests the psychological and narrative limits of this model: the surface fellow cannot withstand either a world that demands increasing interiority of its heroes or the villain–protagonist who possesses such complexity. At the same time, Edwin’s disappearance casts into relief the ultimate unfitness of Jasper–and, perhaps, of any other character–to fulfill his vacated place, a position supported by strong hints that Edwin must return in some form before the work of the novel can be completed. As a reminder of a previous phase of Dickens’s career and as a symbolic other half of Jasper’s divided consciousness, Edwin, in death, resists obsolescence and suggests his continuing relevance to models of both narrative and the self. [End Page 186] The Mystery of Edwin Drood To the extent that Edwin has received attention in conversations about Edwin Drood, it has been less in critical discussions of the novel than in scholarly and quasi-scholarly debates over the solution to the titular mystery.2 While it certainly seems plain from the half-written text we have been left with that Jasper, in love with his nephew’s fiancée Rosa, intended and attempted to kill Edwin, readers have been less confident that he succeeded. Andrew Lang was perhaps the most influential early proponent of the theory that Edwin had survived the attempt on his life and returned to his native Cloisterham in the person of the detective Datchery, a late-appearing figure who some readers have believed to be one of several characters in disguise. Several of the principal continuations of the novel, too, resurrect Drood, from Henry Morford’s early effort at completing the mystery to Peter Rowland’s 1990s version to Rupert Holmes’s musical adaptation, which allows audiences to choose among a number of possible endings, all of which include Drood’s triumphant return. More sober critics, however, have questioned what they regard as an excessive focus on a “mystery” that, in their account, isn’t much of one: “Many people,” Dickensian Robert Tracy dryly notes, “have unnecessarily troubled themselves over a solution” (32). For Tracy, as for other critics, shifting attention toward Jasper was a necessary corrective to the popular impulse to turn what was actually intended as a psychological study by an author at the height of his powers into a crude whodunit. Spoilsport as he may be, Tracy has a point. Dickens told at least three people–his close friend John Forster, his illustrator Luke Fildes and his oldest son Charley–that Jasper had killed Edwin and would end the novel recounting his crime from the condemned cell.3 Even without this testimony, it seems plain that the ring Edwin is conveniently carrying in his pocket on the night of his murder was to have been used to identify his body, otherwise effectively disintegrated by the quicklime into which Jasper has thrown it. The real mystery of Edwin Drood, then, is perhaps less what happened to him than why people–including those who knew of Dickens’s explicit statements about the...