Could Dickens keep his secrets well? In other words, could he prevent his readers from fathoming a mystery till the proper moment of the dénouement? An important help to the answering of this question will be found in the essay on Charles Dickens by Edgar Allan Poe, who was a critic of extraordinary penetration. If any one could detect a secret it was he. But he was also much given to mystification, and it is not wise to accept anything he says without verifying it. The essay on Dickens turns largely on Barnaby Rudge, and, to the best of my belief, it has not been strictly examined.
Poe says:
We are not prepared to say, so positively as we could wish, whether by the public at large, the whole mystery of the murder committed by Rudge, with the identity of the Maypole ruffian with Rudge himself, was fathomed at any period previous to the period intended, or, if so, whether at a period so early as materially to interfere with the interest designed; but we are forced, through sheer modesty, to suppose this the case; since, by ourselves individually, the secret was distinctly understood immediately upon the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy, which occurs at the seventh page of this volume of three hundred and twenty-three. In the number of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post for 1st May 1841 (the tale having then only begun), will be found a prospective notice of some length, in which we make use of the following words:
‘That Barnaby is the son of the murderer may not appear evident to our readers—but we will explain. The person murdered is Mr. Reuben Haredale. He was found assassinated in his bed-chamber. His steward (Mr. Rudge, senior) and his gardener (name not mentioned) are missing. At first both are suspected. “Some months afterward”—here we use the words of the story—“the steward’s body, scarcely to be recognised but by his clothes and the watch and ring he wore, was found at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds, with a deep gash in the breast, where he had been stabbed by a knife. He was only partly dressed; and all the people agreed that he had been sitting up reading in his own room, where there were many traces of blood, and was suddenly fallen upon and killed, before his master.”
‘Now, be it observed, it is not the author himself who asserts that the steward’s body was found; he has put the words in the mouth of one of his characters. His design is to make it appear, in the dénouement, that the steward, Rudge, first murdered the gardener, then went to his master’s chamber, murdered him, was interrupted by his (Rudge’s) wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist, to prevent her giving the alarm—that he then, after possessing himself of the booty desired, returned to the gardener’s room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.’
This is the prediction we have to examine. In the first place, was such an article published in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post for 1st May 1841? Mr. J. H. Ingram, the chief authority on Poe in this country, very kindly informs me that this review has never been reprinted in any edition of Poe’s works. Should it not be searched out and reprinted in full? I should like to see the context of Poe’s extract, and I should like still more to be sure that the article appeared as he says it did. Mr. Ingram has no doubt that the article appeared as stated by Poe. Mr. J. H. Whitty of Richmond, Va., kindly informs me that all the early files of the Post are inaccessible.
In the second place, Poe affirms that the article appeared in the Philadelphia paper for 1st May 1841, and that the tale was only then begun. As for that, Barnaby Rudge was first published as a volume in 1841, after having run as a serial in the pages of Master Humphrey’s Clock from 13th February 1841 to 27th November 1841. I have failed to find the precise date of its first appearance in America. No doubt it appeared in serial form, and the first instalments on which Poe bases his assertions should have been printed in America considerably earlier than 1st May. But the assertion which chiefly demands scrutiny is very definitely made by Poe. He says: The secret was distinctly understood immediately upon the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy.’ The italics are mine.
We turn to the story of Solomon Daisy ‘as told in the Maypole at any time for four and twenty years.’ It is very simple and matter-of-fact. It tells how Mr. Reuben Haredale, of The Warren, a widower with one child, left the place when his lady died. He went up to London, where he stopped some months, but, finding that place as lonely as The Warren, he suddenly came back with his little girl, bringing with him besides, that day, only two women servants, and his steward and a gardener. The rest stayed behind in London, and were to follow next day. That night, an old gentleman who lived at Chigwell Row, and had long been poorly, died, and an order came to Solomon at half after twelve o’clock at night to go and toll the passing bell. Solomon relates to a thrilled audience how he went out in a windy, rainy, very dark night; how he entered the church, trimmed the candle, thought of old tales about dead people rising and sitting at the head of their own graves, fancying that he saw the old gentleman who was just dead, wrapping his shroud round him, and shivering as if he felt it cold. At length he started up and took the bell rope in his hands. At that minute there rang—not that bell, for he had scarcely touched the rope—but another! It was only for an instant, and even then the wind carried the sound away, but he heard it. He listened for a long time, but it rang no more. He then tolled his own bell and ran home to bed as fast as he could touch the ground. Next morning came the news that Mr. Reuben Haredale was found murdered in his bed-chamber, and in his hand was a piece of the cord attached to an alarm bell outside, which hung in his room, and had been cut asunder, no doubt by the murderer when he seized it. ‘That was the bell I heard.’ He further relates how the steward and the gardener were both missing, both suspected, but never found. The body of Mr. Rudge, the steward—scarcely to be recognised by his clothes and the watch and the ring he wore—was found months afterwards at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds with a deep gash in the breast where he had been stabbed by a knife. Every one knew now that the gardener must be the murderer, and Solomon Daisy predicted that he would be heard of. That is the whole story as told by Solomon Daisy, and Poe affirms that he perceived from this story: (1) That the steward Rudge first murdered the gardener; (2) that he then went to his master’s chamber and murdered him; (3) that he was interrupted by Rudge’s wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist to prevent her giving the alarm; (4) that he possessed himself of the booty, returned to the gardener’s room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.
Poe admits that his preconceived ideas were not entirely correct:
The gardener was murdered, not before, but after his master; and that Rudge’s wife seized him by the wrist, instead of his seizing her, has so much the air of a mistake on the part of Mr. Dickens that we can scarcely speak of our own version as erroneous. The grasp of a murderer’s bloody hand on the wrist of a woman enceinte would have been more likely to produce the effect described (and this every one will allow) than the grasp of the hand of the woman upon the wrist of the assassin. We may, therefore, say of our supposition, as Talleyrand said of some cockney’s bad French—que s’il ne soit pas Français assurément donc il le doit être—that if we did not rightly prophesy, yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right.
I have no hesitation in saying that this is largely a piece of pure mystification, another Tale of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It is conceivable that Poe guesses from Solomon Daisy’s story that the steward Rudge murdered the gardener and his master. It follows that the steward changed clothes with the murdered gardener, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified. But that Poe should have guessed immediately after reading Solomon Daisy’s story that he seized and held by the wrist his wife to prevent her giving the alarm is beyond belief. ‘By the wrist’ are the three significant words, and they prove that Poe must have had before him when writing the parts of the novel up to and including chapter V. For it is in the fifth chapter that the first mention is made of the smear of blood on Barnaby’s wrist. We read there:
They who knew the Maypole story, and could remember what the widow was, before her husband’s and his master’s murder, understood it well. They recollected how the change had come, and could call to mind that when her son was born, upon the very day the deed was known, he bore upon his wrist what seemed a smear of blood but half washed out.
Near the beginning of chapter lxii., where Rudge is making his confession in prison, he says of his wife:
Did I see her fall upon the ground; and, when I stooped to raise her, did she thrust me back with a force that cast me off as if I had been a child, staining the hand with which she clasped my wrist? Is that fancy?
To claim that the seizing of the wrist could have been deduced from Solomon Daisy’s story by itself is to affirm an impossibility.
And so vanishes the main value of the prediction. If Poe wrote that article in the Saturday Evening Post, he wrote it after having read the fifth chapter of Dickens’s novel.
It may be asked whether Poe discovered anything from his reading of the first pages. The only thing which he may have guessed is the thing which it was comparatively easy to guess. He may have conjectured that the mysterious stranger at the Maypole was Rudge Redux. When this surmise had been lodged in his mind the other deductions follow as a matter of course from later chapters, as the tale unfolds itself. Even if Poe identified the stranger at the Maypole with the murderer it was no great feat, for the murderer is closely disguised, from which any intelligent reader would infer that he has a motive for fearing detection in an old haunt. He is shabbily dressed; he is very curious about the people and events at The Warren; he is suspected as a criminal of some kind by the cronies; he strikes Joe as he leaves. On the road he threatens Varden with murder. This shows us that we have before us a fugitive criminal. He is presented to us with all the marks of a villain in hiding. It may be noted that from Solomon Daisy’s story the inference is that only one of two men committed the murder of Reuben Haredale, the gardener or Rudge. There has also been a difficulty in identifying the remains. This leaves Poe no special credit. There is considerable keenness in his conjecture that the treatment of the Gordon Riots was an afterthought of Dickens. Poe says:
The title of the book, the elaborate and pointed manner of the commencement, the impressive description of The Warren, and especially of Mrs. Rudge, go far to show that Mr. Dickens has really deceived himself—that the soul of the plot, as originally conceived, was the murder of Haredale, with the subsequent discovery of the murderer in Rudge—but that this idea was afterwards abandoned, or, rather, suffered to be merged in that of the Popish riots. The result has been most unfavourable. That which, of itself, would have proved highly effective, has been rendered nearly null by its situation. In the multitudinous outrage and horror of the Rebellion, the one atrocity is utterly whelmed and extinguished.
But facts, as Poe admits, are against this supposition. Dickens says in his Preface:
If the object an author has had, in writing a book, cannot be discovered from its perusal, the probability is that it is either very deep or very shallow. Hoping that mine may lie somewhere between these two extremes, I shall say very little about it, and that only in reference to one point. No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced into any work of fiction, and the subject presenting very extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project this tale.
This is final. It appears from Forster’s biography that Dickens desired to expose the brutalising character of laws which led to the incessant execution of men and women comparatively innocent. It is clear also that Dickens made a special study of the contemporary newspapers and annual registers. But Forster admits that the form ultimately taken by Barnaby Rudge had been comprised only partially within its first design, and he admits also that the interest with which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close. ‘What has chiefly taken the reader’s fancy at the outset almost wholly disappears in the power and passion with which, in the later chapters, great riots are described. So admirable is this description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it even for a more perfect structure of fable.’ To this I may add that the letters to the artist Cattermole on the illustrations to Barnaby Rudge are very valuable for the fullness and precision of their detail.
That it is legitimate to draw inferences from the hints given by Dickens I should be the last to deny. His purpose was to provide hints which, when contemplated with what he called a backward glance, should appear luminous at the end of the story. Their meaning at the time might be more or less obscure, but when from the end of the book one could look back upon its course even to the beginning, he would see that the artist had a purpose all through, and that he was steadily preparing his reader for the dénouement. Of this I give a striking proof, on which, so far as I am aware, little stress has been laid. [104] The Edinburgh Review of July 1857 contains an article, ‘The License of Modern Novelists,’ in which the critic deals with Little Dorrit, and denounces his charges against the administrative system of England. Among other things, the reviewer says: ‘Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient period.’ Dickens, for the first and only time in his life, so far as I know, publicly replied to a reviewer. He wrote an article in Household Words of 1st August 1857, entitled ‘Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review,’ in which he turned upon his critic fiercely and sharply. He quotes the sentence about the catastrophe in Little Dorrit, and goes on to say:
Thus, the Reviewer. The Novelist begs to ask him whether there is no License in his writing those words, and stating that assumption as a truth, when any man accustomed to the critical examination of a book cannot fail, attentively turning over the pages of Little Dorrit, to observe that that catastrophe is carefully prepared for from the very first presentation of the old house in the story; that when Rigaud, the man who is crushed by the fall of the house, first enters it (hundreds of pages before the end) he is beset by a mysterious fear and shuddering; that the rotten and crazy state of the house is laboriously kept before the reader, whenever the house is shown; that the way to the demolition of the man and the house together is paved all through the book with a painful minuteness and reiterated care of preparation, the necessity of which (in order that the thread may be kept in the reader’s mind through nearly two years) is one of the adverse incidents of the serial form of publication? It may be nothing to the question that Mr. Dickens now publicly declares, on his word of honour, that that catastrophe was written, was engraved on steel, was printed, had passed through the hands of compositors, readers for the press, and pressmen, and was in type and in proof in the Printing House of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans before the accident in Tottenham Court Road occurred. But, it is much to the question that an honourable reviewer might have easily traced this out in the internal evidence of the book itself, before he stated, for a fact, what is utterly and entirely, in every particular and respect, untrue.
The blows are dealt with a will, and it should be noted that Dickens is more irritated at the stupidity of the reviewer in failing to see the way in which he contrived the catastrophe than at his mistake in the fact. It is to be noted also that Dickens considered that his serial form of publication compelled him to be almost too minute, copious, and constant in keeping the thread in the mind of a reader whose attention had to be maintained for nearly two years.
I reply in the affirmative, and for the following reasons:
1. The external testimonies as given in a previous chapter are all explicit as far as they go in their testimony that in the intention of Dickens Edwin Drood was murdered. There is first the testimony of John Forster. To him Dickens plainly declared that a nephew was to be murdered by his uncle. The murderer was to discover that his crime was useless for its purpose, but he was not to be convicted in the ordinary way. It was by means of a gold ring, which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which the body had been cast, that the murderer and the person murdered were to be identified.
2. Madame Perugini corroborates Forster’s testimony, and points out that the only thing on which he is not positive is the ending of Neville Landless. He guards himself by saying, ‘I think,’ and this makes his testimony to the more important facts the more impressive. Madame Perugini, who thoroughly understood the relations between Forster and Dickens, finds it impossible to believe that Dickens should have altered his plan without communicating with Forster. Forster’s strong character, and the peculiar friendship that existed between him and Dickens, make it impossible to believe that Dickens should suddenly become ‘underhand,’ and we might say treacherous, by inventing a plot which he did not intend to carry into execution. Forster became a little jealous of Dickens’s confidence, and more than a little exacting in his demands on it. This Dickens knew, and smiled at occasionally. But he was very careful not to wound his friend’s very sensitive nature, and he so trusted Forster’s judgment as to be uneasy and unhappy if he did not obtain its sanction for his decisions and his actions. If there had been any change of plan Forster would certainly have been told. He never was told.
3. Again, we know that Charles Dickens the younger positively declared that he heard from his father’s lips that Edwin Drood was dead. I have been able to print part of a play written by Charles Dickens the younger and Joseph Hatton. This shows beyond contradiction that the authors believed Drood to be dead. Mr. Hatton says: ‘Consulting his son, Charles, to whom I offered my sketch, I found that his father had revealed to him sufficient of the plot to clearly indicate how the story was to end.’ How far this may apply to details we cannot be sure, but most certainly it certifies the death.
4. To this I may add that Madame Perugini’s own firm belief that Drood was dead is of no small importance, considering that she was the wife of Charles Allston Collins, who drew the much discussed wrapper. It did not occur either to Madame Perugini or her husband that there was any doubt as to the fate of Edwin Drood.
5. The weighty letter of Sir Luke Fildes printed on pages 54–5 confirms unmistakably and strongly the witness already adduced. Fildes was the sole illustrator of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and he testifies that Collins did not in the least know the significance of the various groups on the wrapper. Further, when Sir Luke was puzzled by the statement that John Jasper was described as wearing a neckerchief that would go twice round his neck he drew Dickens’s attention to the circumstance that he had previously dressed Jasper as wearing a little black tie once round the neck, and asked why the alteration was made. Dickens, a little disconcerted, suddenly asked, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ He then said: ‘I must have the double necktie! It is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it.’ Fildes was impressed by Dickens’s earnestness, and resented the suggestion often made that Dickens’s hints dropped to members of his family or friends may have been intentionally misleading. ‘It is a little startling,’ says Sir Luke, ‘after more than thirty-five years of profound belief in the nobility of character and sincerity of Charles Dickens, to be told now that he probably was more or less of a humbug on such occasions.’
I cannot but feel that the external testimony is too strong to be explained away, and it ought to be read and pondered in its entirety.
In the Memoranda made by Dickens for chapter xii., and printed on page 63, we read that Jasper ‘lays the ground for the manner of the murder, to come out at last. Night picture of the Cathedral.’ Mr. Lang himself admits, ‘It seems almost undeniable that, when Dickens wrote this note, he meant Jasper to succeed in murdering Edwin.’ [113]
The proof that Edwin Drood was murdered is to my mind mainly to be found in the pages of the story. One would have to print a large part of it in order to convey the impressive and unmistakable force of the whole, but perhaps it is better to read it as Dickens wrote it. For he himself advances nothing to modify or mitigate the conclusion that, as the result of a carefully designed plot, Edwin Drood was foully murdered by his uncle. Happily it is not necessary to spend much space on this. I believe that Dr. Jackson is fully justified in his statement that all who have written on the subject acknowledge that Jasper tried to murder his nephew, and believed himself to have succeeded. We all see that Jasper had either strangled Edwin with a black scarf and committed his body to a heap of quicklime that lay about convenient, or thought that he had done so. ‘We all see that the crime is to be proved by a gold ring of rubies and diamonds which Edwin has concealed about his person, though Jasper does not know it.’ Mr. Proctor writes:
It is clear that Dickens has intended to convey the impression that Edwin Drood is murdered, his body and clothes consumed, Jasper having first taken his watch and chain and shirt-pin, which cannot have been thrown into the river till the night of Christmas Day, since the watch, wound up at twenty minutes past two on Christmas Eve, had run down when found in the river.
Having arrived at this point we may proceed.
Is it conceivable that Jasper, believing himself to have succeeded in murdering his nephew, could have failed? Jasper is meant by Dickens to be a man wholly without conscience and heart. Such characters are not numerous in Dickens’s books, but we have evidence that he knew them and had pondered over them. I may quote his words in Hunted Down:
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a man who is a calculating criminal, is, in any phase of his guilt otherwise than true to himself, and perfectly consistent with his whole character. Such a man commits murder, and murder is the natural culmination of his course; such a man has to outface murder, and will do it with hardihood and effrontery. It is a sort of fashion to express surprise that any notorious criminal, having such crime upon his conscience, can so brave it out. Do you think that if he had it on his conscience at all, or had a conscience to have it upon, he would ever have committed the crime? Perfectly consistent with himself, as I believe all such monsters to be, this Slinkton recovered himself, and showed a defiance that was sufficiently cold and quiet. He was white, he was haggard, he was changed; but only as a sharper who had played for a great stake and had been outwitted and had lost the game.
In Household Words for 14th June 1856, Dickens has an article on ‘The Demeanour of Murderers.’ He is referring to William Bousfield, ‘the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey dock.’ Bousfield’s demeanour was considered exceedingly remarkable because of his composure under trial. On this Dickens says:
Can any one, reflecting on the matter for five minutes, suppose it possible—we do not say probable, but possible—that in the breast of this poisoner there were surviving, in the days of his trial, any lingering traces of sensibility, or any wrecked fragment of the quality which we call sentiment. Can the profoundest or the simplest man alive believe that in such a heart there could have been left, by that time, any touch of pity?
The murder of Edwin Drood had been so long premeditated that Jasper had done it hundreds and thousands of times in the opium den. The motive was his fierce and wolfish passion for Rosa. He loathed his poor nephew as the chief obstacle to his wishes, and planned out in every detail a murder which would utterly remove him from the sight of men.
Jasper, then, was an unredeemed villain, but he was anything than a fool. He drugged Drood; he strangled him; he put his body in quicklime; he had time to rob the victim of his jewellery; he maintained a threatening and defiant attitude. He was not afraid that Drood would return to convict him of an attempt to murder. He had done his business. I think it worth while to point out that in Dickens’s view Jasper’s malevolence must have been raised to the highest point of fury on the night of the murder. For the murder was committed on a night of the wildest tempest. Trees were almost torn out of the earth, chimneys toppled into the streets, the hands of the cathedral clock were torn off, the lead from the roof was stripped away and blown into the close, and stones were displaced on the summit of the great tower. In Barnaby Rudge (chapter ii.) Dickens says:
There are times when the elements being in unusual commotion, those who are bent on daring enterprises, or agitated by great thoughts, whether of good or evil, feel a mysterious sympathy with the tumult of nature, and are roused into corresponding violence. In the midst of thunder, lightning, and storm, many tremendous deeds have been committed; men, self-possessed before, have given a sudden loose to passions they could no longer control. The demons of wrath and despair have striven to emulate those who ride the whirlwind and direct the storm; and man, lashed into madness with the roaring winds and boiling waters, has become for the time as wild and merciless as the elements themselves.
As we have seen, Dickens’s method is to make every hint significant, and, as a rule, not too significant. The reader at the time may fail to perceive why a particular point is mentioned, but it is not mentioned carelessly or without design. The backward glance from the end is to interpret all. Besides this there are hints in the novels to which he calls special attention, and which he thereby binds himself to redeem. Conspicuous among these in Edwin Drood is the sentence about the jewelled ring and betrothal over which Edwin Drood’s right hand closed as it rested in its little case. He would not let Rosa’s heart be grieved by those sorrowful jewels. He would restore them to the cabinet from which he had unwillingly taken them, and keep silence. He would let them be. He would let them lie unspoken of in his breast. But Dickens says: ‘Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast ironworks of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.’ No answer to our question, no solution of the problem can be satisfactory which fails to assign its due weight to this sentence. In Proctor’s first attempt at the solution of The Mystery of Edwin Drood contained in Leisure Readings, we find the following amazingly inept words: ‘From the stress laid on this point, and the clear words in which its association with the mystery is spoken of, we may safely infer, I think, that it is intended partly to mislead the reader.’
Later on, Proctor, seeing the insufficiency of this, propounded another theory. This was that the attempt on Drood and his rescue were known almost immediately to Mr. Grewgious, who took possession of the ring; that when the fact that such a ring had been in Drood’s pocket came to Jasper’s knowledge he at once in a state of panic rushed to the vault to recover it from among the quicklime; that Drood, divining this intention, concealed himself in the vault and confronted Jasper the moment he opened the door. This theory is partly approved of by Mr. William Archer. [119] But Dickens’s point is plainly that the ring was the only jewellery possessed by Drood about which Jasper knew nothing. It is the finding of the ring in the tomb that is to bring the guilt of the murder home.
As for the numerous assumptions made by Proctor, it can only be said that they have no foundation in the facts. There is no reason to believe that the attempt on Drood and his rescue were known almost immediately to Mr. Grewgious. There is no evidence that Grewgious took possession of the ring. There is no evidence that Jasper came to know that such had been in Drood’s pocket. All these theories are not only without foundation, but, I think, also in plain contradiction to the whole tenor of the story.
If Drood was half dead how did he get away? According to Mr. Proctor’s ingenious theory he was rescued from the bed of quicklime by Durdles. He was rescued with the skin burnt off his face, and his eyebrows gone, so that he could afterwards disguise himself as Datchery. If this is so, the quicklime must have behaved itself in a singularly obliging and accommodating manner. But, as a matter of fact, there is no evidence whatever for the theory, and the whole drift of the story makes against it. The difficulties are admitted even by those who incline to support Proctor’s view and to maintain that Edwin is not dead.
Mr. Lang admits that Proctor’s theory of the murder is thin, and that ‘all this set of conjectures is crude to the last degree.’ I am content to leave it at that. Mr. Lang has conjectures of his own. He conjectures that Mr. Grewgious visited the tomb of his lost love, Rosa’s mother, and consecrated to her ‘a night of memories and sighs.’ He says: ‘Mrs. Bud, his lost love, we have been told, was buried hard by the Sapsea monument.’ This is not told by Dickens. It is better to stick by the narrative.
Supposing that Edwin was not dead, what was the meaning of the long silence? Why did he allow Neville to rest under a cloud of suspicion, and exposed to great peril? Why did he allow Jasper’s persecution of Rosa? Why did he allow Helena Landless, whom he had begun more or less to love, to suffer with the rest? Are we to suppose that he came back disguised to fix the guilt on his uncle? Can we believe that he did not know that his uncle had tried to murder him? If not, are we to believe that he suspected his uncle and was not sure, and came down to try to surprise his uncle’s secret and to punish him? He could only have punished him at most for an attempt at murder. Even that might have been hard to bring home, supposing he himself was not clear as to the facts. ‘Fancy can suggest no reason,’ writes Mr. Lang, ‘why Edwin Drood, if he escaped from his wicked uncle, should go spying about instead of coming openly forward. No plausible, unfantastic reason could be invented.’
Dr. M. R. James, one of the few who still think that Edwin might not have been murdered, says in his last writing on the subject: ‘I freely confess that the view that Edwin is dead solves many difficulties. A wholly satisfactory theory of the manner of his escape has never been devised; his failure to clear Neville from suspicion is hard to explain.’ Mr. Lang, in what has unhappily proved his last article on the subject, in Blackwood for May 1911, explains that while he believed in 1905 that Jasper failed in his attempt to murder, ‘now I have no theory as to how the novel would have been built up.’
Those who more or less strongly still believe that Dickens meant to spare Edwin rest their case mainly on a subjective impression. Says Dr. James: ‘On the other hand, whether the result would be a piece of “bad art” or not, I do think it is more in Dickens’s manner to spare Edwin than to kill him. The subjective impression that he is not doomed is too strong for me to dismiss.’ [122] It is difficult to argue against a subjective impression. The fact remains that Edwin Drood becomes superfluous. He has effected no lodgment in any human heart. Mr. Walters says that Drood is little more than a name-label attached to a body, a man who never excites sympathy, and whose fate causes no emotion. Proctor, who believes that Edwin Drood survived, admits that he lived unpaired. ‘Rosa was to give her hand to Tartar, Helena Landless to Crisparkle, while Edwin and Mr. Grewgious were to look on approvingly, though Edwin a little sadly.’
Mr. Lang in the Gadshill edition of Dickens wrote: ‘Edwin and Neville are quarrelsome cubs, not come to discretion, and the fatuity of Edwin, though not exaggerated much, makes him extremely unsympathetic.’ But in his book on the subject Mr. Lang changes his view and writes: ‘On re-reading the novel I find that Dickens makes Drood as sympathetic as he can.’ Thus impressions alter. Gillan Vase, in her continuation of the story would make us believe that on Edwin’s reappearance Rosa transferred her heart from Tartar to her old lover! But taking the story as it stands, we see that the sorrow for his death is not deep, and that no heart is broken by his disappearance. Rosa is consoled, and more than consoled. Helena grieves for her brother, and flings a shield over Rosa. Neville and Edwin have never been good friends. Grewgious has cheerfully acquiesced in, if he has not instigated, the breaking of the engagement between Rosa and Edwin. The appropriate explanation is: ‘Poor youth! Poor youth!’ That is all.
It has been suggested that there is a parallel between No Thoroughfare and Edwin Drood. According to Proctor it is suggested clearly in No Thoroughfare that Vendale has been murdered beyond all seeming hope. Proctor’s real argument seems to be that Vendale is not marked for death, and does not die, and that Edwin Drood belongs to the same class. He says that Nell and Paul, Richard Carson and the other characters who die in Dickens’s stories are marked for death from the beginning, but that there is not one note of death in all that Edwin does or says. I believe that this is entirely contrary to the facts. There are some who like Edwin, but none who love him. He is hated by his uncle, and hated perhaps by Neville.
In No Thoroughfare, a story written by Wilkie Collins and Dickens in 1867 as a Christmas Number, we have the story of a man supposed dead coming to life again. It may be noted that the only portions of this story furnished exclusively by Dickens were the overture and the third act. Collins contributed to the first and fourth act, and wrote the whole of the second. Vendale, a wine-merchant, is in love with a Swiss girl, Marguerite. She returns his affection, but her guardian Obenreizer is bitterly opposed. He consents, however, to the marriage if Vendale can double his income and make it £3000 a year. Vendale discovers that a forgery has been committed, through which £500 are missing. He is asked by the Swiss firm with which he deals to send a trustworthy messenger to investigate the fraud and discover its perpetrator. Vendale resolves to go himself, and tells Obenreizer. Obenreizer is the culprit, though Vendale does not suspect it, and the two go to Switzerland together. Obenreizer keeps planning a murder, and contrives to give Vendale an opium draught. He drugs him again, and in the course of a perilous mountain journey Vendale is roused to the knowledge that Obenreizer had set upon him, and that they were struggling desperately in the snow. Vendale rolls himself over into a gulf. But help is near. Marguerite’s fears have been excited, and she has followed her lover on the journey. She engages a rescue expedition, and they find the lost man insensible. He is delirious and quite unconscious where he is. Then he seems to sink in the deadly cold, and his heart no longer beats. ‘She broke from them all, and sank over him on his litter with both her living hands upon the heart that stood still.’ But by and by, when the crisis of the exposure comes, ‘supported on Marguerite’s arm—his sunburnt colour gone, his right arm bandaged and slung over his breast—Vendale stood before the murderer a man risen from the dead.’ I cannot see that this is a great surprise. Vendale was not marked for death. I think the unsophisticated reader, knowing how he is loved and how he is waited for, and how unconsciousness may pass into consciousness, would fully expect him to live. When he comes to life, he is supported on Marguerite’s arm. There was no arm on which Edwin Drood could lean. Dickens can provide for his old bachelors like Newman Noggs, but he had no provision for Edwin.
From the Wrapper.—I am convinced after a careful perusal of nearly all that has been written on the subject that the real strength of the disappearance theory is to be found in the bottom picture of the wrapper. When Madame Perugini published the article from which I have quoted, Mr. Lang in a letter to the Times [127] rested his whole case on the cover design. He said:
The chief difficulty in accepting the fact has always been that, in designs on the covers, by Mr. C. A. Collins, first husband of Mrs. Perugini, we see a young man, who is undeniably Edwin Drood, confronting Jasper in a dark vault, in the full light of a lantern held up by Jasper. Mrs. Perugini says that this figure may be regarded as ‘the ghost of Edwin as seen by Jasper in his half-dazed and drugged condition,’ or Helena Landless ‘dressed as Datchery.’ The figure is not dressed as Datchery, nor was Miss Landless fair like Drood, but very dark. As for the ghost, he is as substantial as Jasper, and it is most improbable that Dickens would have a mere hallucination designed in such a substantial fashion, ‘massive and concrete,’ as Pip said of Mr. Wopsle’s rendering of the part of Hamlet.
Mr. Lang in his final Blackwood paper repeats the assertion with unhesitating confidence. He goes so far as to say:
Last, Dickens had instructed his son-in-law, Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie Collins), to design a pictorial cover of the numbers, in which Jasper, entering a dark vault with a lantern, finds a substantial shadow-casting Drood ‘in his habit as he lived,’—soft conical hat and all,—confronting him.
As to this we note:
1. That Collins received no such instructions.
2. That neither Collins nor Luke Fildes nor any of the Dickens family read the illustration in that sense. They all supposed Edwin to be dead.
3. We also note that, in spite of Mr. Lang’s confident assertions, there is no unanimity as to the meaning of the design. It may be Drood; it may be, as I think it is, Datchery; it may be Neville Landless, as Mr. Hugh Thomson has suggested. But no one is entitled to dogmatise on the subject.
4. As I have already pointed out, in the great majority of the wrappers the designs are vague and general, and cannot be verified in the narrative.
5. But to my mind the most conclusive proof that the wrapper is not to be rigidly and pedantically interpreted is that Dickens himself was the very last man in the world to give away his secrets on the cover. On this Madame Perugini has said all that needs to be said. I am glad to find that in his last review of the controversy Dr. M. R. James makes no mention of the wrapper evidence.
It appears that certain readers have taken the heading of chapter xiv., ‘When shall these three meet again?’ as an argument for the theory that Drood reappears. If the use of the quotation has any special interest a very good interpretation has been supplied by Mr. Edwin Charles. Mr. Charles points out that the words are used in Macbeth before the three witches meet again to plant in Macbeth’s mind the tragical lust of ambition. He slays Duncan, who is at once his guest, his kinsman, and his king. And Duncan’s sons, also guests of Macbeth, fly respectively to England and Ireland, and Macbeth uses the flight to spread suspicion against them. ‘We hear our bloody cousins are bestow’d in England and in Ireland: not confessing their cruel parricide.’ Jasper is Edwin Drood’s kinsman and guardian and host. Jasper slays his nephew, and contrives that the suspicion of his murder shall fall on his other guest, Neville Landless, who has to leave Cloisterham. Is this a chance parallel? Does the use of the words in the heading of the chapter prove that Dickens had the tragedy of Macbeth in his mind? Mr. Charles not only thinks so, but he holds that the quotation positively destroys any shadow of doubt as to what was intended to be the fate of Edwin. Mr. Charles also notes that Dickens makes another reference to Macbeth in the story when he records the dinner which Grewgious gave to Edwin and Bazzard at Staple Inn. Speaking of the leg of the flying waiter Dickens says that ‘it always preceded him and the tray by some seconds, and always lingered after he disappeared,’ adding, ‘like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.’
There is not much to reply to in the argument, but the reply is, to say the least, sufficient.
Another argument has been drawn from the tentative titles written by Dickens here first printed in full. Two of them are ‘The Flight of Edwin Drood,’ and ‘Edwin Drood in Hiding.’ On this Mr. Lang writes in the Morning Post [130] that, though the titles do not go with the idea that Edwin was to be slain early, Dickens may have intended the titles to mislead his readers, and may have rejected them because he felt them to be too misleading. This I believe to be the exact truth. Dickens was willing to have as much mystery as possible, but he soon perceived that it would not suit his purpose to raise the question whether Edwin was dead or alive.
In Dr. Jackson’s book on the subject there is a very able discussion on the manner in which the murder was accomplished. Dr. Jackson inquires: (1) Where and how did Jasper murder Drood, or attempt to murder him? (2) Where and how did Jasper dispose of Drood’s body, or attempt to dispose of it? For myself, I believe that the manner of the murder is part of the mystery to be solved as the book proceeds. In this I am in general agreement with Proctor. It would be vain to guess what happened on that stormy night. To give the details definitely would have been to give them prematurely, for much of the interest of the novel is to depend on their unfolding. But certain suggestions may be offered. Dr. Jackson holds that significance is to be attached to Jasper’s babblings in the presence of the opium woman. He tells her that he has in his mind the tower of the cathedral, a perilous journey over abysses with an indispensable fellow-traveller. Also that when the journey was really made there was ‘no struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty,’ but that ‘a poor, mean, miserable thing,’ which was nevertheless real, lay ‘down below at the bottom.’ Dr. Jackson thinks that we have here Jasper’s confession of the place and the manner of the crime. ‘He had ascended the tower with Edwin, and he had seen Edwin’s body lying down below, presumably at the foot of the staircase by which they had ascended.’
Mr. Walters thinks that Drood was to be encountered near the cathedral, drugged and then strangled with the black silk scarf that Jasper wore round his own neck. Mr. Proctor and Mr. Lang suppose that Jasper partially strangled Drood near the cathedral, and then deposited his body in the Sapsea monument. They do not explain ‘the perilous journey over abysses.’ The babblings of the opium den become intelligible if Jasper flung or pushed Drood down the staircase of the tower. But if Drood was attacked outside the cathedral on level ground they are ‘unjustifiable mystifications.’
Dr. Jackson further argues that in chapter xii., ‘A Night with Durdles,’ is a rehearsal of the coming tragedy. He thinks that when Durdles sleeps Jasper makes a wax impression of a key with which Durdles had opened the outside door of the crypt and the door between the crypt and the cathedral. He finds quicklime in the crypt. Then he flings or pushes Drood, who is drugged, down the staircase, and deposits his body in the quicklime in the crypt. Else why did Jasper make a careful study of the tower with Durdles?
My friend and colleague, Miss Jane T. Stoddart, kindly sends me the following:
Some critics have failed to realise the extreme importance of the Sapsea monument in connection with the murder. It has been suggested by Professor Jackson that Jasper buried the body in a heap of lime in the crypt of the cathedral. But crypts are semi-public places, and if heaps of lime were about workmen would be coming and going. In no case could a corpse lie unnoticed on the open floor of a crypt for more than a few hours. All the evidence points rather to the Sapsea monument in the graveyard as the murderer’s chosen hiding-place. Observe how Dickens distinguishes between tombs and monuments, clearly meaning by the latter those massive vault-like erections of stone which are often seen in old churchyards, and which have the dimensions of small chambers with a corridor. Durdles says in chapter V.: ‘“Say that hammer of mine’s a wall—my work. Two; four; and two is six,” measuring on the pavement. “Six foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.”
‘“Not really Mrs. Sapsea?” asks Jasper.
‘“Say Mrs. Sapsea. Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs. Sapsea. Durdles taps that wall represented by that hammer, and says, after good sounding: ‘Something betwixt us!’ Sure enough, some rubbish has been left in that same six-foot space by Durdles’s men!”’
There is therefore a ‘six-foot’ vacant space at least in the Sapsea monument, left, no doubt, for the reception at some far distant date of the Mayor’s body. Within this place Jasper decides to deposit the remains of his victim. I do not agree with the critics who fancy there was a Sapsea vault in the crypt. The monument is in the full light of day, for in chapter xii. the Mayor is walking near the churchyard ‘on the look-out for a blushing and retiring stranger.’ And in chapter xviii. he calls Datchery’s attention to this ‘small lion’ in the churchyard. Mrs. Sapsea, we are distinctly told, is buried within the monument, not in any subterranean vault in the crypt.
THE ‘NIGHT WITH DURDLES’
We come now to the night of the mysterious expedition of Jasper and Durdles, when they climb the Cathedral Tower in the moonlight, and when Durdles lies in a drugged sleep on the floor of the crypt. Jasper has been very active during this interval. How has his time been spent? His first business, after possessing himself of the key of the crypt, must have been to search in the bundle carried by Durdles for the key of the Sapsea monument. We have repeatedly been told of his interest in the bundle, into which (see chapter iv.) he had seen Durdles drop this particular key. The inscription had been placed on the monument, but we are to understand that the key had not yet been returned to the Mayor. Having secured this key, Jasper leaves the building, and by some means which can only be conjectured conveys quicklime to the monument, and places it in readiness in the empty space. He may have gone back to the yard-gate where Durdles had showed him the mound of lime, but this would have been a very risky proceeding, as the ‘hole in the city wall’ occupied by Durdles was beyond Minor Canon Corner, the Monks’ Vineyard, and the Travellers’ Twopenny. Even in the dead of night, sharp eyes in the lodging-house (Deputy’s, for instance) might have seen a man go by wheeling lime in a barrow or carrying it in a sack. It is far more probable that the lime was found nearer to the cathedral.
It has been suggested, further, that Jasper, while away from Durdles, took a wax model of the key of the crypt, which also opens the door at the top of the steps leading from the crypt to the cathedral. The Dean (it is presumed by Professor Jackson) has already entrusted him with another key, that of the iron gate which gives access to the Tower. We are told that Durdles ‘bears the close scrutiny of his companion in an insensible way, although it is prolonged while the latter fumbles among his pockets for a key confided to him that will open an iron gate, so to enable him to pass to the staircase of the great Tower.’
Visitors to cathedrals to-day usually find that the key of the tower staircase is in charge of the chief verger, and Jasper would have no difficulty in obtaining a loan of it from this functionary for one night, though hardly for a longer period, as visitors would be coming and going.
Dr. Jackson supposes that the Dean lent his key to the choirmaster, and assumes that, before the expedition with Durdles, Jasper has already taken a wax model of it. If he did so, it must have been in the interval between locking-up time, when we find him (see chapter xii.) conversing with the Dean and the verger, and the time of his changing his coat to go out on the expedition. But Dickens tells us that Mr. Jasper withdrew to his piano, and sat chanting choir music in a low and beautiful voice for two or three hours; ‘in short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is about to rise.’ I take it, then (1) that the iron key was lent to Jasper by the verger for use in this nocturnal expedition; (2) that no wax model of it has been made up to the time of starting; (3) that the verger will look for the return of the key next day.
It seems to me most unlikely that Jasper took a wax model of the crypt key or the key to the iron gate, either on the night of his wandering with Durdles, or at any other time. If he took any wax model, it was that of the key to the Sapsea monument. He used the crypt key merely to let himself out of the building and in again. May not the simplest explanation be that he unlocked the door of the monument, leaving it merely closed, so that a turn of the iron handle would admit him on the night of the murder? According to the picture at the foot of the cover the door seems to have a handle.
I find it difficult to believe that Jasper would order duplicates of two large and unusual-looking keys to be made from wax models by a locksmith in Cloisterham. Such an order would have excited curiosity and perhaps unfavourable surmises in a town where Jasper was so well known. I should expect a curious stare if I carried wax models of church keys even to a locksmith in a London suburb; and Jasper had no time during the week before Christmas to make a journey to London. He was not himself a worker in iron like Roland Graeme in The Abbot, who at the cost of much time and labour forged a bunch of keys almost exactly resembling those carried by the lady of Lochleven.
On the night of the murder—that wild and stormy Christmas Eve—Jasper brought Edwin into the churchyard on some pretext, after partially stupefying him with the ‘good stuff’ which affects the brain so speedily. He may have persuaded him to drink to the dawn of Christmas, as Faust proposed to quaff the cup of poison to the rising Easter dawn:
Der letzte Trunk sei nun, mit ganzer Seele,
Als festlich hoher Gruss, dem Morgen zugebracht.It is after midnight when the murderer and his victim are abroad together. At that hour the ‘streets are empty,’ and only the storm goes thundering along them. The precincts ‘are unusually dark to-night.’ No need, then, for Jasper to fear detection as he slips the great silk scarf over Edwin’s head and pulls it tightly round his throat. ‘No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty—and yet I never saw that before.’
The maundering talk of Jasper in the opium woman’s den need not be taken literally. The difficult and dangerous journey ‘over abysses where a slip would be destruction’ may have no reference to the actual tower, but to the perils of the scheme and the risk of detection. Among other modes of killing, however, the idea of flinging Edwin from the tower may have occurred to Jasper, and been abandoned. Hence his outcry, ‘Look down! look down! You see what lies at the bottom there!’
Dr. Jackson thinks Jasper departed so far from his original plan that he chose the crypt instead of the Sapsea monument as a hiding-place. I think it far more likely that, if ever he intended to hurl Edwin from the tower, he set aside this plan when he found that it meant the making of two duplicate keys. Suppose that in the days following the crime, when the names of Edwin Drood and Jasper were in every mouth in Cloisterham, a small tradesman in some obscure lane were to ask his neighbours why the choirmaster needed these two large keys. The conjecture might be sufficient to destroy him.
I venture to think that Miss Stoddart is right in assigning the place of the body to the Sapsea monument, but I incline to agree with Dr. Jackson that, in order to do justice to the ‘Night with Durdles,’ and the confessions to the opium woman, we must give some place to the tower as connected with the murder. But I do not understand how Jasper should have seen Drood lying beneath him dead if he had merely pushed him down the tower stairs. Would it not have been more likely that Jasper should have pushed Drood from the galleries, and seen him fall into the space beneath? We cannot lay great stress on the topography of Cloisterham. The Sapsea monument is a pure invention, having no counterpart in Rochester, and Dickens manifestly used the utmost freedom in dealing with his materials. Mr. Lang, by the way, makes a strange mistake in saying, ‘As he walks with Durdles that worthy explains (in reply to a question by Jasper) that, by tapping a wall, even if over six feet thick, with his hammer, he can detect the nature of the contents of the vault.’ [139] The wall is not six feet thick. The words are: ‘six foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.’
It was for Dickens to explain in the remaining part of the novel how the murder was achieved, and no one has a right to say that he would have failed in doing so. His object is to leave upon us the impression of a murder which was in a singular degree premeditated, ferocious, and complete. If Dr. Jackson is right in supposing that Drood was thrown from the tower, in addition to his being drugged, strangled, and laid in quicklime, Dickens gives us a fresh thrill of horror.
In discussing this problem we have no aid from external evidence. It seems that the question was not raised by the critics of the time. We are thrown upon internal evidence, and not only the internal evidence of the book, but the evidence given by a study of Dickens’s methods. We have also, as I hope to show, some help given indirectly from Dickens’s own biography, and in particular from a book by Wilkie Collins.
It will be convenient at this stage that we should discuss the exact position of affairs after Edwin vanished from the scene.
To us who read the book, Jasper’s guilt is so plain and his character so atrocious that we wonder why those who knew him did not at once suspect his guilt. To us Jasper is a self-confessed criminal with his doom already written, but to his neighbours at Cloisterham he presented himself in a wholly different aspect. The Dean himself is not more obviously a pattern of virtuous living. Jasper occupies a conspicuous set of rooms. His fire burns, his red light glimmers, his curtains are drawn, in sight of all the town. He is young, good-looking, socially attractive, and occupied in an almost sacred profession. His duties as choirmaster raise him far above the position of a provincial teacher of music. On Sundays and weekdays the people hear his voice in Psalms and Canticles and Anthems. Edwin expresses the truth about his uncle’s standing when he says: ‘I should have put in the foreground your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such an independent position in this queer old place.’ Mrs. Crisparkle remarks on his ‘well-bred consideration,’ and his pallor as of ‘gentlemanly ashes.’ When the story opens there is not a soul in Cloisterham who breathes a word of scandal against him, and his real nature is suspected by only two living persons known to us. One is Rosa Bud, whom he has terrified by his secret love-making; the other the opium woman in London, who has heard strange mutterings in his drugged sleep which to her were not wholly ‘unintelligible.’ The Dean’s fear is that ‘Mr. Jasper’s heart may be too much set on his nephew.’ Nocturnal ramblings with the disreputable Durdles suggest nothing more surprising to the Dean than that Jasper means to write a book about the place. His visits to London are so carefully timed that he is rarely absent from the daily services. He is a favourite with his landlady, Mrs. Tope, and to mothers with marriageable daughters he must appear a very eligible young bachelor. Who could dream that a man of twenty-six, refined, highly educated, and agreeable, should seek his private recreation in an opium den?
Eight or nine months pass away, and at the point where the story closes Jasper is to all appearance still safe and prosperous. But already the avengers are upon his track, and we shall find it possible from the indications given in the book to show that there were at least six persons designed to have a share in the final capture.
The first mind in which suspicion lodges is clearly that of Mr. Grewgious, and he has taken his impressions of Jasper from Rosa and from Helena Landless. From his interview with Rosa in chapter ix. he learned that the young bride-elect wished to have nothing to do with Jasper. ‘I don’t like Mr. Jasper to come between us,’ she said, ‘in any way.’ After the murder, when Grewgious comes to Jasper’s rooms he has already seen Rosa and Helena Landless, and the latter must have told him of the persecution to which Rosa has been subjected. When Jasper utters a terrible shriek and falls to the ground in a swoon, his companion stands by the fire, warming his hands, and looking curiously at the prostrate figure. He refuses to eat with Jasper, and treats him from that time onwards as ‘a brigand and wild beast in combination.’ He keeps a personal watch on his movements in Staple Inn, and it is doubtless with his connivance and support that Datchery goes to Cloisterham. Are not these significant words of Grewgious in chapter xxi. to Rosa and Crisparkle: ‘When one is in a difficulty, or at a loss, one never knows in what direction a way out may chance to open. It is a business principle of mine, in such a case, not to close up any direction, but to keep an eye on every direction that may present itself. I could relate an anecdote in point, but that it would be premature.’ In that last sentence may not Grewgious refer to the plan for sending Datchery to Cloisterham?
When the novel breaks off, Grewgious is working against Jasper, but only on strong suspicion. If Rosa had reported to him Jasper’s exact words in her final interview with him, that suspicion may have been heightened to certainty. The part allotted to him in the ultimate crisis is that of identifying the remains of Edwin, now hardly distinguishable otherwise, owing to the action of quicklime in the Sapsea tomb, by means of the ring which was on the young man’s person at the time of his murder, and which possessed invincible powers to hold and drag. After giving the ring to Edwin Mr. Grewgious had said ‘Her ring. Will it come back to me? My mind hangs about her ring very uneasily to-night. But this is explainable. I have had it so long, and I have prized it so much. I wonder—’
The ring will come back to him from the dust of death.
It is universally admitted that Datchery was disguised.
Before seeking to identify him with a character already known to us I shall give a short note on the principles and limitations of disguise. Suppose one wishes to disguise himself, how far is it possible for him to succeed? What are the limits within which success is possible?
The question was very carefully discussed in the Berliner Tageblatt for 15th May 1912, under the title ‘On the Psychology of Dissimulation.’ The author, Dr. Hugo Eick, uses the word Verstellung entirely in the sense of mental disguise or purposeful deception. In the closing paragraph he limits the possibilities. His remarks on this question are not without value for the students of certain literary problems.
According to Dr. Eick, the really fundamental things which can never be imitated are all manifestations of positive life. For example, we cannot simulate courage, enthusiasm, humility. It is true that we can reproduce certain distinctive marks of courage and enthusiasm which may deceive the inexperienced; but the essence of these qualities can be expressed only by a person who has experienced them, and who possesses them. A brave man may simulate timidity and cowardice, the man who is capable of enthusiasm may wear the mask of apathetic indolence; all depressive and negative conditions may be imitated. But fulness of life and the sap which quickens it cannot be replaced by any dissimulation. The stupid person may persuade another stupid person to believe in his cleverness. But it is impossible to counterfeit cleverness before a clever person unless we possess a minimum of cleverness, because a certain amount of cleverness is needed for the deception itself. The real tone of truth’s voice can no more be copied than the fiery gleam of enthusiasm. At this point all the arts of deception fail; the voice contradicts the words. The man who possesses something of these qualities of soul can indeed simulate higher degrees of the same qualities, and can exploit them in unlimited measure. But the elemental things of life are inimitable, and lie beyond the reach of falsehood. He who imitates an elemental thing is immediately discovered—supposing, of course, that the discoverer has himself some share in the element.
The idea that Datchery is a new character may safely be dismissed. It is in one of the characters already on the stage that we must find Datchery. I might proceed by taking the characters one by one, and by a process of exhaustion arrive at Datchery. But a simpler way may be to enumerate the qualifications required in Datchery, and to show that one character of the story possesses them all. The claims of the other characters may be then discussed.
Datchery is assigned the task of collecting and co-ordinating all the evidence of diverting suspicion from the innocent Neville Landless, and fixing it on the true criminal. In order to do this satisfactorily he required a combination of qualities.
1. We need mental alertness and ability. Stupidity would be fatal.
2. We need high courage and firm resolution.
3. We need an individual who is at once fearless and skilful, one who knows the art of disguise, one who can assume a new character and carry through the assumption to a triumphant end.
4. We need supremely a character whose whole heart goes with the effort at detection. There must be behind all his actions a passionate, personal, intimate concern. These requirements, I believe, are satisfied in Helena Landless, and in Helena Landless alone. The identification is naturally received at first with a certain measure of incredulity and surprise, but a careful and patient study of the story will confirm it.
The theory was put forth by Mr. Cuming Walters in 1905 in his book Clues to Dickens’s ‘Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ It is one of the most brilliant conjectures or identifications in literary history. In arguing for its truth I must follow largely on the lines of Mr. Cuming Walters, but I hope to supply some fresh and fortifying considerations.
No one will ever understand this problem unless he studies the method of Dickens as explained by Dickens himself in his letter to Wilkie Collins (page 92), and in his reply to the Edinburgh, (page 105). Dickens is supremely an artist, and he tries to insert nothing without a purpose. Sometimes his hints are intended to help at the time, sometimes to mislead temporarily. Sometimes they are intended to be plain when the end is reached, and the reader peruses the story in the light of the conclusion.
1. Helena has the mental alertness and ability which qualified her for the task. It is interesting to see from the original manuscript and the proofs how Dickens kept raising and lowering the lights which fell upon the Landlesses. We have seen from the original manuscript in chapter vi. how Dickens heightened his description of the pair. He changed ‘A handsome young fellow, and a handsome girl; both dark and rich in colour,’ into ‘An unusually handsome, lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome, lithe girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in colour.’ He emphasises Helena’s personal characteristics: ‘Slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound.’ She fought her way through her tragical childhood, was beaten by a cruel stepfather, and would have allowed him to ‘tear her to pieces before she would have let him believe that he could make her shed a tear.’ ‘She had a masterful look.’ Rosa said to her: ‘You seem to have resolution and power enough to crush me. I shrink into nothing by the side of your presence.’ But it is soon manifest that Helena has a tender heart. She and her brother came to the Crisparkles ‘to quarrel with you, and affront you, and break away again.’ But they are touched by Mr. Crisparkle’s kindness, and Helena is more than touched. Neville tells Crisparkle that in describing his own imperfections he is not describing his sister’s. ‘She has come out of the disadvantages of our miserable life, as much better than I am as that cathedral tower is higher than these chimneys.’ Describing the misery of their childhood to Crisparkle, Neville says: ‘You ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued her, though it often cowed me. When we ran away from it (we ran away four times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished), the flight was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first decamped.’ He says again to Crisparkle: ‘You don’t know, sir, what a complete understanding can exist between my sister and me, though no spoken word—perhaps hardly as much as a look—may have passed between us.’