2. She has been from the beginning a born planner and leader. She has shown the daring of a man. When her brother lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short, she tried desperately to tear it out or to bite it off. Yet this strong and fiercely passionate girl had herself under the strictest control.
She had no fear of Jasper. Rosa, Helena, Neville, Jasper, and Edwin meet in Crisparkle’s drawing-room. Rosa is singing under the control of Jasper. She bursts into tears and shrieks out: ‘I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!’ Helena immediately comes to the rescue, and with one swift turn of her lithe figure lays the little beauty on a sofa. Edwin says to Jasper:
‘Not under any circumstances,’ returned Helena.
This to my mind is the first unmistakable suggestion of what was to be developed. Here we have Jasper and Helena falling into enmity almost at the first moment of their meeting, challenging one another to battle. Helena accepts the challenge. Not under any circumstances would she be afraid of Jasper. She lives to redeem that word.
3. Dickens expressly tells us that Helena from her childhood was accustomed to disguise herself as a boy. ‘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.’ This is the strongest reason for the identification of Helena with Datchery. I find it difficult to suppose that any careful student of Dickens will believe that these facts about Helena’s disguise were put in without intent. It was one of those facts which Dickens intended his readers to interpret by the backward look. Those who were amazed when Datchery appeared as Helena would be referred back to the significant words which they had missed.
Helena protects her unhappy brother in London, and plans against his enemies. She surmises that ‘Neville’s movements are watched, and that the purpose of his foes is to isolate him from all friends and acquaintances, and wear out his daily life grain by grain.’ She secures the help of Mr. Tartar.
In her conference with Grewgious, Helena plans for checkmating Jasper, and inquires whether ‘it would be best to wait until any more maligning and pursuing of Neville on the part of this wretch shall disclose itself, or to try to anticipate it.’
4. Helena’s whole heart went with the effort at detection. We have seen her hatred of Jasper. In the conversation between Helena and Rosa about Drood and Jasper, Rosa betrays her horror of Jasper and his mesmeric power over her, which makes her ashamed and passionately hurt. They resume on the same strain.
Says Rosa:
‘But you said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me—who am so much afraid of him—courage to tell only you. Hold me! Stay with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself.’
The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and the wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form. There was a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were then softened with compassion and admiration. Let whomsoever it most concerned look well to it!
This last sentence is another of the unmistakably prophetic sentences in Dickens. Helena was the sworn champion thenceforth of Rosa against Jasper. Helena submits herself to the fairy bride and learns from her what she knows. When Jasper is mentioned and Rosa says, ‘I could not hold any terms with him, could I?’ Helena answers with indignation, ‘You know how I love you, darling. But I would sooner see you dead at his wicked feet.’
As to the close and tender affection between Helena and Neville, and her vehement sympathy with his trial, there is no question. I quote one passage because it seems to me a most striking fact that in the proofs of Dickens the whole of it is struck out:
‘I don’t think so,’ said the Minor Canon. ‘There is duty to be done here; and there are womanly feeling, sense, and courage wanted here.’
‘I meant,’ explained Neville, ‘that the surroundings are so dull and unwomanly, and that Helena can have no suitable friend or society here.’
‘You have only to remember,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that you are here yourself, and that she has to draw you into the sunlight.’
They were silent for a little while, and then Mr. Crisparkle began anew.
‘When we first spoke together, Neville, you told me that your sister had risen out of the disadvantages of your past lives as superior to you as the tower of Cloisterham Cathedral is higher than the chimneys of Minor Canon Corner. Do you remember that?’
‘Right well!’
‘I was inclined to think it at the time an enthusiastic flight. No matter what I think it now. What I would emphasise is, that under the head of Pride your sister is a great and opportune example to you.’
‘Under all heads that are included in the composition of a fine character, she is.’
‘Say so; but take this one. . . . She can dominate it even when it is wounded through her sympathy with you. . . . Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance she has faced malignity and folly for you as only a brave nature well directed can. So it will be with her to the end . . . [pride] which knows no shrinking, and can get no mastery over her.’
Immediately after, Neville says: ‘I will do all I can to imitate her.’
‘Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave woman,’ answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly. In his proof Dickens struck out the words, ‘as she is a truly brave woman.’
It is impossible, I think, to read this and not to see that Dickens is afraid that we may too soon suspect Helena Landless of being Datchery.
Neville’s sufferings under the suspicion are unmistakable and cruel. When Crisparkle saw him he wished that his eyes were not quite so large and quite so bright. ‘I want more sun to shine upon you.’ Neville tells him that he feels marked and tainted even when he goes out at night, and he never goes out in the day. He says, though Dickens did not mean us to read the sentence: ‘It seems a little hard to be so tied to a stake, and innocent; but I don’t complain.’
Such are the main reasons that induce me to believe that Helena is Datchery. It is admitted on all hands that she was meant to play an important part in the story. What part does she play if she is not Datchery?
But the proof that impresses me as much as any other is to be found in the passage: ‘John Jasper’s lamp is kindled and his lighthouse is shining when Mr. Datchery returns alone towards it. As mariners on a dangerous voyage, approaching an iron-bound coast, may look along the beams of the warning light to the haven lying beyond it that may never be reached, so Mr. Datchery’s wistful gaze is directed to this beacon and beyond.’ The detective of whom this is written cannot possibly be a mere detective. His heart is engaged in the search. This fits Helena, and Helena only, of all the characters that have been brought forward. A professional detective paid by Grewgious could never have behaved in that way. Helena’s whole heart was in the business. She had to relieve her fondly-loved brother from a cruel weight of anxiety and suspicion. She had to bring a villain whose baseness she thoroughly knew to justice. She had to liberate the girl friend she loved from persecution, and she looked to a beyond, to the haven—the haven of Crisparkle’s love.
Datchery wears a wig, and it is unusually large, as though a woman’s hair were concealed under it. As Mr. Cuming Walters also points out, Helena undoubtedly had a strong motive for not sacrificing her hair to the disguise, for she was unmistakably in love with Crisparkle.
There is no doubt that if Datchery was Helena, one of her chief difficulties must have been with her hands.
Miss Stirling Graeme, the author of Mystifications, had a marvellous power of disguising herself. ‘There was nothing extraordinary about her,’ says Dr. John Brown, ‘but let her put on the old lady; it was as if a warlock spell had passed over her; not merely her look, but her nature was changed: her spirit had passed into the character she represented; and jest, quick retort, whimsical fancy, the wildest nonsense flowed from her lips, with a freedom and truth to nature which appeared to be impossible in her own personality.’
Sir Walter Scott in his Journal for 7th March 1828 tells us that when she returned to her party in the character of an old Scottish lady she deceived every one. ‘The prosing account she gave of her son, the antiquary, who found an auld wig in a slate quarry, was extremely ludicrous, and she puzzled the Professor of Agriculture with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the parks around her old mansion-house. No person to whom the secret was not entrusted had the least guess of an impostor, except one shrewd young lady present, who observed the hand narrowly, and saw it was plumper than the age of the lady seemed to warrant.’
In the Daily Mail of 4th April 1912 there is an account of two girls who lived together, passing as husband and wife. The man with whom they lodged said: ‘The husband’s hands were so small and soft that both my wife and myself were suspicious.’
I ask the attention of readers to the manner in which Dickens refers to Datchery’s hands. I do not lay too much stress on these indications, but they deserve consideration.
1. We read in chapter xviii. about Datchery in the coffee-room of the Crozier, ‘as he stood with his back to the empty fireplace waiting for his fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry.’ (‘Empty’ was an afterthought on Dickens’s part.) Here we have Datchery keeping his hands out of view.
2. A little after, Datchery asks the waiter to take his hat down for a moment from the peg. If he had stretched out his own hand it might have been noticed.
3. Later in the same chapter, when Datchery meets Jasper and the Mayor, he does not shake hands with them. ‘“I beg pardon,” said Mr. Datchery, making a leg with his hat under his arm.’ Originally this was written ‘hat in hand.’ If he carried his hat under his arm, one hand would be buried in the hat.
4. Afterwards we read of Datchery following Jasper and the Mayor, ‘with his hat under his arm, and his shock of white hair streaming in the evening breeze.’
5. When Datchery is talking to the opium woman, ‘he lounges along, like the chartered bore of the city, with his uncovered grey hair blowing about, and his purposeless hands rattling the loose money in the pockets of his trousers.’ His hands are thus out of sight. Immediately after we find him ‘still rattling his loose money,’ and again, ‘still rattling.’
6. At last he begins to count out the sum demanded of him by the opium woman. ‘Greedily watching his hands, she continues to hold forth on the great example set him.’ Of course, she may merely be watching for the money in his hands, but there may be something more in it than this. Let it be noted that Dickens originally wrote, ‘Greedily watching him,’ and inserted ‘his hands’ later.
7. Immediately after ‘Mr. Datchery drops some money, stoops to pick it up.’ In all the scene with the opium woman he keeps his hands out of sight as much as possible, and when he does show them they strike the old woman.
I may add, though much has been said about the possibility of detecting by means of the voice, this does not appear by any means to be impossible, or even very difficult. Only one meeting between Jasper and Helena is recorded. Her voice is described as low and rich. Even if he had talked with Datchery, it is more than doubtful whether he would have known the voice again, music-master though he was. Datchery, if our supposition is right, was an expert in disguise, and could have carried it off. I find in the pleasant Recollections and Impressions of Mrs. Sellar that she had no difficulty in deceiving her nearest friends. She tells us how one day, when Sir David and Lady Brewster were dining with the Sellars at St. Andrews, after dinner Lady Brewster begged her to dress up and take in Sir David:
‘“But what will account for my absence?”
‘“Oh, you have been obliged to go to bed with one of your headaches; and I’ll introduce the stranger.”
‘So I went upstairs, put on a false front, and was announced as Miss Craig. On the gentlemen coming in I was specially introduced to Sir David, but not being at all attractive-looking, he soon left me for younger and fairer friends! Determined he should take some notice of me, I said I would not play the piano unless Sir David asked me; and on this being told him he muttered: “God bless the woman! what does she mean! I don’t know her.”’ [163]
Mr. Lang says: ‘A young lady of my acquaintance successfully passed herself off on her betrothed as her own cousin—also a young lady—and Dickens had not to imagine anything so unlikely as that.’
To this I may add that Scott tells a story of Garrick and his wife. Mrs. Garrick was an accomplished actress, but once she witnessed an entertainment in which was introduced a farmer giving his neighbours an account of the wonders seen on a visit to London. The character was received with such peals of applause that Mrs. Garrick began to think it rivalled those which had been so lately lavished on Richard the Third. At last she observed her little spaniel dog was making efforts to get towards the balcony which separated him from the facetious farmer. Then she became aware of the truth. ‘How strange,’ she said, ‘that a dog should know his master, and a woman, in the same circumstances, should not recognise her husband!’ [164a]
So strong is the evidence for Helena Landless being Datchery that even the chief advocates of the Proctor theory have fully admitted its force. Dr. M. R. James says: ‘I will go as far as this: if Edwin is dead, then Datchery is Helena.’ [164b] Mr. Andrew Lang over and over again admitted that Datchery might be Helena. But he contended that, if so, the idea of Dickens is improbable with the worst sort of improbability, is terribly far-fetched, and fails to interest. ‘It is the idea of a bad sixpenny novel. We are asked to credit Dickens with the highest scientific skill, and this egregious invention is the result of his science. The idea would have been rejected by Mr. Guy Boothby. But it does not follow that Mr. Walters has not hit on Dickens’s idea. If he has, Edwin Drood is far below Count Robert of Paris in its first uncorrected state, as the public will never know it.’
There is something in this argument, and it has never yet been fairly met, but I believe that I can show that the idea was probably suggested to Dickens by one figure in real life, and another figure in fiction. So far as I am aware these suggestions are made for the first time.
In the Bancroft Recollections, Lady Bancroft writes on page 31:
My first part at the Strand Theatre was Pippo, in his burlesque The Maid and the Magpie, which proved an immense success, and I established myself as a leading favourite. It was not until the Life of Charles Dickens was published that I knew his opinion of this performance. Dickens had written years before, in a letter to John Forster, these words:
‘I went to the Strand Theatre, having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I really wish you would go to see The Maid and the Magpie burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that ever I have seen on the stage—the boy Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn’t be done at all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. She does an imitation of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels—wonderfully clever—which, in the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you cannot imagine a woman’s doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance, the levity, impulse, and spirits of it are so exactly like a boy, that you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. I never have seen such a curious thing, and the girl’s talent is unchallengeable. I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original.’
Lady Bancroft adds: ‘Charles Dickens’s being impressed with my likeness to a boy reminds me that on the first night I acted in The Middy Ashore, one of the staff came up to me at the wings and said: “Beg pardon, young sir, you must go back to your seat; no strangers are allowed behind the scenes.”’ From this it must be inferred that Dickens had there that evening a new idea as to the possibilities of disguise. Dickens’s letter was written in 1859.
I believe that Dickens in this Datchery assumption was mainly influenced by Wilkie Collins. Most writers on Dickens have observed his admiration for Collins, the way in which he co-operated with him, and the high value he placed on his work. The Moonstone has been referred to in this connection, but I venture to think that the novel which led Dickens to his idea was No Name. I have already printed (page 91) Dickens’s wildly enthusiastic testimony to its merits. He placed it far above The Woman in White, and far above The Moonstone. In particular, he admired the character of Magdalen Vanstone.
In No Name we are introduced to a charming family—husband, wife, and two daughters—the Vanstones. Then it turns out that the parents are unmarried. The husband made a great mistake in marrying a bad woman in his early youth, and is nearly ruined in consequence. He induces a good woman to live with him as his wife, and he has a fortune of £80,000. By a singular mischance both he and the mother die suddenly about the same time. Vanstone had made a will leaving his property to the daughters, but just before the death of his wife he discovers that his real wife is dead, and so they go out and get married. The law is that marriage abolishes all past wills. The consequence is that the will is not effective, and the two daughters are left without a penny, and without a name. What are the girls to do? The younger, Magdalen, has great force of character, and shows a talent for the stage. She resolves to revenge herself on her father’s brother who has taken all the money. Instead of going to work as an ordinary actress, she gives performances of her own. She is very clever at acting different parts. She disguises herself as an old woman, and in all sorts of disguises. She is nineteen, almost the age of Helena Landless. Here is a description of the way in which she disguises herself:
I found all the dresses in the box complete—with one remarkable exception. That exception was the dress of the old north-country lady; the character which I have already mentioned as the best of all my pupil’s disguises, and as modelled in voice and manner on her old governess, Miss Garth. The wig; the eyebrows; the bonnet and veil; the cloak, padded inside to disfigure her back and shoulders; the paints and cosmetics used to age her face and alter her complexion—were all gone. Nothing but the gown remained; a gaudily flowered silk, useful enough for dramatic purposes, but too extravagant in colour and pattern to bear inspection by daylight. The other parts of the dress are sufficiently quiet to pass muster; the bonnet and veil are only old-fashioned, and the cloak is of a sober grey colour. But one plain inference can be drawn from such a discovery as this. As certainly as I sit here, she is going to open the campaign against Noel Vanstone and Mrs. Lecount, in a character which neither of those two persons can have any possible reason for suspecting at the outset—the character of Miss Garth.
What course am I to take under these circumstances? Having got her secret, what am I to do with it? These are awkward considerations; I am rather puzzled how to deal with them.
It is something more than the mere fact of her choosing to disguise herself to forward her own private ends that causes my present perplexity. Hundreds of girls take fancies for disguising themselves; and hundreds of instances of it are related year after year, in the public journals. But my ex-pupil is not to be confounded, for one moment, with the average adventuress of the newspapers. She is capable of going a long way beyond the limit of dressing herself like a man, and imitating a man’s voice and manner. She has a natural gift for assuming characters, which I have never seen equalled by a woman; and she has performed in public until she has felt her own power, and trained her talent for disguising herself to the highest pitch. A girl who takes the sharpest people unawares by using such a capacity as this to help her own objects in private life; and who sharpens that capacity by a determination to fight her way to her own purpose which has beaten down everything before it, up to this time—is a girl who tries an experiment in deception, new enough and dangerous enough to lead one way or the other, to very serious results. This is my conviction founded on a large experience in the art of imposing on my fellow-creatures. I say of my fair relative’s enterprise what I never said or thought of it till I introduced myself to the inside of her box. The chances for and against her winning the fight for her lost fortune are now so evenly balanced that I cannot for the life of me see on which side the scale inclines. All I can discern is, that it will, to a dead certainty, turn one way or the other on the day when she passes Noel Vanstone’s doors in disguise.
I am not prepared to criticise Dickens’s plot as Mr. Lang has done. If Wilkie Collins made an admirable heroine of Magdalen Vanstone disguising herself variously, why should not Dickens succeed in making a character as wonderful and more attractive of Helena Landless? There is nothing to be condemned in the idea itself. It has been used by masters, and used successfully. There would have been nothing to condemn, I believe, in Dickens’s way of working it out if he had lived to complete his book. The comparison with Guy Boothby is singularly inept.
The objections that have been made to the Datchery-Helena theory turn mainly on the supposed disgracefulness of Dickens deceiving his readers as he did, and working out a melodramatic idea. These objections might have been, and, I believe, would have been, scattered to the winds by the complete story.
The most serious objection to the identification of Datchery as Helena is the confusion in the chronology. This is admirably stated by Dr. Jackson, who examines in a masterly way the arrangement of the chapters. He comes to the conclusion that chapter xviii. has been introduced prematurely. It ought to have followed chapter xxii. If Dickens had lived to issue the fifth and sixth monthly instalments, he would have placed our chapter xviii. without the alteration of a single word after chapter xxii., next before chapter xxiii. We know that Dickens told his sister-in-law that he was afraid the Datchery assumption in the fifth number was premature. Dr. Jackson gives us a full and valuable examination of the manuscript so far as its arrangement is concerned. I have tested his statements in every point, and can only confirm them. To Dr. Jackson’s chapter ix., ‘The Manuscript,’ I refer the reader.
There are other objections. In particular, some are troubled by Datchery’s masculine ways. They ask how Helena, fresh from Ceylon, should have known the old tavern way of keeping scores. There is not much in this. In fact, these scores, which could have served no purpose, seem to me the natural expression of a buoyant girl rejoicing in her achievements. A cool-headed, middle-aged detective would never have expressed himself in such a way. Why should not Helena have known about tavern scoring? She was accustomed to walk with her brother Neville, and in the course of their walks they may very likely have visited a tavern now and then. We read of Neville finding his way to a tavern when he walked away that dark night. In Phineas Finn, at the end of chapter lxxi., Trollope, reporting the conversation of two high-born ladies, Lady Laura Kennedy and Miss Violet Effingham, has this:
‘Was I not to forgive him—I who had turned myself away from him with a fixed purpose the moment that I found that he had made a mark upon my heart? I could not wipe off that mark, and yet I married. Was he not to try to wipe off his mark?’
‘It seems that he wiped it off very quickly; and since that he has wiped off another mark. One doesn’t know how many marks he has wiped off. They are like the innkeeper’s score which he makes in chalk. A damp cloth brings them all away, and leaves nothing behind.’
This shows, at least, that chalk-marking is not a matter of esoteric knowledge in England, but is known to high and low. I may note that Dickens inserted the adjective ‘uncouth’—‘a few uncouth, chalked strokes’—over his original manuscript, to make it clear no doubt that the scorer was an amateur at the business.
Then there are objections to Datchery’s masculine fare—fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry; bread and cheese, and salad and ale. It must be remembered that Helena was in disguise. This was not a mere disguise of dress, but it was a disguise of everything. She was assuming a character and carrying it out. She had all the ability and all the will for accomplishing this. In doing masculine things she was simply carrying out her disguise. A woman passing for a man must do what a man would do or she will fail, and be found out.
It has been suggested that if Datchery is Helena, and therefore knows the Gatehouse, why does she give it ‘a second look of some interest’? Dr. Jackson replies very well that the house for her has now a new importance, and is the object upon which her thoughts are to be concentrated for weeks, and perhaps for months. But Dickens did not mean this passage to be printed, for good reasons of his own.
This leads us to note that certain passages which have been much discussed were not meant for publication by Dickens. That is, he struck them out in proof. Dr. Jackson points out that in chapter xviii., when Datchery consults the waiter at the Crozier about ‘a fair lodging for a single buffer,’ he is obviously asking to be recommended to Tope’s. The waiter is puzzled at first. When Mr. Datchery asks for ‘something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient,’ the waiter shakes his head. ‘Anything cathedraly, now?’ Mr. Datchery suggested. Then comes the mention of Tope. Datchery boggles about the cathedral tower seeking for lodgings, but Dickens did not mean us to read the words: ‘With a general impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope’s was somewhere very near it, and that, like the children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was warm in his search when he saw the tower, and cold when he didn’t see it.’
When the Deputy pointed out Jasper’s, first Dickens wrote ‘“Indeed?” said Mr. Datchery, with an appearance of interest.’ Then he wrote: ‘“Indeed?” said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some interest.’ Then he struck out the sentence entirely.
Dickens also struck out the sentence which describes Datchery after the Deputy left him: ‘Mr. Datchery, taking off his hat to give that shock of white hair of his another shake, seemed quite resigned, and betook himself whither he had been directed.’ He also struck out the passage in which Mrs. Tope and Datchery talk of what occurred last winter:
Perhaps Mr. Datchery had heard something of what had occurred there last winter?
Mr. Datchery had as confused a knowledge of the event in question, on trying to recall it, as he well could have. He begged Mrs. Tope’s pardon when she found it incumbent on her to correct him in every detail of his summary of the facts, but pleaded that he was merely a single buffer getting through life upon his means as idly as he could, and that so many people were so constantly making away with so many other people as to render it difficult for a buffer of an easy temper to preserve the circumstances of the several cases unmixed in his mind.
Nearly all the conversation between the Mayor and Datchery is deleted. See page 9.
Also Dickens erases the little talk between the Deputy and Datchery beginning: ‘Master Deputy, what do you owe me?’ See page 11.
It may not be possible to deduce any assured inference from these omissions, but they are worth pondering, and may be referred to again.
One opposing theory is that Datchery was Drood. With all respect for the scholars who have propounded it, this appears to me a purely comic notion. It is the most fantastical of all fancies as to who was Datchery. As Dr. Blake Odgers points out, every one at Cloisterham knew the murdered man: a mere white wig would be no disguise at all. I may add that if Jasper had discovered him he would almost be justified in finishing the murder this time. For what would be Drood’s object? The theory is that, in spite of his being drugged, throttled, perhaps thrown from a tower, at all events buried in quicklime, and in all probability locked up in the tomb, Drood got away when his uncle was triumphantly flinging his watch and scarf-pin into the river. Supposing it were so, what was Drood doing while he watched his uncle? Is it said that he was so bemused by the opium that he did not know who had handled him in such a murderous fashion? This is very hard to believe. Mr. Andrew Lang himself says: ‘Fancy can suggest no reason why Edwin Drood, if he escaped from his wicked uncle, should go spying about instead of coming openly forward.’ Mr. Archer says the flaw is that the theory provides no motive whatever for Drood’s disguising himself as Datchery. Why should Drood devote himself to an elaborate scheme of revenge upon his near kinsman and friend? He would want to hush the matter up, and save Jasper from himself. Why did Drood let Neville lie under the suspicion of murder, and why was not Rosa let into the secret? It is hardly worth while to point out that there is nothing in Drood’s character as given us which could have enabled him to show the ability, the composure, and the self-control of Datchery. Who could have supplied him with money to live idly at Cloisterham? His money was all locked up till he came of age, and Jasper was his guardian and trustee. If Grewgious supplied the money, why did not Grewgious make an end of Neville’s misery?
A far more plausible theory is that Datchery was Bazzard. Dickens almost invites readers to connect Bazzard with Datchery when he makes Grewgious say to Rosa when she came up to London that Bazzard ‘was off duty here altogether just at present, and a firm downstairs with whom I have business relations lend me a substitute.’ (The words ‘here altogether’ were added by Dickens.)
I have no doubt that Dickens in some way meant to explain Bazzard’s business. But that Bazzard should have been Datchery will appear a sheer impossibility to careful students of Dickens. Proctor, whose side remarks are often excellent, puts the point briefly as follows: ‘No one at all familiar with Dickens’s method would for a moment imagine that Datchery is Bazzard, Mr. Grewgious’s clerk. Bazzard was as certainly intended to come to grief, and be exposed in the sequel as was Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend.’
Mr. Cuming Walters says: ‘Literary art rebels against the idea. Bazzard was one of Dickens’s favourite low comedy characters.’
Dr. James dismisses the Bazzard theory ‘because Buzzard in his first and principal appearance has too much both of the fool and of the knave about him to develop into the Datchery whom we are intended to admire.’
Dr. Jackson says: ‘Capacity can ape incapacity, but incapacity cannot ape capacity. This being so, I am sure that Bazzard, who is not only “particularly angular, but also somnolent, dull, incompetent, egotistical, is wholly incapable of playing the part of the supple, quick-witted, resolute, dignified Datchery.”’ In these judgments I agree. Bazzard has no ethical quality. He has not the smallest personal interest in the discovery. How could it be said of Bazzard that his ‘wistful gaze is directed to this beacon, and beyond?’
As the theory is obvious and popular, it may be worth while to say something more, and Dr. Hugo Eick’s words, as previously quoted, may help us. Helena Landless had the elemental qualities needed for the Datchery role. Note that among Shakespeare’s heroines who masquerade as men, Rosalind, in As you Like It, and Julia, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, have not these elemental qualities and are suspected. Portia has them, and even her own husband does not know her in her doctor’s robes. She is recognised by all as a young doctor, but not one person in court thinks ‘There is a woman!’ Bazzard might have imitated depressive and negative conditions, but he could not have imitated the qualities of positive life. ‘Fulness of life and the sap which quickens it cannot be replaced by any dissimulation.’
It should also be noted that if Bazzard was Datchery, he had no occasion to disguise himself in a huge white wig, for he was not known in Cloisterham.
The theory that Datchery was Grewgious may be dismissed in a sentence. Grewgious with his ‘awkward and hesitating manner,’ his ‘shambling walk,’ his ‘scanty flat crop of hair,’ his ‘smooth head,’ his ‘short sight,’ his general angularity fits in no way the watchful, courtly, adroit, fluent, and versatile Datchery.
Mr. Lang has a wild conjecture somewhere that Neville was Datchery, and that Helena was disguised as Neville. It is difficult to treat this seriously. Neville would inevitably have been found out. His cause was undertaken by his friends, and his business was to study and wait. Why on earth should Helena disguise herself as Neville?
There is something more attractive about this theory, and it has been very well argued by Mr. G. F. Gadd in the Dickensian, vol. ii. p. 13. Mr. Gadd uses the argument ‘with a second look of some interest,’ as showing Datchery’s ignorance of Cloisterham. He quotes Tartar’s phrase ‘being an idle man,’ as corresponding with the ‘idle buffer living on his means.’ He suggests that Dickens at this point of his story avails himself of the licence not unfrequent in fiction of temporarily abandoning the strictly chronological order. He suggests that Tartar as a seafaring man might know something of opium smoking, and compares the wistful gaze directed to this beacon and beyond, to what is said about Tartar as he and Rosa entered his chambers at Staple Inn. ‘Rosa thought . . . that his far-seeing eyes looked as if they had been used to watch danger afar off, and to watch it without flinching, drawing nearer and nearer.’
But, as Dr. Jackson points out, Tartar has his duties assigned to him. He has to watch over Neville and see him almost daily. Again, Tartar does not know about Cloisterham and the Drood mystery what Datchery knows and needs to know. ‘Thirdly, I doubt whether the cheery, straightforward, simple-minded Tartar is capable of Datchery’s versatility, subtlety, and address.’ To this I add that Tartar’s heart is not engaged in the business as Helena’s is. Also what need is there for his disguise? He has never been in Cloisterham, and nobody there knows him.
For these reasons we conclude that Helena and no other is Datchery. I have taken no account of the theory that Datchery is an unknown person. An unknown person could not possess the necessary qualities of heart.
How Edwin Drood was to end is a problem which can only be solved to a certain extent. We find we are left in the middle, and as much mystery remains as fully justifies the title. We do not know the precise manner in which the murder was accomplished. In particular, we are left ignorant as to the way in which the crime is to be brought home to the victim. We cannot define the relations of the opium woman to Drood and Jasper and the Landlesses. We do not know the history of Jasper’s early years. We can do no more than speculate, and the speculations must be confined within strict limits. The first question is, whether Dickens himself knew how he was going to extricate and complete his narrative.
Scott has left us the astonishing statement [184] that ‘I have generally written to the middle of one of these novels without having the least idea how it was to end.’ Mr. Skene, a true friend of Sir Walter Scott, tells us [185] that when Scott described to him the scheme which he had formed for Anne of Geierstein, he suggested to him that he might with advantage connect the history of René, king of Provence, in which subject Skene had special means of helping him. Scott accepted the suggestion, ‘and the whole dénouement of the story of Anne of Geierstein was changed, and the Provence part woven into it, in the form in which it ultimately came forth.’
Was Dickens in the same case when death interrupted him in his work?
Was this an ‘apoplectic’ novel?
Scott speaks frankly of Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous being his ‘apoplectic books.’ Does Edwin Drood bear the same relation to the body of Dickens’s work as Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous bear to the Waverley Novels? Mr. Lang, whose views on this subject varied much, in one of his later writings takes the view that Dickens was deeply embarrassed. He says: ‘It is melancholy to think of this great and terribly overtasked genius tormented by fears that were only too real.’ He finds the story wandering on, living from hand to mouth, full of absurdities. He thinks that Dickens was very capable of changing his original purpose, and saving the life of Edwin.
There is no doubt that Dickens was puzzled about the order of his chapters. Forster tells us that Dickens ‘became a little nervous about the course of the tale from a fear that he might have plunged too soon into the incidents leading on to the catastrophe such as the Datchery assumption (a misgiving he had certainly expressed to his sister-in-law).’ I have already expressed agreement with Dr. Jackson in his plan for renumbering the chapters. Unless this plan is adopted there is chronological confusion. Also there is no doubt that Dickens had been working under terrific strain. But the testimony of those who knew him best is that his faculties were never brighter and stronger than they were in his last months.
The same impression is left upon me by his unfinished novel. Those who dislike Dickens’s later manner may easily find faults. They may say that Honeythunder is grotesque rather than amusing. They may say that Jasper’s courtship of Rosa is melodramatic and wolfish. I confess to being perpetually puzzled by the account of Neville’s capture on the morning after the murder. Why was he pursued in that manner? All that was known against him was that he had been with Edwin on the previous night. He is only eight miles away from Cloisterham, and stopping at a roadside tavern to refresh. He starts again on his journey, and becomes aware of other pedestrians behind him coming up at a faster pace than his. He stands aside to let them pass, but only four pass. Other four slackened speed, and loitered as if intending to follow him when he should go on. The remainder of the party (half a dozen, perhaps) turn and go back at a great rate. Among those who go back is Mr. Crisparkle. Nobody speaks, but they all look at him. Four walk in advance and four in the rear. Thus he is beset, and stops as a last test, and they all stop. He asks:
‘Why do you attend upon me in this way? . . . Are you a pack of thieves?’
‘Don’t answer him,’ said one of the number. . . . ‘Better be quiet. . . .’
‘I will not submit to be penned in,’ says Neville; ‘I mean to pass those four in front.’
They all stand still, and he shoulders his heavy stick and quickens his pace. The largest and strongest man of the number dexterously closes with him and goes down with him, but not before the heavy stick has descended smartly. Naturally Neville is utterly bewildered. Two of them hold his arms and lead him back into a group whose central figures are Jasper and Crisparkle. Why on earth did not Crisparkle speak to him at the beginning, and tell him what had happened? All this is somnambulistic.
There seems to be a slight slip in chapter ii.
Jasper’s room at the Gatehouse is described. It has an unfinished picture of a blooming schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece. At the upper end of the room Mr. Jasper opens a door and discloses a small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared for supper.
‘Fixed as the look the young fellow meets is, there is yet in it some strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the chimneypiece.’ They dine in the inner room. The cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a decanter of rich coloured sherry are placed upon the table.
‘How’s she looking, Jack?’
Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he returns: ‘Very like your sketch indeed.’
‘I am a little proud of it,’ says the young fellow, glancing up at the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the air.
Dickens seems to have forgotten that the sketch is in the other room.
It seems to me that these are slips, but I do not find any other readers have taken the same view. With these exceptions, the story seems to be one of Dickens’s best books. Its grasp of local colour and detail is as strong as ever it was. There is much of his old humour in the Mayor, in Miss Twinkleton’s Girls’ School, in Billickin, in Durdles and his attendant imp. Also the story is constructed with the greatest care and ingenuity. Any one who carefully goes over the manuscript and the proofs will see that Dickens had a plan in his mind that he half revealed and half concealed, that his phrases and details are chosen with the nicest care, and that he meant to reward those who at the end could take a ‘backward look’ by the delight they would experience in seeing how everything had been scrupulously planned and artistically conducted to a climax. We cannot do justice to the book in its present state. But Dickens’s royal genius was at its full, and would have vindicated itself. He had set himself deliberately to carrying out a plot far more exact than he had ever attempted, and the end was in view from the beginning.
This is not to say that the reason of every incident and every description was disclosed from the first. I have previously discussed Edgar Allan Poe’s reading of Barnaby Rudge, and shown that his perception, keen as it was, yielded him less than he thought. I have shown how Dickens prepared the plan for Little Dorrit from the start of his book. It may be traced now, but without the ‘backward glance’ it would not have been easy to trace it.
We may also say with some confidence that no new characters of importance would have been introduced to us in the second half. In the chapter ‘Half Way with Dickens’ I have shown that this is the case with five of his principal books. The conclusion is not stringent, for Dickens was free to change his method. But it may be said to be highly probable; if it is true we are left to conjecture the part that the various characters would have played in the winding up of the tale.
The book was to end with the capture and conviction of Jasper. I have already written of the part played and to be played by Grewgious. Another hunter of Jasper was Durdles. The task assigned to Durdles among the hunters is fairly clear. Sooner or later, by tapping round the Sapsea monument he is to discover the presence of ‘a wheen banes,’ or at least of some unsuspected ‘rubbish.’ He had put the inscription on the monument before Christmas, and had no doubt satisfied himself then that all was safe. ‘When Durdles puts a touch or a finish upon his work, no matter where, inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his work all round, and see that his work is a-doing him credit.’
Having made his inspection when the epitaph was put on, Durdles would have no further curiosity about the tomb until, in the following summer, he took Mr. Datchery on a rambling expedition as he had taken Jasper. His peculiar gift, like that of the bloodhound, is to aid in tracking down the quarry.
Deputy has also his part to play. From the first Jasper hates and fears Deputy, and there are signs near the close of Edwin Drood that this strange boy, who has some characteristics in common with Dickie Sludge, of Kenilworth, is to form a close alliance with Datchery. The ugliest side of Jasper’s character displays itself in his treatment of the ‘young imp employed by Durdles.’ The chanting of the line, ‘Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning,’ has for him a note of menace. With the fury of a devil he leaps upon the boy when he emerges from the crypt with Durdles, and hears a sharp whistle rending the silence. ‘I will shed the blood of that impish wretch!’ he cries; ‘I know I shall do it.’ Durdles has to appeal to him not to hurt the boy. ‘He followed us to-night, when we first came here,’ says Jasper. ‘He has been prowling near us ever since.’
Deputy denies both accusations. ‘I’d only just come out for my ’elth when I see you two a-coming out of the Kinfreederal.’
What has Deputy actually seen? He may have testimony to give of the most vital consequence, but even if he has seen nothing of Jasper’s movements while Durdles lies asleep, or of his approach to the Sapsea monument, he will tell Mr. Datchery of that furious onslaught when Jasper clutched his throat and threatened to kill him. He will prove a very useful ally of the hunters.
It seems quite inconceivable that either Durdles or Deputy could have known the whole secret and kept it. Neither of them was capable of keeping a secret long. But they might have suspicions, and they might and would know circumstances which when rightly interpreted led to the inevitable conclusion.
I cannot but think that the chief part in the coming narrative was to be played by the opium woman. The novel from the very first page has a touch of the East. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone the Indians did their part, and then vanished from the scene. But in Edwin Drood we have the Landlesses from Ceylon with a touch of dark blood, or at least of the Eastern spirit. Mr. Lang is in excess of the facts when he calls them Eurasians, and Dickens hesitates in ascribing black blood to them. They are more probably gypsies. We have also the connection of Edwin Drood with the East. There is more than a suggestion of dark blood in John Jasper. Above all, we have the opium woman. What was the connection between John Jasper and the opium woman? What was John Jasper’s history before he came to Cloisterham?
We do not know, but conjectures have been hazarded. Mr. Cuming Walters thinks that the opium woman’s hatred of Jasper may be due to the fact that Jasper has wronged a child of the woman’s. He also conjectures that Jasper may be the son of the opium woman. Dr. Jackson conjectures that Jasper seduces a young girl who had treated the old woman kindly, that he neglected this girl for Rosa, that the girl committed suicide, and that the old woman devoted herself to the pursuit of the betrayer. All this is mere speculation. We have really no means of judging whether the speculation is true or not. It does seem that the woman’s peculiar hatred of Jasper must have an origin and a grave cause. Miss Stoddart suggests that the opium woman was not wholly degraded, and that she is horrified by Jasper’s continually repeated threatenings while under the influence of opium; that her sympathies have been wakened for that hapless Ned who bears a threatened name, and she resolves to do her best to serve him. With an honest purpose she makes her way before Christmas to Cloisterham. She loses sight of Jasper, but actually meets Edwin Drood. The kind act of that young stranger causes her to unload her conscience, and she bids him be thankful that his name is not Ned. At her second visit in the summer she knows from Jasper’s confessions under her own roof that the long premeditated crime has actually taken place, and her object in visiting Cloisterham is to gather evidence that may serve the ends of justice. This sunken creature has a task assigned to her, and she fulfils it.
I am not sure that Dickens means to throw any redeeming light on the character of the opium woman. She has been wronged; she is seeking vengeance, and at last, she finds it. How this comes to pass Dickens meant to tell us, but he meant, no doubt, to surprise us in the telling.
My own belief is that Dickens intended to surprise his readers by telling them of some unsuspected blood relationship between his characters. Surprises of this kind are given in his novels. No reader of Oliver Twist could have guessed from the first part Oliver’s relationship to Monks and the Maylies. Who would have supposed from the first half of Nicholas Nickleby that Smike was the son of Ralph?
‘That, boy,’ repeated Ralph, looking vacantly at him.
‘Whom I saw stretched dead and cold upon his bed, and who is now in his grave—’
‘Who is now in his grave,’ echoed Ralph, like one who talks in his sleep.
The man raised his eyes, and clasped his hands solemnly together:
‘—Was your only son, so help me God in heaven!’
In the midst of a dead silence Ralph sat down, pressing his two hands upon his temples. He removed them after a minute, and never was there seen, part of a living man undisfigured by any wound, such a ghastly face as he then disclosed.
Again, who would have supposed from the early part of Great Expectations that Estella was the daughter of Abel Magwitch? [196]
In Barnaby Rudge, Maypole Hugh turns out to be an illegitimate son of Sir John Chester. In The Old Curiosity Shop, ‘The Stranger’ is found to be the brother of the Grandfather. In Bleak House, Esther Summerson is revealed as a daughter of Lady Dedlock. In Our Mutual Friend, John Rokesmith turns out to be John Harmon.
That the action of opium had a part to play in the revelation can hardly be doubted. The whole book is drenched in opium. In The Moonstone the problem is who stole the jewels. It is solved by opium. The jewels are stolen by a man under the influence of opium surreptitiously administered. He is quite unconscious of what he has done, and remains unconscious. Afterwards he is discovered by a fresh administration of opium. When the opium has completely done its work the man repeats his deed, and the experiment is conclusive.
I do not think that any one reading right on would name the perpetrator of the theft, and yet when we take a backward glance we find an account of a dinner-party about the seventieth page which gives the clue. I doubt whether any one on first reading it would see in it anything that mattered, and yet it contains everything that matters. The height of art in work like this is to conceal art. You may be able at an early stage to introduce facts which contain the ultimate solution of your problem, and yet appear important enough to be stated for their own sake. The solution of the problem, or rather the materials of the solution, should be given, and yet the reader should be unable to detect the full significance of the preliminary statement till the complete clearing arrives. At the same time the book will not be satisfactory if details are superfluous, if they do nothing to carry one on to the dissipation of the mystery.
It is not to be denied that this fitting of everything into its place is at times a little wearisome. ‘The construction is most minute and most wonderful,’ wrote Anthony Trollope of Wilkie Collins. ‘I can never lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past two on Tuesday morning, or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone.’ There is truth in this, but if Anthony Trollope had written a novel of mystery, which perhaps he could never have done, he would have had to take the same path.
Another doctor in The Moonstone tells us that the ignorant distrust of opium in England spreads through all classes, so much so, that every doctor in large practice finds himself every now and then obliged to deceive his patients by giving them opium under a disguise. He himself claims that opium saved his life. He suffered from an incurable internal complaint, but he was determined to live in order to provide for a person very dear to him. ‘To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my sentence of death.’
Like Collins, Dickens was keenly interested in the possibilities of opium. Collins himself was a lavish consumer of the drug, but I do not think it has been suggested that Dickens himself ever touched it. Nor is it likely, for Dickens with all his tenseness of nerve was an eminently self-controlled and temperate man. But in Edwin Drood he has inserted a sentence in praise of opium. The opium woman says to Datchery: ‘It’s opium, deary. Neither more nor less. And it’s like a human creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but seldom what can be said in its praise.’ The last sentence was an afterthought on the part of Dickens. It has been written in.
As to whether Jasper was made ultimately to repeat his crime in any fashion under the influence of opium, it is impossible to say. He was unquestionably more or less under the influence of the drug when he committed it.
The literary men of Dickens’s period were much interested in the action of drugs, in mesmerism, and the like. Elliotson, to whom Pendennis is dedicated, was on intimate terms with Dickens. Dickens plainly implies that Crisparkle went to the weir because Jasper willed him to do so. Collins and Dickens were both addicted to calling witnesses to their accuracy. At the close of Armadale, Collins says: ‘Wherever the story touches on questions connected with law, medicine, or chemistry, it has been submitted before publication to the experience of professional men. The kindness of a friend supplied me with a plan of the doctor’s apparatus—I saw the chemical ingredients at work before I ventured on describing the action of them in the closing scenes of this book.’ Every one remembers the ‘spontaneous combustion’ preface to Bleak House. I do not know whether any medical man can be found to confirm the science of Armadale, or of Bleak House, or of The Moonstone. But that is not the question before us. We have only to do with what the novelist himself believed to be a scientific possibility. In Kenilworth [200] Wayland compounds ‘the true Orvietan, that noble medicine which is so seldom found genuine and effective within these realms of Europe.’ Scott adds a note: ‘Orvietan, or Venice treacle, as it is sometimes called, was understood to be a sovereign remedy against poison; and the reader must be contented, for the time he peruses these pages, to hold the same opinion, which was once universally received by the learned as well as the vulgar.’ Dickens’s science must be received in the same manner.
Mr. Crisparkle has one piece of evidence in his memory. ‘Long afterwards he had cause to remember’ how, when he entered Jasper’s rooms and found him asleep by the fire, the choirmaster ‘sprang from the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out, “What is the matter? Who did it?”’
As we have already seen, the gathering of the threads is in the strong hands of Datchery.
As we know, Forster adds that Neville Landless was to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer. It will be seen that this part of his testimony is more doubtful than the rest, and cannot, therefore, be so implicitly accepted, but it may well be true. Melancholy seems to mark Neville Landless for its own, and his passion for Rosa is hopeless. If he dies, it is a heavy blow for his devoted sister, who finds her triumph marred by the death of her brother. Singularly enough, some writers who have hesitated to accept Forster’s more expressed testimony make much of the death of Neville Landless and its circumstances. It need only be pointed out that all this is pure conjecture, however ingenious it may be.
I find no difficulty in believing that Dickens carried out his plan of making Jasper give in prison a review of his own career. This has been called a poor and conventional idea, but as worked out by Dickens it would neither have been poor nor conventional. What remains to be told is, I repeat, largely the story of John Jasper’s earlier life.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By Charles Dickens. Parts 1–6. With 12 illustrations by Sir Luke Fildes, R.A. 1870.
How Mr. Sapsea ceased to be a Member of the Eight Club. Fragment found by John Forster. See his Life of the Novelist. Added to the ‘Biographical,’ ‘National,’ and ‘Centenary’ editions of the novel.
The Cloven Foot: An Adaptation of the English Novel to American Scenes, Characters, Customs and Nomenclature. By Orpheus C. Kerr (R. H. Newell). New York: Carleton. 1870.
The Mystery of Mr. E. Drood. By Orpheus C. Kerr. An English edition of foregoing, with several minor alterations. London: The Piccadilly Annual. 1870.
John Jasper’s Secret: A Sequel to Charles Dickens’s Unfinished Novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By Henry Morford, of New York, and his wife. Issued in parts in America by T. B. Peterson and Bros., Philadelphia, from October 1871 to March 1872; and in England anonymously. An edition of the same work was published in 1901 with the astoundingly false announcement on the title-page that the book is by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens the Younger. New York: R. F. Fenno and Co.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A Play by Walter Stephens. Performed at the Surrey Theatre, 4th November 1871. Chapman and Hall. 1871.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A drama by G. H. Macdermott. Performed at the Britannia Theatre, 22nd July 1872.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete. Part the Second. ‘By the Spirit Pen of Charles Dickens, through a Medium.’ Published at Brattleborough, Vermont, U.S.A. 1873.
The Great Mystery Solved: Being a Sequel to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By Gillan Vase. 3 vols. London: Remington and Co. 1878.
Le Crime de Jasper. Traduit de l’Anglais. Dentu. Paris: 1879.
Alive or Dead: A Drama. By Robert Hall. Performed at the Park Theatre, Camden Town, 3rd May 1880.
Watched by the Dead: A Loving Study of Dickens’s Half-Told Tale. By Richard A. Proctor. London: W. H. Allen and Co. 1887. (The genesis of this ‘loving study’ appeared as articles in the Belgravia Magazine, June 1878; Leisure Readings, 1882; and Knowledge, 1884; over the pseudonym of ‘Thomas Foster.’)
How ‘Edwin Drood’ was Illustrated. By Alice Meynell. Century Magazine, February 1884.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Suggestions for a Conclusion. Cornhill Magazine, March 1884.
The Welfleet Mystery (An Outgrowth of Dickens’s Last Work). By Mrs. C. A. Read. The Weekly Budget, 1885.
A Novelist’s Favourite Theme. Cornhill Magazine, January 1886.
Mystery on Mystery. By Edward Salmon. Belgravia, September 1887.
The Drood Mystery Again. By Robert Allbut. Daily Union, U.S.A. (letter dated 21st August 1893).
Clues to the Mystery of Edwin Drood. By J. Cuming Walters. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd. 2s. 6d. 1905.
Solving ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ By B. W. Matz. Dickensian, July 1905.
The Mystery of Datchery. By William Archer. Morning Leader, 15th, 22nd and 29th July. Replies by J. Cuming Walters, 17th and 26th July 1905.
The Drood Case. By Andrew Lang. Morning Post, 28th July 1905.
The Plot of Edwin Drood. By Andrew Lang. Academy, 29th July 1905. Reply by J. Cuming Walters, 12th August 1905.
The Clearing of a Mystery. By Harry Beswick. Clarion, 28th July 1905.
The Drood Case. By J. Cuming Walters. Morning Post, 8th August 1905.
The History of a Mystery: A Review of the Solutions to ‘Edwin Drood.’ By George F. Gadd. Dickensian, September to December 1905.
Interview between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes on the Drood Mystery. By Andrew Lang. Longman’s Magazine (At the Sign of the Ship), September 1905.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By Hammond Hall. Dickensian, September 1905.
Mystery of Edwin Drood. By H. H. F. Academy, 26th August. By J. Cuming Walters and Andrew Lang, 9th September 1905.
Bazzard and Helena. By H. H. F. Academy, 9th September 1905.
Dickens Memories, with Some Reflections on the Edwin Drood Mystery. By Percy Fitzgerald. Daily Chronicle, 20th September 1905.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood: More Opinions Regarding the Identity of Datchery. By Dr. Blake Odgers, J. Cuming Walters, Willoughby Matchett and A. Bawtree. Daily Chronicle, 23rd September 1905.
Edwin Drood Mystery. By J. Cuming Walters. Daily Chronicle, 27th September 1905.
The Puzzle of Dickens’s Last Plot. By Andrew Lang. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd. 2s. 6d. net. 1905.
A Dickens Mystery: Mr. Andrew Lang’s Adventures with Edwin Drood. By J. Cuming Walters. Daily Chronicle, 14th October 1905.
The Mysteries of Edwin Drood. Times, 27th October. Letters on the same by Sir Luke Fildes, R.A., 3rd November (reprinted in Dickensian, December 1905); Andrew Lang, 10th November 1905; and J. W. T. Ley, 21st November 1905.
Edwin Drood Again. By J. Cuming Walters. Academy, 28th October 1905.
Mr. Lang the Disentangler. By Walter Herries Pollock. Evening Standard, 30th October 1905.
Mr. Lang Detecting Again. By G. K. Chesterton. Daily News, 2nd November 1905.
Edwin Drood: Solutions to the Mystery. By Henry Smetham. Rochester and Chatham Journal, 18th November 1905. (Reprinted in pamphlet form for private circulation.)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By E. J. S. The Star, 25th November 1905.
The Literary Correspondence of Edward Honey concerning the Fate of Edwin Drood. The Scottish Review, 30th November 1905.
Mr. Luke Fildes, The ‘Drood’ Mystery, and Mr. Lang. By J. Cuming Walters. Dickensian, December 1905.
Edwin Drood, Dead or Alive. By J. Cuming Walters. Westminster Gazette, 23rd December 1905.
Datchery the Enigma: The Case for Tartar. By George F. Gadd. Dickensian, January 1906.
Edwin Drood. By Andrew Lang. Westminster Gazette, 15th January 1906.
The Edwin Drood Syndicate. The Cambridge Review, Nos. 668–673, 1906.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By the Rev. Wilfrid Lescher, O.P. Catholic Times, 9th February 1906.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By A. M. P. The L.C.C. Staff Gazette, April 1906.
Lytton’s ‘John Acland.’ By J. Cuming Walters. Athenæum, 14th April 1906.