The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Fred Kaplan describes how Dickens started the novel in the usual way by writing the first two installments. The ideas that were behind this story had been written in Dickens's notebook some time before. The idea of two young people who had been separated for many years after having been pledged to be married was written down as early as 1861 or even 1857, and by the middle of 1869 he was hard at work developing his characters, the situations, and the events of the novel. The central plot had by then shifted to the relationship between John Jasper, his ward, and his nephew, and this would be come the central element in the novel: "The obsessive, addictive passions of Jasper's imagination and heart dominate the novel. It is a loving and creative heart. And it is also a grotesquely damaged, perversely destructive heart" (1988: p. 545).

Bradford A. Booth (in Richard M. Baker, 1951) states that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was written "in the bitterness of Dickens's deteriorating family life" (1951: p. viii). Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858. He had had a rel

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ent man to death" (pp. 29-30). Aylmer sees the book as a demonstration of the dangers of relying on circumstantial evidence. Baker, on the other hand, sees Jasper John as a murderer and finds evidence on the story that Dickens intended this to be the conclusion. He sees the novel not as a mystery in the sense Aylmer sees it but as a novel of psychological insight, a character study of a "terrible man": "It typifies the eternal contest between good and evil; it reveals in Jasper. . . a man suffering from an abnormal state of mind, from a psychosis aggravated by drug intoxication" (p. 42). Baker cites examples from the first chapter of evidence he feels shows Jasper to be the murderer. He notes the opium-induced dream in which Jasper is the Sultan, Edwin Drood is the robber, and Rosa Bud is the dancing girl Edwin has stolen from him. He sees a foreshadowing of the method of murder when, in the dream, Jasper seizes a Chinaman by the throat, acting as a strangler. When Jasper emerges from his opium sleep, he seems to be afraid that he has revealed his dream, the plan Baker sees formulating in his mind for the murder of Edwin Drood. Baker writes: "Here, then, is a potential murderer dramatically presented at the very outset of
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Approximate Word count = 2723
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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