The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens was the last work of the author and has been widely discussed and written about not only for that reason but also because it was unfinished and thus poses something of a problem for critics and readers. The book is thus a mystery in a double sense, leaving the reader uncertain whether Dickens intended that John Jasper was the murderer of his nephew Edwin Drood.
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 relationship with Ellen Ternan during the 1860s that had alienated some of his children. He was unhappy during those years, and this is embodied in several ways in his final book. Booth notes that the construction of Edwin Drood is notable among the novels of Dickens. The usual mood for the novelist was expansive, with many plots coming together because his exuberant imagination apparently could not be confined to one plot. Subplots and multiple characters a...