The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Dickens lived long enough to complete only six numbers of the novel, and soon a whole Drood ‘industry’ (which still flourishes today) grew up, concerned with providing a plausible solution to the mystery. The story was to have been illustrated by Katey's husband, Charles Collins, but ill health compelled him to withdraw after designing the monthly-part cover and he was replaced by Luke Fildes. Drood was very favourably received, selling 10,000 more copies than Our Mutual Friend and showing in its descriptive passages, Forster believed, that Dickens's ‘imaginative power was at its best’ (Forster, 808). It was the culmination of Dickens's lifelong fascination with the demeanour and psychology of murderers and he was, his daughter Katey remembered, ‘quite as deeply fascinated and absorbed in the study of the criminal Jasper as in the dark and sinister crime that has given the book its title’ (‘“Edwin Drood” and the last days of Charles Dickens’, Pall Mall Magazine, June 1906, 644). It was to be a murder story, ‘the originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man were the tempted’ (Forster, 808). In April 1870, 'there appeared the first instalment of Dickens's new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, set mainly in Rochester (‘Cloisterham’) and planned for publication in eleven monthly instalments, the last one to be a double number. Illustrated with 14 plates by Luke Fildes. But, more than this, the truncated whole gives us in full that theme, the inescapable duality of our nature, which Dickens wished to put into our heads as we attempt to solve the book's puzzle.' -Keating, Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best BooksįIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PARTS of Dickens's final work, left unfinished at the time of his death.

There is a host of different characters, each one standing out in sharp memorability. There is the extraordinarily skilful way in which we, the readers, are moved between scenes of humour, of farce, of sentiment, of brooding mystery. There are pulsatingly vivid descriptions of the old cathedral city and, in glimpses,of the hidden side of the teeming metropolis of London. 'The pages of Edwin Drood are crammed with splendid things.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens