Dickens began Drood, his last novel, in the spring of 1870, four and half years after he completed Mutual Friend. This is the longest gap between any two books in Dickens's career, a sign perhaps of his failing health and of his intense involvement with the PUBLIC READINGS during the final years of his life. He planned the new novel for only 12 monthly numbers, about two-thirds the length of his usual monthly serials, but he completed only half of them. When he died on June 9, 1870, he was working on the final pages of the sixth number.

He was excited by his idea for the book, telling JOHN FORSTER that it was "not a communicable idea (or the interest in the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." The difficulties began in the first number, which he underwrote by 12 pages. He remedied the shortfall by pulling a chapter from the second number and including it in the first. His notes for the novel also indicate that he had difficulty following his plan in later numbers and introduced several episodes earlier than he expected to. Though most of his original readers were not aware of these difficulties as they read the story, WILKIE COLLINS, in a harsh judgment of the book, described it as "Dickens's last laboured effort, the melancholy effort of a worn-out brain."

Collins may have been reacting to Dickens's subject matter, which, with its oriental themes, opium trances, and mystery genre, seemed to be challenging Collins's own novel, The Moonstone, which had completed its serial run in ALL THE YEAR ROUND in 1868. Many of the commentators who have attempted to suggest the ways in which Dickens planned to complete the novel assume that the book was to be more on the order of a Collins mystery thriller than like Dickens's own earlier works. Dickens's initial inspiration, however, sounds a lot like the idea for some of his own earlier novels: "Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate." Although Dickens dropped this plan or transformed it into the story of Rosa and Edwin, there is in their arranged relationship echoes of John Harmon and Bella Wilfer's arranged marriage (Mutual Friend) and of Pip's expectations for his marriage to Estella (Expectations).

In many ways Drood reminds its readers of Dickens's earlier novels. The intriguing opening chapter with its contrast between the opium den in London and the cathedral in Cloisterham recalls the contrast between city and country in Bleak House and the opposition of the private and public spheres in that novel's two narratives. In Drood, the opium den may have connections to the East, but its primary function seems to be to represent the repressed inner world of Jasper, so different from his respectable outer appearance as the choirmaster of the cathedral, a contrast not unlike that between Bradley Headstone's controlled and mechanical respectability as schoolmaster and his passionate and murderous suppressed self in Mutual Friend. The cathedral is a projection of one side of Jasper's character; it also represents a way of life that has often been compared to the ecclesiastical world of ANTHONY TROLLOPE's Barsetshire novels. But Dickens is not concerned with the politics of Cloisterham or with the ways in which worldly concerns affect the religious community. He is more interested in the ways religious mysteries attempt to explain the human situation and the presence of evil in the world. Drood seems closer to the world of GRAHAM GREENE than to that of Trollope.

The cathedral and the opium den act as the symbolic centers in Drood, as the MARSHALSEA PRISON does in Dorris or the dustheaps and the river do in Mutual Friend. The DOUBLES in the novel also continue one of Dickens's repeated motifs. Like Sydney Carton in Two Cities, Harmon/Rokesmith in Mutual Friend, or Pip, who is both blacksmith and gentleman, Jasper is a divided figure whose separate lives are part of his mystery. This doubling in the central character is echoed in the Landless twins and, in comic parody, in Miss Twinkleton, who is described as having "two distinct and separate phases of being".

What Dickens planned to make of these materials has been a matter of considerable dispute. The commentators can be broadly placed into two camps. The first group argues that Drood was to be a novel like Dickens's earlier ones, relating private and public realms; finding parallels in the domestic sphere to the larger public world. His interest was not so much in the mystery or the murder at the heart of his story as in the psychology of the characters involved in it, particularly John Jasper, who would be presented from the inside as a portrait of a murderer. The other school looks at Drood as something new in the Dickens canon, a mystery thriller in the manner of Collins, relying on a sensational plot with surprising turns at the end of the story. Adherents of this view often read the novel as if it were by Agatha Christie, looking for details in the text that provide clues to the surprises Dickens had planned. Several key questions have focused much of the discussion: What, exactly, is the central "mystery" in Edwin Drood? Is it Drood's disappearance, the identity of his presumed killer, or something about Jasper and his connection with Princess Puffer? What role was the ring that Grewgious gave to Edwin intended to play in the unraveling of the mystery? How would Durdles and his knowledge of the tombs underneath the cathedral figure in the story? Who are the Landless twins and why are they in Cloisterham? Is Datchery a detective come to Cloisterham to solve the mystery of Edwin's disappearance, or is he one of the other characters in disguise, as his mismatched hair and eyebrows suggest?

Besides the text itself, literary detectives have the illustrations by LUKE FLUES and CHARLES ALLSTON COLLINS to work from; reports of Dickens's intent from the illustrators, his family, and Forster; a fragment, known as "The Sapsea Fragment," that may have been planned for a future number but was probably a discarded passage from the existing text; Dickens's other works; and numerous contemporary works by other authors that provide parallels to Drood or offer suggestions for interpreting Dickens's intentions. Forster (1872) offers the most clues: "The story," he writes, "was to be that of a murder of a nephew by his uncle; 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. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told to another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it... . Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer."

Forster's account is consistent with the existing text and with Dickens's usual interest in the psychology of the characters rather than in the elaborations of plot. His account identifies Edwin as the victim and Jasper as the murderer, the most probable directions suggested in the existing text. The very probability of Forster's solution disappoints those who want more mystery or who expect the story to turn upon unexpected events, but such surprises would not be characteristic of an author who "solved" the Harmon murder halfway through Mutual Friend and who was more interested in Headstone's criminality than in his crime.

Forster's account makes Jasper the puzzling center of the story, and commentators have wondered just what sort of man this murderer would reveal himself to be in his final meditations in the condemned cell. Is he a consciously malevolent man who conceals his villainy behind a mask of clerical respectability? A passionately out of control man insanely jealous of Edwin's relationship with Rosa? A person who must control others and who uses the powers of drugs and hypnotism to do so? A killer with ties to the Eastern cult of Kali who has a mission to murder Edwin? A man so deeply divided within himself that the respectable choirmaster is not even aware of the murderous activities of the opium addict? Commentators have advanced all of these interpretations to explain his character.

Clearly Jasper is a kind of Jekyll/Hyde figure. Both sides of his character appear in the opening chapter, where his murderous visions in London are countered by his singing later the same day in the cathedral service. The narrator's description of the doubleness in Miss Twinkleton's character may provide some important clues to understanding Jasper: "As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being". Jasper the opium addict may be a totally separate person from Jasper the choirmaster; his murderous side may be unaware of his loving side that dotes on Edwin and later actively seeks to discover his nephew's murderer. Jasper is clearly subject to spells of drugged drunkenness and seems to be practicing animal magnetism when he frightens Rosa at the piano and "suggests" to Crisparkle the location of Edwin's watch. There is a good deal of evidence, both in the novel and in external sources, leading to the suggestion that he is a Thug, a member of an Eastern cult of murderers, who kills Edwin in a ritual murder to avenge an earlier wrong. The surprising scene that was to end the novel might have been Jasper's realization and confession of his hidden side or Dickens's sympathetic interior portrait of the murderer coming to recognize his divided self and admitting the evil he has done.

EDMUND WILSON (1941) suggested that the divided Jasper was also a portrait of his creator: "Mr. Jasper is, like Dickens, an artist: he is a musician, he has a beautiful voice. He smokes opium, and so, like Dickens, leads a life of imagination apart from the life of men. Like Dickens, he is a skillful magician, whose power over his fellows may be dangerous. Like Dickens, he is an alien from another world; yet, like Dickens, he has made himself respected in the conventional English community." Jasper's final revelation, then, was also to be the author's revelation of his own self-division, that he was, to use Wilson's phrase, "two Scrooges." If W. W. Robson's suggestion that Datchery was to be revealed as Dickens himself ("'The Mystery of Edwin Drood': The Solution?" Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 1983), then Drood might have become for Dickens what The Tempest was for Shakespeare, his final affirmation of his magical artistry and his revelation that imagination itself was the solution to the mystery.

If Drood was to be Dickens's most complete self-revelation, there is reason to believe that Jasper may not be fully aware of his crime—even in his murderous persona—or that he may, like Pip, carry the guilt of his relative's death without being guilty of actually carrying out the crime. Several commentators have suggested that Edwin, after becoming aware of Jasper's intent to murder him, ran off and disappeared or that Jasper failed in his attempt to kill Edwin. According to this view, the surprise at the end of the novel—a surprise for both the reader and Jasper—was to be Edwin's reappearance, his resurrection from his presumed death. The power of the cathedral to renew life is suggested in the pages Dickens wrote on the day before he died. After an episode in the murky visions of the opium den, Cloisterham is bathed in the redeeming light of the morning sun: "A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields—or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time—penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life". The resurrection theme recurs in all of the later novels, from Sydney Carton's sanctified execution to the baptismal drownings in Expectations and Mutual Friend. Edwin's return would have provided a surprising turn to end Dickens's last fable and a fulfillment consistent with the resurrection theme in all of his later novels.