First published in Adam’s Notebook, Mar. 2022

This is the end, beautiful friend — the end. Of all Dickens’s novels, Edwin Drood is the one seemingly most overdetermined by haunting. I say seemingly, because one of the things I am going to try to do in this post is argue that the very overloading of ghosts into this text mean that we need to approach it, dialectically, as the most non-immaterial, the most ungeistlich of Dickens’s works. This would at least explain why so many readers and critics of Dickens have felt there’s something lacking in this novel, beyond the material absence of the second half of the book — something not quite present, some Dickensian quality or essence absent. Gissing and Bernard Shaw both dismissed it as not truly Dickens, as trivial and of no account; and even a modern critic like Claire Tomalin thinks it a bust: ‘the mystery a slight one, the villain less interesting than he promises to be at first, the comedy only moderately funny, the charm a little forced, and the language reads at times like a parody of earlier work.’ [Tomalin Charles Dickens (2011), 389]

But before we can get there, we have to consider the possibility that Drood is not just one of Dickens’s ghost stories, but perhaps even the ghostliest of all of them. Begin with its composition: Dickens’s deal, struck with Chapman and Hall, included a clause that returned a portion of the advance in the event that the author died before he could complete the whole. [The clause depended upon a threshold of sales not being met; in the event, and despite Dickens’s premature death, sales were so high that none of the advance had to be returned.] Dickens’s health had been poor for several years (there had been a similar clause in the contract for Our Mutual Friend) and during his last ‘reading’ tour Dickens suffered a stroke serious enough to interfere with his ability to pronounce words, even the names of his own characters. Mortality was haunting him, somewhat in the manner of the spectre that dogs the signal-man in Dickens’s 1868 story. The writing of Edwin Drood was haunted, for Dickens, by his own ghost.

Dickens’s actual death, 9th June 1870, left the final six monthly instalments (of the novel’s planned twelve) unwritten. The Drood we have is haunted by its own incompletion — the likeable young title-character missing, his former fiancé intimidated by Jasper, Edwin’s sinister uncle, an outwardly respectable choirmaster at ‘Cloisterham’ cathedral, actually an opium-addicted villain with mesmeric powers. The missing second half of this novel twitching and bothering readings of the present first half like a phantom limb.

Many critical accounts of the novel import invisible matter from this spectral final twenty-three chapters, either extrapolating from the actually published material or else intuiting as crucial to a reading of the whole elements not present either in the novel itself or in the Droodian paratexts of Dickens’s working notes, reported conversations with friends and illustrators and so on. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Edmund Wilson’s hugely influential essay ‘The Two Scrooges’ (1941, collected in The Wound and the Bow). Wilson’s approach is itself haunted by a spectral presence, the ‘thugee’ — a term itself only spectrally related to reality (it seems likely that, although people were of course sometimes strangled and robbed in Northern India during the 19th-century, the ‘thugee’ were an orientalised fantasy projected onto the territory by British imperialism: this is the argument made by Subramanian Shankar’s Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text [SUNY Press 2001]).

I lay my finger on two aspects of Wilson’s argument with respect to Drood: one is that the novel is, as it were, haunted by the East, and specifically by Philip Meadows Taylor’s 1839 sensation novel Confessions of a Thug. According to this reading Jasper has not only murdered Edwin, he has throttled him with a black scarf before he (Edwin) departed on a journey and disposed of the body because this was how the Thugee performed their assassinations.

Two relates to Wilson’s larger argument with respect to Dickens, that Drood is, in its representation of Jasper, essentially the study of a divided consciousness, a split subjectivity, outwardly respectable inwardly tormented by opium-mediated wickedness, lust and violence. Just as, per the title of Wilson’s essay, Scrooge is two people, so Edwin Drood is the story of ‘The Two Jaspers’, one of whom genuinely loves his nephew Edwin, the other of whom hates him, resents his betrothal to Rosa Bud (Jasper wants Rosa for himself) and so kills him. Dickens told Forster that Jasper would murder Drood, and eventually be apprehended as the murderer, but that even in the condemned cell he would rehearse the events of the murder as if somebody else had committed it:

The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the 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 of another, had brought him. [Forster, Life of Dickens (1872) 3:464; emphasis mine]

Jasper haunts himself; he is his own revenant, his own spectre. So much is intimated in the celebrated opening paragraph of the novel, a piece of prose that still has the power to startle — a lump of stream-of-consciousness decades before William James theorised and Joyce et al experimented with the mode.

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still, the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility. [Dickens Drood, 1]

Jasper is in an opium den in London, but he sees Cloisterham (that is, Rochester, 30 miles east on the north Kent coast), the city in whose cathedral he is precent and choir-master. His mind comprises two layers — a sense of his ‘public life’, and his rectitude, haunting his opium vision that is itself haunted by a separate layer of orientalised fantasy: barbarity and sensuality (those 30,000 dancing girls). We see here, filmily projected across the screen of the page, a different doubling: Dickens as respectable public figure, national treasure, teller of moral and diverting tales for the multitude, and Dickens as a disreputable private individual, repute compromised by his (strictly) adulterous relationship with Ellen Ternan, an affair assiduously kept secret.

The consensus among Dickensians nowadays is that the two ‘tower’s, in the first two sentences, are misprints for ‘town’: which is certainly possible, since ‘correcting’ the text, as modern editions all do, makes more sense of the progression hallucinating the town in general and then zeroing-in on the cathedral tower. But we might return that making sense in this sense, rational and consecutive sense, is entirely not the point of this writing. The paragraph is not about conceptual linearity but about superposition: at once the bed in the dingy Limehouse opium den and Cloisterham’s cathedral and the De Quincey-esque vision of oriental lubriciousness. Town and tower and spike.

It’s true that Dickens, in effect, rows-back his stylistic experiment almost as soon as it has begun: the opening of the second paragraph glosses the first, as if for the simple-minded: ‘the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around.’ But this introduces another aspect of the text, one Bridget Brophy noticed by back in 1980:

Rereading Dickens’s text, I was astonished to notice that its first five chapters are in the present tense. They include Jasper’s opening opium dream and his introduction to Deputy’s job of stoning the drunken Durdles’s home. In Chapter Eight, where Neville and Edwin quarrel at the instigation of Jasper and Jasper’s drink, the narrative is again in the historic present. So it is in Chapters Twelve (Jasper’s night expedition to the tombs and Durdles’s ‘dream’ of Jasper abstracting the key), Fourteen (the crucial ‘When shall these three …?’) and Nineteen (Jasper’s declaration to Rosa). Chapter Twenty-Two opens in the past tense with a round-up of what has happened meanwhile, but quickly moves into the present tense and stays there for Jasper’s opium session and Datchery’s detection.

Something very near half of Dickens’s text (ten chapters out of 22) is written in the historic present. Apart from Chapter Twenty-Two, which comes from a number where there was a mix-up, both in Dickens’s notes and in some editions, about the numbering and the division of chapters, each of Dickens’s chapters is either wholly in the past or wholly in the present tense. In other books, Dickens uses the present haphazardly, when it strikes him as apt. In Drood I think his switches of tense are systematic. [Brigid Brophy ‘To Be Continued’, London Review of Books 2:21 (6 November 1980); later collected in Brophy, Baroque and Roll (Hamish Hamilton 1987)]

Rather disarmingly, Brophy goes on: ‘I cannot name an exact significance for each of the present-tense chapters (though I’d like an acknowledgment, please, if some other critic can)’, adding: ‘in some cases the significance may be designed to emerge only in the second half’ — thereby proposing another reading of this material text that involves deferring conclusion into the inexistent ghostly second half. But, with all due acknowledgement to Brophy’s insight (not, actually, original to her: several prior Dickensians have spotted it), it’s not actually hard to see how the lamination of historic present and past tense works in Drood. It is the formal narrative enactment of the same superposition that the novel’s opening paragraph embodies: past and present not distinguished sharply from one another, but coexisting. London and Cloisterham the same place — England and orientalised, opiated, violent ‘East’ (India, Ceylon, China) the same place.

The conventional love triangle of the novel’s manifest drama — Jasper secretly lusts after Rosa, who is betrothed to Edwin, and so Jasper harbours violent resentment against Edwin — coexists with a latent dynamic: Jasper’s desire is actually for Edwin, which he mediates through their shared conventional desire for Rosa. What Jasper doesn’t know is that Edwin and Rosa have agreed, amicably, to separate, so the ostensible reason for Jasper’s murder of Edwin is, with dark irony, not even present (Forster notes this in his summary of what Dickens told him about how the story would pan out: ‘discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed’). So the as it were ‘public’ rivalry for Rosa’s hand (between Edwin and Neville Landless) is haunted by the hidden or ‘private’ rivalry for Rosa’s hand (between Jasper and Edwin) that is in turn haunted by a latent, unspeakable queer desire of Jasper for Edwin that uses Rosa as a homosocial focal point, a kind of cypher.

But of course this narrative depends upon a compilation of the actual text of the novel with para-novelistic textualities like Forster’s account. Absent this latter, and with a stricter New Critical focus on only the text, we cannot be sure that Edwin is dead. He might only be missing. His status exists in a state of spectral superposition, located in the beyond-the-deathbed last half of the whole.

There is one more doubled-haunting in Drood that we need to address before we can take the larger thesis of this post further, and that is the ghost, or perhaps not, of Edwin Drood himself. There are several complications here, the main one being that nothing in the actual text, and only hints from the paratexts (such as the Forster passage quoted above), guarantee that Drood is dead at all. It may be that he is only missing — perhaps like Frances Tyrrell in Scott’s St Ronan’s Well (1823), he has been injured and is recuperating prior to making his dramatic reappearance at the novel’s close. And that phantom limb has itself been haunted by a uniquely spurious kind of ghost, Charles Dickens himself. You’ll say that me describing this latter ghost as ‘spurious’ is tendentious, and so it is — but we can be grown-up about this. Arthur Conan Doyle believed in the literal reality of ghosts and spirits and was even prepared to act as amanuensis for the dead author. I don’t share his beliefs. As Leah Price notes:

Conan Doyle only toyed with a message from the spirit of Joseph Conrad asking for an ending to Suspense (left unfinished, as its title implies, at the author’s death), but was more flattered when Dickens posthumously invited him to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The exchange was recorded in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research:

“I shall be honoured, Mr Dickens.”

“Charles, if you please. We like friends to be friends.”

The account was written-up in the journal Light, October 1927. Conan Doyle, of course, never did actually write this completed Drood. Indeed, there is a small awkwardness inherent in that Doyle had already endorsed the — (I’ve read it: terrible) ‘Spirit-pen’ completion by American printer Thomas Power James, published in 1873: Edwin Drood Completed. Accordingly Doyle checks:

Q. “Was that medium who finished Edwin Drood inspired?”

A. “He was not by me.”

It’s lose-lose, this question, for the spiritualists. If they confirm that the ‘Spirit pen’ Drood was ‘really’ written by Dickens, the need for a new completion by Doyle disappears; but if they, as they do here, deny it, they are confirming that some spiritualists are frauds. And if that other one was, why not this one too?

Doyle’s own account of the séance is in his memoir Edge of the Unknown (1930). He insists that his medium — the young violinist and psychic Florizel von Reuter — had never read Edwin Drood. He cannot have been sure of this, although it is true that Reuter (the ‘von’ was an affectation to German nobility to impress her European clients: she was an Iowa-born regular girl) usually ‘channelled’ musicians and composers, and not literary figures, so it is possible.

Q. “Is Edwin Drood dead?”

A. “I prefer to write it all out through you. No; he is alive, and Chris is hiding him”.

‘Chris’. Right. Indeed, Reuter’s replies sometimes smell of outright evasion. One of Drood’s most persistent mysteries is the identity of ‘Datchery’ who appears suddenly late in the story, and might be a previous character returning in disguise. Of that she had this to say:

Q. “Who was Datchery?”

A. “What about the fourth dimension? I prefer to write it all out through you.”

Even Doyle bridles, in his memoir, at this patent misdirection (‘What the fourth dimension has to do with it I cannot imagine. I think it was meant as chaff, since the fourth dimension is what no one can understand’) although he bucks-up again at what follows: ‘now,’ he says, ‘comes the important sentence: “Edwin is alive and Chris is hiding him.”’ Doyle is confident that ‘Chris’ — a name spelled out on the Ouija board, rather than spoken and misheard, and so certainly Chris — is Crisparkle, even though that character’s first name is Septimus.

This seems to me to be exceedingly important, both from a literary and from a psychic point of view. Some of the best brains in the world have occupied themselves over the problem as to whether Drood was dead, and if not where he could be. Numerous solutions have been suggested, but though I am fairly well posted in the matter this is an entirely new one. Chris is the Rev. Crisparkle, who in the novel is a kindly and energetic, muscular Christian. Certainly if he played the part indicated it is well concealed. But then it was the author’s duty to conceal it well. There are several subtle touches which might point to the truth of it. On re-reading the fragment with this idea in my mind I can say with certainty that up to a point Crisparkle certainly knew nothing about it. He has a soliloquy to that effect, and whatever means are legitimate by which an author may mislead a reader, a false soliloquy is not among them. But after that point in the story there is no reason why Crisparkle may not have surprised Drood’s secret and helped him. There was a huge cupboard in Crisparkle’s room which is described with a detail which seems unnecessary and exaggerated if nothing is to come from it. There again the artist drew his frontispiece under Dickens’ very particular direction, and it contains small vignettes of various scenes. There is one which shows Drood standing in a sort of vault, and someone who has some indications of clerical garb coming in to him with a lantern. Is this not Crisparkle and is it not some corroboration of the spirit message?

What’s really interesting about this, I think, is not how patent its motivated reasoning is (although that is interesting). It’s how the project of defending the veracity of spiritualism depends reverts to an itemisation of materialities — huge cupboards, characters soliloquising, images engraved and printed on to the green cover wrapper of the monthly instalments. Because, of course, the only other mode of defence here is the bald claim (‘Chris is the Rev. Crisparkle’) which, as unevidenced assertion, is vulnerable to unevidenced denial. We could put it this way: Doyle is haunted by the thought that the spiritualism in which he has invested so deeply, emotionally and psychologically, is a scam — that behind the veil of spirit-mediums and tablerappers is mere matter, imposture, living knuckle-bones striking actual mahogany, sputum-infused-muslin instead of ectoplasm. And perhaps this touches on a deeper truth, a dialectical dynamic in which life is haunted by the dead as death — spirits, ghosts, the afterlife — is haunted by the living and the material.

Consider Doyle’s ‘corroboration’. Is it Crisparkle, represented at the bottom of the monthly wrapper illustration, at the head of this post? It could be, although the usual reading of this individual is that he is Jasper. There is room for disagreement on this, and I would not presume to dogmatism, but the ‘clerical dress’ fits Jasper just as it does Crisparkle, where the long scarf the character is wearing can only be Jasper’s (at least if we go by the written descriptions contained in Dickens’s novel)

There are three possible explanations for this unwritten yet illustrated, scene — discounting a supplementary fourth explanation (which is also, I must concede, perfectly possible: namely that this illustration correlates to no scene in the novel, written or unwritten; that either Fildes invented it, or Dickens suggested it to Fildes when the novel was still plastic in his imagination and then changed his mind). But let’s go with the material evidence. What does this illustration say? Maybe it says: that Edwin is alive, and Jasper here stumbles upon him. In such a case the balance of probabilities seems to me to suggest that what we’re seeing here is Jasper mistaking living Edwin for a ghost — it’s even possible Edwin is has a ghostly mien because he is covered in lime dust, having raised himself from where Jasper had deposited his body. But a second possibility is: that Edwin is dead, and Jasper here stumbles in upon his ghost, his (as it were) actual ghost. This would turn the novel into a conventional, categorical ghost story. The there’s a third explanation: perhaps the scene happens only in Jasper’s opiated mind, as a vivid dream or perhaps a waking hallucination. In that case it would record Jasper’s guilty conscience and the ghostly mien of Edwin reflects his certainty — or if Edwin is alive, his mistaken belief — that he is, that he can be, only a ghost.

Of these three possibilities, only one would make Drood a ghost story in the sense that Christmas Carol and ‘The Signal-Man’ are ghost stories. But this possibility is — bear with me — haunted by the varying materialities of the other two possibilities.

To repeat myself — or, I should say: to strike the keynote again: ghosts mark the ways life is haunted by death. Drood, I am arguing, marks instead the way death is haunted by life. Rosa Bud’s improbable surname speaks to vernal possibility: to growth and life, and one thing on which we can be perfectly sure (all other speculation straying into the debateable land of indicated by the use of the word ‘mystery’ in the book’s title) is that, in the impossible Dickens’-authored completion of Drood, Rosa will marry and beget children, most likely with Tartar (cf Forster: ‘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.’) Yet her first appearance in the novel is as an ‘apparition’ with a veil — actually her apron — over her face, like the haunting nun in Villette:

An apparition, with its face concealed by a little silk apron thrown over its head, glides into the parlour.

“O! it is so ridiculous!” says the apparition, stopping and shrinking. “Don’t, Eddy!”

“Don’t what, Rosa?”

“Don’t come any nearer, please.” [Drood, 3]

This noli me tangere is played for amusement, of course, rather than Gothic frisson. Indeed, Dickens indulges a regrettable cutesey infantilising condescension in describing Rosa’s attractiveness: she is a ‘charming little apparition’; ‘the apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its mouth while making this complaint; Edwin’s mild remonstrance ‘brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a corner of the apron’ and so on. It seems bad form to, in effect, kink-shame Dickens for what he found alluring in a woman, but this is wincing, twee stuff.

One thing Rosa objects to is that her betrothal to Edwin has been effected by the dead hand of the past — their respective parents, both now dead, arranged the match before the two of them were even born — and during their walk around Cloisterham we discover that her other objection to the match is that Edwin is going to move to Egypt for work, to ‘wake up Egypt a little’ [7] in his own phrase, and she does not want to have to accompany him as his wife. Egypt for Rosa becomes an externalisation of this same dead-hand of the past. The two discuss through the (again, cutesy, wincing) device of discussing a notional third-party whom Edwin is going to marry, a most ‘sensible creature’ unlike the silly-headed Rosa, although the joke is that the third party actually is Rosa.

“And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried off to Egypt; does she, Eddy?”

“Yes. She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill: especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped country.”

“Lor!” says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.

“Do you object,” Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes downward upon the fairy figure: “do you object, Rosa, to her feeling that interest?”

“Object? my dear Eddy! But really, doesn’t she hate boilers and things?”

“I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,” he returns with angry emphasis; “though I cannot answer for her views about Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.”

“But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?”

“Certainly not.” Very firmly.

“At least she must hate the Pyramids? Come, Eddy?”

“Why should she be such a little — tall, I mean — goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?”

“Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,” often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite choked.”

The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close. [Drood, 3]

Dickens was younger than I am today when he wrote this clumsy approximation to the kind of language a young couple will use when simultaneously flirting with one another and bickering — though he’d been married all his adult life and fathered a great many children, none of whose courtships he had closely observed. This, I suppose, is as close as his imagination could bring him.

But what’s interesting here is the way Egypt becomes a correlative both to Rosa’s resentment that their marriage has been arranged by the dead — that it is, in some sense, a ghost marriage — and also its anticipation of Edwin’s fate, buried under millions of tons of masonry in the English equivalent of a Pyramid, Cloisterham Cathedral — and, perhaps, exhumed as a corpse from thence by Tartar, the modern-day Belzoni, uncovering the past (the secret of Drood’s disappearance): Tartar, the man with a name, in Howard Duffield’s phrase, ‘as redolent of the East as a whiff of hashish’ [Howard Duffield, ‘John Jasper — Strangler’, The Bookman 70 (1930), 582] — although of course in the novel we have, Tartar is assertively English and hardly ‘Eastern’ at all. By the same token, of course, John Jasper is a name with an orientialised provenance (it was the name of one of the Magi in a medieval European cult, from Biblical Hebrew גִּזְבָּר‎ ‘gizbar’).

This connects with the third of the novel’s three orientalist co-ordinates — after Egypt, here, and Jasper’s quote-unquote ‘chinese’ opium decadence, and the dream of ‘Arabian Nights’ exoticism, cruelty and sensuality with which the novel opens: Neville and Helena Landless. This brother and sister come to Cloisterham from Ceylon (Sri Lanka, that is) and the novel is not clear on their racial identity. They might be the offspring of white colonial settlers — though they are perhaps too dark-skinned for that — or else ‘Anglo-Indian’, which is to say mixed-race — or else native Sri Lankan. Whether they are racially or only geographically associated with Sri Lanka, Dickens is clear that this oriental provenance has resulted in a greater degree of passion, and propensity to violence, something ‘tigerish in the blood’, compared to the paler English characters. This is how Crisparkle registers the two of them when they first arrive in chapter 6: Neville ‘an unusually handsome lithe young fellow,’ Helena ‘an unusually handsome lithe girl’

Both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed about them both; a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. Slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound. [Drood, 6]

There is a striking sensuality in this quasi-bestial description of the two: and of course Crisparkle, Forster suggests, ends up marrying Helena. Later, when Helena embraces the distraught Rosa, we get a second reference to her ‘gipsy’ quality: ‘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!’ [7]

‘Gipsy’, of course, is another way of saying Egyptian: when Roma people first appeared in England in the sixteenth century they were — wrongly — believed to have come from Egypt. By the nineteenth-century the consensus was that (to quote Anton Herriman) ‘the “Little Egypt” whence the Gypsies alleged they had come’ was not ‘the Nile region’, since ‘their Indian derivation was made certain and “Little Egypt” explained as simply a Gypsy fable’ [Herriman, ‘Little Egypt’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 3 (1891), 152 — it’s unlikely, though not impossible, that Dickens had come across Professor Emil Thewrewk’s eighteenth-century Gypsy Grammar, often cited by nineteenth-century accounts of Gipsy life and history: if so he might even have combined the Romani words dur, ‘far’, and rōd, ‘seek’ in the surname of his title character].

In other words, and quite in line with Said’s seminal critique of ‘orientalism’, in which a enormous range and diversity of peoples and cultures are all bracketed as ‘the east’, from Greece to Japan, ‘Egyptians’ are Indians, gypsies are Sri Lankan, ‘chinese’ opium (actually grown in India) becomes middle-Eastern Arabian — this is the flattening superpositions of various ‘oriental’ locations into one hallucinatory figuration, and then drawing them all together on Cloisterham.

In Rosa’s childish conflation of gods and pharaohs (‘Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses’) Egypt figures only death, tombs and dust — the dead hand of the past; but in the lithe vigour and animal sexuality of the Landlesses ‘Egypt’, as ‘India’, figures energy, life renewal. It’s about empire, of course. But empire was not a spiritual enterprise, it was a material and practical one — economic and political, a matter of practical enrichment and power, to which discourses such as ‘religion’ subordinated themselves (converting ‘natives’ to Christianity made ‘natives’ more biddable, more easily controlled and ruled). Opium, somatically speaking, may lead to spectral hallucinations of the sort Jasper experiences at the beginning of this novel, but opium was also very much a tradeable good, over which Dickens’s Britain had fought two actual wars (1839–42, 1856–60) in order to leverage Chinese trade to their advantage.

What I’m calling superposition here might also be termed a kind of coming-together, even a reconciliation. There is a tradition of Hegelian scholarship that insists on the materiality of Hegel’s Geist and Weltgeist, what Fredric Jameson suggests is a ‘fundamental identification of Geist with collectivity’ (‘in this,’ he notes, ‘I have followed the movement of Adorno’s thinking … which reaches its climax in the utterly unexpected eruption of the Marx in the 1844 manuscripts’: Jameson, The Hegel Variations: on the Phenomenology of Spirit [Verso 2010], 12). A material, social Geist, neither some transcendental abstraction nor ‘personified in any particular anthropomorphic figure’ [Jameson, 78] but as collective social embodiment. ‘Spirit is,’ Hegel famously declared, ‘in its simple truth, consciousness, and forces its moments apart’, a statement Jameson reads as ‘community [rendered] in terms of an opposition between consciousness and self-consciousness.’ The most self-conscious figure in Drood is Jasper, although the way his subjectivity forces apart, by the dialectical means of collapsing together (London and Cloisterham and the East, his desire for Rosa and his desire for Edwin, what he knows and what he doesn’t know that drives him) can only be reconciled in the final, unwritten scenes of this novel when hyper-English, respectable, muscular Christian Crisparkle marries Indian/gypsy racial other Helena.

Edwin Drood is a particular case of Barthes’ ‘death of the author’, in that the author — Dickens — literally died. But we ought not to forget that Barthes’ proposed death was both figurative (he wasn’t literally advocating the assassination of writers) and total — he did not suggest that the dead author should return, as a revenant or wraith, spectrally to influence our reading. Come on, for Christ’s sake come on, Conan Doyle may have been flattered that dead-Dickens insisted on him calling him by his first name, was wasn’t actually speaking to dead-Dickens. He was part of a living-breathing quasi-theatrical performance, the reality of which he obscured to himself for personal reasons. In Chesterton’s supremely witty monograph Charles Dickens he concedes ‘What was the mystery of Edwin Drood from Dickens’s point of view we shall never know, except perhaps from Dickens in heaven’, adding, brilliantly: ‘and then he will very likely have forgotten.’ Actual Dickens can’t help up here because Actual Dickens doesn’t exist any more.

There’s a famous (brief) Kafka fable called ‘Leopards in the Temple’, which runs to one sentence: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.’ The Landlesses are, as it were, tigers rather than leopards, and we’re dealing with a medieval Christian cathedral rather than a ‘temple’, but this fable points, perhaps, to the direction Dickens’s last novel is headed, in terms of the integration, or reconciliation, of East and West.

Empire is the material business of conquest, oppression, slaughter, domination and expropriation. To argue that empire is something beyond this, some abstraction or idea, is to mystify and so facilitate its in-the-world activity (Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for Kubrick’s Spartacus has Olivier’s Crassus retort to Caesar’s insistence that ‘Rome is the mob’: ‘No! Rome is an eternal thought in the mind of God’ — an idea Trumbo was an intelligent-enough leftist to peg with the scornful irony it deserves). Why did Dickens, a writer generally happy to call Islington Islington and Lambeth Lambeth — to call London London, that is — rename Rochester ‘Cloisterham’? What’s wrong with Rochester? Well, the novel does supply an answer to this particular question:

For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town. Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham. It was once possibly known to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another, and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to its dusty chronicles. [Drood, 3]

The narrative never does ‘unfold as it advances’ the rationale for renaming Rochester — unless the unfolding happens in the subsequent sentences, to whit: ‘Cloisterham’ is only the latest in a long string of other names, imposed upon this place by a succession of colonising conquerors. Cloisterham, so seemingly sleepy, is the material site of material historical violence, buried like mummies under a pyramid, like Edwin in the vaults of Cloisterham cathedral. Drood’s dead, dude; but the world lives, and that life and fecundity is manifest, reverse-haunting this deadened half-novel with a florescence of completions, reworkings and critical engagements. The Dickens is dead: long live the Dickens.