Charles Ogdens: "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" Solved at Last
Shortly before his death Charles Dickens told his son, Charles Dickens the younger, how he intended that the novel, which he left half-finished, should end — the younger Dickens dramatized the story and put into the conclusion which he had received from the father.
Special correspondence
London, Nov. 13. — When Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving his last novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" only half finished, the English-speaking world — and a good many of the folk who speak other languages too — spent much time trying to guess how the great author had intended that his perplexing story should end. And that guesswork has been going on with more or less spasmodic vigor ever since.
Many literary Sherlock Holmes, including Andrew Lang, have filled many a magazine page trying to prove from the clues left by Dickens what the conclusion was to have been. Several authors, more ambitious than discreet, have audaciously assumed the mantle of the dead prophet and finished the book. Mediums have invoked the spirit of Dickens himself to solve the mystery, with results equally unconvincing.
For 37 years the "mystery" has remained the great puzzle of the literary world. None of those who have tried to unravel it have supposed that it ever could be proved whether or not he or she had found the correct solution, as planned by the master hand.
It can be, though, for something has been found by the granddaughter of the great novelist, Miss Ethel Dickens, which contains the proof that has so long been sought. It is a play written by the eldest son of Charles Dickens — Charles Dickens, the younger. And that play, which is a dramatization of the unfinished "Mystery," ends as Dickens has intended to end his baffling and fascinating story. I have been extremely fortunate in obtaining from Miss Dickens herself this account of it.
"The play of 'Edwin Drood' was written some years after my grand father's death, and my father's chief object in writing it was to give the ending of the story as he had received it from my grandfather's lips.
WRITTEN FOR AMERICA
"My father had long had the idea of this play in the mind, but I think it was during his visit to America and by reason of the extreme appreciation and love of my grandfather and his works that he found existing so strongly all over that country, that the play was finally written — and written for America.
"There can be little doubt that as my grandfather progressed with the story of 'Edwin Drood' many modifications were made of the original plot, and this is clearly proved by the conversation that I will speak of presently which took place between himself and my father some little time before his death.
"He was, I believe, keenly interested in this his last work. The development of the story and the study of Jasper, whom he evidently intended to present to us as an unmitigated villain from first to last, filled his remaining days, however, ruinous to his own health, gave to the world a most interesting and baffling enigma, the clues to the mystery one is invited to follow being so numerous and so apparently impossible to fit neatly together in order to arrive at any definite and satisfactory conclusions.
HOW DICKENS WORKED
"My grandfather pursued his usual method of work during the writing 'Edwin Drood' — that is to say, after an early breakfast he would go to his study or in fine, warm weather to the chalet in his garden and there work or grind away as he something called it, until the luncheon hour. It was never difficult, I have heard my father say, to judge from the expression on his face whether he had been successful in the arduous task of pleasing himself. Very often he looked sad and worn and spoke little and retired in his work again after taking a mere pretence of food; but there were brighter days when his eyes shone, when his face and manner were alert and cheerful and when he looking forward with pleasure to the walk he would take in the afternoon. Then those about him knew 'Edwin Drood' was making happy progress. My grandfather was a reticent man, seldom speaking much of his own work at any time and not caring to be questioned, particularly about the story the solution of which he was desirous of keeping himself until the end.
VERY METHODICAL
"My grandfather was exceedingly orderly and methodical in his manner of working (as he was in everything did), forcing himself to go to his desk each morning at the some hour, and he was generally very accurate in sending the exact amount of material required to the printer; but I have been told that a few days before he died he suddenly discovered that he had bought forward history of 'Edwin Drood' too quickly for the six numbers he had still to write. This gave him a great deal of anxiety and was the cause of mach thought and trouble. But on the very day he was taken ill, the day before his death, he announced at the luncheon table that be hoped he had overcome this difficulty and he returned to his work in gay spirits.
"In the curious proviso made in his agreement with Messrs. Chapman & Hall relating to 'Edwin Drood' — the first time any such proviso had been made in agreements between himself and his publishers — we certainly see that some vague premonition of impending death was in his mind, and later on signs were not wanting to show that this presentiment was constantly with him, and one cannot help feeling how painfully he must have desired to finish the story which, had he but know it, was gradually but surely undermining the strength and devotion which he ungrudgingly bestowed upon it every day of his closing life.
HIS VARIOUS MOODS
"Of course all I can tell you must be from hearsay, for I scarcely remember my grandfather; but my father spoke constantly of him and he always said that although of so reticent a nature he was never surly in his manner and it pressed for an explanation of what he was writing by on he loved, he would at once gravely refuse to give it, or if he was in one of his rare communicative moods he might suddenly and to his companion's surprise throw away his shy reserve and become perfectly frank and confidential. I imagine that it was owing to some such quick change of reeling that my father was enabled to give the closing scene to his play of 'Edwin Drood,' and this brings me to the conversation which I mentioned at the beginning of our interview.
"It came about in this way: One afternoon some three weeks before my grandfather died my father was at Gad's hill, and, as so oft happened, he and my grandfather started off on one of those long, rambling walks which were the chief recreation my grandfather allowed himself when he was, as then, hart at work — if, indeed, recreation they could be called, far it was. I believe, during these walks that the creative brain was most active — and, although he liked to have some confidential companion which him, I frequently heard my father said that often the whole walk would be taken in complete silence, not one syllable on any subject passing my grandfather's lips. However, this special occasion was not one silence. It was then that my father heard in detail the definitive scheme for the end of the book, my grandfather also telling him that when he first began this work he had a slightly different end in view, but that as the book developed certain definite alterations became necessary with regard to the final tragedy. He also added that my father was absolutely the one person to whom these facts were known.
LITERARY PUZZLE
"The ring which plays so important a part in the book was not mentioned by my grandfather on this occasion, but my father was under the impression that it was to hold the original place in the story and was to be the means of identifying the murdered body as that of Edwin Drood. As, however, my grandfather did not touch upon this point, my father has not emphasized it in the play."
Some prominent members of the organization of Dickens lovers called the Dickens Fellowship, with whom I have conversed about the matter, are disposed to be skeptical concerning the statement that Dickens confided to his son Charles how he intended to end the story. They say it is almost incredible that the younger Dickens should have had authoritative knowledge on a subject that the whole literary world was speculated about, and have refrained from making his knowledge public, especially in view of the fact that he could have made mach money out of it. But such reticence on his part, extraordinary as it may appear, really proves nothing in face of the evidence that he did possess that knowledge. Miss Dickens told me that he made no secret of it in his own family. Her brother, Charles and her sister Mary heard him talk about it on several occasions. From each of them I have obtained statements confirming that given me by Miss Ethel Dickens.
CLAUSE IN CONTRACT
Miss Dickens' reference to the indication that her grandfather had some premonitions of impending death afforded by his agreement for the publication of his last work should perhaps be explained. At his own request he had a clause insered in his agreement with his publishers. Chapman & Hall providing for a satisfactory pecuniary settlement between them and his executors in case he should "die during the composition of the said work of 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood.' "
Needless though this clause seemed at the time, its sad pertinency was proved by his death at Gad's Hill on the 9th of June, 1870, when he had written the manuscript of only six of the twelve numbers that were to complete the book. The greater part of the previous day he had spent working upon it in the Chalet, a gift from his friend Charles Fechter, the actor, which had been erected in the grounds. In the study there he penned the last words that he ever wrote on the "Mystery."
DEATH OF DICKENS
"He was late leaving the Chalet," says his biographer, John Forster, "but before dinner, which was ordered at 6 o'clock, with the intention of walking afterward in the lanes, he wrote some letters, … and dinner was begun before Miss Hogarth saw, with alarm, a singular expression of trouble and pain in his face. 'For an hour,' he than told her, 'he had been very ill,' but he wished dinner to go on- These were only coherent words uttered by him." He died at 10 minutes past 6 o'clock on the succeeding day, but during the 24 hours that elapsed between his seizure and his death there had never been a gleam of hope.
WHAT CRITICS SAID
When Dickens started writing "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," his position as the greatest of English novelists was everywhere acknowledged. He had no rival: he cold add nothing to his literary fame. But many of the reviewers who lavished the warmest praise of his works said that plots were weak — that he could not write a book the ending of which would not be foreshadowed long before he reached it.
It is believed he left this criticism keenly. Its refutation was task he assigned himself in "The Mystery." He wanted to write a book that would keep people guessing to the end as to how it would turn out — a work that should be full of baffling clues, misleading suggestions and trails that were crossed by red herrings.
How well he succeeded, as far as he went, is proven by the wide divergences in the conclusions reached by those who have essayed to solve "The Mystery." On the question whether or not Dickens intended that Edwin Drood should really meet his death at the hands of the villain Jasper they are hopelessly at odds. In the reconstruction of the plot, Andrew Lang, of all of them the man who perhaps has the greatest reputation for literary astuteness, defeats the villain and brings Drood back to life.
AMERICAN SOLUTION
From America came the earliest attempts to finish the unfinished half of the "Mystery." Dickens had been dead hardly a year when "John Jasper's Secret" was published in Philadelphia. It was the joint production of a New York journalist Henry Morford, and his wife. It was first published anonymously, but in subsequent editions it authorship was impudently attributed to Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens the younger. Despite their reputations of the forgery their names are still attached to reprints of the book. In this Morford solution Jasper tries to murder Drood, and thinks he has succeeded. In the end he is confronted by his supposed victim, and succumbs to poison. For the rest of the characters things end in the conventionally happy style.
NEXT ATTEMPT
From spookdom emanated the next attempt. It was a bulky volume of 500 pages entitled "The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete." It was sent forth to a skeptical world as the work of Charles Dickens' spirit aided and abetted by a medium of Brattleboro, Vt. It abounded in inexplicable blunders and grammatical vagaries. It brought Edwin Drood back to life and dealt out retributive justice to Jasper by depriving him of his reason and consigning him to a madhouse.
ENGLISH CONCLUSION
In the assurance that no one could possibly "go on better" than a solution of "The Mystery" by ghost of his author, America gave up constructing sequels to Dickens' work after this, and his own country folk took up the game. A woman of some literary reputation in the north of England, written under queer pen name of "Gillan Vase," issued a three-volume conclusion of the unfinished work under the title "A Great Mystery Solved." There again Drood escapes from the tomb to which Jasper consigned him and the villain makes a dramatic exit by committing suicide in jail.
Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer, wearying of his studies of the mysteries of the heavens, solaced himself by studying Dickens's mundane mystery. His speculations were published under the title "Watched by the Dead: a Loving Study of Dickens's Half-Told Tale." The watcher is Edwin Drood, who, escaping from the death which Jasper has planned for him devotes himself to bringing Jasper to justice.
PLOT OF THE PLAY
There is no space to mention the numerous magazine articles on the subject that have been published from time to time. But the reader will want to know what Dickens intended should be to fate of Edwin Drood. The answer to that question as revealed by the play, is that Jasper did murdered Drood. Which shows that all — or nearly all — of those who have tried to reconstruct the conclusion of "The Mystery" from clues left by Dickens have been baffled by him and that he was equal to the task he had set himself.
The play, which I have permitted to read, is a good, sound, old-fashioned melodrama, ending in a weird form of dead for Jasper. It was written subsequent to Charles Dickens, Jr's, tour in the United States in a series of readings from his father's work, and was done in collaboration with his late Joseph Hatton, with the idea of meeting the requirements of E. S. Willard. It was sent over to the United States, and was, I believe, actually put in rehearsal there, but for some reason or other was never produced, and was pigeon-holed, and never came to light again until a few weeks ago, just before Joseph Hatton's death.
DEEMED DESECRATION
The queer thing about it was that the late Charles Dickens, Jr., never made the slightest capital out of the fact that the play contained the ending of the story as his father had planned it — the one great fact that would have made the play instantly marketable. He was a peculiarly reserved uncommercial-minded man, to whom the financial importance of the information given to him by his father would have made no appeal. It was generally understood at the time that the great novelist had passed on to his eldest son his plans for the completion of "Edwin Drood" and in consequence Charles Dickens, Jr., was after his father's death beset with offers to finish the novel. These he refused, as it was the feeling of the family at that time that it would be a kind of desecration for any one else to assume the mantle of Elijah. In might seen strange that Forster, Dickens's biographer, knew nothing about the circumstances, but this is to be explained by the fact that Charles Dickens, Jr., and John Forster were not on good terms. Although the facts were well known to all the members of the family of Charles Dickens, Jr., apparently they were never communicated to the other members of the family.
Published: Deseret Evening News, November 23, 1907