The notebook which Charles Dickens began keeping in I855 hardly compares in interest with the notebooks of Henry James. Dickens was extremely telegraphic and elusive in making his entries, and there is none of James's "O mon bon" airs. (A suggestive comparison between James's and Dickens's notebooks can be made from the lists of names each writer kept for future use in novels. Typical of James are such names as "Melina Peverel, Millington, Chailff, Bedborough, Highmore, Ddacoombe, Eastmead, Gereth, Desborough Umberleigh, Mme de Rimmington." Typical of Dickens are: "Stephen Marquick, Miriam Denial, Verity Hawkyard, Sally Gimblet, Spessifer, Pickles Johnson, Wopsle, Whelpington Pleasant") The volume has little even of what Bagehot called Dickens's "fawning fondness over details; its streamlining is indicated by Forster's labeling it a Memorandum Book rather than a notebook. There is a fascination, nevertheless, in seeing how situations took shape in Dickens's novels after he had recorded a few jottings in this notebook. To isolate but one example: in September, I857, while acting the part of Richard Wardour in "The Frozen Deep", Dickens was inspired by an idea he was to use almost two years later as the core of "A Tale of Two Cities". During his recitation of the speech of the heroically dying Wardour (who sacrificed his life for the sake of others), the tears of the audience inspired Dickens to foresee the possibilities of Sydney Cartons role. As he remarked in a letter afterwards: "New ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground, with surprising force and brilliance. Last night, being quiet here, I noted them down in a little book I keep."

The notebook entries seemingly alluded to consist of a list of possible tides for the novel such as "Memory Carton" together with a sentence giving its basic situation: "How as to a story in two periods with a lapse of time between, like a French drama?" Another entry consists of bare jottings for the relationship between Carton and Stryver : "The drunken? — dissipated? — What? — Lion and his JACKALL and Primer, stealing down to him at unwonted hours." In I859, Dickens apparently returned to these jottings and constructed his tale. This procedure was likewise employed, but more extensively, when he was writing "Little Dorrit", "Our Mutual Friend", and some of his later short stories. "Great Expectations" seems to be the only one of his later completed novels for which he did not consult his notebook except for naming the characters. In a short article, there is insufficient space to demonstrate fully Dickens's use of his notebook in these later novels, but attention can be focused with profit upon one obvious question: did he employ the same procedure when he was writing "Edwin Drood"? In discussing this question, I hope that what emerges may be of interest to non-Droodians (a classification which includes the present writer) as well as to the sleuths, for the discussion demonstrates that our prevailing notions about the Dickens notebook are inexact, and that the text itself, as it appears in the Nonesuch edition, is highly inadequate. Part of the inadequacy of the text can be attributed to Forster. In presenting the notebook in his biography of Dickens, Forster suppressed several entries. He also lumped together the entries he wished to discuss and thus ignored the order Dickens had followed in his manuscript. A few corrections to Forsters version were made, many years later, by Mrs. J. Comyns Carr in her "Reminiscences" (the manuscript having passed into her possession), but it was not until 1938 that what appeared to be the whole Memorandum Book was published as a unit. This version, published by the Nonesuch Press, is a strange item of scholarship. The editor does not trouble to explain that the text he is presenting was made up not by consulting Dickens's manuscript but by simply reprinting Forster's entries, in the same order, without Forster's running commentary. But even if explanation about the manuscript is lacking, what is more strange is that the Nonesuch editor omitted three of the best entries that Forster had printed, including one relating to "Edwin Drood" (although Forster was not aware of the relationship). The Nonesuch editor also omitted the corrections published by Mrs. Carr.

The only explanatory note included in the Nonesuch version is Forster's statement that Dickens did not consult his notebook when writing "Edwin Drood". "Except in one very doubtful instance," asserted Forster, Dickens did not use the notebook after writing "Our Mutual Friend". This "doubtful instance" was the final entry in the notebook, a mysterious reference to the Sapsea sequence: " 'Then I'll give up snuff'. Brobity. — An alarming sacrifice. Mr. Brobity's snuff-box. The Pawnbroker's account of it.' " There is otherwise nothing to recall "Drood", says Forster, and the notebook therefore comprises "that interval of ten years in his life [1855-1865]."

Hesketh Pearson and other later biographers have accepted Forster's judgment here, but it is a mistaken judgment. The very first entry from the notebook printed by Forster was put to use in "Drood". It is a speech by a maid at Tavistock House:

The gas-fitter says, sir, that he can't alter the fitting of the gas in your bed-room without taking up almost the ole of your bed-room floor, and pulling your room to pieces. He says, of course you can have it done if you wish, and he'll do it for you and make a good job of it, but he would have to destroy your room first, and go entirely under the jistes.

In "Drood", when Grewgious is inspecting Mrs. Billickin's furnished lodgings, the landlady repeats this speech, slightly adapted to her own mincing rhythms:

"I do not tell you that your bedroom floors is firm, for firm they are not. The gas fitter himself allowed, that to make a firm job, he must go right under your pistes, and it were not worth the outlay as a yearly tenant so to do. The piping is carried above your pistes, and it is best that it should be made known to you."

A less striking example of Dickens's having consulted the notebook for "Drood" is Mr. Grewgious speech to Rosa about his never having been young. " 'I was the only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I believe I was born advanced in life myself,' Grewgious explains. 'Young ways,' he adds, 'were never my ways.' " In the notebook, Dickens has the barebones for such a speech: "The old child. That is to say, born of parents advanced in life, and observing the parents of other children to be young. Taking an old tone accordingly."

Another notebook entry (hitherto unpublished) which may possibly have contributed a detail for "Drood" is the following: "Characters. The Newfoundland-Dog man, and teazing capricious woman." This puzzling memorandum was probably written after Dickens had observed a man who, in appearance, resembled such a huge dog. In any event, the first picture he gives of Datchery, in chapter XVIII of the novel, makes this comparison:

This gentleman's white head was unusually large, and his shock of white hair was unusually thick and ample. "I suppose, waiter," he said, shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might shake his before sitting down to dinner, "that a fair lodging … might be found … eh?"

In addition, as Forster himself admitted, Dickens certainly consuited his list of names in the notebook for "Drood", and extracted the names Sapsea, Peartree, and Kimber.

It seems safe to conclude that Forster was wrong and that Dickens was certainly drawing from his notebook in the course of writing "Edwin Drood". The borrowings indicated so far, however, were of a different kind from those for "A Tale of Two Cities". They are all examples of incidental embellishment rather than of leading idea or situation. Actually, Dickens did, at first, consult his notebook for the leading idea as well. In July 1869, he wrote in a letter to Forster:

What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way? — 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 fates.

Examination of the manuscript of the notebook proves that Dickens was using the same words here that appear in his notebook, but Forster for some reason, perhaps a perverse one, did not print the entry.

Forster observes that this leading idea "left its trace" on "Drood" in the story of Rosa and Edwin, but that it was "laid aside," as a leading idea, before Dickens began writing the novel in earnest." Perhaps Dickens felt that the situation was too closely comparable to one he had already used in "Our Mutual Friend", and so he made it subordinate to the murder story. In any event, by August, 1869, he had revised his plan and had developed a new leading idea which he outlined mysteriously to Forster by letter. Was this idea, also, drawn from the notebook? The suggestion has, in fact, been made by Mr. H. B. Smith that the "principal dramatic situation" in "Drood" was based on the following notebook entry:

There is a case in the State Trials, where a certain officer made love to a (supposed) miser's daughter, and ultimately induced her to give her father slow poison. … Her father discovered it … forgave her. … She afterwards poisoned him again … and successfully. Whereupon it appeared that the old man had no money at all, and had lived on a small annuity which died with him, though always feigning to be rich. He had loved his daughter with great affecting.

This Balzacian memorandum may account, says Mr. Smith, for the scene "in which Jasper falls in a fit on learning that he has … wasted a perfectly good murder and gained nothing by it." The suggestion is not very convincing. As Mrs. Carr noted, Dickens had exploited this situation many years earlier in "Martin Chuzzlewit". Perhaps a more ardent Droodian may find a more significant clue by puzzling over Dickens's strange entries (even in the Nonesuch version), for there is ample evidence to show that Dickens was thumbing through his notebook in 1869 and I870, just as he had done when writing "Little Dorrit", "A Tale of Two Cities", and "Our Mutual Friend".