"The Modern Language Review", Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1977)

Howard Duffield, in an article for The Bookman (February 1930), presented the interesting theory that John Jasper, strange hero of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was a Thug. Edmund Wilson endorsed this view in ‘The Two Scrooges’ in 1939. And the connexion between the unfinished novel and Thuggee has been maintained ever since, as evidenced by Angus Wilson in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel published in 1974. Here he offers the theory of Jasper’s connexion with the followers of Kali, but suggests no acceptance or denial of its reliability.

This paper proposes to reexamine the evidence in those sections of the novel that have been thought to suggest Thuggee, and to analyse this evidence to show that the author can be seen to imply some other intention. The theory is not provable either way because of the unfinished state of the novel, but, taken section by section, it does appear to be an improbable one. The idea is immediately interesting and seductive, but, as with so many of the proposed endings to this novel, close examination shows it to be less satisfactory than hopeful.

Edmund Wilson devotes no more than a long paragraph to the problem, although his reference to Duffield’s theory has been largely responsible for thirty-odd years of acceptance of the notion that ‘Mr Duffield has here shown conclusively that Jasper is supposed to be a member of the Indian sect of Thugs’. Mr Wilson concludes the paragraph with the claim that Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) ‘seems to have inspired Dickens with the idea of outdoing his friend the next year with a story of a similar kind’ — even though Wilkie’s tale has nothing to do with Thuggee. Duffield’s article, on the other hand, goes into considerable detail, both about Thuggee and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The central clue is Jasper’s silk scarf worn on Christmas Eve to protect his throat from the cold air. The illustrator, Luke Fildes, had noticed this; and, in a letter to The Times (3 November 1905), he wrote that when he asked Dickens about the scarf he was told in confidence that it was to be used to strangle Edwin Drood. Duffield associates this statement with Jasper’s dark looks, his opium habit, and the scattering of oriental motif in the novel, considering all this as support for his theory of Thuggee. We are told the history of Thuggee, of its exposure in India, and the extensive struggle by the British police to stamp it out. Then Duffield lists similarities between Thuggee and elements in Dickens’s tale: the mysterious disappearances that occurred in India, and Edwin’s disappearance; the devotion to destruction to which Thugs are sworn, and Jasper’s declaration, in the Diary which he shows to Crisparkle, that he is devoted to Edwin’s murderer (Chapter 16); the skills of hypocrisy so mastered by both Thug and Jasper; the preparation of burial place; and the observation of omens which Duffield finds similar in Dickens’s novel to that preoccupation among Thugs.

The Thugs were members of a savage brotherhood of murderers whose methods were exposed during the British rule in India. in 1829 the Supreme Government of India found themselves at grips with a secret cult of ‘religious assassins’ among whom the craft of murder was sanctified as an ancestral rite. A special police department devoted to the suppression of Thuggee was established, and the work was completed only as late as 1904. Votaries of Kali, Goddess of Destruction, the Thugs did not ‘murder’, but ‘sacrificed’ their victims to their goddess according to a prescribed method. Howard Duffield explains that ‘murder by a Thug was invariably a “mysterious disappearance”. Travellers who set out upon a journey never reached their journey’s end. Neighbours vanished. Soldiers on furlough failed to return to the ranks. Nothing was ever known concerning a Strangler’s victim, except that he was gone’ (p. 583). The number of disappearances grew to such proportions that the Government was forced to undertake investigations which revealed facts so abhorrent that, until they were proven beyond a shadow of doubt, the Government refused to admit the existence of such crime.

During two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the period spanned by the life of Charles Dickens, one of the outstanding features of English rule in India was this effort to suppress the Phansigars, popularly known as ‘Thugs’. The discovery, history, and suppression of the Thugs was reported in England and Europe with excitement, and the gangs and their particular methods, not to mention the romantic tales and legends that grew up around them, became common knowledge, as is evidenced in an article in Household Words, published some twenty years after the establishment of the special police department in India. Here the stranglers are lampooned — and also anglicized:’ “The Blue Bludgeon,” which is well known to be the rendezvous of the famous Torn Thug and his gang, whose recent achievements in the strangling line, by means of a silk handkerchief and a life-preserver, used tourniquet fashion, have been so generally admired of late.’ Seventeen years later the interest in Thugs is still prevalent, and an amusing article in All The Tear Round in 1868 shows us how much the Thugs had captured the imagination of Europe. A melodramatic villain of little conviction in a novel entitled Le Dernier Mol de Rocambole by M. Ponson du Terrail is mocked by the author of the article, who points out that ‘at the time when this novel appeared, Thugs were the rage in Paris. There were Thugs in the feuiletons, there were Thugs on the stage, the exploits of Thugs were recorded in the patter songs of the cafés-chantants. in accordance with the prevailing fashion, the Thugs form no inconsiderable portion of the dramatis personae of the Dernier Mot de Rocambole’.

Two other articles, both by John Lang, were published by Dickens. The first, ‘Wedding Bells’, is an account of the murder of a young Brahmin bride by a female Thug. The tender-hearted young woman takes pity on an old woman whom she passes on the roadside. Overcome by illness and fatigue, the old woman calls upon the Almighty for aid. ‘But, miserable as was her appearance, she had quick bright eyes, and an intelligent and prepossessing expression.’ The bride invites the hag into her bylee, or covered carriage, but when the procession arrives at its destination ‘the young bride was discovered a corpse. She had been strangled during the night, and the thin cord with which her life had been taken was still about her neck. She had fallen victim to a woman Thug… Her jewels and golden ornaments, for which she had been murdered, had been taken from her person’. The other article is a brief and straightforward account of the habits and customs of Thugs whom Lang was able to observe during a visit to Calcutta.’ Here Lang reports the curious sensation he experienced ‘in conversation with men who had each committed his ninety or a hundred murders — to see the fingers that had strangled so many victims’ (p. 457). He comments on the good-natured manner in which the imprisoned Thugs acted out their methods so that he should understand their ways, and how one of the children sought his approval with the cry of’ “Was that good?”’ (P. 457).

We must remember here that nothing was published in either Household Words or All the Tear Round without the blessings and approval of Dickens himself, who checked each published article and read a large proportion of the manuscripts that came into his offices. It is likely that Dickens would have read Colonel Meadows Taylor’s portrait of Ameer Ali, The Confessions of a Thug, which was published in 1839. This work evinced the comment from Blackwood’s Magazine that

the astounding disclosures relative to the system of secret murder in India, called Thuggee, which have been brought to light during the last ten years, have so far penetrated the veil of apathy through which every detail regarding our Indian empire is too generally contemplated in this country, as to excite a considerable degree of curiosity in the listless minds of general readers, and even to form the subject of a work, which — though most of those who have casually perused it have probably supposed it a romance, superinduced on a slender substratum of reality — is, in sooth, in almost every incident of its fiendish narrative, ‘an ower true tale’.

The work is a fictionalized account, based upon the actual life of one of these remarkable men. An officer in India who had first-hand experience of these criminals, Meadows Taylor, wrote his novel at the suggestion of Bulwer Lytton, who was interested in the subject himself but did not have the necessary knowledge for a work of his own. Lytton does use the idea of Thug murder as an element of ‘A Strange Story’, published in All The Tear Round in 1861-2. One of the characters in this tale is believed to ‘belong to that murderous sect of fanatics whose existence … has only recently been made known to Europe’, and this man makes an attempt upon the hero’s life:

Before I could turn, some dark muffling substance fell between my sight and the sun, and I felt a fierce strain at my throat. But… with one rapid hand I seized the noose before it could tighten too closely, with the other I tore the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round on the dastardly foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot. His hand, as he fell, relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from the knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit plain.

Another author who centred a work upon Thuggee was Eugene Sue. Dickens had been entertained by Sue in Paris in 1847 and would have known, at least in part, his major work, The Wandering Jew (1844-3), which enjoyed great success. One of the highlights of the work is a detailed account of Thuggee, when one of the characters transfers the practice of the craft he learned in India to Europe. It is also possible that Dickens, with his fascination for crime and criminal methods, would have been familiar with the reports written by Colonel Sir William Sleeman, officer in charge of the suppression of Thuggee in India. And in 1869, the same year that Dickens began The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the American novelist, James de Mule, was publishing a novel called Cord and C’reese, the subject of which was an Englishman who was affiliated with the Thugs, Europe was bewildered as well as fascinated by what it learned from India; and learned articles attempted to understand. One such article discussed William Sleernan’s Ramaseeana (1836), an account of the vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs. The reviewer suggests that ‘the subject is one which must excite the most acute feelings in the mind of every friend to humanity’ as the book related details of ‘probably the most extraordinary organized society of ruthless villains that ever existed on the face of the globe’.

The word ‘thug’ derives from the Hindi word thugna, to deceive, and it was on the particular principle of deception that the success of the Thugs depended. It was essential to their operations that the Thugs should pass as peaceful citizens, and indeed it was their skill in deception that so astounded and interested the British, Captain James Sleeman, Sir William’s son, reports that the complexity of character presented by the Thug was ‘utterly baffling to a student of psychology’, for, as a general rule, the Thug was a ‘good citizen and model husband, devoted to his family and scrupulously straight when not on his expeditions’. It is just such a dichotomy in the personality and life style of John Jasper that underpins the enigma of his characterization: in Cloisterham a respectable member of the Cathedral community, and in London a frequenter of the seamy opium den of the Radcliffe Highway, he is also perhaps the murderer of his nephew. It happened among Thugs (much as it happens in Cloisterham) that if the disappearance of travellers ever aroused suspicion, such suspicion was apt to fall upon others than the respectable, well-mannered, and inoffensive traveller that the Thug always appeared to be. He was a well-to-do merchant travelling on business and surrounded by his companions and servants. Gangs were divided so that the Thug was inconspicuous; roles were cunningly played; and, by the time suspicions were about, those concerned had long since scattered and had returned to their respectable homes and employments, to pose once again as public-spirited citizens, husbands, and fathers. A similarity between The Mystery of Edwin Drood and this aspect of the Thug’s mode of covering his traces lies in the manner in which Jasper sees to it that suspicion is immediately cast upon Neville after Edwin’s disappearance and never upon Jasper himself, whose half-life is a secret in Cloisterham. Jasper, who has built up his reputation in the cathedral community as a quiet, sensitive, gifted, and respectable gentleman, is able to set Neville up as a scapegoat, thus diverting suspicion that might fall upon himself away towards the dark stranger, who is young, alien in colour and speech, whose background is a mystery, and whose impetuosity and integrity lead him into hasty, passionate actions easily interpreted as violent. Mrs Crisparkle's fear of and antagonism towards Neville, and her faith in Jasper’s respectability, is a good barometer of the town’s opinion of both the men.

If Jasper is the murderer, or intends to be the murderer, of Edwin Drood, then this is perhaps why he requires the loyalties of Mr Sapsea. In the Number Plans to Chapter 4, Dickens notes that Sapsea should be connected with Jasper, for ‘he will want a solemn donkey bye and bye’. We see how Jasper makes use of his donkey, in particular, in Chapter 15, when Neville is waylaid, brought back from his walking tour, and taken to the Mayor’s parlour, where ‘Mr Sapsea being informed by Mr Crisparkle of the circumstances under which they desired to make a voluntary statement before him, Mr Jasper broke silence by declaring that he placed his whole reliance, humanly speaking, on Mr Sapsea’s penetration’. From here onwards, Dickens employs indirect speech to demonstrate that Jasper’s familiarity with the Mayor enables him to put words into his mouth, and to dictate the terms of Neville’s fate according to his own plan. We are further titillated by this odd association when Datchery comes to Cloisterham and finds Jasper and Sapsea together at the Gate House. Mrs Tope has told him that ‘he and Mr Jasper were great friends’ (Chapter 18) and we wonder what further uses Jasper may have for his donkey. Jasper’s friendship with Sapsea is a kind of bribery; similarly, officials and rulers in Indian villages were sometimes bribed by the Thugs, who sometimes found themselves having to use their ill-gotten rupees to maintain or pretend ignorance if enquiries were made.

At regular intervals the Thugs would gather together; they would fabricate a feasible excuse to their wives for a journey, and set out upon a voyage, one from which they promised their families many riches. (Colonel Sleeman uses the word ‘expedition’ constantly as he explains the ritual, just as Dickens repeats the word when he describes the ‘unaccountable expedition’ that Jasper makes with Durdles through the Cathedral in the moonlight in Chapter 12.) Travel in India was a tedious business: the highways that traverse the plains became murder traps, particularly among the groves of trees, or topes, planted by well-wishers to cool and comfort the voyager on his long way. Here, where travellers had stopped to camp overnight, or to avoid the hottest part of the day, the Thugs would prepare their ground for murder. Some of the Thugs were specifically trained as ‘inveiglers’, whose task it was to insinuate themselves into the intimacy and trust of travelling parties in order to strike their death blow beneath the guise of mutual respect and attachment. Thugs often proved to be delightful company, masters at beguiling a tiresome journey with story and song. But they were also skilled and patient in assessing their victims, their habits and natures, and in awaiting an appropriate moment for attack. Certainly, Jasper’s skills as an ‘inveigler’ are considerable, particularly when lie handles Sapsea, and Crisparkle and his mother. But when Jasper is with his victim, Edwin Drood, it is hard to believe that the intense, dog- like devotion for his nephew is no more than a show of love such as the Thug would demonstrate towards a stranger he met by chance upon the road.

Colonel Sleeman, and other reporters like him, were sickened by the hardheartedness of the Thugs. No remorse was demonstrated as they listed the hundreds of travellers who had fallen victim to their wiles. Perhaps this attitude is less incomprehensible if seen in relation to the religious motives behind the murders. The Thugs were not common criminals, lunatics, louts who had a lust for blood: they were religious men who served their goddess with a passionate devotion, and a fanatical conviction that would obviate the regular guilt and compassion that could be expected of one who had not been initiated into the rites of Kali. And perhaps this is the biggest stumbling block of all to the theory of Jasper as Thug, not mentioned, or explained, by either Duffield or Edmund Wilson: for Dickens would have had to work hard indeed to convince the reader that the cynical John jasper, Lay Precentor in a Christian Cathedral, whose devotion to that faith is hardly evident (particularly by comparison with the devout fidelity of the Reverend Crisparkle), could be the lonely and constant worshipper of Kali of India. Of course, Jasper may well have been in the East at some time in his life, but we do not know about this; if his dreams in the opium den are actual memories of the East, they do not have to be, for the dream in Chapter 1 in particular answers to a traditional pattern of dreams influenced by opium found in the writings of opium eaters such as Coleridge and De Quincey; and if Jasper learned to smoke opium, there was no need for him to have learned the addiction any further away from home than London’s east end.

Thug ritual murder was carried out during a journey undertaken for that specific purpose. We think of the concept of the journey, not only in terms of Chapter 12 in which Durdles and Jasper explore Cloisterham Cathedral in the moonlight, but also in terms of the extraordinary statement that Jasper makes in the opium den in the last chapter, when he tells the Princess Puffer of the ‘difficult and dangerous journey’ that haunts his dreams (Chapter 23). But that both the rules of Thuggee and Dickens’s novel should have in common the idea of a journey can surely be accounted no more than coincidence. The expedition through the Cathedral can hardly be compared with a journey across the plains of India. Furthermore, the ‘difficult and dangerous journey’ to which Jasper refers is a problem in the novel, for we do not really know what Jasper means. There is the suspicion that he is speaking in metaphoric terms: that the ‘journey’ to which he refers is conceived as a concept of time. To assume that he refers to the expedition made with Durdles in the Cathedral as a practice run for the night of the murder is no more than an assumption. The words and their meaning remain a puzzle.

It was common for Thugs to employ an affectation of love and concern for the companions of their voyages; and here we remember how Jasper charms his nephew, how convinced Edwin is of Jasper’s devotion, and the exaggerated words of endearment that are particularly noticeable when nephew and uncle first meet in Chapter 2. Common, too, was it to persuade the victim to leave his lodging a little after midnight upon the day of the murder, as Jasper may have done with Drood after he and Neville had returned from their walk to the river on Christmas Eve, the night of Edwin’s disappearance, in Chapter 15. It was also usual for the victim to he given opium in his food and drink, or to have it offered in a pipe, in order to lull his senses. The question here may be, does Jasper drug the wine lie offers to Durdles on their expedition through the Cathedral in order to calculate the effect it would have on his nephew when, and if, he takes him on a similar journey through the Cathedral towards his death? And we have to assume that Edwin and Neville are both drugged when they are the guests of the choirmaster in the Gate House in Chapter 8, though here Jasper’s intentions are probably to engender another quarrel between the two young men, and to intensify their mutual antagonism.

The Thug believed his activities to be ritual murder done at the command and under the guidance of the goddess Kali. She had taught him his methods and skills and she expressed her continued interest in his work through a series of omens. The Thug was therefore highly superstitious, and believed that the wishes of Kali were conveyed through the cries of certain animals and birds. The river was also a significant omen in his worship. Howard Duffield relates this aspect of the rules of Thuggee to Dickens’s novel, and sees the expedition with Durdles as primarily a search for omens made at the appropriate time. He points to the ‘chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook’ heard near the summit of the tower; their view from the tower showed them the ‘river winding down from the mist of the horizon’ (Chapter 12). ‘The call of a rook in sight of a river, known as “Julkajura”, was the most favorable omen which could possibly befall. In the lore of the Phansigar, the Goddess had spoken and had given to whatever plan was in Jasper’s heart her frightful benediction’ (p. 585).

Certainly, even though one may be reluctant to grant the role of ‘omen’ to the rooks, their role in the novel is sometimes sinister and often ambiguous. In the earliest pages of the novel Dickens calls attention to the rooks that circle around the Cathedral (Chapter 2), and his description of the Cathedral frequently includes some mention of ‘its hoarse rooks hovering about’ (Chapter 3). We hear the cawing of the rooks from Minor Canon Corner (Chapter 6); also, when Rosa and Edwin say their farewells after their decision to end their engagement, the rooks hover ‘above them with hoarse cries, darker splashes in the darkening air’ (Chapter 12), and they appear as a fearful warning. When Christmas visitors come to Cloisterham ‘the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time’ (Chapter 14), and during the storm on Christmas Eve, ‘great ragged fragments from the rooks’ nest up in the tower’ are flung to the ground (Chapter 14). At the end of the work, the rooks join the procession into the Cathedral: in bizarre fashion they come from ‘various quarters of the sky, back to the great tower; who may be presumed to enjoy vibration, and to know that bell and organ are going to give it them’ (Chapter 23). But can we really be happy with the notion of rooks and river being omens sent forth by the goddess of destruction? Rooks and rivers are familiar objects in the English landscape, and they are not unfamiliar images in other works of Charles Dickens, where they have no supernatural significance. The river is a consistent image in Our Mutual Friend and in Little Dorrit; and when David Copperfield describes Canterbury Cathedral he remembers the ‘venerable cathedral towers, and the old jackdaws and rooks whose airy voices made them more retired than perfect silence would have done’ (David Copperfield, Chapter 39).

After consultation of the omens, the day and hour for the start and direction of the expedition would be defined. This required as much care and consideration as every other aspect of the Thug’s plans, for the moment of murder must be one in which time and position had to coincide exactly. Now, when Crisparkle visits Jasper with a plan for the reconciliation of Drood and Landless, he finds that Jasper is perplexed by his proposal; Crisparkle regards this perplexed face with some curiosity ‘inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close internal calculation’. When Crisparkle assures Jasper of his being able to answer for Neville’s intentions, ‘the perplexed and perplexing look vanished’ (Chapter 10). It is doubtless at this moment that Jasper is confirmed in his intention to attack Edwin Drood on the night of Christmas Eve when both young men would be his guests.

One other slight similarity between the rules of Thuggee and the events of The Mystery of Edwin Drood relates to the stipulation that if a victim of Thuggee was accompanied by a dog, the dog was to be killed lest the animal cause the discovery of its murdered master’s grave. This brings to mind the mysterious dog that is found in a sketch that Charles Collins prepared for the novel. Dickens’s son-in-law was prevented through ill health from fulfilling the commission to illustrate this novel, and the task was taken over by Luke Fildes. Some of Collins’s work survives, and an early sketch is of the Dean and Crisparkle, or perhaps Sapsea, talking in the Street in Cloisterham in the company of Mr Tope. At Sapsea’s feet is a small dog, but in two other sketches that we have of this scene the dog has been removed.’ Why is this dog drawn in in the first place, and why is it removed from the illustration? The problem is interesting, too, in the light of the dog that Durdles hears howling a year ago at Christmas, when, having fallen asleep in the Cathedral crypt, he was woken by ‘one terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog: a long dismal woeful howl, such as a dog gives when a person’s dead’ (Chapter 12). When Durdles made enquiries, no one else had heard the noise, and he was unable to understand it.

Ritual observation also attached to the burial or disposal of the victims. Murder was not attempted until a burial place had been designated and prepared, and gravediggers were a select group of specially trained men, as were the inveiglers and stranglers. So expert were the Thugs in concealing the dead that the ground beneath which the bodies rested appeared undisturbed, and the burial places could not be discovered unless the slayers themselves revealed their whereabouts. Sometimes even the Thugs could find the graves only by reference to landmarks. All this makes excellent material for detective novel writing and, turning back to Dickens’s novel, we recall that much has been made by critics of the careful preparations for the disposal of the corpse. It is said that Jasper’s fascination with Durdles’s skills in finding out where people are buried results from the need to find a suitable place for Edwin’s corpse that would be safe from such skills of detection. It is also thought that the mention of quick-lime in Chapter 12 is a hint to the reader to understand that the body will be destroyed by lime. Another proposal is that Jasper will hide his nephew’s corpse in Mrs Sapsea’s tomb where Durdles’s men are said to have left some rubbish, indistinguishable from Edwin’s body. If Jasper was concerned to destroy or conceal the body, this would be a natural compulsion, and how far we can assume that Dickens would have been borrowing from Thug ritual in his concentration on this part of the murder is dubious. Where critics are convinced that the body is deposited in Mrs Sapsea’s tomb they not only disagree with the belief that the body is burned in quick-lime, but they also forget that when Durdles is talking to Jasper about the tomb he is not demonstrating at the tomb itself but is using the tomb as an hypothetical example because it had been talked about that evening: ‘Not really Mrs Sapsea?’ Jasper asks as Durdles begins to explain the workings of his skills; ‘Say Mrs Sapsea. Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs Sapsea’ Durdles replies (Chapter 5). So there is enough dispute about the text itself without having to apply the rules of Thuggee to add to the muddle.

The ritual attaching to burial in Thug custom is, more than any other aspect of their methods, designed to protect them from discovery. So would any murderer have to cover his tracks. Although we may assume (and it is only assumption) that Jasper’s interest in Durdles is to be able to assess exactly how he works so that the special knowledge he possesses can be counteracted, and although the mention of the quick-lime may be a pointer that Jasper will destroy his victim’s body in this lime, this does not make John Jasper a Thug. For, after all, Orlick plans to burn Pip’s body in the lime kiln so that nothing would be left of his corpse to betray his murderer (Great Expectations, Chapter 53), and Orlick is never suspected of being a Thug, nor is he. Further, if Jasper kills his nephew, Thug or no Thug, he will have to secrete the body in some way that will not betray the killer. All murderers have the same problem!

In Thug ritual the killing itself required the practised use of ‘the most harmless weapon in the world, the ruhmal, or strip of cloth, little bigger than a handkerchief’.’ This slip of cloth had the sanctity of a relic, being regarded as a fragment of the gown of Kali, and ordinarily was white or yellow; it was usually worn as a part of one’s dress, perhaps as a girdle or scarf. Its use was not a matter of choice, but of decree, for by the laws of Thug faith no blood could be shed during the murder. The masters of the skill also took pride in knowing that their victims were dead before they hit the ground. This made them something other than stranglers, for strangulation is a slow process. The knot of the ruhmal was placed against the throat of the victim in such a way as to exert pressure on the carotid sinus, causing a sympathetic paralysis and sudden death, so that death was not by strangulation but by an inhibition of the nervous centre.

On the eve of the supposed murder, Jasper protects a tender throat with ‘a large black scarf of a strong close-woven silk, slung loosely round his neck’. When he arrives home in the evening, he ‘pauses for an instant in the shelter to pull off that great black scarf; and hang it in a loop upon his arm. For that brief time, his face is knitted and stern. But it immediately clears, as he resumes his singing, and his way’ (Chapter 14). Duffield considers that although the ruhmal would normally be a pale colour, that it is here a black scarf is in accord with the fact that the gown of Kali is usually portrayed as being black. It is also true that a member of the cathedral community could not reasonably wear a pale-coloured scarf ‘both with his singing robe and with his ordinary dress’, but Duffield does not offer an explanation for the length of the scarf: the long looped scarf would be too cumbersome and large a piece of material for a Thug to handle. (The ruhmal is ordinarily about thirty inches in length. A knot was formed at the double extremity and a slip knot eighteen inches from it, giving the Thug a firm hold.) Further, would Dickens have been so inattentive to detail as to make the ruhmal, known to be of the specific thirty inches in length, a long black silk scarf that could not as easily be manipulated?

Thugs were secretly trained from their youth to the highest degree of skill in strangulation; three men accounted for each victim, and each had his particular job to do, as in all aspects of the Thug ritual, which by its nature was interdependent within the group. To one of the three men fell the task of throwing the ruhmal around the neck, the second man seized the arms and legs, and a third would sometimes administer blows at vital parts to bring down the victim at the psychological moment. The art demanded constant practice and fathers taught sons, gurus instructed young men, until all who were engaged on a Thuggee expedition became expert enough to carry out the various aspects of the endeavour with ease, skill, and speed. Each man would take up his place beside the victims, awaiting a signal which would indicate the moment for attack, and sometimes the period between attack and the completion of the burial would be no more than thirty minutes.

Some Thugs prided themselves on an ability to strangle single handed. ‘This, however, was so rare that it was esteemed the most honourable distinction to ascribe to a Thug, who was then considered to have conferred a dignity upon his family which ennobled him in the eyes of his fellows for many generations.” If Jasper is a Thug, then he would be a rare and gifted one, for his attempt upon his nephew’s life would of necessity be made single handed. But a problem attendant upon proving Jasper’s association with Thuggee lies in just this method of murder. It has been made clear that the stranglers were assisted in their killing by two other men, and that to attempt a murder single handed required inordinate skills; it is hard to believe that Jasper was possessed of these skills. We could more easily believe it of the powerful and agile Tartar, or of the Reverend Crisparkle for whom physical fitness is as important as religious devotion and intellectual pursuits; but Dickens gives us no information about any such physical prowess in the choirmaster, save that he suffers from indigestion, fainting fits, a grey pallor, and poor appetite. And, more than this, he is too young. Although Jasper is obviously an Englishman, versed in the habits, language, faith, and customs of his country, this would not Count against his having been captured as a boy by a group of Thugs (as did sometimes happen) and trained into their sacraments. On the other hand, to have acquired the skills and knowledge of a Thug expert enough to attempt strangulation single handed would have demanded many more years of adulthood than Jasper’s twenty-six, if he is also to have become so well integrated into the alien culture of English provincial life. In Chapter 2 Dickens is quite clear as to Jasper’s age: he writes that ‘Mr Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty’ and in the manuscript Jasper is given as some ‘five or six-and-twenty’ years. Also in this chapter, Edwin Drood points out that there are only half a dozen years or so between them. Of course, Dickens could manipulate his fiction at will, and such an objection is not necessarily conclusive, but even Colonel Meadows Taylor’s fictionalized and romantic hero, who several times performs the strangling of a victim single handed, is given the maturity of some thirty to thirty-five years and an intensive training from puberty to the prime of his manhood.

Another of the essential rules of Thuggee was that the murder of a party of travellers was not to be attempted unless the whole group was killed. No one could live to be a witness to their rites. This is relative to Jasper’s fury when he discovers Deputy lurking about the Cathedral after the expedition made with Durdles. The sight of the boy so arouses his fury (‘so quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older devil himself’ (Chapter 12)) that we realize that Jasper’s cries of ‘He followed us to-night, when we first came here!’ and ‘He has been prowling near us ever since!’ (Chapter 12) are motivated by a dreadful anxiety lest the boy has observed his movements. But whether this anxiety is related to the laws of Thuggee, or to the natural fear of a criminal that there has been a witness to his actions is a moot point! We suspect that Deputy’s sharp eyes and his animosity towards Jasper will tell against the choirmaster in the end, but is Jasper’s anger a result of being naturally afraid of being watched, or a result of his being a Thug and therefore desirous to protect his crime from being witnessed? The distinction would seem hardly to be there. There are a few accounts of victims having survived strangulation; and this may suggest the possibility of a failure on Jasper’s part to complete his task. We remember, for example, the doctor who escapes from the ruhmal in Lytton’s tale of ‘A Strange Story’, related earlier.

Since Jasper may fail in his attempt to carry out the Thug ritual to its successful end, the failure is answered for by the Thug superstitition that only evil could befall a Thug who murders a man in possession of gold at the time of the murder. Unknown to Jasper, Edwin Drood is carrying the gold ring set with diamonds and rubies that was given to him by Mr Grewgious as a betrothal ring for Rosa. The young people’s arrangement that they should break off their engagement decides Drood against giving the girl her mother’s ring and it is likely that he carries it with him in his breast pocket on Christmas Eve. Jasper knows that the watch and pin is the only jewellery Edwin wears, and these are removed and found in the Weir a few days later by Crisparkle; the gold ring is not with them. But, not surprisingly, there is conflicting evidence about the rules of Thuggee. This superstition about gold, recorded by Edward Thornton in his Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1837), is contradicted by the information offered by Colonel Sleeman who gives a long list of Thug plunder, and this includes anything under the sun, and very frequently gold. Money was not the object of the murder (it was a religious duty to please Kali) hut the Thugs were irritated if their victims were poor and had cost them a lot of time and trouble to entrap. Furthermore, are we not reluctant to believe that the gold ring, with its romantic associations with the past, is actually no more than an omen that disrupts Jasper’s well made plans?

It can be seen that the details of similarity between the rules and practices of Thuggee and The Mystery of Edwin Drood are interesting, and it is not to be wondered at that Howard Duffield could write that ‘to anyone familiar with the habits and history of the East, the discovery that in a novel saturated with Orientalisms the chief character was to figure as “A Strangler” is electrifying’ (p. 583). Nor is it surprising that he concluded that part of the mystery of the unfinished novel could be explained in terms of Jasper’s being a Thug. But although the evidence is interesting, it cannot be considered more than that, and certainly is not conclusive.

But, finally, the real objection to this interesting and imaginative red herring must be that to have imposed the rules of Thuggee upon John Jasper in order to explain some of his extraordinary actions would not be in accordance with Dickens’s methods and habits. Writing of the same character in the same novel, critics have devoted considerable attention to whether John Jasper is a mesmerist or not, and in the same way (lie feeling is that this idea is also unsatisfactory.¹ Where the theme of opium is so explicit, that of mesmerism is merely implicit, if it is there at all; so with Thuggee. To explain Jasper’s remarkable and hypnotic personality in terms of animal magnetism is to reduce its power as an artistic creation; and to modify the ‘romance’ of the crime de possion which the murder of Edwin by his uncle would be, to fit in with the ‘romance’ of the Thugs of India, is probably to make a false, and furthermore a reductive, equation. That which is fascinating in John Jasper is surely not the mechanism of mesmerism, or the association with the East but, rather, his extraordinary complex, mysterious, and interesting psyche. We have seen that it is the psychology of crime itself that so rivets Dickens’s attention, from such characters as Quilp and Sikes in the early novels, up to Bradley Headstone and now Jasper in the later ones, Here is no deus ex machina; such mechanical aids are to be scorned in the world created by Dickens’s fertile imagination. John Jasper is a jealous man, jealous of the interesting life that Edwin Drood will live when he goes abroad, and jealous, agonizingly jealous, of the bride that Edwin will take with him. Jasper is also a frustrated, bored, and lonely man; he guards a secret of decadence and immorality from the petty gossip of Cloisterham’s small, censoring community. Intelligent, gifted, and suffering, the villain need not also be a Thug and a mesmerist for his characterization to convince us. The enigmatic personality itself, its duality and distress, is at the centre of Charles Dickens’s interest.

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Notes

1. The most recent proponent of Jasper as a mesmerist is Fred Kaplan in his detailed "Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction" (Princeton, New Jersey, 1975), where it is shown that Jasper ‘has been given a full armament of mesmeric weapons: the power of his music, eyes, hands, touch, voice, presence’ (p. 131). Kaplan claims that ‘states of mesmeric trance are frequent in Edwin Drood’ and that ‘through some mechanism that was to have been explained in the final sections of the book, undoubtedly Jasper was to have been revealed as self-mesmerized, through some vehicle, perhaps music or opium’ (pp. 153-4).