At all times the river flows fast as it approaches the sea, but it flows fastest when the tide is ebbing; now of all times and between the tidal boundaries of all places is a human body likely to be found floating among the other refuse. Part of the impact of the analogy to life arises, as usual, from the fact that the statement is literally true. Mr. Crisparkle, Joining the search for Edwin Drood, uses this fact to guide him: "No search had been made up here, for the tide had been running strongly down ... and the likeliest places for the discovery of a body, if a fatal accident had happened under such circumstances, all lay — both when the tide ebbed, and when it flowed again — between that spot and the sea" (MED, ch. 16). If a body exists anywhere in the river, most likely it will be here. But the meaning quickly spills over into the terrifying knowledge that a human body in the river is a somehow guilty thing. Who in reading of this does not find reenforced the presentiment that Edwin Drood has been foully murdered?

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In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the reader gradually comes to realize that John Jasper lives in an ugly lighthouse. Literally, to be sure, his dwelling is "an old stone gatehouse crossing the Close, with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it." But:

Through its latticed window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening scene, involving in shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper covering the building's front. As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind goes through these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound that hums through tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue, in the pile dose at hand. (MED, ch. 2)

Already the description contains oblique allusions to the lower river in the suggestion of the arched bridge with a stream flowing under it. The fire, barred by the lattice, is not cheery, but creates obscuring shadows. The "rippling" wind carries a hint of the sea, its connotations of death enhanced by the companion ripple of solemn sound humming through tombstones and stone representations of life. But these are only suggestive wisps. Midway through the story, the allusion becomes pointed. Jasper and Durdles, about to make a midnight excursion into the crypt of the cathedral, pause to glance around them: "The whole expanse of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted. One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper's own gatehouse. The murmur of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the building were a Lighthouse" (ch. 12). Jasper's gatehouse, then, stands on the edge of the graveyard, the borderland beyond which life does not go. His lighthouse with its red light and ambiguous meaning is of the marsh: an ugly beacon surrounded by death.

On the evening Edwin will disappear, a terrible storm arises. As it continues through the night, John Jasper's gatehouse light "burns" reassuringly.

The red light burns steadily all the evening in the lighthouse on the margin of the tide of busy life. Softened sounds and hum of traffic pass it and flow on irregularly into the lonely Precincts; but very little else goes by, save violent rushes of wind. It comes on to blow a boisterous gale. (ch. 14)

Further on:

No such power of wind has blown for many a winter night. Chimneys topple in the streets, and people hold to posts and corners, and to one another, to keep themselves upon their feet. The violent rushes abate not, but increase in frequency and fury until at midnight, when the streets are empty, the storm goes thundering among them rattling at ail the latches, and tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to get up and fly with it, rather than have the roofs brought down upon their brains.

Still, the red light burns steadily. Nothing is steady but the red light. (ch. 14)

Despite the reassuring lighthouse, morning reveals the devastation all about, while time discloses that Edwin has vanished mysteriously sometime during the tempestuous night: the ominous steadiness of the deceptive red light has signaled not safety, but destructive violence.

In the last pages of the novel, left incomplete but clearly approaching its crisis, Mr. Datchery, one of Dickens's indefatigable bloodhounds, has appeared mysteriously on the scene. Convinced of Jasper's guilt in the disappearance of his nephew, Datchery has his own interpretation of the lighthouse: "John Jasper's lamp is kindled, and his lighthouse is shining when Mr. Datchery returns alone towards it. As Mariners on a dangerous voyage, approaching an iron-bound coast, may look along the beams of the warning light to the haven lying beyond it that may never be reached, so Mr. Datchery's wistful gaze is directed to this beacon, and beyond" (ch. 23). The "warning light" has no power to deceive Datchery with its steadiness. Its warning for him is different as he warily seeks a way past it to the "haven" that is sure evidence of Jasper's guilt, the end of the case.

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Harthouse, then, is seen to be a type of monster related to the marsh — cold, rigid, and monotonous. He is a relatively uncomplicated ancestor of John Jasper, the complex and guilt-ridden character who dominates The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Without any preparation, Dickens plunges the reader directly into the consciousness of John Jasper in the brilliant associational paragraph that introduces the novel. This paragraph describes an opium dreamer's slow return to consciousness:

An ancient English Cathedral Town? How can the ancient English Cathedral Town 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. (MED, ch. 1)

An unoriented reader groping for footing in this confusion must struggle along with the disoriented consciousness of the dreamer to find some semblance of reality in the images flashing past apparently chaotically, though actually in a pattern of beautifully synthesized dream logic. Bedpost, tower (spire), spike, and scimitar merge together without quite coalescing. Why has the bedpost become the spike? Why does the spike with the suggestion of an impaled human figure hover before the Cathedral tower? They are all drawn together by the ambiguous guilt within the dreamer. The images interplay from three different levels of experience. In the immediate situation, Jasper is aware that he has perverted his capacity to dream into the guilty journey of the opium dream, whose "Eastern" attraction is yet so powerful that he cannot resist it. In the larger world of Cloisterham, he knows he conducts a hypocritical and guilty relationship to the Cathedral, which should lead to salvation but for him leads only to the graveyard. And in between, the glamorous, guilty Sultan flashes past in resplendent colors at once alluring and repellent. Thus, in its interpretation of experience, the dream consciousness has hooked external reality together with two configurations — the marsh and the fairy tale — on the point of a shared image. The ironic, drowsy laughter acknowledges the power of the mind to construct so much from the rusty spike on the old bedstead — as Proust would later marvel at the conjuring powers in a bit of madeleine and a cup of tea.

With returning consciousness, the man moves about the opium den, while the reader moves outside to observe him. The dream world is much on the man's mind as he unsteadily contemplates the sleeping Chinaman, the Lascar, and the haggard woman, who has lapsed again into unconsciousness after performing her duties as hostess. "'What visions can she have,'" he muses. She mutters; he listens. '"Unintelligible,"' he comments. When the Chinaman and the Lascar also give indications of some kind of internal activity, he regards them with equal bafflement and the repeated observation; "Unintelligible." He thus reassures himself with the reminder that nobody can penetrate the dream world of another to violate his privacy: a source of "gloomy satisfaction in this guilt-ridden world of perverted opium dreams. The reader, too, feels the exclusion, not only from them, but, more importantly, from Jasper.

Now, at the end of the chapter, comes a break in the printed page before the last paragraph. This break emphasizes the withdrawal from the personal view of John Jasper to the distant perspective of the narrator, whose interpretation coincides with and legitimizes that of the character.

That same afternoon, the massive grey square lower of an old cathedral rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells are going for daily vesper service, and he must needs attend il, one would say, from his haste to reach the open cathedral door. The choir are getting on their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to service. Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled into their places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, "WHEN THE WICKED MAN — " rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered thunder. (ch. 1)

For the observer, too, the tower of the old cathedral is ominous as, without suggest of sanctuary, it receives the "jaded traveller" returning from the London opium den. The service is one he "must needs attend" as he hastens to join the choir (with its rhyming echo of spire) getting on their "sullied" white robes "in a hurry," like prisoners falling tardily into a procession "filing" into service, while the Sacristan "locks the iron-barred gates" behind them. The jaded traveller, among the other figures of guilt, like them hides his face while the accusing words echo through the threatening arches.

Within the course of the three pages of chapter 1, the point of view has moved progressively away from the anonymous man whose view we are experiencing, from the completely subjective to the completely objective. In the first paragraph, we peer out through this man's eyes; in the last paragraph, we have moved far out to become detached and unacquainted observers — strangers to the man through whose consciousness we entered the world of the novel. In between, we hover intimately over this man to observe closely his every move, but without the power to enter again the secret recesses of his consciousness.

This process invests John Jasper with deep mystery because the reader remembers his complex and enigmatic internal world and is now excluded from it. The total effect of this introductory chapter enlarges the meaning of the mysterious man, whose anonymity is preserved throughout, to include others as well. John Jasper therefore becomes an allegorical figure projecting the reader into a world where one must attempt self-reconciliation. Whatever the individual guilt of John Jasper, it looks basically to be the guilt of Everyman, torn between the unlimited dream and the circumscribed reality, and with a propensity to corrupt both.

As Jasper hurries from the sordid episode in the London opium den to the evening service in Cloisterham cathedral, he begins to shift ambiguously between good and evil, the angelic and the demonic. While he is master of the choir, he dons a "sullied robe."

Some of the characters, like his nephew Edwin, greatly respect him; others, like Rosa, are terrified of him. In an early scene, Edwin speaks admiringly of the place of honor his uncle has earned for himself by his good work in the church. He finds his uncle's response bewildering: '"I hate it. The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.'" The service, which to Edwin sounds "quite celestial," to Jasper seems "devilish." He explains:

"I am so weary of it. The echoes of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging round. No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place, before me, can have been more tired of it than I am. He could take for relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?" (ch. 2)

In Jasper, as in the Coketown population, the craving grows for "some physical relief — which craving must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong." Asking his nephew to "'take it as a warning,'" Jasper explains that "even a poor monotonous chorister and grinder of music — in his niche — may be troubled with some stray sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call it?'" Here are the forewarnings of the potential explosive outlet.

His association with the stonemason Durdles identifies Jasper more specifically with the criminal-martyr of the marsh. More than a hint of analogy glances between the name of the one and the occupation of the other. What could a stonemason have to do with "Jasper," except perhaps in a carving way? Around the person of Durdles, Dickens has assembled a fantastic array of stone images and associations. He is chiefly "in the gravestone, tomb, and monument way, and wholly of their colour from head to foot."

He is an old bachelor, and he lives in a little antiquated hole of a house that was never finished:'^ supposed to be built, so far, of stones stolen from the city wall, lb this abode there is an approach, ankle- deep in stone chips, resembling a petrified grove of tombstones, urns, draperies, and broken columns, in all stages of sculpture. Herein two journeymen incessantly chip, while other two journeymen, who face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death, (ch. 4)

Durdles, known among the urchins of the town as "Stony," has hired one of them for the unusual occupation of stoning Durdles home on any occasion the urchin catches him out "arter ten." Jasper is curious enough about the significance of his friend's nickname to drag the question into a conversation quite gratuitously. '"There was a discussion the other day among the Choir,'" he observes, '"whether Stony stood for Tony; ... or whether Stony stood for Stephen; or whether the name comes from your trade. How stands the fact?'" (ch. 4). Although he gets no answer from his uncommunicative and apparently unhearing companion, the various possibilties have been suggested, prominent among them the name of the stoned martyr. Lest the point be missed, however, Dickens labors it further a short time later when Jasper and Durdles are accosted by a group of stone-throwing urchins.

"Stop, you young brutes,' cried Jasper angrily, "and let us go by!"

This remonstrance being received with yells and flying stones, according to a custom of late years comfortably established among police regulations of our English communities, where Christians are stoned on all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were revived, Durdles remarks of the young savages, with some point, that "they haven't got an object," and leads the way down the Lane. (ch. 5)

Jasper, like Quilp with the amphibious boy, feels a kind of kinship with "The Stony One," a feeling given some objectivity in this shared stoning. He recognizes that both live a "curious existence" inasmuch as their "lot is cast in the same old earthy, chilly, never-changing place,' though he considers that Durdles has a much more mysterious and interesting connection with the Cathedral than his own. On the midnight excursion made into the crypt by the pair, Durdles falls unaccountably asleep after imbibing from his companion's wicker bottle, while Jasper himself comes and goes shadowily through the night on some undisclosed business. In Dickens's total depiction, Durdles remains enigmatic, but he seems to be a figure of allegory, partly identifying Jasper ever more unmistakably with the criminal-martyr of the marsh, pardy personifying some kind of nemesis operant in Jasper's life.

Soon after the midnight excursion comes Christmas Eve — the night Edwin Drood is to disappear. Three men are to meet in the gatehouse/lighthouse on this night: Jasper, Neville, and Edwin. During his preparations for this occasion, John Jasper begins to emerge clearly as a marsh monster with marked similarity to Rogue Riderhood. It has been a good day for the singing master. He has never sung better; his time is perfect. "These results are probably attained through a grand composure of the spirits. The mere mechanism of his throat is a little tender," for he wears, both with his singing-robe and with his ordinary dress, a large black scarf of strong close-woven silk, slung loosely round his neck" (ch. 14). Jasper has been out on chores of hospitality. Now he hurries to get home before his guests arrive, singing delicately in a low voice as he goes. "It still seems as if a false note were not within his power tonight, and as if nothing could hurry or retard him. Arriving thus under the arched entrance of his dwelling, he pauses for an instant in the shelter to pull off that great black scarf, and hang it in a loop upon his arm." Like Riderhood, this man pursues some unswerving and cataclysmic course. Looking "as if nothing could hurry or retard him," he too might be compared to an ugly fate, or be described as impervious to implacable weather. Attention is drawn to the scarf to reenforce its analogy as he hangs it "in a loop upon his arm."

As Jasper approaches the postern stair, he meets Mr. Crisparkle, the Minor Canon, who has been concerned of late about the choir master's "black humours." Jasper is unaccountably buoyant and cheerful. He tells Crisparkle that he plans to burn his diary at year's end because he has been "out of sorts, gloomy, bilious, brain- oppressed, whatever it may be." As he explains: "A man leading a monotonous life ... and getting his nerves, or his stomach, out of order, dwells upon an idea until it loses its proportions." Crisparkle expresses his pleased surprise at the improvement in his colleague. As David Copperfield's Martha drew attention to her similarity to the river, Jasper explains himself to Crisparkle in a related analogy: "'Why, naturally,'" he returns. '"You had but little reason to hope that I should become more like yourself. You are always training yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are, and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed.'" Despite Jasper's apparent recovery of spirits, his self- description reminds us of his "muddy" nature on this stormy and destructive night when "nothing is steady but the red light" in the gatehouse. His metaphorical comment also foreshadows his physical condition as he later searches through the muddy land around the river for signs of the vanished Edwin.

On one night when Jasper returns home from this search, Mr. Crewgious, Rosa's guardian, is waiting for him. Jasper has arrived exhausted, looking rather like Magwitch or Gaffer Hexam: "Unkempt and disordered, bedaubed with mud that had dried upon him, and with much of his clothing torn to rags" (ch. 15). Grewgious tells Jasper that Rosa and Edwin are not in fact engaged to be married. Although Grewgious does not know it, this is crucial information for Jasper. In the case against him that Dickens is building in the mind of the reader, Jasper has presumably disposed of Edwin as his rival for the affections of Rosa. Now, as Grewgious fulfills his errand by delivering a message that renders this act meaningless, a startling transformation takes place: "Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor." Thus has Jasper, the "muddy weed," by steps been reduced into a heap of muddy residue, his human character fallen completely away from him. And here the unfinished novel leaves John Jasper.

It is tempting to try to solve at least one part of the mystery of Edwin Drood by extrapolating from an analysis of Jasper's depiction as a marsh monster: what would have been the truth ultimately revealed about John Jasper? Actually, there could be no important truth not already inherent in his portrayal. Whether he was guilty of the death of his nephew is almost incidental, like the fate of Browning's duchess. He has made it clear that he feels driven by the boring monotony of his existence to any kind of relieving action. Does his desire for Rosa follow or precede his weariness and boredom? In either event, it is a guilty desire, as was Lady Dedlock's wish for Tulkinghorn's death. It seems most probable that his guilty desire for his nephew's fiancée helped turn his life into the "cramped monotony' from which he must seek relief. Under similar circumstances, Lady Dedlock seeks relief in flight. Where can he seek it? In the wish-fulfillment dreams of the opium den? ("Take it as a warning,' he has said to Edwin.) A similarly wretched ancient monk, he says, could have found relief "carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?" Where Lady Dedlock becomes frozenly dehumanized, Jasper becomes a savage monster. And yet not a monster like Sikes or Riderhood, nor a savage like Gaffer, nor even quite a suave devil like James Harthouse. Though savage, he is capable of human thought and feeling; though bored, he is not indifferent.

After Edwin's disappearance, Jasper once more makes his way to the London opium den after a long absence. The haggard woman who supplies him with his pipe suspects him of some villainous act and prods him to reveal his secret to her. As the opium takes effect, he becomes confidential while she intermittently furnishes sympathetic encouragement. '"Look here,'" he says,

"Suppose you had something you were going to do. ... But had not quite determined to. ... Might or might not do, you understand. ... Should you do it in your fancy, when you were lying here doing this?"

She nods her head. "Over and over again."

"Just like me! I did it over and over again. I have done it hundreds of thousands of times in this room."

"It's to be hoped it was pleasant to do, deary.'

"It was pleasant to do!" (ch. 23)

The savage air with which he makes the final comment demonstrates that the wish-fulfilling power of the opium dream obviously satisfies the craving for physical relief. In fact, strangely enough, it was once better than the actuality has proven to be: '"I did it so often, and through such vast expanses of dme, that when it was really done, it seemed not worth the doing, it was done so soon.'" The implication is clearly that Jasper is guilty of finally making in actuality the Journey so often taken in dream; but the implication is almost too clear. Dickens is not to be trusted here: for Jasper to say "when it was really done' is not quite equivalent to saying "when I did it." One is reminded of the vague false suspicion cast upon Gaffer, of the trick played on good Mr. Boffin by the alligator in Venus's specialty shop, or of the elaborate circumstantial case built against Lady Dedlock only to be exploded.'

The same scene in the opium den that implies guilt prepares equally well for the opposite conclusion — that he is innocent of the deed. The haggard woman is priming the pump for further revelations.

"I see now. You come o'purpose to take the journey. Why, I might have known it, through its standing by you so.'

He answers first with a laugh, and then with a passionate setting of the teeth: "Yes, I came on purpose. When I could not bear my life, I came to get the relief, and I got it. It WAS one! It WAS one!" This repetition with extraordinary vehemence, and the snarl of a wolf (ch. 23)

The present journey he is taking, however, is less than relieving. It is slow in coming ("Is it as potent as it used to be?'" he asks regarding the pipe). In addition, the event of which he dreams has presumably now taken place in reality, and "when it comes to be real at last, it is so short that it seems unreal for the first time." Furthermore, the reality somehow does not equal the dream, being disappointing and unsatisfying by comparison. And, finally, now that "it" is real, the relief of the dream is needed at least as much as it was. Jasper laments:

"It has been too short and easy. I must have a better vision than this; this is the poorest of all. No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty — and yet I never saw that before." With a start.

"Saw what, deary?"

"Look at it! Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is! That must be real. It's over." (ch. 23)

The meaning of "that" and "it" remains shrouded in ambiguity, but it clearly has not finally brought relief to Jasper: it also prevents his achieving relief in the formerly totally satisfying way. The wicked desire for Edwin's death, like the wicked relief felt by Lady Dedlock, becomes additional cause for Jasper to carve demons out of his heart: "What was his death but the key-stone of a gloomy arch removed?" Although it is of course possible — perhaps probable — that Jasper could have proved to be a murderer, yet I believe it more consistent with Dickens's practice that he would have been found guilty only as Lady Dedlock was guilty of the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn: in will, but not in deed. The difference, however, is negligible for the difference made in the effect upon him. Whether he did the deed or not, he is self-condemned by guilt.

With the creation of John Jasper, the last of the monsters to be summoned forth by Dickens, the warning of the marsh necessarily receives its final iteration. He is a subtle monster. Into his nature enter the refinement and sophistication that make of the "drifting icebergs" like James Harthouse a "very Devil," much more fearful and dangerous than the "roaring lions by which few but savages and hunters are attracted." He, however, is not protected by indifference: rather, like Pip and Lady Dedlock, he is capable of a sensitive internal torment much subtler than that primitively manifested by Gaffer and Sikes in their fearful looks over their shoulders. Despite their differences from one another, each of the marsh creatures sounds the death-in-life warning: People who think or feel like these creatures, who will or act like them, might as well live in the marsh, for they bring the marsh with them wherever they go. They may live and die as amphibians, as unawakened human beings; tramp mud through the drawing rooms of London; fly into the marsh miasma even while fleeing in boredom from it; or transform a counting/gatehouse into an ugly lighthouse. Subhuman or dehumanized, victims or perpetrators, they are living reminders that there are many kinds of self-imposed death. People may turn both themselves and those they touch into monsters through forgetting their humane links with others.

The double guilt felt by Pip can be echoed in the heart of any sensitive person. Every marsh monster to be encountered in human affairs reminds us that "All about this was quite familiar knowledge down in the slime, ages ago." Of what account is our great myth of human progress if we still permit our fellows to remain subhuman or cause them to be dehumanized, or if we ourselves can revert so readily to the monster? This, or something very like it, is the warning of the marsh, allegorically represented in the two journeymen of Stony Durdles, incessantly sawing stone in a petrified grove of tombstones "as if they were mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death."

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In his last years, as the events in Dickens's life must have deepened his personal feelings of guilt and non-fulfillment and failure, there are certainly grounds for describing a darkened outlook in his final novels. Nonetheless, there is likewise evidence in The Mystery of Edwin Drood that his faith in the Weltanschauung he had developed remained unshaken. He still could muster the perspective to see beyond his own diminished actual world to reaffirm the real significance of human dreams and values.

Edwin — not Jasper — becomes the vehicle for putting the dismal Cloisterham world into perspective. In this Cloisterham, the narrator has earlier observed: "Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a cold perspiration, tarnished sugar- tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books" (MED, ch. 3). The "pale old watches," the "ineffectual legs," and the "volumes of dismal books" are emblems of a nineteenth-century human community that for the dme being has lost its way.

On a later occasion, after Rosa and Edwin have decided to go their separate ways, Edwin decides to return to Mr. Grewgious the "sorrowful jewels" he had planned to give Rosa as his fiancée. He explains his decision to Grewgious:

They were but a sign of broken joys and baseless projects; in their very beauty they were . . almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle dust. Let them be. He would restore them to her guardian when he came down; he in his turn would restore them to the cabinet from which he had unwillingly taken them; and there, like old letters or old vows, or other records of old aspirations come to nothing, they would be disregarded, until, being valuable, they were sold into circulation again, to repeat their former round, (ch. 13)

The note struck here is a sad one because at the moment the human dream seems bankrupt, without value on the market. Despite the biographical evidence to suggest that Dickens's view at the end was a "dark" one, this idea might have appeared anywhere in Dickens. Its implications go beyond either the optimistic or the pessimistic: they may be viewed as predominantly either sad or happy depending on the current state of the dream; on which part of the total allegory one is exploring at the moment and how it is being woven. Yet whichever is predominant, the opposite possibility lingers in the background to communicate the bittersweet interpretation of life. In the world about him, Dickens found an inexhaustible supply of variations on his allegory of life. The busding specificity of his novels may sometimes obscure the universal representation; yet the universal, once seen, is thereafter clearly visible through the circumstantial.

Recognizing the unified mode of experience controlling and stabilizing the richly varied materials of life that burst from his novels leads finally to a new respect for the mind of Charles Dickens. His interpretation of life remains strikingly valid, unsentimental, and relevant a century and more after its inception. He shared with Shakespeare and Arnold's Greeks one fundamental quality of spirit; the capacity to see life steadily and see it whole. Life is tragedy, but it is also comedy. If it is sad that human dreams and aspirations come to nothing, it is a joyous miracle that they can and will be sold into circulation again to repeat their former rounds. Again as in Shakespeare, the world of Dickens's novels, though pervaded by mysterious forces over which humanity has little or no control, is the world of time, bustling with the things and activity of this life, and finding the meaning of life in the quality an individual brings to its living. The fact that dreams can be revitalized for every oncoming human being ensures that human life can continue to be existentially invested with the qualities necessary to give it significance.