Sir — As a regular English reader of The Trollopian I have been interested in the articles on Edwin Drood and the endeavors of the writer to prove his theory that Dick Datchery was Mr. Grewgious in disguise, and as I believe this theory to be erroneous, I hope you will allow me space to give my reasons. The writer is no doubt correct in his argument that Dick Datchery endeavoured to disguise his identity by a large wig of white hair, and it is obvious that he was at Cloisterham to collect evidence to prove that Jasper was the murderer of Edwin Drood. It is also obvious that Mr. Grewgious, and others, were suspicious of Jasper, but beyond this I see no evidence to identify Dick Datchery with Mr. Grewgious and a great deal against it.

Mr. Grewgious was an elderly man, the lover of Rosa’s mother, and well known at Cloisterham to Miss Twinkleton, Mr. Crisparkle, and others, and indeed to Jasper himself, and yet we are asked to believe that by simply assuming a wig of white hair no suspicion of his identity could arise among any of these people. Dickens would surely not have stretched the credulity of his readers to that extent! Again, Mr. Grewgious is represented as a busy London lawyer, without a partner, and we are to assume that such a man could disappear from his home and office without, apparently, his absence attracting any notice, and take up his residence at Cloisterham for an indefinite time. As a further small point, although Mr. Grewgious knew Jasper’s lodgings quite well, Mr. Datchery on his first appearance at Cloisterham apparently did not know where they were, and had to be shown his way to them by the “hideous small boy, Deputy,” and when he saw them for the first time looked at them “with some interest.” All of this, it seems to me, makes it very unlikely that Mr. Datchery was really Mr. Grewgious; but it happens that there is further direct evidence against their identity.

When Rosa flies from Cloisterham and goes straight to Mr. Grewgious’s office, which is after the time when Dick Datchery appeared at Cloisterham, and they have tea together, the following conversation takes place:

“Do you always live here, sir?” asked Rosa.

“Yes, my dear.”

“And always alone? ”

“Always alone, except that I have daily company in a gentleman by the name of Bazzard; my clerk.”

This, of course, would have been a direct lie on the part of Mr. Grewgious, on the assumption that he was Dick Datchery, and I refuse to believe that Dickens would have put a lie into his mouth in conversation with Rosa.

It may be asked, if Dick Datchery was not Mr. Grewgious, was he any other character in Edwin Drood, and I think the answer is clear, although there is not very much evidence. One would expect him to be someone who, for no given reason, had been absent for some time from his usual haunts. Is there anyone answering to this description? The answer comes in the continuation of the conversation, already quoted above, between Rosa and Mr. Grewgious. This continues, after Mr. Grewgious’s reference to Mr. Bazzard, his clerk:

“He doesn’t live here?”

“No, he goes his ways after office hours. In fact, he is off duty here altogether, just at present, and a Firm downstairs with whom I have business relations, lends me a substitute.”

This seems to me to be conclusive. Here is someone “off duty altogether, just at present” whom Mr. Grewgious could have sent to Cloisterham, without any of that risk of almost certain discovery which would have attended his going there in person.

It may be objected that it is almost as unlikely that a lawyer should have sent his clerk on this sort of detective work as that he should have gone himself. It happens, however, that in Orley Farm, one of Anthony Trollope’s best books, which was published about ten years before Edwin Drood and would no doubt have been read by Charles Dickens, that distinguished barrister Mr. Furnival does send his clerk, Crabwitz, under a false name down to Hamworth to try and buy off Mr. Dockwrath, which Mr. Crabwitz, under the name of Mr. Corke, fails to do. It seems just possible that the idea of making Mr. Grewgious employ Mr. Bazzard on similar work may have occurred to Charles Dickens from reading Orley Farm.

At any rate, I claim that if Dick Datchery is in fact any of the characters mentioned in what remains of Edwin Drood, the most likely personage is not Mr. Grewgious, but his clerk, Mr. Bazzard.

H. M. MacVicar

Bath, England

The Datchery Assumption: Reply

Sir: — I should like to direct Mr. MacVicar’s attention to the following points, which were not included in my brief study of Hiram Grewgious. I submit them as additional evidence that the old lawyer and Datchery are one and the same.

1. Is it not highly significant that the paragraph wherein Mr. Grewgious first appears in the novel is preceded by one dealing with an impersonation? The news of the quarrel between young Drood and Neville Landless had aroused the curiosity and interest of the young ladies in the Nuns’ House; and Miss Twinkleton had done her best to minimize its effects upon her pupils by reducing it to the proportions of a “slight fracas.” Do you remember that Dickens says: “But the subject so survived all day, nevertheless, that Miss Ferdinand got into new trouble by surreptitiously clapping on a paper moustache at dinner-time, and going through the motions of aiming a water-bottle at Miss Giggles”? Mr. Grewgious makes his entrance hard upon the revelation of Miss Ferdinand’s impersonation of Neville Landless, and I contend that Dickens thus foreshadowed the role the old lawyer was to play later when he became Dick Datchery.

2. Dickens’s description of the old lawyer makes him the logical candidate for the Datchery assumption. “Mr. Grewgious,” the novelist tells us, “had been well selected for his trust, as a man of incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate qua1ities discernible on the surface.” The last four words imply that Rosa’s guardian had additional qualifications, although they were internal, and not outwardly apparent. “He had a scanty flat crop of hair,” we find later, “in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head.” Note the clever introduction of the word “wig,” a foreshadowing of Datchery’s “shock of white hair.” That Dickens played fair with his readers is readily proved when one considers how this part of the old lawyer’s description reads in the manuscript of Edwin Drood. There we find: “He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in color and consistency like some very common yellow fur tippet or the mane of the cheapest description of toy horse.” Originally, the idea of the artificiality of Grewgious’s hair was even more strongly emphasized, yet when Dickens deleted the toy horse’s mane, he allowed the rest of the description to stand. The adjectives “scanty” and “flat” will also take on greater significance if one turns to a certain passage in Nicholas Nickleby, written years before Edwin Drood. In his description of Vincent Crummles, the strolling player, Dickens wrote: “he had — very short black hair, shaved off nearly to the crown of his head — to admit (as he [Nicholas] afterwards learnt) of his more easily wearing character wigs of any shape or pattern.” When Dickens, the friend of noted players like Macready and Fechter, and himself an amateur actor of almost professional stature, presents Mr. Grewgious as a second Vincent Crummles so far as the appearance and quantity of his hair are concerned, I maintain that he did so for a definite purpose. I submit that he meant the old lawyer to wear the “character” wig of Dick Datchery. Incidentally, Bazzard would have had no need whatsoever to disguise himself, for no one in Cloisterham knew him or had ever seen him.

3. When Dickens says of Grewgious: “Receiver and Agent now, to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below,” the novelist makes it inferable that Mr. Grewgious is a man of some means, not busy or dependent upon his profession, and that he could readily absent himself from his chambers. When in London, he comes into close contact with only one person, his clerk; and there is ample evidence in the chapter “Philanthropy, Professional and Unprofessional” to show that he has already sent Bazzard away.

4. Apropos of Bazzard, why does Dickens, when he introduces us to the clerk for the first and only time in chapter xi, say that “this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of some strange power over Mr. Grewgious” Bazzard’s mystery is never solved in the fragment, but I maintain that his strange power was closely connected with his unachieved ambition to be a writer of tragedies that would one day be produced successfully upon the stage. Dickens does not even tell us in this chapter that Bazzard has written a tragedy; he will not disclose that fact until much later. But he keeps hinting at it, and Mr. Grewgious keeps hinting at it in such a mysterious way, that I cannot help concluding that the old lawyer is somehow fascinated by his clerk’s connection—remote though it may be — with the theatrical world. In other words, I see in this mystery hovering about Bazzard and his tragedy a suggestion of Mr. Grewgious’s fondness for playing a part, for dominating a situation, for being, in short, the actor he will become. And I also believe that the old lawyer took the name of Dick Datchery from a character in Bazzard’s tragedy, The Thorn of Anxiety, with which he was undoubtedly familiar.

5. When he penned the title of the famous controversial chapter xviii, Dickens had in mind a double meaning for the word “settler,” and it includes the old lawyer. The novelist was suggesting not only the man who “announced that he had a mind to take a lodging in the picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of settling down there altogether,” but also the man who was to be a “settler” in another sense: one who settles something. Hiram Grewgious, alias Dick Datchery, is going to settle the whereabouts of Edwin Drood’s body, and at the same time recover the ring he values so highly — the ring that is his only memento of his lost love. Since he is first, last, and always Rosa’s champion, he has the strongest incentive to settle the question of who murdered Edwin Drood and thereby brought sorrow and distress to his ward. In this respect Hiram Grewgious and John Jasper were intended by Dickens to be antagonists not unlike Hamlet and King Claudius.

6. Finally, I would point out the fact that Dick Datchery never comes in contact with Miss Twinkleton, Mr. Crisparkle, or any of the persons whom Grewgious met in Cloisterham, with the exception of John Jasper. And when Datchery meets the choirmaster, on one single occasion, it is in the latter’s room, which was “sombre” and “mostly in shadow,” as Dickens himself tells us in chapter ii. Furthermore, as Dr. R. Austin Freeman states in The Mystery of Angelina Frood: “All disguise is a form of bluff. It acts by suggestion. And the suggestion is effected by a set of misleading circumstances which produce in the dupe a state of mind in which a very imperfect disguise serves to produce conviction.” The white wig, the eyebrows dyed black, an altered voice, and the military-looking costume of Datchery convinced Jasper that the man was what he purported to be; the choirmaster, in his gloomy room, had no reason to suspect otherwise.

7. Datchery did know where Jasper’s lodgings were, but Dickens could not say so without giving away the whole show. The speech, “‘Indeed?’ said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some interest,” was not to have appeared in the printed version; it was deleted from the final proof by Dickens himself, prior to his death, but was allowed to stand by John Forster. This and several other passages were cut out by Dickens because they pointed too strongly to the identity of Datchery, and to his interest in Jasper.

8. Grewgious did not lie to Rosa when he said “Yes, my dear” in answer to her question “Do you always live here, sir?” Staple Inn was his permanent residence, and he would so consider it. We cannot put too literal an interpretation on “always,” or we should doubt that Grewgious ever went outside his rooms.

Of course Dickens wanted to have his readers believe that Bazzard, or Tartar, was the man who appeared in Cloisterham as Dick Datchery. The true identity of Datchery was to have been one of the surprises the novelist had in store for them. But Bazzard is too obviously put forth as a red herring. In his last story Dickens was determined to surpass The Moonstone; he would not have turned to the most obvious devices for his novel, which is a masterpiece of intricate plot construction. Nor do I believe that he would have copied an incident from Orley Farm. The conflict in Edwin Drood is between Hiram Grewgious and John Jasper; they typify the forces of good and evil. Evil is triumphant until overthrown by good, and it is Grewgious, in the guise of Datchery, who brings about Jasper’s downfall and the final victory of right and justice over wrong.

Richard M. Baker

Kent, Connecticut