Self-repressed ... John Jasper has spent most of his adult life savagely repressing his feelings with consequences truly appalling. “I must subdue myself to my vocation”, he tells Edwin, but “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?”.

Jasper, one imagines, feels something like the wickedly ill-treated battery hen. He feels “cramped”, “cooped up” and “girded in”. Wholly unsuited to monotonous life in claustrophobic Cloisterham (Jasper calls himself a “moping weed” and ‘the famous definition of a weed [is] a thing growing up in a wrong place’), Jasper forces himself to endure it while deep inside, his resentment and hatred of his life builds and builds, ever threatening to erupt more violently. (In the Middle Ages, jasper was considered to be the stone of warriors — imparting a warlike spirit — so with an intrinsically aggressive nature, it’s small wonder that Jasper struggles to subdue it.)

‘Better out than in’ holds so much truth that it has now become a cliché, but, crucially, Jasper has no outlet for his feelings — apart from one, which proves disastrous. Unlike Miss Twinkleton, his working day often stretches from early morning until late at night. Nor does he have a confidante. He has to resort to confiding in his diary. Edwin probably served as confidante once, but envy having twisted love to hate, Jasper is at his most repressed with Edwin. That’s why ‘a look of intentness and intensity — a look of hungry [Edwin is the prey], exacting [Iron-control is required if you’re pretending to love someone you hate — it’s no easy task to fake your body language], watchful [In case an unguarded facial expression or vocal inflection has aroused Edwin’s suspicion, for signs of which Jasper has to watch Edwin’s own reactions], and yet devoted affection — is always ... on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed in this direction’. [Macbeth: “False face must hide what the false heart doth know”.]

Jasper’s one relief is opium. “I came to get the relief, and I got it. It WAS one! It WAS one!” But unfortunately, by ‘harmlessly’ acting out his darkest fantasy — and endlessly strangling Edwin — Jasper inures himself to the idea of committing the deed in reality. Alcohol, when taken in large amounts, strips away social constraints and often leads to violence. Dickens suggests that opium smoking, too, especially when in the transitional (glazed eyes) state — half-awake, half-dreaming — exerts a similar influence. Certainly, it unshackles the devil within Jasper and when in opium’s grip he becomes, and considers himself to be, a wholly different person — the precursor of Dr Jekyll’s Mr Hyde — a man ruled by his dark, animal passions.

Few things provoke hatred like envy and jealousy, and Edwin has everything that Jasper lusts after: the prospect of an exciting, rewarding job (in exotic Egypt) and saucy Rosa handed to him on a platter.

It’s small wonder that Jasper successfully provokes Neville’s rage against Edwin. He puts into words his very own feelings. Both for Neville and Jasper, nothing is more intolerable than that Edwin, instead of appreciating his good fortune, treats it with careless indifference and even bemoans it. Jasper, in his peculiar way, worships Rosa and to hear her fiancé patronise and carelessly slight her ... Rosa’s portrait, too, is a constant reminder of Edwin’s attitude: a comic, mocking sketch that Edwin couldn’t be bothered to finish — though Jasper doubtless finds it arousing, depicting Pussy at her wickedest.

‘“Don't stop, dear fellow. Go on.” “Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?” “How can you have hurt my feelings?” [Edwin has just made comments that could not have infuriated Jasper more — bitterly bewailing his own ‘misfortunes’ and contrasting them with Jasper’s ‘lucky’ lot, maddeningly repeating “it's all very well for YOU”, “YOU can take it easily”, “YOUR life is not”, “YOU have no”, “YOU can choose for yourself”, “Life, for YOU, is a plum” — and Jasper is desperately fighting the urge to leap up and strangle the selfish swine on the spot! It’s a very close run thing.] “Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill! There's a strange film come over your eyes.” [Rosa: “When a glaze comes over [his eyes,] he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most” i.e. he’s become ‘Mr Hyde’] Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. After a while he says faintly: “I have been taking opium for a pain ... The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone directly. [Lady Macbeth: “The fit is momentary. Upon a thought he will again be well. If much you note him you shall offend him and extend his passion”.] Look away from me. They will go all the sooner.” [Lady Macbeth’s words about a ‘fit’ are to cover for her husband who, appalled by the presence of the murdered Banquo’s ghost, is in danger of betraying his guilt to his guests. Jasper, in his savage rage, is almost undone by the presence of the man he’s planning to murder and nearly betrays his murderous intent.] With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes downward at the ashes on the hearth. [And Jasper now concludes his Herculean struggle to regain control and repress his murderous other self.] Not relaxing his own gaze on the fire, but rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his elbow-chair, the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with thick drops standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath, becomes as he was before.’ [‘“We have had an awful scene with him [i.e. Mr Hyde],” says Jasper, in a low voice. “Has it been so bad as that?” “Murderous! ... He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet. It is no fault of his, that he did not. But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and strong with him, he would have cut him down on my hearth. ... Seeing what I have seen tonight [which is not what Jasper was talking about previously], and hearing what I have heard, I shall never know peace of mind when there is danger of those two [Edwin and Mr Hyde] coming together, with no one else to interfere. It was horrible. There is something of the tiger [‘Jasper says this with a savage air, and a spring or start at her’] in his dark [wicked] blood ... Even you have accepted a dangerous charge.” “You need have no fear for me, Jasper,” returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a quiet smile. “I have none for myself.” “I have none for myself,” returns Jasper ... ‘because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of his hostility. But you may be, and my dear boy has been. Good night!”’ Note that Jasper’s brief transformation was induced (on this occasion) by anger — the same trigger that turns Dr Banner into The Incredible Hulk! Jasper is even, as we shall see, appalled by his other self’s strength.

Jasper is deliberately linked with Macbeth (e.g. Jasper is described as ‘that loving kinsman’, while Duncan says of Macbeth: “We love him highly”, “That is a peerless kinsman”), but while Macbeth is a reluctant murderer, regrets killing Duncan and is horrified by visions of the murdered Banquo, Jasper is eager for the kill and returns to the opium den in order to enjoy the vision of strangling Edwin again. (Macbeth: “Look on’t again I dare not”.) Jasper’s only regret is that Edwin’s murder was too easy and quick, so that “when it was really done, it seemed not worth the doing, it was done so soon”. For Macbeth, however: “If it were done, when ‘tis done then ‘twere well it were done quickly”. Similarly, Macbeth’s “Nor time nor place did then adhere” is reversed in Drood to “Time and place are both at hand”. In fact, almost every plot line or passage of text alluded to in Drood is recreated in inverted form, so that the events and characters are turned on their head. The words of Jasper just quoted, for example, come from a scene in which ‘Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer’ (the witch) interrogates Jasper/Macbeth but finds him (deleted text) “too deep to talk too plain”. In the parallel scene in Shakespeare’s play, his royal highness Macbeth questions the witches and ultimately discovers that they were too deep for him. They “palter with us in a double sense”, he says, while in Drood it’s Jasper who has a penchant for double-speak.

Here’s Dickens’s original version of Jasper’s fit:

‘” ... There is no cause for alarm. You see them in the act of passing. Put those knives out at the door — both of them!” [Or ‘Mr Hyde’ will grab one up and cut Edwin down at his feet.]

“My dear Jack, why?”

“It’s going to lighten, they may attract the lightning, put them away in the dark.”

With a scared and confounded face, the younger man complies. No lightning flash ensues, nor was there, for a moment, any passing likelihood of a thunder storm. He gently and assiduously tends his kinsman who by slow degrees recovers and clears away that cloud or blight [malignant influence]. When he, (Jasper) — is quite himself and is as it were once more all resolved into that concentrated look ...’

Both scenes are foreshadowed at the beginning of the book. Jasper has to withdraw to an armchair by the hearth and ‘sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean spirit [Biblically, to have an ‘unclean spirit’ means to be possessed by a demon — or in this case by ‘Mr Hyde’] of imitation. Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and [seizes] him with both hands by the throat’. In response, the opium-drugged Lascar ‘draws a phantom knife. It then becomes apparent that the woman has taken possession of this knife, for safety’s sake’.

Here are four examples of Dickens’s inversion technique:

• ‘“The proverb says that threatened men live long,” [Edwin] tells [the opium woman]’, so in Drood threatened men don’t live long and Edwin dies that very night.
• ‘And then the intoned words, “WHEN THE WICKED MAN — ”’, which continues in the Bible, ‘turns away from his wickedness that he has committed, and does that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive’. Jasper doesn’t turn away from his wickedness and save his soul alive.
• Mr Grewgious has settled down ‘under the dry vine and fig-tree of P. J. T’. Micah 4.4: ‘They will sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and no one will make them afraid’. Mr Grewgious is definitely a little afraid of Bazzard who’s ‘possessed of some strange power over’ him e.g. “Let me help you [to a drink]. I’ll help Bazzard too, though he IS asleep. He mightn’t like it else”.
• Macbeth says “They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly”. In Drood it’s Neville, the innocent party, who’s “tied to a stake”. Similarly, Macbeth says “Give me my staff” while Neville says “Here is my staff”.

Dickens isn’t the only one to reverse things, though. Jasper also turns things topsy-turvy in his diary to protect himself from prying eyes and make a fool of Crisparkle. When he writes (or says) ‘Neville Landless’ it’s code for his tigerish other self (no one calls the real Neville Landless by his full name) and when he writes ‘the murderer’ (who’s John Jasper) he means Mr Neville.

To Jasper: “Ye've smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight”. [Jasper, remember, kills Edwin “over and over” in his opium dreams. “I always made the journey first.”]

After looking at Edwin asleep, Jasper ‘passes to his own room, lights his pipe, and delivers himself to the Spectres it invokes at midnight’.

Jasper: “My Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned's life too. You will laugh at this entry; you will guess when it was made: ‘Past midnight. — After what I have just now seen [in his opium dreams], I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal [“Must I take to carving (demons) out of my heart?”] passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me. [‘Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde.’] So profound is the impression, that twice since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood’. [Jasper’s murderous visions are so convincing he needs to check that he hasn’t really killed Edwin. And when is Edwin finally murdered? “Not long after he left Mr Jasper’s house at midnight.”] “Here is another entry next morning: ‘Ned up and away. Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever. He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be, but he was not as bad a man. [Rosa to Jasper: “you forced me, for his own trusting, good, good sake, to keep the truth from him, that you were a bad, bad man!”] He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with him as far as I could [“To think . . . how often fellow-traveller, and yet not know it! To think how many times he went the journey, and never saw the road!”], and left him most unwillingly. I am unable to shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil — if feelings founded upon staring facts are to be so called.’” [When Edwin meets Princess Puffer, half-incapacitated by opium, ‘her eyes are staring’ and when Crisparkle awakens Jasper from his murderous opium dream, Dickens refers to ‘the glare of [Jasper’s] eyes’.]

“Again and again,” said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the book before putting it by, “I have relapsed into these [murderous] moods, as other entries show. But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it in my book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.” [Jasper’s ‘black humours’ are his murderous visions and thoughts, which will become redundant once Edwin has been strangled — so killing Edwin will be a very effective antidote. And Mr Crisparkle’s assurance (of a compliant Neville) smoothes the way for this ‘antidote’ by allowing Jasper to make Neville his scapegoat: ‘“You expect Mr. Neville, then?” said Mr. Crisparkle. “I count upon his coming,” said Mr. Jasper’.]

“You are my witness,” said Jasper ... “what my state of mind honestly was, that night ... and in what words I expressed it. You remember objecting to ‘murderous!’, as being too strong? It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.” [Jasper actually says: “remember objecting to a word I used” but the word in question was ‘murderous’.] (NB. From “I was dreaming at a great rate” — because opium-induced visions flash through a smoker’s mind — everything Jasper says until the end of Chapter 10 is true, but in a paltering, double sense.)

Jasper to Crisparkle on Christmas Eve: “We were speaking, the other evening, of my black humours [‘Black’ in the sense of threatening, malignant and wicked] ... I mean to burn this year’s Diary at the year’s end ... Because I feel that I have been out of sorts . . . brain-oppressed [A “heat-oppressed brain” causes Macbeth to see a bloody vision of the murder weapon] ... But I am in a healthier state now. [His murderous hate is at long last about to be given free rein and he already feels much happier.] A man leading a monotonous life ... dwells upon an idea [The idea — at first only a fantasy — of gaining Rosa by killing Edwin] until it loses its proportions. That was my case with the idea in question. So I shall burn the evidence of my case [the incriminating evidence], when the book is full, and begin the next volume with a clearer vision”. [Clear of his murderous visions.]

Jasper’s opium dreams are so real that he has trouble differentiating fantasy from reality. How, then, can he be certain that his actual murder of Edwin wasn’t merely a vision?

Jasper: “... there was no quarrel or difference between the two young men at their last meeting. We all know that their first meeting [So Mr Hyde is a fairly recent phenomenon] was unfortunately very far from amicable; but all went smoothly and quietly when they were last together at my house. [Because the murder was planned for outside it.] My dear boy was not in his usual spirits . . . and I am bound henceforth to dwell upon the circumstance the more, now that I know there was a special reason for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which may possibly have induced him to absent himself.”

“I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!” exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle.

“I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!” repeated Jasper. [Much better for Edwin to have disappeared of his own accord than risk being hung for his needless murder.] “You know — and Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise — that I took a great prepossession against Mr. Neville Landless [the tigerish Mr Hyde], arising out of his furious conduct on that first occasion. You know that I came to you, extremely apprehensive, on my dear boy's behalf, of his mad violence. You know that I even entered in my Diary, and showed the entry to you, that I had dark forebodings against him. Mr. Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole case . . . I wish him to be good enough to understand that the communication he has made to me has hopefully influenced my mind [maybe the events of that night really were just an opium-induced vision], in spite of its having been, before this mysterious occurrence took place, profoundly impressed against young Landless [the recently emerged Mr Hyde].”

Jasper’s last diary entry: ‘My dear boy is murdered. The discovery of the watch and shirt-pin [Proof that it wasn’t all a vision] convinces me that he was murdered ... All the delusive hopes I had founded on his separation from his betrothed wife, I give to the winds. They perish before this fatal discovery. I now swear, and record the oath on this page, That I nevermore will discuss this mystery with any human creature until I hold the clue to it in my hand. [Very convenient. Jasper’s taken a vow not to answer anyone’s questions!] That I never will relax in my secrecy or in my search. That I will fasten the crime of the murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer. [Who’s John Jasper, and thus, Neville Landless.] And, That I devote myself to his destruction’. Which is exactly what Jasper does. He devotes himself to the destruction of Neville Landless. Though he does offer to forswear himself and not pursue Neville if Rosa agrees to marry him.

From Dr Jekyll’s written confession: ‘Within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.’ ‘My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.’ ‘I had now two characters ... one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of [good and bad] whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.’ Dr Jekyll, as he continued to drink his potion, found his own identity growing ever fainter. Finally, he was permanently transformed into the wicked Mr Hyde. Similarly, by continuing to smoke the opium which unleashed the devil within him, the ‘Dr Jekyll’ of Jasper’s nature was slowly corrupted by the id-governed ‘Mr Hyde’.

Although, when the novel begins, Jasper’s excessive affection for Edwin is entirely and consciously hypocritical (to conceal his murderous intentions), Jasper’s intensity of feeling for his nephew is evidently well-known and longstanding. But why should Jasper, year after year, consciously fake extreme love for a man he’s slowly grown to hate? It makes no sense. He might hide his dislike, but not extravagantly pursue its antithesis. One possible explanation is provided by a strategy Freud termed ‘reaction-formation’. David Stevenson gives this explanation: ‘To ward off an anxiety-causing and unacceptable impulse, one may [unconsciously] replace it with its over-emphasized diametrical opposite. For example, the young boy who hates his older brother for his accomplishments and the rewards and praise which he receives may transform this hatred into aggressive love and praise. This replacement of his hatred with its opposite, love, represses the hatred, and satisfies his superego's guide for what is acceptable, but does not eliminate the original impulse. The best indication that an emotion or act is a formed reaction is any noticeable persistence or excess in the behavior.’ This clearly fits Jasper exactly — as well as the book itself which is founded on antithesis. But Jasper was far too smart and self-aware — and his underlying hatred far too intense — to deceive himself forever. And it’s interesting that his subsequent behaviour is based on guilt-relieving dissociation: ‘as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted’. It’s not Jasper who’s to blame for killing Edwin (though he takes vicarious pleasure in it), it’s his other self, ‘Mr Hyde’, who’s the truly guilty party.

Edwin: “Why, sister Rosa, sister Rosa, what do you see from the turret?”

Answer from the Bluebeard tale: “I see nothing but the sun ... and the grass”. Rosa’s own eyes ‘see nothing but the grass’ when she’s with Jasper in the ‘Sun-Dial’ chapter. Bluebeard murdered six wives to be rid of them; Jasper kills Edwin, and threatens to murder all of Rosa’s future suitors, in order to gain a wife.

John Jasper is Janus-like in being two-faced and in having transition as a key characteristic. (Dickens created a character in Household Words called Jasper Janus.) If Jasper’s rooms are taken as an extension of his character (such as by being ‘mostly in shadow’) then Mr Tope enforces the Janus connection: “There’s his own solitary shadow betwixt his two windows — the one looking this way, and the one looking [the other. That’s to say:] down into the High Street”. Jasper lives in a gatehouse above a gateway; Janus was the Roman god of doors and gateways. ‘Gateway’ can be interpreted metaphysically — a door between life and death (through which Jasper assists Edwin) — and it’s Dickens who makes the connection: ‘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’. So Life is on one side, Death on the other, with Jasper’s gatehouse in-between, shining out like a devil-red beacon. (Janus is the God of Beginnings and is sometimes linked with Christ; Jasper is all about endings and is linked with Lucifer. Janus, as warden of doors and gates, was frequently depicted with keys. In Drood it’s Durdles who unlocks doors and Jasper is forced to ‘borrow’ his keys. The keys of Jasper’s profession are only piano keys.)

Durdles: “And here I fell asleep. And what woke me? The ghost of a cry. The ghost of 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. That was MY last Christmas Eve.”

My guess is that the shriek was Jasper’s and the howl that of the dog he’d mortally wounded, which is why Jasper is so agitated by Durdles’s account. Needless to say, the sounds weren’t really of unearthly origin. Durdles only assumes they were supernatural as nobody else heard the cries. But since the crypt is so isolated — as Dickens is at pains to point out — it’s not likely that they would.

But why should Jasper kill a dog? And why the strange coincidence of dates — the same day (it was almost certainly past midnight) that Edwin was murdered? Well, having spent his life repressing his negative and aggressive feelings, Jasper (Mr Hyde) would surely have previously given them vent. And a savage act against man’s best friend, accompanied by a half-triumphant, half-despairing shriek, would be an effective way to let them out. People commonly yell to release frustrations and psychopaths often have a history of animal abuse.

Jasper finds his ‘religious’ life intolerable, and Christmas, with all its holy associations, would be the most intolerable time of all — the period when Mr Hyde would be most likely to break out. Furthermore, just as the monks got relief from carving demons in a holy place, and ‘the Imp finds [stoning the dead] a relishing and piquing pursuit ... because their resting-place is announced to be sacred’, so Mr Hyde gets additional relish from murdering Edwin (and killing a dog) on the holy day celebrating the birth of Christ. Indeed, within minutes of Jesus’s supposed time of birth.

It’s noteworthy that Jasper sings so beautifully on Christmas Eve. About to let loose his long repressed hatred and break free from his monotonous daily routine, he’s happy and relaxed. And with vocals no longer forced and mechanical, he sings angelically. We’re told that there’s an ‘ancient superstition that [swans] sang sweetly on the approach of death’. Jasper sings sweetly ahead of his victim’s death.

And what was to be Jasper’s ultimate fate? A speech near the end of Macbeth spells it out. All’s up with Macbeth but “Why should I play the Roman fool and die on mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes do better upon them”. So, contrariwise, John Jasper would have committed suicide.