Edwin Drood died on the day celebrating the rebirth of the sun, but the Winter and Summer Solstices are too closely linked with Paganism and sun-worship for the Christian Dickens to have tied events in Drood to them too closely. So while MED abounds in references to celestial bodies, fire, time (and clocks), tides, stones, dirt and dust and everything ‘earthy’, trees and woods of all varieties and the produce of fruitful Nature — though, typically, a good deal of this bounty is boxed up tight in Crisparkle’s closet — and is fixated on the eternal cycles of moon/sun, darkness/light, winter/summer, destruction followed by rebirth/renewed life (“as certainly as night follows day”, says Jasper) — all are subtly evoked from a safe, non-sun-worshipping distance.

As the year’s shortest (most repressed) day and the beginning of the repressive season of winter, the Winter Solstice met Dickens’s thematic needs exactly — particularly as such celestially-induced retraction is followed by Nature cutting loose and bursting forth in summery glory.

Crisparkle: “This is the first day of the week ... and the last day of the week is Christmas Eve”. So December 25 is a Sun-day.

Splitting Drood into two parts — before and after midnight December 24 (just before the end of Chapter 15) — produces some interesting search results.

A search for ‘sun’ in Part One (ignoring all general, non-seasonal references) finds:

‘Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery but cold’, ‘by the declining sun’, ‘reddened by the sunset’, ‘faced the wind at sunset’, ‘or at all events, when the sun is down’, ‘the westering sun bestowed bright glances on it ... Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn’, ‘the sun dipped in the river’.

So the sun is in constant decline, and even, in the final citation, in ‘danger’ of being extinguished.

In Part Two, however, after the Winter Solstice, the sun no longer sinks. There’s not even one more sunset. Instead, the sun rises. Septimus Crisparkle ‘was back again at sunrise’.

Jasper (in Part One): “It is hardly worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that hangs ripe on the tree for him”. The Tree of the Golden Apples (given by Earth goddess Gaia to the wife of Zeus) was tended by the Hesperides, three Sunset Goddesses.

A close link is made between the sun and life and health:

• ‘But no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of the sun.’
• ‘For still no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of the sun.’
• Mr Tartar, who’s bursting with health and vigour, is continually referred to as ‘sunburnt’. Rosa, too, is a ‘sunny little creature [who Jasper worships] ... abiding in the place to keep it bright and warm in its desertion’. She also brings sunshine into Mr Grewgious’s life (stirring new life in him) “and makes [his room] Glorious!” [i.e. bright and sunny as in ‘a glorious day’.]
• ‘[Lobley] was the dead image of the sun in old woodcuts, his hair and whiskers answering for rays all around him’.
• Crisparkle to Neville: “I want more sun to shine upon you”.
• And again: “She has to draw you into the sunlight”.
• Helena: “My poor Neville is reading in his own room, the sun being so very bright on this side just now” — one of a number of indications that Neville isn’t destined to live out the book i.e. he moves out of the light of the sun. Indeed, he only emerges from his rooms at night.
• ‘Little Rickitts (a junior of weakly constitution)’. And what causes the bone-softening disease known as rickets? Not getting enough sunlight.
• ‘They preferred air and light to Fever and the Plague.’
• ‘Golden drinks ... ripened long ago in lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade. Sparkling and tingling ... pushed at their corks ... like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates ... Glowing vintages ...’ Wine as ‘bottled up’ sunshine which, when taken in small measure, has reviving and curative properties e.g. Constantia. (R L Stevenson rewrites this even more explicitly in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘Wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house ... the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.’)

There are just 76 occurrences of ‘moonli’ (which finds both moonlight and moonlit) in the almost 4,000,000 words of Dickens’s other 14 novels. In Part One of Drood (less than 60,000 words) there are 22. And in Part Two ... none at all! Moonlight vanishes entirely — replaced by stars and starlight (which themselves, like ‘daylight’, don’t occur in Part One). Indeed, apart from Mr Tartar’s ‘best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars’, all 29 instances of ‘moon’ fall in Part One, the season when moonlight hours grow predominant. (Deuteronomy 4.19: ‘And lest ... when you see the sun and the moon and the stars ... you are drawn away and worship them, and serve them’.) Even the two passages that recall The Moonstone are in the first part of the novel. (The word ‘moon’ occurs 28 times in Part One and 29 times in total. Interesting numbers ...)

There are two mentions of Monday (Moon’s day) in the novel. Both relate to Neville. So is he more attuned to the moon than the sun?

Neville: “... and Cloisterham being so old and grave and beautiful, with the moon shining on it — these things inclined me to open my heart.” ‘Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the spell of the moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves ...’ Admittedly, these extracts give false emphasis as other reasons for Neville’s actions are given, but they are suggestive. And if, in the completed novel, they’d been matched by similar instances ...

There’s no celestial globe in any of Dickens’s other novels, but such an apposite object could hardly be omitted from Drood, so great play is made of Miss Twinkleton possessing one.

‘Miss Twinkleton then said: “Ladies, another revolving year”. [It’s no coincidence, I think, that Drood was intended to be published in 12 monthly parts.]

Before clockwork, time was measured by tracking the sun. ‘Solstice’ means ‘sun stand still’ or ‘sun stop’ and thus ‘time stop’. On December 25 in Drood, mechanical devices for measuring time stop too. ‘It is ... seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off’, and Edwin Drood’s watch had ‘run down, before being cast into the water’. (Figuratively, solstice means a stopping-point.)

Janus — with whom Jasper is paralleled — was often depicted in the Roman era bearing gold and silver keys. These were to lock and unlock the solstice gates — called Janua Celi and Janua Inferni. In other words, Janus is the doorkeeper who opens and closes the celestial cycle of the winter and summer solstices. He’s also a Solar God of Dawn.

Nature is woven into the fabric of Drood, including into Cloisterham’s Cathedral via sunlight, moonlight, the sea (metaphorically) and, most notably, in the oft-quoted passage: ‘A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields — or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life’.

The names of nearly all the characters have a link with nature and/or elements associated with the Solstices (such as fertility): Sap Sea, [Land]less, Honey Thunder, Ed[win D][rood] (rood was a plot of land approximately the size of a quarter of an acre), Cri[sparkle] and [Twinkle]ton (suggesting light and stars), Billickin (means a ‘dipper’ and at the end of the handle of the Dipper (a cluster of seven stars in Ursa Minor) is Polaris, the North Star, which marks the position of the north celestial pole), Hi[ram] (the constellation and zodiacal sign Aries, beginning 21 March, the day of the vernal equinox) [Grew]gious, Tope (grove of trees and mound or barrow; also a provincial name for a wren, which is a bird symbolic of the waning year), Tartar (burning barrels of tar were often rolled down hills at the Solstice), Lob Ley (‘lob’ is a nugget of gold (and gold, in ancient times, was universally associated with the sun) and ‘ley’ is untilled land), Datchery (rhymes with hatchery), Tisher (transpose the ‘T’ and it’s as close to Ishtar, goddess of fertility and sexual love as Dickens could get without making it blatant) and Jasper (a gemstone incorporating a poisonous snake: J[asp]er). Nicknames: Stony, Rosebud (the rose is an emblem of the sun and dawn), Eddy, Wild Boy, China Shepherdess and, in a deleted passage, Tartar calls Lobley “a Triton” (the son of Neptune). Alternative names considered: Wakefield, Brood, Peptune (suggestive of Neptune, deity of the sea), Olympia (site in ancient Greece that was the chief sanctuary of Zeus, a sky and weather god) Heyridge.

There are many types of trees and woods mentioned in Drood, let’s consider just one, the elm: ‘To such as these, it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-trees in the Close [The elm is traditionally associated with death (in Oliver Twist and Martin Chuzzlewit it’s a coffin-timber), but also with rebirth]: so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together’.

Apart from its association with death (a gateway between our world and the Underworld), the elm is also said to be the abode of fairies. So for the parting between ‘fairy bride’ Rosa and Edwin, under the murderous gaze of Jasper, there could only be one setting: ‘When they came among the elm-trees by the Cathedral, where they had last sat together, they stopped as by consent ... [and] kissed each other fervently. “Don't look round, Rosa ... Didn't you see Jack?” “No! Where?” “Under the trees. He saw us, as we took leave of each other”.

Deleted text: ‘“At Christmas? Certainly. O dear yes, I settled with her that I would come back at Christmas,” replied Mr Grewgious, as if the question had previously lain between Lady Day, Midsummer Day, and Michaelmas’. All are quarter days (close to the solstices and equinoxes) when payment of rent falls due, so Hiram Grewgious’s life, as a professional Receiver of rents, revolves around seasonal change, but — and this is the point, of course — in a manner wholly divorced from nature. And nature itself has been crushed virtually out of existence in smoggy London, ‘where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable ... a few smoky sparrows ... in smoky trees ... to play at country’ — blooming only in Mr Tartar’s flower-boxes. Even in Cloisterham there’s a ‘stamped-out garden’, a ‘poor strip of garden’, ‘railed-off’ and ‘stone-walled’ gardens and ‘what was once a garden, but is now the thoroughfare’. Man’s activities, alas, all too often lead to Nature being repressed: ‘The everlastingly-green garden seemed to be left for everlasting, unregainable and far away’.

Edwin: “Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine”. This conflates two ironic allusions: ‘No three times three and hip-hip-hips, Because I’m ripe and full of pips — I like a little green. To put me on my solemn oath, If sweep-like I could stop my growth I would remain, and nothing loath, A boy — about nineteen’. Edwin’s growth is very soon about to be stopped, but not in the way that was meant. “Nine times nine” is taken from a witch’s speech in Macbeth: “Weary sev’nnights nine times nine shall he dwindle, peak, and pine”. And why? Because the witches intend to whip up a wind that’ll keep the sailor out of port. (Macbeth acts on the information provided by the witches and that’s his tragedy, Edwin fails to act on Princess Puffer’s (warning about Jasper) and that’s his. The opium woman and the ‘Weird women’ are paralleled, of course e.g. she looks at Jasper ‘with a weird peep’ and is as ‘withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the ... stall seats’, which echoes “What are these, So withered ... That look not like th' inhabitants o'th' earth ... ... Are ye fantastical ...”)

1st Witch: When shall we three meet again?

2nd Witch: When the hurly-burly's done ...

3rd Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.

‘When Shall These Three Meet Again?’ asks a chapter heading in Drood. Invert the answer in Macbeth and you get: ‘That won’t be after the rise of the sun’. And so it proves. Jasper, Neville and Edwin dine on Christmas Eve and, come sunrise Christmas morning, never meet again.

Edwin: “But I shall be here, off and on, until next Midsummer; then I shall take my leave of Cloisterham, and England too”. He’s off “to wake up Egypt a little”.

The importance of the Summer Solstice to the Ancient Egyptians can hardly be overstated. They not only worshipped a Sun-god, but the annual overflow of the Nile, without which they were dead meat, also occurred on (or within days) of the Solstice.

Edwin: “Why should she be such a ... goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?” “Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton ... Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses”. To the Egyptians, the Pyramid was a ‘hill of light’, quite literally so; faced in white limestone with a golden capstone, it dazzlingly reflected the sun — the generative power of which it was symbolic of. The goose, representative of the sun, was an emblem of the soul of the pharaohs. And goose sacrifices at the time of the Winter Solstice symbolised the returning sun. Isis was a goddess of the moon and mother of Horus (born at about the time of the Winter Solstice) who was the son of Sun-god Osiris. An ibis was the bird associated with Thoth, a god of the moon, and it was this ibis-headed god who helped Isis during her pregnancy. Cheops proclaimed himself a living Sun-god, unlike previous Pharaohs who, although considering themselves a reincarnation of Horus, believed that they became a Sun-god (Osiris) only after death.

Septimus Crisparkle (who has ‘radiant features’) is twice associated with the hawk. He has ‘hawk’s eyes’ and ‘it was hawked through the late inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle’. In Egyptian mythology, the hawk/falcon was the sacred bird of the hawk-headed Sun-god Horus. Horus is the man-god most closely associated with Jesus, so linking Crisparkle with him certainly met Dickens’s criteria of making his allusions ironic. ‘Septimus, because six little brother Crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were born, like six weak little rushlights, as they were lighted.’ (Is it a coincidence that a ray of sunlight is made up of seven separate colours?) Septimus’s mother shortens his Christian name to Sept. Sept was one of the Egyptian names for Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. No surprise, then, that when Crisparkle goes to the Weir, ‘It was starlight’. To the Ancient Egyptians, Sirius (thought to derive from the Greek word ‘Sirio’ which means ‘sparkling’) was the second most important celestial body. Notably, it was closely linked with Isis and Horus. ‘Horus who is in Sept/Sirius’ [Pyramid Text, line 632].

“Do you keep a cat down there?” asked Mr. Grewgious. Edwin coloured a little as he explained: “I call Rosa Pussy”. Later: “I hazard the guess that her dear name [Pussy] ... is preserved sacred”. So ‘Pussy’ is preserved sacred and Sacred Cat is the name of Bast, the Egyptian Cat goddess (daughter of Isis), who represents the life-giving power of the sun. One theory as to why we call a cat puss or pussy is because of Bast (which is pronounced Pasht) and its variations. She was the protectress of women, mothers and children, so, naturally, Rosa is a girl who brings out the protective instinct in others. Helena’s ‘wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form’, Rosa felt ‘protected by the interposition of Mr. Grewgious between herself and [Jasper]’, ‘again rises to ... seek protection within the house’, ‘under Joe's protection’, to Mr Grewgious, “I have come to you to protect me”.

Bast (or Bastet when in half-feline, half-human form) was called the Lady of Truth. But the only time Rosa speaks of ‘truth’, she says, “you forced me, for his own trusting, good, good sake, to keep the truth from him”.

Bastet means ‘devouring lady’. Mr. Grewgious gives Rosa reassurance that she won’t be devoured by fire: “Any outbreak of the devouring element would be suppressed by the watchmen”.

Human sacrifices were made to Bastet but in Drood it’s Rosa/Bastet who “is sacrificed in being bestowed upon [Edwin]”. And ‘Miss Twinkleton ... turns to the sacrifice, and says, “You may go down, my dear.” Miss Bud goes down’. (Jasper offers to lay sacrifices at sunny Rosa’s feet, but the sacrifices he offers to make involve the gift of life i.e. not seeking Neville’s death.)

Click here for information about the close link between cats and the sun and moon, and for details about Bastet. The Egyptian cobra is mentioned in connection with Horus. Remember that it’s also known as an asp. (It’s not Crisparkle/Horus who’s in danger of losing an eye in Drood, of course. Deputy to Jasper: “I'll smash your eye, if you don't look out!”)

Septimus is unattached at the book’s beginning, but Helena is clearly destined to be Sept’s lady by the end — and ‘Lady of Sept’ was the appellation of Egyptian goddess Pakhet.

Pakhet’s name translates as ‘the tearer’. Neville: “My sister would have let him tear her to pieces, before she would have let him believe that he could make her shed a tear”. And: “I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out”. So ‘the tearer’ tore herself.

Pakhet was called the “night huntress”. Neville and Helena have ‘a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers’.

Pakhet is generally regarded as the Middle Egyptian equivalent of the Upper Egyptian Sun and Fire goddess Sekhmet, who was representative of the destructive power of the sun. ‘There was a slumbering gleam of fire in [Helena’s] intense dark eyes ...’

In Ancient Egypt, scarabs were often carved out of jasper. Scarabs are personification of Khepri, a Sun-god of dawn and creation, but in Drood Jasper is the obverse of light and life. He’s associated with darkness, blackness and shadow.

Crisparkle: “I have a depraved desire to turn Heaven’s creatures into swine and wild beasts”. A feat accomplished in Greek legend by Circe (who has links with the hawk). Hecate, her most famous mythical mother, was Goddess of the New Moon (and appears in Macbeth) and her father was Sun-god Helios. Circe could blot out the sun and moon by enchanting the clouds and was a Moon goddess herself. In fact, nearly all the gods and goddesses named or alluded to in Drood have links with the sun, the moon and/or fertility, even those (such as the Graces) not commonly associated with such.

There are two mentions of a ‘hole in the wall’ in Drood: ‘Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall’ and ‘the Verger’s hole-in-the-wall’. The passage in the Bible that gives the most explicit account of sun-worshipping Pagans is in Ezekiel 8. And how does the narrator obtain access to the shocking sights?

7 When I looked, behold a hole in the wall.

10 So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about.

14 Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. [A god of fertility — symbol of death and rebirth in nature — and the spouse of Ishtar.]

16 And he brought me into the inner court of the LORD's house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD ... were about five and twenty men with their backs toward the temple of Yahweh, and their faces toward the east; and they were worshipping the sun toward the east.’

After Edwin Drood’s disappearance, there’s a remarkably long break in the action. When the narrative picks up again a full six months have past. Jasper doesn’t confront Rosa in the garden on the Summer Solstice, though; it’s between Midsummer Day and Old Midsummer Day. (‘Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer days ... between haymaking time and harvest.’)

Having unleashed his ‘mad violence’ against Edwin at midwinter, Jasper now, appropriately, gives vent to his ‘mad’ love for Rosa at midsummer. Indeed, he tells her that he loves her ‘madly’ a full seven times (a significant number in Drood).

During midsummer the sun is at its strongest and brightest and it blazes down in the ‘Shadow on the Sun-Dial’ chapter.

Isaiah 38:7.8: ‘And this is the sign to you from the Lord [Jasper: “Give me a sign that you attend to me”], that the Lord will do this thing which He has spoken: Behold, I will bring the shadow on the sundial, which has gone down with the sun on the sundial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees on the dial by which it had gone down’. [God putting the clock back. The opposite of which would be a devil putting a timepiece forward. And if Jasper moved the hand on Edwin’s watch forward would that have wound it down prematurely, so that it could be thrown in the Weir at once? Did Jasper also ensure that he had an alibi for the hours after the time when the watch would have run itself down normally, ‘proving’ that he couldn’t have disposed of Edwin’s jewellery or, consequently, have been the murderer? Why, after all, is the winding up and down of the watch made so much of? The idea (and Dickens’s clue to it) is wonderfully ingenious and would have served admirably to baffle Jasper’s pursuers.]

In light of all the above, and of Dickens’s love of Shakespeare, Drood was bound to be influenced by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And so it was. To a surprising extent.