Original: Dickens Studies Annual

Scholars gathering to discuss The Mystery of Edwin Drood at Santa Cruz in August 1993 centered on essentially similar concepts in their readings. Robert Tracy discussed Dickens' borrowing "from himself' and journeying through earlier novels as he wrote his last (42), and Gerhard Joseph, relating the life to the fragment, saw Dickens' "career ... as a series of repetitive acts that marks an aesthetic journey, of doing the same fanciful thing over and over again" (16). This paper argues that Dickens not so much revisits the past but does what he has always done: he re-writes his own life, his own fancies, and in so doing reconstructs myths. He also returns to sources that persistently haunt the novels. Two of these have a shaping influence on The Mystery^, of Edwin Drood and in this work relate to each other: the Genesis 4 story of Cain and Abel and Shakespeare's Macbeth.¹

The Cain and Abel story, basic to our conception of the human condition, stands "out of the vast repertoire of Western myth ... for the extraordinary longevity and variousness of its appeal" (Quinones 3). Ricardo Quinones points to Byron's Cain as an originatory work initiating the post-Romantic sense of the myth of Cain and Abel as different from that of the pot, so that the Cain figure, no longer only a precursor of evil and a fratricide, becomes the intelligent and complex questor. "He is the only character in the drama whose intelligence is probing, who seems to be a character of consciousness as well as of conscience."² Elie Wiesel, in his re-telling of the story, reflects precisely this, that the Cain upon whom Byron and Dickens dwell is a post-Romantic figure, victor/victim, prey to God's whim yet creator of his own destiny. Commenting that "no other Biblical situation contains so many ques­tions or arouses so many uncertainties" (53), Wiesel's most relevant point for the purpose of an assessment of the world of Cloisterham is, that the Genesis story is set in the fallen world, and has as its background the parents of these sons who have a memory of paradise. "Called upon to share their parents' haunted kingdom, they quarreled over heavenly favors and finally confronted one another in every role that defines man's relationship to other men" (53).

Man's relationship to other men and the role of fratricidal sacrifice is gathered into the motif of the city. The sanctuary to which the Dean of Cloisterham refers so patronizingly has its source in the story of Cain, founder of the first city and associated with the cities of sanctuary established in order to provide refuge "for the children of Israel, and for the stranger, and for the sojourner among them that everyone that killeth any person unawares may flee thither" (Numbers 35:15).

Crisparkle's attempt to protect Neville is countered by the bland thinking of the Dean who reminds him that "The days of taking sanctuary are past." (Sanctuary as a legal recourse was abolished in England in 1623.) So, "Minor Canon Row knew Neville Landless no more; and he went withersoever he would, or could, with a blight upon his name and fame" (16, 146).³ Not only is the cadence of this prose biblical, but the intent is evocative of Genesis: shunned by the world, Cain becomes a fugitive and a vagabond. Neville Landless is overtly described by Honeythunder as Cain (17.149). Other refer­ences occur: Neville is assaulted and insists that he " 'has no chance but to set his mark upon' " his attackers, alluding to the words: "And the Lord set his mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him" (4:15); when Jasper asks where Edwin is, Neville replies " 'Where is your nephew? ... Why do you ask me?' " (15.133) echoing: "Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?" (4:9). Neville's departure from Cloisterham (the sacred city?) for London (the secular city?) is interesting: perhaps the sacred and the secular cities are inverted in that Cloisterham is associated with death and fear whereas London becomes the sanctuary to which Rosa and Neville and even Miss Twinkleton flee to the protection of Grewgious and Tartar.

In an article entitled "Cain: Or, the Metaphorical Construction of Cities," Gerald L. Bruns describes the city in terms evocative of Dickens' city, the polls inhabited by nameless transgressors:

The building of cities is rooted in the idea of banishment from the soil ... the destruction of the household, of being the outcast of the settlement, of being marked for life, that is, being the marked man or the fugitive.... Beneath the polls there is the labyrinth. (74)

Bruns reminds us of Augustine's thesis that "the City of God and the city of the world" are not separate, but that "as far as human history goes, the former lives like an alien inside the latter" (18.1.391) so "at the centre of the city is the pariah or the scapegoat" (Bruns 79). This ambiguity accords with the doubleness in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with Jasper's life being conducted between the two cities; and this in turn accords with the same issue in the Cain and Abel story, of "an encounter with the lost brother, the sacri­ficed other," the struggle between good and evil with its "great purpose" being "to address a breach in existence, a fracture at the heart of things". Fraternity itself conjures up an image of "the dream of the human family, the pastoralism of the heart, a vision of unity and concord and co-opera­tion ... summarized" in the image of the siblings. But this idyll itself ushers in "difference, discord, and division" in that the "Cain/Abel story represents a shattering reminder of the fragility of the his compact" (Quinones 3).

The polarities of fraternity and death have an ironic complicity, and the violence endemic in the Bible story—a reminder that the opposite of brother­hood is murder—marks the Cain theme in literary history as one of "in­wardness, emotional tension, and secret conflict" (Quinones 6). These words, so apt to the Cain and Abel story, are pointers to the central concerns of Dickens' novel, the tension between love and death, between a man and his kin. The power of the Cain and Abel story rests in large measure upon its "dualistic nature" so that it "presents rival principles in opposition."⁴ Gene­sis and Dickens recognize a tragic basis to existence, a dark event at the heart of society, a sacrificial act which initiates a reciprocal violence to which mankind is ever in thrall. Of course, the sacrificial act, theologically, involves the laying down of the self in submission to a higher good while Cain's is not a significant act, perhaps, in as much as it is not for the good of the "tribe."⁵ The dark event, the murder of Abel, is motivated by envy and the mysterious sense that the "other" is pleasing to God; this undermines the social desire for unity of whatever sort. Beginning with Byron's drama of Cain (although, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), in its presentation of the monster created by the self, ought perhaps to have this honor), this theme is intensified in post-Romantic literature whereafter the Doppelganger, typi­fied in the two brothers at variance, pervades nineteenth-century art.

Cain haunts man's conscience. Claudius knows that the murder of his brother, King Hamlet, "hath the primal eldest curse upon't", (3.3), recalling the story of man's second offence against God and the first murder. Envy, selfishness, and murder conjoin with that earlier defiance in Eden. And mur­der, the commentators teach us, is what has happened in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Collins, impatient perhaps of arguments like mine, warns that "whenever Dickens thought about murder, echoes of Macbeth came into his mind" (Charles Dickens: The Public Readings 299). There are indeed "ech­oes of Macbeth" in this novel; moreover, useful comparisons can be made between the play, the novel, and the Genesis story: Macbeth's embittered kingship, the unfruitful tilling of Cain's soil, the wearying drudge, of loath­some duties in Cloisterham, are alike; Cain's alienation from the community is echoed by Jasper's and Macbeth's; all suffer the "wakeful misery of the night," for all are "girded by sordid realities" which torture their imagina­tions; the sense of a lost Paradise and of Hell pervades both Genesis and Shakespeare's play as it does this novel: " 'In the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night"' Jasper tells Rosa, he is " 'girded by sordid realities ... wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions.' "

On Shakespeare and Dickens, Alfred Harbage has written movingly about Bill Sikes that "we see that he has done with his killer just what Shakespeare has done with his. He has effected a transplant, giving to a creature who lacked a conscience his own conscience and ours"; it is naive, he says, to assume that writers "so successful in portraying murder must have the capac­ity to commit it" when "what they had was the capacity to repent it" (The Shakespeare Dickens Analogy 61). Macready first made the comparison be­tween Dickens and himself as ' "Two Macbeths!" ' after he attended a perfor­mance of the 'Sikes and Nancy' Reading. Echoes of Macbeth are undeniable:

At times, he turned to beat this phantom off, though it should look him dead; but the hair rose on his head, and his blood stood still, for it had turned with him, and was behind him then. He leaned his back against a bank, and felt that it stood above him, visibly out against the cold night sky. He threw himself on his back upon the road. At his head it stood, silent, erect, and still: a human gravestone with its epitaph in Blood!! ("Sikes and Nancy" 484)

Each image is apt, and each is found in Macbeth's horror of Banquo's ghost. "If Dickens had not known Macbeth," asks Harbage, "would the slaying of a gangster's moll have created in a London slum a sense of almost doomsday horror?" (Aspects of Influence 126). By the same token, if Shakespeare and Dickens had not known the story of the first murderer shunned by man and also by God so that his punishment was too great to bear, would either have re-written the myth, "And the Lord said unto him, therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him" (4:15).

The presence of the Cain and Abel myth is suggested by echoes that perme­ate The Mystery of Edwin Drood quite as frequently as do those from Macbeth, perhaps most strikingly in our recognition that Jasper, living "apart from human life," is as removed from fellowship as is Cain. What draws us to the novel is this insight into a man who lives in isolation, who knows, as does Macbeth, that he "must not look to have ... troops of friends^." (5.3.25). Macready's performance of Macbeth concentrated on his withdrawal from his companions (Downer 330) and we are told of Jasper that "it is curious to consider that the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or interchange with nothing around him" (23.203). He is trapped as much by his inner life as by the narrow limitations of the cathedral precincts. In the words of Lawrence Frank:

John Jasper, superficially beyond the pale of sympathy, reveals the extent to which human energy may be twisted and inverted. ... [his] rebellion takes the form of perversity and self-absorption. ... in a world whose values are ... ina­dequate to man's psychological and moral predicament. In creating John Jasper, Dickens explores the ambiguities of human consciousness denied by a society no longer understanding itself or the human beings for whom it exists. (194-95)

This notion is commensurate with that of Byron's Cain in which artistic creation is a rebellion against a stifling conformity: Byron's poet figure is courageously linked "against the forces of convention and tyranny" with other "figures of rebellion in the Christian and Classical traditions: Satan, Cain, and Prometheus" (Russell 184). Jasper does have elements of the By­ronic hero particularly in his compulsion/revulsion effect on Rosa; there is that in his creation which is crucially dependent on his disturbing sexual power. Jasper is often depicted as diabolic: he describes the Cathedral services as "devilish"— " 'Must I take to carving [demons] out of my heart?' " he asks miserably (2.11). In the Sun-Dial scene he sets "his black mark upon the very face of day," describes " 'Paradises and Hells of visions' ", and the "preservation of his easy attitude" is "diabolical" in its contrast with "his working features and his convulsive hands" (19.170-71).

Jasper's characterization, however, is not like that of Fagin, Quilp, or Com­peyson at whose fates we are more horrified than compassionate.

The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black, with age and dirt. ... In a frying-pan which was on the fire ... some sausages were cooking: and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old and shriv­elled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quan­tity of matted red hair. (8.50)

The red-headed devil holds a fork at a cauldron, presides over the fire of hell, and runs the underground world of crime, but the funny touch of the pork sausage, together with fixed images of devilry, make Fagin's characterization, though splendid, a static portrayal. Another character with red hair and of mythically evil proportions is Monks, a sidekick of the devil's, a snivelling terrified tortured being, who falls into fits, has "a broad red mark, like a bum or a scald" (46.296) on his throat, is the bad brother of the pure hero, yet is protected from the end that comes to Sikes because, terrified of bloodshed, he shies away from murder. Shaped in the mode of a myth, or fairy-tale, he is larger-than-life. He is a grotesque, a parody of biblical Cain:

The man shook his fist, and gnashed his teeth. ... He advanced towards Oliver, as if with the intention of aiming a blow at him, but fell violently on the ground, writhing and foaming, in a fit. (33.207)

About Sikes, Dickens' "Preface" debates whether "every gentler human feeling is dead within such bosoms" (xxviii) in a way that he does not consider doing in connection with Fagin or Monks in whom there is clearly no gentle humanity, nor has there ever been. But in Sikes, and more subtly in Jasper, is explored the enigma of how it may be that a human being lives though "every gentler human feeling" dies within his bosom. The Cain-Abel myth "provides a perfect locus" for this preoccupation because it scrutinizes the ambiguities of the human condition balanced between the ethical and the evil, and dramatizes "the struggle on the part of a character offended by the conventional moral code^." (Quinones 19-20). The fascination with Cain is like that with John Jasper—it is paradoxical and contradictory, and ulti­mately mysterious.

Generations have puzzled over why discord should arise when Cain's sacri­fice is rejected. His offering is the first indication in the Bible of prayer, and is an assertion of Cain's identity as a "tiller of the ground" by which means he would find favor in the eyes of God. When Dickens makes Jasper a musician and choirmaster, and has his talents become a source of misery and oppression to him, there is a tenuous but interesting connection in the motif that recurs in accounts of Cain, whose descendants, "artificers in brass and iron" who also "handle the harp and organ" (Genesis 4:21-22), are the first artists (Mellinkoff 1, 103). God rejects Cain's offerings of the fruits of the earth, and accepts Abel's blood sacrifice: "If thou doest well, shant thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door" (4:7). There is a careless indifference in this, an "arbitrariness of preference" which invali­dates Cain's offering. "All life," Quinones argues, "is an offering where one is being judged" (12). In the scene in which Jasper confesses disappointment and disillusion with his own life compared with that of his nephew, which promises to be exciting, creatively active, and loving, there is an echo of Cain's situation; he feels rejected, bound to suffer and toil hopelessly in the world while others prosper; perhaps, too, Edwin's circumstance has something of Abel's in it. The vulnerability and crushing sense of rejection experienced by the offerer "might explain the special appropriateness of the Cain-Abel story within a setting of artists" because the nature of artistic endeavour consists in "distinctive presentations of the self" wherein "the totality of one's being is defined and placed on the line" (Quinones 12-13). Jasper is an artist, and there is some deep sense of loss, pain, fear, trouble of some kind, associated with his work.

The dualistic nature of the Cain-Abel story is also vivid in Dickens' novel; Jasper has precisely the qualities that Quinones ascribes to Cain, a "ques­tioning, dissatisfied, probing critical intelligence." He lives in a narrow mean-spirited environment dominated by the smugness of the Dean and Mrs. Crisparkle; and Crisparkle, perhaps a type of Abel, "stands for the consolida­tion of the religious spirit with the social structure of the day." Jasper is impatient, even mocking, of the good Crisparkle's reverence for traditional values represented by the ancient English cathedral, the image of which domi­nates in such a bizarre way the opium fantasy that opens the novel. This "contest of values" (Quinones 13) inevitably leads to violence, shocking in the peaceful and sacred precincts; equally, violence may be an appropriate response to a society impervious to the misery inflicted on its choirmaster and disloyal to its actual ideals when it rejects the stranger, Neville Landless, on tenuous grounds on the morning of Christ's nativity. "Violence is crucial to the Cain-Abel story" in its concentration on the spread of sin; in other words, the first killing is another Fall, because man is made in God's image. The ideal of fraternity culminating paradoxically in murder, points to "a vortex of emotional fury" that has been a rich source for visual and literary artists (Quinones 13). Post-Romantic literature has grasped and reiterated this paradox of brothers and death, exploring persistently the Doppelganger motif.

This Doppelganger motif (Carol MacKay called it "our old friend" [12]) is present in Dickens' work from the beginning, in Oliver Twist, whose identity is lost and who struggles to withstand the dark other and regain his rightful heritage, until the enigmatic first lines of The Mystery of Edwin Drood: "An ancient English cathedral town? How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here!" We are taken into an hallucinatory mingling of Turkish robbers with English choirboys, to discover a "scattered conscious­ness ... fantastically [piecing] itself together" (1.1). But it is not only Jasper's consciousness that is split for it soon transpires that the conscience of Clois­terham is also in trouble: it is a rigid society masking its cruelties in pious conventions. Likewise, Edwin Drood represents all that Jasper longs to be, and Neville Landless, dark, alien, with no prospects, also in love with Rosa Bud, is Jasper's dark self. In the cathedral gatehouse, when the unhappy musician intervenes between the two young men who represent, on the one hand, all his desires, and on the other all he represses, he encounters "the externalized manifestation of his own warring states of mind" (Frank 177).

So we come again to the Cain-Abel story wherein the sacrificed brother becomes "a lost portion of the self, a self that is abandoned, sundered, the twin, the double, the shadowy other ... able to express all the dimensions of some lost portion of life that the foundation sacrifice in its fullest meaning acknowledges" (Quinones 11). The story presents an archetype that, in mur­dering his brother, Cain murders his own self.

Jasper, the last of Dickens' ambiguous villains, arose out of the same intriguing emotional and imaginative world that produced his first one, Bill Sikes. When Dickens returned to Oliver Twist for the purposes of the "Sikes and Nancy" reading, he returned to what Steven Marcus described as "his first and most intense representation of the crisis of his young boyhood" (375): an expression of another aspect of himself is revivified in the character of Sikes with whom Dickens sympathetically identifies. (Albert Hutter and others have noted that Dickens also identifies with John Jasper [36].)

In that reading, Sikes is goaded by Fagin and humiliated by Noah Claypole into pain and rage. Though careful to lock Nancy's door, and remembering Fagin's advice not to be " 'too—violent—for—for—safety' ", he strikes Nancy with the pistol, "twice upon the upturned face that almost touched his own" and then "shutting out the sight with his hand seized a heavy club, and struck her down!!" (482-83). Terrified, he cannot bear to turn his back upon the corpse, and leaves the room in which it lies, though Nancy's eyes, ITS eyes, pursue him until he is almost mad.

Reviewing the novel in 1844, R. H. Horne expressed horrified pity for the "detestable wretch" who is hunted down like "a wild beast ... with tenfold more ferocity than ever was fox, or boar ... our sympathies go with the hunted victim in this his last extremity" because he is "one worn and haggard man with all the world against him ... we are not with the howling mass of demons outside" (199-200). Bill Sikes takes on that dimension shared with Headstone and Jasper—and Macbeth and Cain: we change our allegiance from "the howling mass of demons" to ^"this hunted-down human being."

Violence emanating from pain is followed by horror, terror, and flight "into the solitude and darkness of the country"; then Bill Sikes takes "the desperate resolution of going back to London" because "there's somebody to speak to there, at all events," but those who were "his fellow-thieves" shun him. "All three men shrank away. Not one of them spake" (484-85). Bill Sikes, like Cain, is cast out from the community and ejected from the sight of God.

One thesis has it that "the novelist had familiarised himself with violence and the need to act out violence" (Sanders 205), and although we are warned by Collins not to take too seriously the claims that Dickens was identifying with his villains when he wrote " 'I am ... murdering Nancy' " or " 'I do not commit the murder again ... until Tuesday' "^. (Dickens and Crime 267-68), violence is a recurrent preoccupation. The relevance in this for my argument lies in Jasper's murderous thoughts which, although not explicit in the novel, are, perhaps, part of a dark fantasy, a dark aspect of himself, to which we have been given no access. This image, of a hidden guilt, evokes the very ambiguity of "fallen man," the man who sins and repents, and invents God to explain and forgive the mystery of his sin—the man who kills the brother he loves. Sikes arouses the vengeful anger of the community, so that "It seemed as though the whole city had poured its population out to curse him" (50.327); it is perhaps this lynching against which God protected Cain. As the rabbis point out, "God's mercy to the guilty who repent of his sin is infinitely greater than that of man" (Hertz 15). Cain's agony, that "from Thy face shall I be hid," reveals him to be not wholly bad. Fagin is wholly bad, damned and without grace, but Sikes is not of the devil's party because he is not without remorse. That he should be brought to death by his own horror rather than by external forces of law and vengeance might leave the reader with a sense of justice done, but also with horrified compassion.

Collins, who demonstrates Dickens' conviction that murderers are always vile, concedes that "Sikes becomes, in a sense, a sympathetic character" (1962, 263), and in the case of Headstone, allows that though "very wicked" and "responsible for his actions," he is pitiful in the scene in which "Charlie Hexam, his one remaining object of affection, finally repudiates him and leaves him 'in unutterable misery' " (Dickens and Crime 263, 285). This distressing scene compares with that in which Grewgious looks down upon Jasper, grovelling, "a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor" (15.138). Jasper "undergoes a process of total disintegration," however, like Wraybum and Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend, having descended into "the regions of the godlike river" after the Christmas Eve storm, he is "granted the opportu­nity to deny or to accept the potentiality for change" (Frank 185).

Such potential may suggest that the impulse of the novel is Resurrection.⁶ The disconcerting first chapter ends with the intoning of evensong: "WHEN THE WICKED MAN—"; these words, capitalized in the text, come from Ezekiel, promising that "When the wicked man turneth away from his wick­edness ... he shall save his soul alive" (18:27). The phrase is noted in the Number Plans followed by "Touch and Key-note." "It is a key-note which was surely intended to stand for the novel as a whole," Sanders avers (208-09). Though the "wicked man" indulges in debauchery in the first lines of the opening chapter, he is nevertheless promised salvation by its end. There is the promised salvation because wickedness is the other side of salvation; there is a balance between life and death, so that in that last wonderful assertion, of the brilliant morning that shines on the old city, the sun penetrates the cathedral and preaches the Resurrection and the Life (Sanders 208-09; MED 23.215).

Will this cathedral in which the "cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble comers of the building, fluttering there like wings" (MED 23.215) reject its choirmaster? On the next and last page of the novel, the choirmaster's enemies are ranged against him in the extraordinary and grotesque figures of the "astounded" Deputy and the fist-shaking Princess Puffer, and although Mr. Datchery "falls to with an appetite," having solved, perhaps, his mystery, it is force majeur up to us, in a sense, to decide.

In the case of Sikes and Headstone, man is less merciful than is God in the story of Cain: the demons are in the mob that yells for the murderer's blood and the hunted man destroys himself. Suicide and lynching are the punishments meted out by man; that which is meted out by God, according to Genesis, comes as a result of Cain's plea: "Behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me" (4:14). Sikes flees because he has cut himself off from man and God and "every one that findeth me shall slay me." The punishment, greater than mankind can bear, is mitigated in so far as Cain is protected from vendetta: "Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him" (4:15). The history of this mark has shown how man persists in being less merciful than God (Mellinkoff 154-55).⁷

The redemption of Eugene Wrayburn demonstrates, on the other hand, God's mercy. He is saved from drowning by the woman who loves him, and although the last words of the novel indicate that Society rejects his marriage to her, clearly God (and Mr. Twemlow) do not—for the union is a religious and redemptive commitment to love and to grace. On the other hand, there is John Jasper, enigmatic and compelling, with a dark aspect of his personality purporting to violence and obsessionally directed towards murder, or so some commentators say, and yet his anguish can be recognized though his fate remains unknown.

The interest that this paper has in the characters of Sikes and Jasper goes beyond their being "villains" similarly compounded. Sikes's return to Dick­ens' creative life as the major attraction in the farewell season of public readings in 1869 and 1870 is fascinating. Six months after the private reading of "Sikes and Nancy," and in May 1869, Dickens began to "cast about for a new subject" (Dolby 416-17). In September 1869 the title was settled and a celebratory dinner held: a month later the first number of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was read to Forster. Meanwhile the farewell reading program was being planned and rehearsed; Dickens wanted "to leave behind ... the recollection of something very passionate and dramatic^." and he fulfilled this promise. " 'I shall tear myself to pieces' " he whispered just before the last performance in March 1870 after which he would " 'vanish from these garish lights ... for evermore.' " It is supposed that the excitement and intense exhaustion brought about by the forty-minute performance hastened Dickens' death three months later, but he was driven by an obsessional desire to repeat the reading "over and over again." After each performance, an uncontrollable craving to go through it again would overtake him; he "was, moreover, discovered in the grounds at Gad's Hill re-enacting the murder of Nancy a day or two before he died" (Collins, Public Readings 465; Dolby 38,87, 449).

All this while he was creating John Jasper, who describes his own dreams as a journey that he needed to repeat obsessively, " 'over and over again ... hundreds of thousands of times' " (23.206).⁸ Jasper and Sikes are, on the face of it, very different, the one an elegant and artistic member of a sophisticated and respectable cathedral community, the other a brute raised in the violent slums of London's seamy underworld, a house-breaker and bully; but they are both wrought from the same source: from the figure of the man whose evil pursues and destroys him, the man who kills the thing he loves. This figure, widespread in an era concerned with "the personality in which evil is always threatening from within" (Welsh 130), finds its prototype in Cain who, having killed his good brother (his "good self" some analysts would have it) is pursued into the wilderness of sin and expulsion from the sight of God, and thereby into damnation.

That the "shadow of Macbeth" persists throughout the works "implies that Dickens was drawn to the soul in torment." His "vivid rendering of the tormented consciousness" (Morgan) of Cain causes his readers to respond to Sikes and Jasper with pity and fear for the sinner. The fact that interpretations of the story of the first murderer shift between compassion for, and condemna­tion of, Cain generates tension in the portrayals: the first man to kill is also the first man to beg for forgiveness and mercy, to earn the protection of God. He thus represents a complex but very real possibility for moral regeneration.

NOTES

The Chairman's Fund Educational Trust of Anglo American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated, together with Rhodes University are gratefully acknowledged for their generous support during the preparation and presentation of this paper.

1. Gerhard Joseph pointed out in discussion that the myth of Abel and Cain is not only repeated throughout the Dickens canon but "Genesis itself does the same thing in setting up fraternal conflict in generation after generation, as we move through the Patriarchs."

2. Jeffrey Burton Russell's account of Mephistopheles argues for a change in the early nineteenth century of the vision of the devil: "distaste for the church" aroused the notion that the Romantic hero, in his "rebellion against unjust and repressive authority," became a type of the devil:

The Romantic idea of the hero ... stands in contradiction to the classical epic notion of the hero.... The Romantic hero is individual, alone against the world, self-assertive, ambitious, powerful, and a liberator in rebellion against the society that blocks the way of progress towards liberty, beauty, and love, the Romantics read these qualities into Milton's Satan. Their admiration for Satan was not Satanism, however—not the worship of evil. (174-75)

References to The Mystery of Edwin Drood (MED) are to chapter and page numbers in the Clarendon edition on which the World's Classics edition is based. Chapters are short and references may be found readily in other editions.

4. That the Cain/Abel story recurs in Dickens' work as motif, allegory, emblem, and so on, has often been noted: John Cunningham, for instance, points to Magwitch's Christian name, Abel, and that "we see Compeyson and Magwitch, linked like Cain and Abel, in a death-grip" (11). The use of the story is not always so imaginatively done, however, as in "Cain in the Fields," written with R. H. Home for Household Words. Here the metaphor of Cain is merely convenient, repeated mechanically to enforce condemnation of "the red-handed descendants of Cain" murdering and robbing in the countryside (280).

5. A colleague, Jeanette Eve, recommended that I indicate that I am not arguing that Dickens is drawing exclusively on the Genesis myth; the presence of Crisparkle, notably in Chapter 10 in his reference to Christ, demonstrates that the larger context is Christian.

6. As do, for example, Thacker (111) and Sanders (206-17). That Edwin Drood's "resurrection" is concomitant with thematic concerns in other novels is the thesis of my own cautious proposals in The Companion to The Mystery of Edwin Drood (5-9).

7. Ruth Mellinkoff agrees with Quinones's thesis that there are shifts in the way Cain is perceived, and that he is represented in Jewish thought as either unregener­ate and a marked beast, or as a sinner who sincerely repents, is marked with the horn, an honourable sign in the ancient world denoting strength and glory, thus singling him out as even heroic (5 and 60).

8. Fred Kaplan makes the connection between the characterization of John Jasper and the murder of Nancy Reading when describing the "kind of self-hypnosis" manifesting "the compulsiveness, self-destructiveness, and power over oth­ers ... that he was to depict so brilliantly in the final year of his life in the character of John Jasper" (239). This is a footnote and Kaplan does not take this enticing point further.