The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

No one illustrates this more than Jasper, who is practically a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure: a religious man, a gifted musician, a kindly uncle, but also an opium addict, a vindictive lover and someone driven by sexual obsession.Īs Mr. In an important 1940 essay, one that changed the way Dickens was viewed by critics, Edmund Wilson wrote about the strain of dualism that runs all through the novels, counterbalancing good and evil, sometimes within a single character. (Drood is by comparison something of a pill, and the reader feels no great loss when he disappears.) Jasper is by far the most interesting character in the book.

Holmes doesn’t like to spoil the fun by revealing his own ideas about the mystery, but when pressed, he said he believed, as most scholars do, that John Jasper almost certainly killed Edwin Drood. Already in poor health, and taking laudanum both to help him sleep and for pain in his legs, he exhausted himself and died of a stroke in June 1870, worn out at the age of 58.

During the months he was writing it, Dickens broke a longstanding rule about not doing a reading tour while also working on a book. The readings may partly explain why “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was never completed. These weren’t stuffy 92nd Street Y sorts of evenings but dramatic one-man shows in which Dickens acted out all the parts with such passion that by the end he would be physically and emotionally spent. And in his later years he became famous for the public readings he gave from his books both in England and in America. Even as he became an immensely successful novelist, he delighted in putting on amateur theatricals, usually starring himself, from his own scripts. From a young age he was stage-struck and for a while yearned to be an actor, not a writer. Theirs is a world that Dickens knew well. The show is set in a Victorian music hall, where the actors, a second-rate touring troupe from London, are putting on their own, very hammy version of Dickens’s last, unfinished novel. CHARLES DICKENS, a lifelong ham, would have loved Rupert Holmes’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” now playing in a well-received Roundabout Theater Company revival at Studio 54.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens