Dickens, ever extravagant with the raw material of his richly textured, warmly glittering fictions, had no reason to make the book's denouement accessible midway. Close on the heels of this inconvenient lack of data are other, almost equally vexing questions: If Edwin has been slain, was the villain his guardian, the choirmaster John Jasper, who leads two lives, one as a respected community member and another as a frequenter of opium dens? And if Edwin is dead, yet if Jasper is not the assassin, then who is?Ĭlues abound, but there is always the chance that they are red herrings. By the beginning of Dicken's Chapter XV he has certainly disappeared, but there is simply no way to ascertain what has happened to him. The crux of the mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is whether that amiable young man, Edwin Drodd, was ever murdered at all. Their was even a mock trial staged in London in 1913, with Chesterton and Shaw participating, to determine the guilt or innocence of Edwin Drood's probable murderer.

So also have Andrew Lang and J.B.Priestly, as well as two Wilsons, Edmund and Angus. Chesterton ('insoluble'), George Gissing ('a paltry mystery'), George Bernard Shaw (constructed by a man 'already three-quarters dead') and Longfellow ('one of his most beautiful works if not the most beautiful of all') are among the distinguished men of letters who have pronouned their verdict on Edwin Drood. 'This great stump of a novel,' as Edward Blishen refers to it, has throughout the decades gathered about its scores of argumentative fans (known variously as 'Droo-ids,' 'Droodians' or 'Droodists') who form cliques and occasional cross-alliances according to the theory they espouse to settle the story's outcome.

The puzzle, with its eternally elusive solution, has for over a century held the imagination of readers. Thus was one of the curiosities of literature established, a mystery to this day. Only half of the 12 proposed monthly installments were then on paper the remaining six, alas, remained in the fertile brain of their creator and were entombed with him in Westminister Abbey. For The Mystery of Edwin Drood, called that after no little deliberation, was never completed: Dickens was working to get it out when he suffered a stroke and died the very next day. In 1869, when he began what was to be his last novel, Charles Dickens had no way of knowing just how apt its title would come to be.

The mystery of edmund drood