Dickens' incomplete mystery and its many endings

By Richard Boyle

Continued from last week

On the morning of June 8, 1870,Charles Dickens routinely sat down to carry on writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But the pages he wrote that day would be his last, for during the evening he suffered a stroke and died early the next morning. When news of his death spread, the American poet, Henry Longfellow, expressed concern over the fate of Edwin Drood, which was in mid-publication. "I hope it is finished," he wrote. "It is certainly one of the most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful. It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand and left it incomplete."

Alas, Edwin Drood was indeed left terribly and tragically incomplete; a stunted creation. Of the twelve parts planned, only six had been written by the time of Dickens' death - and even the sixth part remained unfinished. However, although Dickens' pen had "fallen from the hand," this did not deter others from trying to pick it up on his behalf and to continue writing from where he had stopped.

Dickens left no written indication of how he intended to proceed with the story. As a result, in the years following his death, a whole stack of books were written to take advantage of the possibilities created by an incomplete mystery. Frederic Kitton summed up the phenomenon best when he wrote in l897: "It may, without exaggeration, be said that no uncompleted work of fiction has excited so much comment, or caused such an amount of conjecture concerning the author's intention with respect to the plot, as the remarkable fragment of Charles Dickens' last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood".

The books generated by Edwin Drood covered the literary and not-so-literary spectrums. There was the serious study, such as The Puzzle of Dickens' Last Plot, by Andrew Lang and William Archer. Then there was the curious comment, such as the astronomer R.A. Proctor's, Watched by the Dead: A Loving Study of Dickens' Half-told Tale. And there was the frivolous exploitation, such as the necessarily anonymous, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Part the Second, by the Spirit Pen of Charles Dickens.

Worse still, there were also fraudulent attempts to cash in on Dickens' unfinished novel. John Jasper's Secret,for example, bore the names of Wilkie Collins (Dickens' good friend and fellow novelist) and Charles Dickens the younger (the eldest son), but in fact it was written by a New York journalist, Henry Morford, and his wife. Wilkie Collins' name was probably used because after Dickens' death rumour had it that Collins had been asked to complete the book. However, this was strongly denied by Dickens' publishers as well as by Collins himself.

More recently, Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini have come up with an ingenious and compelling piece of fiction called The D. Case:The Truth About The Mystery of Edwin Drood (I992). Messers. Fruttero and Lucentini cleverly summon fictional masters of detection to solve, once and for all, the puzzle of The D. Case at "an international forum on the completion of unfinished or fragmentary works in music and literature".

The great sleuths of popular literature, such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown, arrive at the forum and meet to solve the thorny mystery surrounding Edwin Drood. In The D. Case, the entire text of Dickens' novel is reproduced, alternating every few chapters with the cogitations and investigations of "the Drood working group." It is an entertaining, double-barrelled exercise in literary puzzle-solving.

Just as authors had been inspired to provide an ending to the story, so too did a number of playwrights. The first stage adaptation, by Walter Stephens, was produced in 1871 and had Jasper drinking poison after being uncovered as the murderer. Another adaptation, staged a year later by G.H. Macdermott, ended with Drood turning up alive, which so astonished Jasper that he fell down dead. Edwin Drood was also dramatised by Charles Dickens the Younger, but unfortunately arrangements for production fell through.

There have been at least three film versions of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The first, a silent movie made in 1914, was co-directed by Herbert Blache and Tom Terriss. (Terriss also starred as Jasper.) The second version, made in 1935, was directed by Stuart Walker and starred Claude Rains as Jasper, Douglas Montgomery as Neville, and Valerie Hobson as Helena. The most recent version appeared in 1993. This was directed by Timothy Forder, and starred Robert Powell and Nanette Newman.

Rupert Holmes wrote a musical stage adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood which premiered at the Delacorte Theatre in New York's Central Park on August 21, 1985. Holmes used his imagination - and borrows the collective imagination of the audience at each performance - to help round out and finish the story. Initially conceived as "a springboard for a series of theatrical moments and events, using a literary curiosity as a trampoline", the novelty of solving the mystery from one's theatre seat spread to American and European living rooms, where it was turned into an intricate parlour game. The show won five Tony Awards including, Best Book, Best Score and Best Musical.

At the start of the show, members of the cast come among the audience to explain that they (the audience) will be contributing to the outcome of the performance by voting later on for optional endings. The musical includes the number, simply titled "Ceylon", which is sung principally by Neville and Helena Landless. It takes place after the quarrel between Neville and Edwin Drood, and is an attempt by the twins to make peace with Drood. They begin by singing:

"Ceylon... Ceylon
By the Bengal Bay
East of Jaipur
West of Mandalay!
Agra... Patna
Sholapur and Kolhapur and all,
How far they are
From the High Street and the Market Hall."

At this juncture, Drood breaks in to argue that it is all very well for them "to sing of their minor gem," but that he has a role to play which cannot be ignored. The twins then continue to evoke the island of their birth:

"Ceylon.... Ceylon Cross the Injun Seas T'wards the Fjords of Thornaby-on-Tees Typhoons Monsoons, Break upon the Coast of Malabar!"

Neville and Helena go on to lament the reception they are being given, and make a promise to their island home that they will return in the future:

"How warm are the winds of our Golden Isle! How cool are their words and how cold is their smile! They wish us gone! We'll be back someday Ceylon!"

At the point at which Dickens' narrative was rudely terminated the audience is faced with the responsibility of providing the denouement. The first choice to be made is whether Drood is actually dead or not. Then it is necessary to address the question of Datchery's identity, as well as that of the murderer. An audience vote is then taken... I won't go any further in case some enterprising impresario should wish to stage the musical here.

While there have been a variety of endings concocted over the past 130 years, the fact remains that Dickens had stated in a letter that the story was to be of the murder of a nephew by his uncle. Luke Fildes, the illustrator of the story, was convinced that Dickens intended Drood should be killed by his uncle, and Charles Dickens the Younger was informed by his father that Drood was dead. It appears that the originality of the story was to consist in the self-review of the murderer's life in his condemned cell.

There is little doubt that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a bold attempt to throw off the confining conventions of Dickens' earlier work. Yet his old mastery was always present. "Some of the characters in the story were touched with subtlety," John Forster wrote in his biography of Dickens, "and in its description his imaginative power was at its best. Not a line was wanting to the reality, in the most minute detail, of places the most widely contrasted, and we saw with equal vividness the lazy cathedral town and the lurid opium-eater's den."

For me, the fascination with Edwin Drood is not so much with the ending but with Neville and Helena Landless. What were their origins? One can only assume, since Dickens gives no details, that they are British residents of Ceylon rather than Eurasians, but Drood does taunt Neville about his dark skin and Helena is described as being "gypsy-like." Where did Dickens imagine they lived in the island? What adventures did he think up for them when he wrote about their escapes? And did John Capper provide Dickens with the real-life models on which the Landless twins were based?

I am informed by a friend, who worked backstage on Edwin Drood before it moved to Broadway, that Neville and Helena are portrayed in the show as Ceylonese and appropriately 'browned up'. It would seem that Rupert Holmes has politicised this aspect of the story. The number "Ceylon" is really a parody by the twins of British attitudes towards them. According to my friend, originally there was another song (probably cut before the Broadway run) in which Neville bitterly satirizes how people tell him, "I am English, you are British" - that is, a British subject rather than a national.

- Concluded

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