Bon Voyage,
PatH! Have a great visit to the west coast! Didn't
Andy have a travel day yesterday too? To upstate New York? We get around, don't we?
Ella, I've spent the morning poking around the link you brought yesterday to
background information on James Harper - what a character! A big man, Mayor of NY, and a shrewd publisher! Started his own police force - (Banished free-roaming pigs from the streets of New York, and began work on establishing a citywide sanitation system.)
He was ruthless, he did want to be the first to publish Dickens' MED in hardcover - before Field and Osgood did it. But you know, he doesn't seem to be a man who would stoop to murder, does he? Unless, he hired such people to follow Osgood and turned his back if they resorted to murder to get their hands on the needed information. I think they are following Osgood - that Jack Rogers aka "Datchery" was one of his hired hands, but Datchery is right when he tells Osgood that he is in danger.
But Osgood seems not to be as concerned with his own safety - or Rebecca's. He wants to find the missing installments.
What do you think of the idea that Dickens had written the ending pages first - and that they are hidden somewhere? He really was interested in the story Poe related about William Godwin's
Caleb Williams, do you remember? If Dickens lived to publish Installment Seven, where do you think he might have gone with the story? For those of you who haven't read Dickens' novel, we were left after the 6th installment with Datchery, an investigator (we think he was someone else in disguise) on Uncle Jasper's trail - and the Opium dame, was a connection that he was pursuing...
I'm caught up in the idea that Dickens' had already written the conclusion - before he even began the 6 existing episodes. Although, on another day, I believe that Dickens still hadn't figured out how he was going to end the story!
