After spending so much time and reading so much peripheral matter related to Edwin Drood - do you have a personal opinion about where Dickens might have been going with the novel, Matthew? I read somewhere in an interview, I think it was - that you thought that Dickens did not know how he would end it at the time of his death. Am I remembering that right?
From the tale you've told in the Last Dickens, I sense that you believe there might be other explanations of what happened to Edwin Drood...including the idea that he may not have been murdered at all - Eddie Trood LIVES! Do you think it is reasonable to believe that Dickens has an idea, perhaps not thought out in detail yet, but an idea of whether or not Edwin Drood had been murdered by his Uncle Jasper?
I personally do believe Dickens would not have had a settled plan for an ending--from looking at the evidence of his writing process for his other novels and also for MED. That's not to say I think he was flying blind. I'd bet he had several paths he had ready to follow, but was taking it piece by piece as he usually did. I think that either Edwin Drood or Edwin Drood's father, who had the same name, would have come into play in the second half. There is conflicting "evidence," of course, for everything--which is part of the fun.
Here is some of what I say in my introduction to the Modern Library edition to MED:
The longstanding assumption that Dickens knew how the novel would end – and the vague suspicion that it is our own deficiency that we haven't deduced his conclusion yet – emanates from two primary sources. First, there seems to be an unspoken fantasy about Dickens, because of his great mastery and consistency as a storyteller, that the novels emerged more or less complete from his head. Second, despite some excellent scholarship on the subject, the process of writing in the serial-novel format of the nineteenth century is still not widely appreciated.
More of what I say in my introduction:
Sending along Drood's first installment to Buckingham Palace in the spring of 1870, Dickens did offer to tell the Queen of England ‘a little more of it in advance of her subjects’. The novelist was more tight-lipped in two other remembered exchanges about Drood that took place as the novel was being published. Here is an account by son Charley:
Charles Dickens, Jr.: ‘Of course, Edwin Drood was murdered?’
Charles Dickens: ‘Of course; what else do you suppose?’
And another, from a separate conversation, recounted by Georgina Hogarth, Dickens's sister-in-law and confidante:
Georgina Hogarth: ‘I hope you haven't really killed poor Edwin Drood?’
Charles Dickens: ‘I call my book the Mystery, not the History, of Edwin Drood.’
The first exchange calls to mind the phrase ‘The Loss of Edwin Drude’ one of Dickens's early scribbled title choices, and the second evokes another title in the same list, ‘Edwin Drood in Hiding’. What these flashes of reflected memories give us are not answers but important indications that, in whatever detail Dickens had worked out his story, he wanted it to be a surprise even to those close to him. That he had offered a preview to Queen Victoria – though in language suitably gradual (‘a little more of it in advance’), rather than suggesting a full revelation of the ending – should remind us what a commodity surprise was to Dickens.
As for the name Drood, Edward Trood really was the son of the innkeeper across from Gadshill. That's one possibility. Here is another, from 1930s Dickens biographer Thomas Wright (who also mentions Trood): “The title of it was most likely taken from the name of a young man, Edwin Drew ( a correspondent of the writer of this book), who at the time the story was in hand happened to be in communication with Dickens. Mr. Drew, who was later well-known in journalistic and musical circles in London, was engaged on the Hampshire Chronicle; and, recollecting Dickens's early struggles and ultimate success, he had written to Dickens to ask respecting the possibility of gaining a livelihood by the pen in London, by one without money or friends. In reply, Dickens said, 'On no account try literary life here. Such an attempt must lead to the bitterest disappointment.' Like most other advice, however, it was not taken... It has also been pointed out that the landlord of the Sir John Falstaff inn just opposite Gad's Hill Place was named Trood. It was not Edwin Trood, however, but William Stocker Trood." Wright apparently didn't know the name of Trood's son (William Trood's brother, too, was Edward Trood, I believe).
But the name also might have been a process of experimenting for Dickens. We see that in his list of titles where he plays around with Edwin Brood--although that also could have evolved from Trood--and Drude.
Here is a bit about the local legend in Rochester that may have inspired MED... from Walters “Clues to Dickens's Mystery of Edwin Drood”: “A well-to-do person, a bachelor, was the guardian and trustee of a nephew (a minor), who was the inheritor of a large property. The nephew went to the West Indies and returned unexpectedly. He suddenly disappeared, and was thought to have gone on another voyage. The uncle's house was near the site of the Savings Bank in High Street, and when excavations were made years later the skeleton of a young man was discovered. The local tradition is that the uncle murdered the nephew, and thus concealed the body. Here is the germ of the plot of 'Edwin Drood,' and the mystery is not so much the nature of the crime as its concealment and eventual detection”
And of course I latch onto that for The Last Dickens
A writer couldn't ask for material that's more fun than that!
One last quote from my introduction, more interesting perhaps to those who have read MED:
There is a surprising amount of Dickens in the shadowy Jasper, as well. Like Jasper, Dickens burned his diaries at the end of each year, along with his letters. In his final years he relied on medical opiates to ease his ailments, surely an experience he channels into Jasper's drug use. He also kept up hypnotism (or mesmerism) as a hobby, and this description from his eldest child Charles Jr. suggests a carryover to everyday life also seen in Jasper: ‘the mere intense gaze of those keen and luminous eyes, even without any of the passes and manipulations which form so much of the stock in trade of the ordinary mesmerist, had astonishing influence over many people, as you will read in all sorts of descriptions of him, and to my mind always seemed as if it could read one's inmost soul.’ Dickens's wife Catherine, before their separation, suspected that Dickens's mesmerism was wrapped up in a romantic obsession and emotional liaison with at least one woman. Whether Dickens also saw himself as the older man wedging himself into the life of young actress Ellen Ternan we cannot say, but at the very least he was obliged to keep their relationship as secret as possible, and some of his conflicted feelings about this may be on display in Jasper's destructive and clandestine pursuit of Rosa. The dark secrets of abandonment and resentment in family life—and by extension the life of an incestuously small village—are more key to an understanding of Drood than any single character in the cast.
