Bits & Bobs

BITS AND BOBS

There are repeated references to Jack and the Beanstalk in Drood. This is because:

·	the Ogre is a tyrant who wants to grind people’s bones.

·	the beans are amazingly fruitful and shoot up to the sky.

·	the magic ‘bean-stalk country’ that Rosa encounters in Tartar’s cabin enforces her identity as a fairy. It puts her in a fairytale world and it’s a fairy in the sky-garden who directs Jack to the Giant.

Dickens is up to his ironic tricks again and the roles are reversed in his story. Edwin calls Jasper ‘Jack’ and it’s Jack who’s the monster (Edwin to Rosa: “I am more than half afraid he didn't like to be charged with being the Monster who had frightened you”) while Tartar is a ‘water-giant’ who lives in ‘the country of the magic bean-stalk’ and is destined to ‘slay him’. (Jasper: “Circumstances may accumulate so strongly [against a man] that . . . pointed, they may slay him”.) Jack in the fairytale ‘changed his complexion’ and disguised himself to prevent recognition but it’s Tartar (‘the water-giant’) who adopts a disguise in Drood (becoming Datchery). Jack slays the Giant ‘on the longest day’ (1820 version); on Midsummer’s Day (or the shortest day) ‘the water-giant’ would have ‘slain’ Jack. The fairy protects Jack from the Giant; the ‘water-giant’ helps to protect the ‘fairy’ from Jack.

Dickens even took one of his own ideas for a story (from his Book of Memoranda) and inverted that i.e. ‘Two people—boy and girl, or very young—going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending Fate.’ In Drood, Rosa and Edwin are forced together, not apart, by their parents and decide early in life not to marry. (Cheekily, after John Forster had made it public, Wilkie Collins pinched Dickens’s original idea and used it for his novel The Two Destinies.)

The Moonstone consists of the first-person testimonials of numerous characters, excluding that of the criminal. Now what would be the reverse of that?

What happened to Edwin Drood’s body? Consider these points:

·	Dickens told Forster that Jasper ‘had thrown the body’ into lime.

Jasper to Durdles: “What I dwell upon most . . . is the remarkable accuracy with which you would seem to find out where people are buried”. Jasper, understandably alarmed by Durdles’s talent for unearthing corpses, pumps him to find out his secret. And having done so, will ensure that Durdles won’t be able to use his tapping trick to discover the body of Edwin. This, together with the previous point, rules out the Sapsea tomb . . .

·	Except as a temporary hiding place until Durdles has been stoned to bed. Durdles spent the previous Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning in the crypt, so if Jasper wanted access he’d likely have to wait. And since he couldn’t leave Edwin’s corpse lying out in the open . . .

·	For Jasper the most satisfying place for Edwin’s body would be a site in plain view that he could see from his room.

·	‘Some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great tower . . . it is necessary to send up workmen, to ascertain the extent of the damage done.’ Nothing happens in a Dickens novel without good reason.

·	Jasper, in his accounts of his ‘journey’ to Princess Puffer, is evidently high up.

·	There are bodies for Durdles to search for in the crypt but none in the tower.

Bearing in mind (a) that Cloisterham, with its one long street, isn’t a place easy to get lost in (so why have someone go astray?), and (b) that Datchery has gone to Cloisterham to try to find out what has become of Edwin, consider the following passage: Datchery ‘soon became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the Cathedral Tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope's was somewhere very near it, and that . . . he was warm in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn't see it.’

‘Until suffocated in her own pillow by two flowing-haired executioners.’ This is an allusion to the young princes who Richard III had murdered in the Tower. In A Child’s History of England, Dickens recounts how the killers ‘smothered the two princes with the . . . pillows and carried their bodies down the stairs, and buried them under a great heap of stones at the staircase foot’. So Edwin’s corpse was carried up the Tower and buried in a pit of lime at the staircase top.

The cover of Drood—in Collins’s original drawing—shows a hatless man with long flowing hair (surely Datchery) pointing (towards Edwin in an adjacent panel) and running up the tower followed by three policemen. One policeman has his truncheon out so they must be after Jasper . . . But why should Jasper be up the tower? John Forster provides the answer, I think. Dickens had told him that ‘all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till . . . by means of a gold ring . . . not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who had committed it’.

A question for John Jasper: “Did Edwin leave a ring—a gold ring—in your rooms? If not, it must be on him still (hooray!) and would identify his body”. This would provoke John Jasper into undertaking a second ‘unaccountable’ late-night expedition. An expedition that would be shadowed. And his followers—Tartar, Crisparkle and Neville—are depicted on the wrapper.

The yin-yang nature of the cover confirms this interpretation. Bottom left is an opium-smoking woman; bottom right is an opium-smoking man. Top left is a lady strewing flowers (love and peace); top right is a woman wielding a knife (hate and violence). Top centre is above ground outside the cathedral; bottom centre is underground in the crypt. Down the left side are roses; down the right side are thorns. The two left panels show Edwin Drood (mistakenly drawn with a moustache) kissing a bored-looked Rosa, and Rosa reading a ‘Lost’ sign above: so it’s Edwin Drood Lost; and the scene on the right, with Tartar dramatically pointing, depicts Edwin Drood Found.

·	Was there a suitable cavity high up in the Cathedral Tower at Rochester that could have been filled with lime and used to gobble up a body? Or did Dickens simply intend to invent a Cloisterham one?

The reason I’ve listed Neville as one of Jasper’s followers is because he’s repeatedly linked in the text with Cain. In the Bible, Cain is made an outcast for murdering his brother, ‘and the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him’ and so Cain isn’t killed. Neville is outcast for a murder he didn’t commit, threatens “to set his mark upon” others, and (continuing the inverted logic) is killed—probably by being pushed off the tower by Jasper. This also ties in with John Forster’s account: ‘Landless . . . was . . . I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer’.

On the original cover by Charles Collins, Jasper and Durdles are shown (bottom centre) on their ‘unaccountable . . . expedition’. (Jasper: “How could I entertain the possibility of [Edwin] . . . leaving this place, in a manner . . . so unaccountable”.) Jasper, clothed pretty much as described in the book, is pointing ahead with a look of mild enquiry on his face, having obviously asked Durdles a question.

Jasper shouldn’t have a moustache, though, so Fildes removed it for the final version, and also added Durdles’s dinner-bundle and key directly above. He also made one other change. Jasper is no longer pointing; he’s taking something out of his pocket. It’s nothing sinister, though, merely his wicker-cased bottle. On either side of this central scene a man and woman are smoking themselves into an opium stupor. A nice touch, then, to have the opium-laced wine, that would shortly lay Durdles low, being produced out of Jasper’s pocket.

Further points to consider:

·	Other characters connected to Egyptian or Roman gods. Billikin’s and Tartar’s ‘secret names’. The Book that revealed ‘all that is hidden in the stars’ in Egyptian mythology.

·	Lady Macbeth (and her closet). Other characters from Macbeth who are mirrored in Drood. How does the opening of Drood reverse that of Macbeth’s? Rosa is twice referred to as ‘Queen’, so by killing Edwin in the hope of marrying Rosa himself, Jasper, like Macbeth, was trying to . . .

·	Demetrius and Lysander. Reversed weather and rose buds.

·	The nightly red light burning in John Jasper’s room during Saturnalia.

·	Maiden/mother/crone.

·	‘Rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of a dowager in silken skirts’. Was this her? Does it fit the theme?

The Story of the Year by Hans Christian Andersen e.g. ‘the golden evening’ [‘Mr Sapsea . . . beguiles the golden evening’], ‘golden fruit’, clever sparrows [‘sparrows’ of ‘tiny understandings’], ‘They kissed each other, and were betrothed’ [‘They [Edwin and Rosa] kissed each other’ and were no longer betrothed] etc

·	‘Golden rain’; ‘golden youth’.

·	Durdles paying to have himself stoned. Who’s the male Patron Saint of stonemasons?

·	Why—apart from its utility (such as for disguising clues)—does Edwin Drood reverse its sources?

According to Dickens’s biographers, ‘a large tear crept down his face’ shortly before he died. A tear principally shed, I can’t help but think, for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the book that he knew he’d never complete.

Sapsea Fragment