Ghosts & Clairvoyants Galore: Notes on Endings to Edwin Drood

In 1870, the great novelist Charles Dickens was fifty-eight years old and quite ill, having suffered a stroke the previous year. Nevertheless, he began work on a new novel and arranged for it to be published serially by Chapman & Hall, with twelve monthly installments to appear starting in April 1870. However, on June 8th, 1870, reportedly after working a full day on this novel-in-progress, he was attacked by another stroke and died the next day. He had completed only half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, leaving the book unfinished and the mystery unsolved.

Undeterred by death, apparently, Charles Dickens appeared to a Vermonter named Thomas Power James and dictated the rest of the novel to him. James provided a “Medium’s Preface,” then included an “Author’s Preface” (supposedly dictated by Dickens’ “spirit-pen” and taken down via automatic writing), and a massive “completion” of the novel that more than doubles its length.

Let’s just say that death did not improve Dickens’ writing style.

Other folks wrote more honest continuations, putting their own names on them (or at least their initials), such as W.E.C. and Gillian Vase. Those were both published in 1914, which was a good year for Edwin Drood, as it also saw the amazing, parodic Trial of John Jasper for The Murder of Edwin Drood in Aid of Samaritan, Children’s Homeopathic, St. Agnes and Mt. Sinai Hospitals: a delightful piece of theatre in which such lofty and exalted persons as G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw took roles.

G.K. Chesterton as Judge in the Trial of John Jasper

As if that’s not cool enough, no less a personage than the great Sherlock Holmes himself finally solved The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as reported by Harry B. Smith in 1942.

Okay, but back to ghosts for a moment. T.P. James was not the only medium to publish a work putatively received from a famous author after death. Hester Travers Smith brought out Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages in 1926. Mark Twain’s spirit came to Emily Grant Hutchings in 1917 and communicated a novel called Jap Herron (which Clemens’ daughter deplored and successfully sued to have destroyed) and then to Mildred Swanson, who published their conversations-across-the-veil as God Bless U, Daughter.

But this post is not going where you might think it is, and I need to remind myself this blog is about Charles Williams, not Charles Dickens. Perhaps surprisingly, Williams did not jump on the spiritualist train to meet Dickens in the afterlife. Instead, he joined another, more respectable tradition: that of scholarly investigation into evidence about how Dickens might have finished the book had he lived to do so.

In 1924, Oxford World’s Classics issued a charming little hardback edition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood “With a Supplementary Note by CHARLES WILLIAMS,” shown here with my small Penelope-cat for purposes of scale. After the text of the novel, Williams provides a ten-page survey of scholarship on Edwin Drood. It is remarkably professional, written in a clearer style than he’s usually known for, and does not stray into the bizarre nooks and crannies of this fascinating field. Instead, with admirable lucidity and logic, Williams lays out the points in the case–both the case of Edwin Drood and the case of Edwin Drood–articulating the problems created by the novel’s unfinished state and then surveying solutions provided by various scholars. The plain prose and matter-of-fact style are unusual for Williams, and it’s good to see him at work in his day job, producing a piece of professional writing far removed from his avocational passions of pursuing strange spiritual byways–especially when he could have done so, given the oddities with which I began this post.

I attribute his insightful writing in this piece not only to the fact that it was a commission from his employer, the Oxford University Press, but also to his love of murder mysteries. A little later, in the 1930s, he began regularly reviewing mysteries for The Westminster Chronicle and other papers. He did so at a remarkable rate, reviewing 290 books in five years!! So even though his Dickens project was before that time, we know he greatly enjoyed reading and analyzing mysteries, and that hobby served him well in commenting on the novel and on scholarship surrounding it.

I found one point particularly insightful. He writes that notable scholars, in analyzing the Drood fragment, have come to the conclusion that there could have been no satisfactory solution to the mystery: that, indeed, Dickens wrote himself into an awkward corner and could not have gotten himself out of it had he lived to try. “The reason for this,” Williams summarizes, “is that although the details are capable of several more or less satisfactory readings, not a single one of these readings gives a convincing account of the behaviour or the characters involved” (366). Wait, he is talking about Season One of The Rings of Power?? Oops, sorry. #SorryNotSorry

In a slightly more characteristic move, Williams ends his short essay with a series of questions about the novel that he clearly thinks are unanswerable without further evidence being discovered. Clearly, he liked the unsolvable mystery more than any tidy solution, which I find the least surprising detail about his “Notes” on Edwin Drood.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share your own thoughts on Whodunnit to Edwin Drood in the comments below.