A Dickens Mystery Best Left Unsolved
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Stephanie J. Block, center
foreground, as the title character in the current revival of “The
Mystery of Edwin Drood,” based on a novel by Charles Dickens. More Photos »
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: November 22, 2012
CHARLES DICKENS, a lifelong ham, would have loved Rupert Holmes’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” now playing in a well-received Roundabout Theater Company revival at Studio 54.
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Theater Review | 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood': Raising the Dickens in All of Us (November 14, 2012)
Original Broadway Review: 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' (Dec. 3, 1985)
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Patricia Wall/The New York Times
The cover of Michael Slater’s latest book about Dickens. More Photos »
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Rupert Holmes, creator of the musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” More Photos »
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Betsy Wolfe as Rosa Bud and Will Chase as John Jasper in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” More Photos »
The show is set in a Victorian music hall, where the actors, a
second-rate touring troupe from London, are putting on their own, very
hammy version of Dickens’s last, unfinished novel. Theirs is a world
that Dickens knew well. From a young age he was stage-struck and for a
while yearned to be an actor, not a writer. Even as he became an
immensely successful novelist, he delighted in putting on amateur
theatricals, usually starring himself, from his own scripts. And in his
later years he became famous for the public readings he gave from his
books both in England and in America. These weren’t stuffy 92nd Street Y
sorts of evenings but dramatic one-man shows in which Dickens acted out
all the parts with such passion that by the end he would be physically
and emotionally spent.
The readings may partly explain why “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was
never completed. During the months he was writing it, Dickens broke a
longstanding rule about not doing a reading tour while also working on a
book. Already in poor health, and taking laudanum both to help him
sleep and for pain in his legs, he exhausted himself and died of a
stroke in June 1870, worn out at the age of 58.
Though it didn’t become known until the early 20th century, Dickens had
also been living with a secret, one that overlaps with the mystery in
“Drood” — and in this, the bicentennial of his birth, several new books
throw additional light on it.
Set in the fictional cathedral town of Cloisterham, “Drood” is mainly
the story of an opium-addicted choirmaster, John Jasper, secretly in
love with Rosa Bud, the fiancée of his nephew, Edwin Drood, who
disappears on Christmas Eve, under suspicious circumstances, shortly
before the book breaks off. (Only 6 of a planned 12 serial installments
were completed.) There is some dark, psychosexual atmosphere and a
couple of nice comic moments, but by Dickens’s usual standards the book
feels thin and underimagined.
That has not kept if from being an object of fascination. Almost from
the moment the book was published it became a literary parlor game to
solve its mystery, or three mysteries, really: Is Drood truly dead, and
if so, who killed him? And who is the strange character Datchery, who
turns up late in the tale, apparently in disguise?
There have also been countless attempts to finish the story. These
include a dramatic version by Dickens’s son Charley and an 1873 book by a
Vermont printer and con artist named Thomas James, who professed to
have channeled Dickens through a medium, allowing him to finish “Drood”
with the author’s “spirit-pen.” In a preface James also claimed to have
in psychic readiness a brand-new Dickens novel, “The Life and Adventures
of Bockley Wickleheap,” which he said “bid fair to equal anything from
his pen while on earth.”
Mr. Holmes said recently that while growing up in Rockland County, N.Y.,
he was fascinated by the unfinishedness of “Drood.” He would pick up
the book, look at the last page and imagine Dickens dropping dead right
then and there. But he didn’t actually read the novel until sometime in
the ’70s, when, now a successful record producer (for Barbra Streisand,
among others) and writer of pop hits like “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” he began it on a train ride to Chicago.
“I said to myself, ‘You know, this has many of the key ingredients of a
musical,’ ” he recalled. “The protagonist is a choirmaster, possessed,
we’re told, of a voice angels themselves might envy. He plays the organ.
He’s madly in love with his vocal student, Rosa Bud, so there’s every
reason for him to sing to her, and her to sing to him.”
He wrote a few early songs for a “Drood” musical, Mr. Holmes added, but
the piece was unremittingly bleak, and there was the problem of what to
do about the ending. He abandoned it and didn’t return to “Drood” until
the early ’80s, when Joseph Papp, the head of the Public Theater, and
his wife, Gail Merrifield, encouraged him to try again.
He solved the bleakness problem by imagining “Drood” as a show within a
show performed in a Victorian music hall. And he solved the ending
problem by not solving it.
Halfway through the second act in his version of “Drood,” which moved
from the Public’s Delacorte Theater to Broadway in 1985, the audience
votes for a villain and on the identity of Datchery, and as often as not
it does so not according to logic or the likelihood of guilt but out of
affection for one or another member of the cast. The script, like an
ingenious piece of clockwork machinery, can accommodate multiple
possibilities, many of them highly unlikely.
Mr. Holmes doesn’t like to spoil the fun by revealing his own ideas
about the mystery, but when pressed, he said he believed, as most
scholars do, that John Jasper almost certainly killed Edwin Drood.
Jasper is by far the most interesting character in the book. (Drood is
by comparison something of a pill, and the reader feels no great loss
when he disappears.)
In an important 1940 essay, one that changed the way Dickens was viewed
by critics, Edmund Wilson wrote about the strain of dualism that runs
all through the novels, counterbalancing good and evil, sometimes within
a single character. No one illustrates this more than Jasper, who is
practically a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure: a religious man, a gifted
musician, a kindly uncle, but also an opium addict, a vindictive lover
and someone driven by sexual obsession.
As Mr. Holmes pointed out, Jasper also bears a certain resemblance to
his creator, for at the time of writing “Drood,” Dickens, one of the
most admired and beloved men in England, seemingly a model of kindness,
decency and probity, had been living a double life for years.
In 1858 Dickens announced in his magazine Household Words that he was
separating from Catherine Hogarth, his wife of 22 years. He also leaked
to the press an even uglier and nastier letter, in which he cruelly and
falsely claimed that Catherine was a neglectful mother unloved by her
children. His friends and contemporaries were astonished and upset; some
of the more cynical assumed he must be having an affair with
Catherine’s younger sister, Georgina, who stayed on with the family as
housekeeper.
But not for decades did it begin to emerge that in 1857 Dickens had
begun a relationship with an innocent-seeming 18-year-old actress, Ellen
Ternan (or Ellen Lawless Ternan, to give her full name, which, as
Wilson pointed out, is oddly echoed by the name of one of the important
characters in “Drood,” Helena Landless.) They met in a theater, where
she was acting in ‘The Frozen Deep,” a melodrama written by Dickens and
Wilkie Collins, and soon he was keeping her in a series of lodgings in
England and France.
The most comprehensive account of the Ternan affair is Michael Slater’s new book, “The Great Charles Dickens Scandal,”
which describes how the secret became known and how the public reacted,
though Mr. Slater doesn’t go very deeply into the nature of the
arrangement itself.
In his masterly, if eccentric, 1990 biography, Peter Ackroyd insisted
that Dickens never consummated his relationship with Ternan, and that
the arrangement was entirely platonic — this in spite of evidence that
Dickens, the father of 10 children with a wife whom he didn’t
particularly care for, was as energetic about sex as he was about
everything else.
The latest big biography, by Claire Tomalin
(who also wrote an earlier book about Ternan), assumes that the
relationship almost certainly was sexual and tracks in great detail when
and where Dickens and Ternan were together. And in “Great Expectations:
The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens,” out this month, Robert Gottlieb
goes one step further and suggests that most likely, as Dickens’s
daughter Kate and son Henry believed, there was an 11th child, a son
born to Ternan in France, probably in January or February, 1863, and who
died a few months later.
If Mr. Gottlieb is right, then Dickens at the time of writing “Drood,”
still unable to acknowledge Ternan publicly, must have been carrying an
incalculable weight of shame and guilt, and it’s reasonable to assume
that the relationship had by then taken on a much darker, more regretful
character. (Ternan later married a clergyman and claimed that the idea
of intimacy with Dickens revolted her.)
The novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” is a long way from touching on
things like a secret pregnancy and a premature infant death, but it’s
full of secrets, sorrow, anger and shame. Jasper, an older man in love
with a younger woman who is sickened by his touch, hates himself but
can’t help himself.
Mr. Holmes’s version is an altogether happier affair, which is another
reason it would have appealed to Dickens. It’s just playacting, the
character of the stage manager reminds us, and we can do it again
tomorrow night and have it all come out differently.
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