Cracking the Case of Charles Dickens’ Unfinished Novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Madcap Musical It Inspired | Broadway Buzz | Broadway.com Cracking the Case of Charles Dickens’ Unfinished Novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Madcap Musical It Inspired Features By Marc Snetiker November 1, 2012 - 2:07PM Betty Buckley & Stephanie J. Block in 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' About the Show Videos Broadway audiences choose an ending for the musical version of Dickens' unfinished novel 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood.' Even the greatest sleuths can’t get to the bottom of Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood , a novel that was left unfinished when the author died suddenly halfway through writing it. A century later, Dickens’ fragmentary story inspired a zany 1985 Broadway musical, which is back on Broadway this fall in its first major revival. Before cracking the case, we dug up the Dickensian dirt on this infamously incomplete mystery.

Death, Dickens and Drood British author Charles Dickens created a host of famous literary characters who meet their demise by the turn of the last page: Miss Havisham went up in flames; Sydney Carton lost his head; even Jacob Marley was already dead on page one. But the fate of one famous Dickens character—young Edwin Drood—remains entirely unknown, almost 150 years after the author’s death. Why? Well, he never finished the book. Dickens began writing what would become his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in 1870, with the plan of releasing a new installment every month for a year. The story follows the title character, an ordinary man whose sudden disappearance throws the fictional townspeople of Cloisterham into a panic. Suspicions arise about who may be responsible for Drood’s vanishing, and the cast of potential culprits includes Edwin’s fiancée, Rosa Bud; his jealous uncle, John Jasper; and vengeful twins Neville and Helena Landless. On June 8, 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke in his home while working on the 23rd chapter.

He died a day later, thus leaving the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood…well, a mystery. Of the 12 installments planned for the story, Dickens had published only three and penned three others. In a curious irregularity, Dickens did not leave behind any notes for the remaining chapters, and so the story’s biggest question—the fate of the disappeared Edwin Drood and the identity of his ostensible murderer—was left unanswered. The Mystery of the Mystery The unfinished ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is as much a part of the Dickensian oeuvre as any of his completed works, and the Mystery's mystery has puzzled literary experts through the ages. The novel’s ambiguous non-conclusion begs three questions: Was Edwin Drood murdered? If so, who did it? And which character goes undercover as Dick Datchery, the shadowy detective who appears on the case six months after Drood’s disappearance?

In a biography of the author, John Forster wrote that Dickens had revealed to him that “the story…was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle.” Additional evidence unearthed over the years, including testimony from Drood’s illustrator, Luke Fildes, and Dickens’ son, Charles Jr., supported the idea that Edwin was in fact killed by his uncle, Jasper. This deduction is generally agreed upon, but nevertheless, no theory about Drood, Jasper or Datchery has received the happy honor of being unanimously accepted. No wonder the story of poor Edwin Drood remained fascinating over the next hundred years to writers of all kinds—not to mention a 20th century composer who first found fame with the pop hit "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." Pick An Ending, Any Ending! Almost immediately after Dickens’ death, some Droodians chose to tackle the story themselves. Henry Morford published a series continuation that found Edwin Drood alive and revealed two identities of detective Datchery. Morford’s entry, titled John Jasper’s Secret: Sequel to Charles Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood, was even rumored to have been authored by Charles Dickens Jr.

Other adaptations, including one by an author who claimed that Dickens’ spirit had actually possessed him, did not receive such high praise. Thus, the enigma of Dickens’ incomplete text has been left to those who interpret the novel in other media. There have been Drood radio programs, television miniseries, big-budget movies and even a mock trial for John Jasper, staged in London in 1914 and featuring George Bernard Shaw as a wisecracking jury foreman. (The verdict? Everyone was guilty.) Because a successful movie hinges upon having an ending, filmmakers who adapted The Mystery of Edwin Drood for the screen were forced to fill in the blanks. Universal Pictures’ 1935 film adaptation revealed John Jasper (played by Claude Rains, above left) as the killer and Neville Landless as Dick Datchery. A 2012 BBC miniseries also indicted Jasper (played by Matthew Rhys, above right), but elected town clerk Bazzard as Datchery. Despite continuing interest and variations from scholars, filmmakers and writers, arguably the most successful interpretation of the piece came in 1985, when Drood found musical life in a new home: Broadway.

A Most Distinguished Musical Pop composer Rupert Holmes’ musical version of Drood was inspired by his interest in British pantomimes and the Victorian-era music hall tradition, including garish costumes, cross-dressing leads and audience participation. Holmes had been urged to try his hand at a musical by Gail Merrifield (the wife of Public Theater head Joseph Papp), who had been impressed by the composer's performance of his own story-songs at a nightclub in 1983. Because he felt Dickens' story was too dry for a Broadway musical, Holmes conceived the show as a play-within-a-play, with the actors playing dual roles as Drood characters and the fictional English music hall thespians portraying them. “[The musical] has the same relationship to Dickens that Kiss Me, Kate does to The Taming of the Shrew,” Holmes explained to the Chicago Tribune. Also in keeping with music hall tradition, Holmes opted to have the lead character of Drood be played by a cross-dressing woman. Holmes wrote the book, music, lyrics and orchestrations for the show—an impressive feat in itself—but the real draw of Drood was his groundbreaking choice to allow the audience, rather than himself, to finish the story.

In the show’s second act, the action abruptly stops where Dickens finished writing, and the audience is left to vote between eight potential detectives, seven possible murder suspects and six would-be lovers to give the story a decidedly happy ending. The Mystery of Edwin Drood debuted in August 1985 at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, an ideal venue for such a rollicking show. Tony winner Betty Buckley played the title role and actress Alice Nutting in a cast that also included George Rose, Cleo Laine and Howard McGillin. Buoyed by good reviews, a revised version opened at Broadway's Imperial Theatre on December 2, 1985. Eventually renamed Drood, the show ran for 608 performances and received 11 Tony nominations, winning five awards, including Best Musical. Edwin Drood Breathes New Life In the spring of 2012, Roundabout Theatre Company announced that its fall season would include the first Broadway revival of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with legendary Broadway star Chita Rivera taking on the role of opium den madame Princess Puffer.

“This is all new for me,” Rivera told Broadway.com of headlining the show’s first major staging in more than 25 years. “We’re discovering it every single day.” Five-time Tony nominee Scott Ellis, who showed his talent for period musicals with Curtains, signed on to direct. A host of Broadway stars joined Rivera in the cast, including Stephanie J. Block in the title role, Will Chase , Andy Karl , Jessie Mueller , Jim Norton , Gregg Edelman and Betsy Wolfe . Performances began on October 19, and early buzz among theatergoers made Drood one of the hottest tickets in town—and with almost 400 different variations, performances are rarely the same. “This show hasn’t been done in so long, and there are so many people that don’t know the show at all,” Wolfe, who plays frequent murderer choice Rosa Bud, told Broadway.com. “I think that people are going to be in for a real treat.” A treat so good, in fact, it may be worth dying for! Crack the case of The Mystery of Edwin Drood at Studio 54—and make your own decision about how the story should end!

Charles Dickens Biography - life, family, childhood, children, story, wife, school, young, son Charles Dickens Biography Near Chatham, England English author, novelist, and journalist English author Charles Dickens continues to be one of the most widely read Victorian (nineteenth-century) novelists. Scrooge, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickelby remain familiar characters today. His novels describe the life and conditions of the poor and working class in the Victorian era of England, when people lived by strict rules. Childhood and schooling Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, at Portsea (later part of Portsmouth) on the southern coast of England, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. Charles was the second born of eight children. His father was a pay clerk in the navy office. Because of financial difficulties, the family moved about until they settled in Camden Town, a poor neighborhood in London, England. At the age of twelve Charles worked with working-class men and boys in a factory that handled "blacking," or shoe polish. While his father was in debtor's prison, the rest of the family moved to live near the prison, leaving Charles to live alone.

This experience of lonely hardship was the most significant event of his life. It colored his view of the world and would later be described in a number of his novels. Charles returned to school when his father received an inheritance and was able to repay his debts. But in 1827, at age fifteen, he was again forced leave school and work as an office boy. In the following year he became a freelance reporter and stenographer (using shorthand to transcribe documents) at the law courts of London. By 1832 he had become a reporter for two London newspapers and, in the following year, began to contribute a series of impressions and sketches to other newspapers and magazines, signing some of them "Boz." These scenes of London life went far to establish his reputation and were published in 1836 as Sketches by Boz, his first book. On the strength of this success Charles married Catherine Hogarth. Together they had ten children. Early works In 1836 Dickens also began to publish The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in Charles Dickens. monthly installments, a form of serial publication that became a standard method of writing and producing fiction in the Victorian period.

So great was Dickens's success with the procedure that Pickwick became one of the most popular works of the time, and continued to be so after it was published in book form in 1837. After Pickwick 's success, Dickens began publishing his new novel, Oliver Twist. He was also now editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a new monthly magazine. He continued publishing his novel in his later magazines, Household Worlds and All the Year Round. Oliver Twist expressed Dickens's interest in the life of the slums to the fullest, as it traced the fortunes of an innocent orphan through the London streets. Though Dickens's career was successful, for the next decade his books did not achieve the standard of his early successes. These works include: Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841), and Barnaby Rudge (1841). In 1842 Dickens, who was as popular in America as he was in England, went on a five-month lecture tour of the United States, speaking out strongly against slavery and in support of other reforms.

On his return he wrote American Notes, a book that criticizes American life as being culturally backward and materialistic (characterized by the desire for wealth and material goods). His next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844), describes the hero finding that survival on the American frontier is more difficult than making his way in England. During the years in which Chuzzlewit appeared, Dickens also published two Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol and The Chimes. First major novels After a year abroad in Italy and writing Pictures from Italy (1846), Dickens published installments of Dombey and Son, which continued till 1848. This completed novel established a new standard in the Dickensian novel and marked the turning point in his career. As its full title indicates, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son is a study of the influence of the values of a business society on the personal fortunes of a family and those with whom the family meets. It takes a somber view of England at mid-century, and its tone becomes characteristic of Dickens's future novels.

Dickens's next novel, David Copperfield (1849–1850), is the first complete record of the typical course of a young man's life in Victorian England. This autobiographical novel fictionalized elements of Dickens's childhood, his pursuit of a journalism career, and his love life. Though Copperfield is not Dickens's greatest novel, it was his personal favorite. In 1850 Dickens began a new magazine, Household Words. His editorials and articles touched upon English politics, social institutions, and family life. They also spoke to the fictional treatment of these subjects in Dickens's novels. The weekly magazine ran to 1859, when Dickens began to conduct a new weekly, All the Year Round. In both these periodicals he published some of his major novels. "Dark" novels The 1850s were a sad and dark time for Dickens. In 1851, within a two-week period, Dickens's father and one of his daughters died. In 1858, a year after he fell in love with an actress, he separated from his wife.

Partly in response to the deaths, Dickens's next series of works were called his "dark" novels, though they rank among the greatest triumphs of the art of fiction. In Bleak House (1852–1853), perhaps the most complicated plot of any English novel, the narrative served to create a sense of the interrelationship of all segments of English society. In Hard Times (1854), Dickens describes an English industrial town during the height of economic expansion, and details an up-close view of the limitations of both employers and reformers. Little Dorrit (1855–1857) may be regarded as Dickens's greatest novel. In it he portrays the conditions of England as he saw it, and the conflict between the world's harshness and human values in its most impressive artistic form. Later works In this period Dickens also began to give public readings from his novels, which became even more popular than his lectures. In 1859 Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, a historical novel of the French Revolution. Besides publishing this novel in the newly founded All the Year Round, Dickens also published seventeen articles, which appeared as a book in 1860 entitled The Uncommercial Traveller.

Dickens's next novel, Great Expectations (1860–1861), is regarded by some as his most perfectly executed work of art. It is a story of a young man's moral development from childhood to adult life. Three years later he produced Our Mutual Friend, which provides an insight of how he viewed London. For several years Dickens's health declined. He never fully recovered from a railroad accident in 1865. He tired himself out by continuing to travel throughout the British Isles and America to read before audiences. He gave a final series of readings in London that began in 1870. Dickens died of a fatal stroke on June 9, 1870, leaving the novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. The day of his burial was made a day of national mourning in England. For More Information Chesterton, G. K., and F. G. Kitton. Charles Dickens. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903. Reprint, London: Burns and Oates, 1975. Epstein, Norrie.

The Friendly Dickens: Being a Good-Natured Guide to the Art and Adventures of the Man Who Invented Scrooge. New York: Viking, 1998. Marcus, Steven. Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Sirabian, Robert. Charles Dickens: Life, Work, and Criticism. Toronto: York Press, 2002. Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens. New York: Viking, 2002. User Contributions: Charles Dickens Charles Dickens Great-grandfather of Monica Dickens Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. He was the second of eight children. His mother had been in service to Lord Crew, and his father worked as a clerk for the Naval Pay office. John Dickens was imprisoned for debt when Charles was young. Charles Dickens went to work at a blacking warehouse, managed by a relative of his mother, when he was twelve, and his brush with hard times and poverty affected him deeply. He later recounted these experiences in the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.

Similarly, the concern for social justice and reform which surfaced later in his writings grew out of the harsh conditions he experienced in the warehouse. Dickens was able to leave the blacking factory after his father's release from prison, and he continued his education at the Wellington House Academy. Although he had little formal schooling, Dickens was able to teach himself shorthand and launch a career as a journalist. At the age of sixteen, Dickens got himself a job as a court reporter, and shortly thereafter he joined the staff of A Mirror of Parliament, a newspaper that reported on the decisions of Parliament. During this time Charles continued to read voraciously at the British Library, and he experimented with acting and stage-managing amateur theatricals. His experience acting would affect his work throughout his life--he was known to act out characters he was writing in the mirror and then describe himself as the character in prose in his novels. Fast becoming disillusioned with politics, Dickens developed an interest in social reform and began contributing to the True Sun, a radical newspaper. Although his main avenue of work would consist of writing novels, Dickens continued his journalistic work until the end of his life, editing The Daily News, Household Words, and All the Year Round.

His connections to various magazines and newspapers as a political journalist gave him the opportunity to begin publishing his own fiction at the beginning of his career. He would go on to write fifteen novels. (A final one, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left unfinished upon his death.) While he published several sketches in magazines, it was not until he serialized The Pickwick Papers over 1836-37 that he experienced true success. A publishing phenomenon, The Pickwick Papers was published in monthly installments and sold over forty thousand copies of each issue. Dickens was the first person to make this serialization of novels profitable and was able to expand his audience to include those who could not normally afford such literary works. Within a few years, he was regarded as one of the most successful authors of his time, with approximately one out of every ten people in Victorian England avidly reading and following his writings. In 1836 Dickens also married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow co-worker at his newspaper. The couple had ten children before their separation in 1858. Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby followed in monthly installments, and both reflected Dickens' understanding of the lower classes as well as his comic genius.

In 1843, Dickens published one of his most famous works, A Christmas Carol. His disenchantment with the world's economic drives is clear in this work; he blames much of society's ills on people's obsession with earning money and acquiring status based on money. His travels abroad in the 1840s, first to America and then through Europe, marked the beginning of a new stage in Dickens' life. His writings became longer and more serious. In David Copperfield (1849-50), readers find the same flawed world that Dickens discovered as a young boy. Dickens published some of his best-known novels including A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in his own weekly periodicals. The inspiration to write a novel set during the French Revolution came from Dickens' faithful annual habit of reading Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution, first published in 1839. When Dickens acted in Wilkie Collins' play The Frozen Deep in 1857, he was inspired by his own role as a self-sacrificing lover. He eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover in the revolutionary period, a period of great social upheaval.

A year later, Dickens went through his own form of social change as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities: he separated from his wife, and he revitalized his career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal called All the Year Round. In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered in parts in this journal. Its popularity was based not only on the fame of its author, but also on its short length and radical (for Dickens' time) subject matter. Dickens' health began to deteriorate in the 1860s. In 1858, in response to his increasing fame, he had begun public readings of his works. These exacted a great physical toll on him. An immensely profitable but physically shattering series of readings in America in 1867-68 sped his decline, and he collapsed during a "farewell" series in England. On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died. He was buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Though he left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, he had already written fifteen substantial novels and countless shorter pieces. His legacy is clear.

In a whimsical and unique fashion, Dickens pointed out society's flaws in terms of its blinding greed for money and its neglect of the lower classes of society. Through his books, we come to understand the virtues of a loving heart and the pleasures of home in a flawed, cruelly indifferent world. Among English writers, in terms of his fame and of the public's recognition of his characters and stories, he is second only to William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens Biography Charles Dickens Biography Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List The attention that has been paid to the life of Charles Dickens is due mainly to his stature as the greatest novelist of Victorian England. Even though the biographical accounts of Dickens frequently try to unravel the mystery of his creative genius, there is something about Dickens' imaginative power that defies explanation in purely biographical terms. Nevertheless, his biography shows the source of that power and is the best place to begin to define it. The second child of John and Elizabeth Dickens, Charles was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea on England's south coast. At that time John Dickens was stationed in Portsmouth as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office.

The family was of lower-middle-class origins, John having come from servants and Elizabeth from minor bureaucrats. Dickens' father was vivacious and generous but had an unfortunate tendency to live beyond his means. His mother was affectionate and rather inept in practical matters. Dickens would later use his father as the basis for Mr. Micawber and would portray his mother as Mrs. Nickleby — two marvelous comic figures. After a transfer to London in 1814 the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, three years later. Dickens was about five at the time, and for the next five years his life was pleasant. Taught to read by his mother, he devoured his father's small collection of classics, which included Shakespeare, Cervantes, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith. These left a permanent mark on his imagination. He also went to some performances of Shakespeare, and these helped to influence his lifelong attraction to the theater. Dickens attended school during this period and showed himself to be a rather solitary, observant, good-natured child with some talent for comic routines, which his father encouraged. In retrospect Dickens looked upon these years as a kind of golden age.

His first novel, Pickwick Papers, is in part an attempt to recapture their idyllic nature; it exalts innocence and the youthful spirit, and its happiest scenes take place in that geographical area. In the light of the family's move back to London, where financial calamity overtook the Dickenses, the time in Chatham must have seemed glorious indeed. The family moved into the shabby suburb of Camden Town, and Dickens was taken out of school and set to menial jobs about the household. In time, to help augment the family income, Dickens was given a job in a blacking factory among coarse companions. Then his father was jailed for debt in Marshalsea Prison for three months. Dickens worked at washing and labeling blacking bottles for six months or so. Years later he reported to his closest friend, John Forster, that he felt a deep sense of abandonment, of being forsaken, at this time. His feelings of lostness and humiliation emphasize the fact that the major themes of his art may be traced to this period.

His sympathy for the poor and the victimized, his fascination with prisons and money, his desire to vindicate his heroes' status as gentlemen, and the notion of London as an awesome and rather threatening environment all appear to have their roots in these experiences, which resulted from the brief but nearly total collapse of his parents' ability to protect him from the world. Out on his own at an early age, Dickens acquired a lasting self-reliance, driving ambition, and a boundless energy that went into everything he did. In many ways Dickens never outgrew the shocks and emotional attitudes of this period, but his achievement is that he worked these shocks over in novel after novel until they took on the symbolic complexity and depth of great literature. At thirteen Dickens went back to school for two years and then took a job in a lawyer's office. Dissatisfied with the work, he learned shorthand and became a freelance court reporter in 1828. The work was seasonal and enabled him to do a good deal of reading in the British Museum. At the age of twenty Dickens became a full-fledged journalist, working for three papers in succession. In the next four to five years he acquired the reputation of being the fastest and most accurate parliamentary reporter in London.

The value of these years was that he gained a sound, firsthand knowledge of London and the provinces which helped him flesh out the experiences of early adolescence with concrete details and a maturer experience of the world. In December 1833, Dickens began to publish sketches of London and its inhabitants in the Monthly Magazine. In time he began to sign them with the pseudonym, "Boz," and gained some notice for the dramatic quality of his reportage. On his twenty-fourth birthday these articles were published in book form as Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People. Although the book was a success it had little intrinsic literary merit. However, it launched him on his career as a writer, a career astonishing in its productivity, quality, and undiminished popular acclaim. A week after his first book was published, the firm of Chapman and Hall approached Dickens about writing a series of fillers to accompany sporting illustrations by a well-known artist. Dickens convinced the firm that the illustrations should follow the text, rather than vice versa, and began writing the first installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which appeared in April 1836.

Writing in monthly installments was a mode of publication that proved congenial to Dickens. In the beginning it enabled him to continue his newspaper work and later to edit magazines. Writing for deadlines inflicted a lack of artistic coherence on his early novels, but eventually he was able to abandon his episodic structures and impose a tighter, more unified organization on his later novels. The Pickwick Papers got off to a slow start, but with the introduction of Sam Weller its sales skyrocketed into the tens of thousands. A Pickwick rage started and Dickens' success was assured. On the surface this novel is a series of sketches, loosely held together by the adventures of Samuel Pickwick and his friends. Yet there are certain basic themes that unify the novel: the celebration of travel, benevolence, youthfulness, fellowship, plenty, romance; the contrast between the freedom of the open road and the constriction of Fleet Prison; the comic treatment of various institutions and professions; and the gradual revelation of Mr. Pickwick's endearing humanity. With the prospect of a livable income, Dickens, at twenty-four, married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a newspaper colleague. The marriage was genuinely happy at first and there were ten children.

Catherine seems to have been a gentle, loving woman, but rather commonplace and lethargic, without much aptitude for housekeeping or childrearing. Under the strain of personality conflicts, the steady pres-sure of Dickens' numerous activities, and his infatuation with Ellen Ternan, the couple separated twenty-two years later in disagreeable circumstances. Dickens' domestic life, in fact, was odd from the start. The man who sentimentalized marriage was prone to falling in love with other women, including his sisters-in-law. The relationship with Ellen Ternan may have begun platonically, but the evidence points to the fact that she eventually became his mistress. Moreover, his treatment of his own children was harsh, even as he made his readers weep over the fates of innocent and victimized fictional children. This does not mean that Dickens was an out-and-out hypocrite. In his novels he projected what most men want at home — an affectionate, tidy, understanding, attentive wife. And he really knew what it meant to be a lost child in an incomprehensible world. But like many hyperactive public men, Dickens was spoiled and impatient.

He craved attention, and between his demands and those of his children, the marriage fell to pieces. His writing was partly an attempt to redress his unsatisfactory personal life, and in doing so it appealed to many with similar discontents. While still working on his Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens contracted to write two more novels and started publishing Oliver Twist (1837-38). During this period he also worked on a second series of Sketches by Boz (1839). Oliver Twist marked a new departure for Dickens, presenting an attack on workhouse conditions and London's criminal-infested slums through the nightmarish experiences of an innocent young boy. Oliver's trials are rewarded in the end when his claim to gentility is established once and for all. Before he had completed that novel, Dickens began Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), an exposure of private schools for unwanted boys. The hero this time actively seeks a gentlemanly position in life, whereas Oliver is a passive character. The private school, the slums, the workhouse are degrading conditions, analogous in some respects to prison. The only proper alternative is gentility.

Dickens was extremely concerned with status, and in these two novels the drama centers upon those who try to deprive the hero of status and those who try to abet him. Each of these novels was successful and increased Dickens' readership. Unquestionably Dickens had hit upon a theme which interested a large proportion of the English middle class. The next novel, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), increased Dickens' popularity still further and stunned the public with the sentimental death of Little Nell. The heroine's urge to leave the corrupt, threatening city and find a pastoral peace and security may represent a drive toward death. London, for all its sinister aspects, is the center of vitality in the novel, while the countryside is rich in graveyards and moldering churches. Even at this early stage in his career Dickens was capable of ambiguous feelings about the central subjects of his novels. He wrote about things that made him uneasy, that raised serious questions in his mind. His novels, in effect, were attempts to answer those questions about the city, prison, crime, success, and gentility. Time and again he came back to these subjects because his questions were of a kind that can never be answered conclusively.

By reworking the old themes, his art gained in subtlety, resonance, and depth. To the end of his career he never stopped growing. Barnaby Rudge (1841) centered on London's anti-Catholic riots of 1780 and examined the relationship between vicious or misguided fathers and the obtuse, selfish authority of public institutions. Just as youth must rebel against the former, so society at large rebels against the latter; but in rebelling everyone is harmed. A historical novel, Barnaby Rudge shows that Dickens had learned much from Sir Walter Scott. In 1842 Dickens and his wife took a trip to America, which resulted in an unflattering travel book, American Notes (1842), and in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44); this novel is flawed in structure, yet it explores various kinds of egoism with extraordinary verve. In a world where egoism predominates, we get an anarchic view of society. Even the hero is infected with selfishness and his success in establishing himself in the world is very precarious. In America he meets egoism in its most predatory form and returns to England chastened and poverty-stricken.

He may win at last through his grandfather's generosity but he clearly exists in a world where strife is ever ready to devour him. Despite the grim sound of these comments, the novel is actually a comic tour de force. Dombey and Son (1846-48) also has a flawed hero in Mr. Dombey. The fault is inhuman pride of position, which undergoes three crises: the death of a son, the desertion by a proud wife, and the collapse of a financial empire. Dickens uses this subject to show the changing Victorian world, and he balances Dombey's pride and the forces of change with the unchanging love of Dombey's daughter, Florence. Dombey and Son marks Dickens' first major attempt to portray English society realistically. This novel is technically superior to his earlier works, but the comic inventiveness is not nearly as flamboyant. As Dickens' organizing skill grew in his succeeding novels, the comic flair diminished, transforming itself into satire. For his eighth novel, David Copperfield (1849-50), he made use of autobiographical material. Copperfield's early hardship and rise to prominence is a thinly disguised version of Dickens' own life.

This was Dickens' first effort to show the education of a hero from the inside, using a first-person narration. The interest of the book lies in the peripheral characters and intrigues as the raw material of Copperfield's growth. The most remarkable thing about Dickens is that from his first novel to his last he never ceased to experiment with his forms, themes, and characters. Each novel built on the previous ones and yet was an effort at something new and fresh. With Bleak House (1852-53), for example, he used Chancery and its legal obfuscations to serve as a metaphor for society at large and to connect every class from the aristocratic Dedlocks to Jo, the street sweeper. Moreover, he set the omniscient third-person narrative side by side with a first-person narrative to get a dual vision of the Victorian mental climate. This kind of experimentation enhanced his popularity, yet it was an important element in his greatness as well. In Hard Times (1854) Dickens combined the moral fable with a realistic social analysis in his depiction of an industrial town. The school and the factory are the confining, objective equivalents of the narrow views of the English political economists.

As an alternative to the grim social environment, Dickens shows the freedom and good-heartedness of a circus troupe. As Dickens grew older, benevolence has a harder time of it in his novels. It is no longer dished out wholesale by pleasant gentlemen of unlimited means. More and more it becomes personal, intimate, the expression of love in an increasingly hostile environment. Dickens' next novel, Little Dorrit (1855-57), presents no alternative to the vision of society as a series of interrelated prisons. From top to bottom all the world's a jail, and no one can escape it. The best that can be salvaged from this claustrophobic society is the mild, tender affection between Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit, both of whom are overshadowed by Marshalsea Prison. However, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Dickens finds an uneasy solution to the prison-like nature of the Victorian world. As society dissolves into anarchy, the only redeeming values are friendship, family, heroic self-sacrifice — each of which is based on love.

As a solution to the nightmare of history these values are far more satisfactory than those embodied in the circus troupe of Hard Times because they are deeper and more universal. Prison also plays a role in Great Expectations (1860-61). Using a first-person narrator-hero, as in David Copperfield, Dickens shows how money and status corrupt people. Crime and prison represent the most dramatic form of that corruption, the dark side of Pip's gentility. Here Dickens returned to his early theme of the young man trying to make good as a gentleman. But this time the theme is shot through with irony because Pip's rise in society is based on a convict's money. In this novel Dickens places redemption in good, honest work. Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) is Dickens' last completed novel. Through an omniscient narrator Dickens explores the corrupting taint of money in the whole of society. Here he stresses the regenerating force of love rather than that of work. This novel combines a large, vivid cast of characters with great structural proficiency, and may well be Dickens' best novel. His last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), remained unfinished.

It turns away from society and concentrates on private pathology, on the double nature of John Jasper, a murderer. It is almost Dostoevskian in its view of the criminal as a tormented man fallen from grace and yet having a very respectable facade. It was characteristic of Dickens that the work on which he was working at the time of his death should mark still another new departure. Edwin Drood is a tantalizing piece of work. Dickens' body of novels remains his outstanding achievement, a living testament to his intensely creative life. But he wrote much else besides: volumes of excellent journalistic essays, two travel books, several hundred letters, a book of Christmas stories, and a child's history of England. He also edited three magazines, two of these for many years. Furthermore, Dickens was very much involved in theater work during the whole of his career. He frequented the theater and, for a time, considered becoming a professional actor. He wrote plays, acted in amateur productions (which were really quite skilled), and he directed plays with an impressive energy and thoroughness. In time his theatrical bent found an outlet in his public readings from his novels. These readings overwhelmed audiences, yet the strain of doing them hastened his death.

Dickens practiced benevolence as well as preached it. In his private life he did many favors for his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his in-laws, the Hogarths. In public he organized charities and gave benefits, contributing substantial amounts. In this capacity he worked with the heiress, Angela Burdett-Coutts, for many years. Physically, Dickens had a slight and rather frail body, but he was very active. He loved taking twenty-mile walks, horseback riding, making journeys, entertaining friends, dining well, and playing practical jokes. He enjoyed games of charades with his family, was an expert amateur magician, and practiced hypnotism. One tends to share Shaw's opinion that Dickens was always on stage. He was the quintessence of a master of ceremonies: ebullient, dynamic, quick, observant, full of zest for life. Yet he was also high-strung, impatient, irascible, and subject to fits of depression. At times he must have been nearly intolerable to live with, however agreeable he may have been as a companion. In view of his strenuous life it was not surprising that he died, prematurely aged, of a stroke at fifty-eight.

At his death on June 9, 1870, he was immensely popular, wealthy, and probably the greatest writer the Victorian age produced. Perhaps his broadest achievement lay in the part his towering novels played in raising the novel from a slightly disreputable level to the dominant form it is today. Appropriately, Dickens was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey and was mourned internationally. Charles Dickens Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver Dickens, Charles Biography of Charles Dickens Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. He was the second of eight children. His mother had been in service to Lord Crew, and his father worked as a clerk for the Naval Pay office. John Dickens was imprisoned for debt when Charles was young. Charles Dickens went to work at a blacking warehouse, managed by a relative of his mother, when he was twelve, and his brush with hard times and poverty affected him deeply. He later recounted these experiences in the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield . Similarly, the concern for social justice and reform that surfaced later in his writings grew out of the harsh conditions he experienced in the warehouse.

As a young boy, Charles Dickens was exposed to many artistic and literary works that allowed his imagination to grow and develop considerably. He was greatly influenced by the stories his nursemaid used to tell him and by his many visits to the theater. Additionally, Dickens loved to read. Among his favorite works were Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, and Arabian Nights, all of which were picaresque novels composed of a series of loosely linked adventures. This format no doubt played a part in Dickens' idea to serialize his future works. Dickens was able to leave the blacking factory after his father's release from prison, and he continued his education at the Wellington House Academy. Although he had little formal schooling, Dickens was able to teach himself shorthand and launch a career as a journalist. At the age of sixteen, Dickens got himself a job as a court reporter, and shortly thereafter he joined the staff of A Mirror of Parliament, a newspaper that reported on the decisions of Parliament. During this time, Charles continued to read voraciously at the British Library, and he experimented with acting and stage-managing amateur theatricals.

His experience acting would affect his work throughout his life--he was known to act out characters he was writing in the mirror and then describe himself as the character in prose in his novels. Quickly becoming disillusioned with politics, Dickens developed an interest in social reform and began contributing to the True Sun, a radical newspaper. Although his main avenue of work would consist in writing novels, Dickens continued his journalistic work until the end of his life, editing The Daily News, Household Words, and All the Year Round. His connections to various magazines and newspapers as a political journalist gave him the opportunity to begin publishing his own fiction at the beginning of his career. He would go on to write fifteen novels. (A final one, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left unfinished upon his death.) While he published several sketches in magazines, it was not until he serialized The Pickwick Papers over 1836-37 that he experienced true success. A publishing phenomenon, The Pickwick Papers was published in monthly installments and sold over forty thousand copies of each issue. Dickens was the first person to make the serialization of novels profitable and was able to expand his audience to include those who could not normally afford such literary works.

Within a few years, Dickens was regarded as one of the most successful authors of his time, with approximately one out of every ten people in Victorian England avidly reading and following his writings. In 1836 Dickens also married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a co-worker at his newspaper. The couple had ten children before their separation in 1858. Catherine's younger sister Mary lived with the couple, and Dickens was very attached to her. He was deeply traumatized by her death at the age of seventeen, and she is believed to have provided inspiration for a number of his idealized, angelic heroines such as Little Nell and Florence Dombey. Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby followed in monthly installments, and both reflected Dickens' understanding of the lower classes as well as his comic genius. In 1843, Dickens published one of his most famous works, A Christmas Carol . His disenchantment with the world's economic drives is clear in this work: he blames much of society's ills on people's obsession with earning money and acquiring status based on money.

His travels abroad in the 1840s, first to America and then through Europe, marked the beginning of a new stage in Dickens' life. His writings became longer and more serious. In David Copperfield (1849-50), readers find the same flawed world that Dickens discovered as a young boy. Dickens published some of his best-known novels, including A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations , in his own weekly periodicals. The inspiration to write a novel set during the French Revolution came from Dickens' faithful annual habit of reading Thomas Carlyle's book The French Revolution, first published in 1839. When Dickens acted in Wilkie Collins' play The Frozen Deep in 1857, he was inspired by his own role as a self-sacrificing lover. He eventually decided to place his own sacrificing lover in the revolutionary period, a period of great social upheaval. A year later, Dickens went through his own form of social change as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities: he separated from his wife, and he revitalized his career by making plans for a new weekly literary journal called All the Year Round.

In 1859, A Tale of Two Cities premiered as a series in this journal. Its popularity was based not only on the fame of its author, but also on its short length and radical (for Dickens' time) subject matter. Dickens became involved in theatrical collaborations with his friend, the novelist Wilkie Collins. In 1857, while interviewing actresses for a play the two had written together, Dickens met Ellen Ternan. Despite already being married, and the age difference between the two (Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18), the two fell in love. This meeting precipitated the end for Dickens of what was already an unhappy marriage. Dickens separated from his wife Catherine in 1858. While his relationship with Ellen was kept very discreet, especially considering Dickens's celebrity, the two travelled together regularly, and Dickens supported her financially until the time of his death. Dickens' health began to deteriorate in the 1860s. In 1858, in response to his increasing fame, he had begun public readings of his works. These exacted a great physical toll on him.

An immensely profitable but physically shattering series of readings in America in 1867-68 sped his decline, and he collapsed during a "farewell" series in England. On June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens died. He was buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Though he left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, he had already written fifteen substantial novels and countless shorter pieces. His legacy is clear. In a whimsical and unique fashion, Dickens pointed out society's flaws in terms of its blinding greed for money and its neglect of the lower classes of society. Through his books, we come to understand the virtues of a loving heart and the pleasures of home in a flawed, cruelly indifferent world. Among English writers, in terms of his fame and of the public's recognition of his characters and stories, many consider him second only to William Shakespeare. Study Guides on Works by Charles Dickens Peter Ackroyd on Charles Dickens | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close In the summer of 1869, when he was already sick and ailing, Charles Dickens began to contemplate the last of his novels.

He had the notion of a young couple who would not marry until the end of the book; he had stray visions of the East End of London, where he wandered late at night trying to fight off the symptoms of weariness and debility that invaded him. He also had "... a very curious and new idea for my new story", the curious idea connected with the effects of opium and the consequent state of altered consciousness. Just a few weeks before, he had visited an opium den in Bluegate Fields, by the dark Thames, where an American companion noted that "we found the haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old penny ink-bottle". Although it is sometimes hazardous to identify the "originals" of Dickens's characters, so vast and multifarious is his power of creation, it is very likely that this old woman appears again in the first pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. As soon as he had conceived the plan for this novel, he entered negotiations with his publisher, Chapman and Hall, to bring out a series of 12 monthly parts. He was working on a limited canvas, since in the past he had contemplated his stories unfolding themselves in 20 parts.

He was aware that some of his energy had left him, in other words, and prepared accordingly. He also had some intimations of his mortality, since he stipulated in the contract that there should be some arrangement for recompensing the publisher in case of his sudden death. And so he began work in the early autumn of 1869. His writing arrangements were in a sense somewhat delicate. For much of the time he remained at Gad's Hill Place in Kent, his family home, where he retreated to a Swiss chalet erected at the bottom of his garden. For the rest of the time he was living secretly in a suburban villa at Peckham in south London, which he shared with his companion, or perhaps mistress, Ellen Ternan. Here, under the assumed name of Charles Tringham, he also worked upon this novel of secrets and of disguise. In his notes for the first monthly instalment he wrote "Opium-Smoking", and then slightly later he jotted down "Cathedral town running throughout". The cathedral town in the novel is named as Cloisterham, but is based upon the town of Rochester that Dickens had known all his life.

He had lived close by it, when he was a child, and Gad's Hill Place was only a mile or so distant. It had always been one of the sources of his inspiration - part of the landscape of his imagination - but in his last novel it is a place of old time and old stone, eerie, broken, desolate, inhabited by some of the strangest creatures that Dickens ever invented. Yet who else but Dickens could have created that imp of the perverse, Deputy, who assists Durdles homewards by throwing stones at his back? The most extraordinary character of all, John Jasper, emerges fully armed from Dickens's imagination. The novelist had created the character of the hypocritical or smooth-fronted murderer in previous short stories, and at the time of composing The Mystery of Edwin Drood he was engaged in the ritual of "killing" Nancy in his public readings from Oliver Twist. It has often been suggested that the strain and exhaustion attendant upon that murder reading hastened Dickens's own death. So death, and murder, were very much on his mind in the composition of the novel. That is why it becomes such a mysterious disquisition upon finished time and last things.

He continued through the autumn and winter months of 1869, but he told a friend that the writing gave him "trouble and anxiety". His earliest biographer, John Forster, has remarked that he seemed unable to work at his old pace or with his old instinctive energy and that he suffered from a "manifest abatement of his natural force". That may in part account for the restrained tone of the narrative. There are few of the flourishes and extravagances that marked some of the larger and longer novels of his maturity; The Mystery of Edwin Drood is marked by the austerity and simplicity of its style. It was so economical, in fact, that he found to his horror that he had written too little for the monthly number. For the first time in his writing career, he was six pages too short. He rushed to add another chapter, and to transpose a scene from a later part of the book. He also made an unaccountable decision. He broke the habit of a lifetime by agreeing to a series of public readings even while he was engaged on a piece of fiction. In previous years he had kept the activities apart, for the sake of his energy as well as his health.

But now, even while deep in the composition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he agreed to give a series of "farewell readings" to his adoring public. He finished them at great cost to his strength. He was now considered to look much older than his 58 years. George Eliot dined with him one evening and declared that he was "looking dreadfully shattered". He was also growing increasingly lame. Yet it was always his philosophy to work on - work on, he used to say, while it is still day. By the third week of March he had completed the fourth number of the new novel, and read it out loud to Forster and to his family. His daughter, Kate, has left a record that "my father's brain was more than usually clear and bright during the writing of Edwin Drood ... the extraordinary interest he took in the development of the story was apparent in all that he said or did". But she added somewhat ruefully that the composition of the book was "a tax too great for his fast ebbing strength". Yet there never had been a way of stopping him working.

To warn or advise him, she said, was as idle as "stretching one's hands to a river and bidding it to cease to flow". It is apposite and significant therefore that in the narrative he was even then writing there is the image of the river Thames as it proceeds ever downstream, "heaving with a restless knowledge of its approach to the sea". The first number of the novel was published at the beginning of April 1870, in the familiar green covers that Dickens had fashioned as his "trademark", and sold approximately 50,000 copies. The book was immediately welcomed as a return to Dickens's "old manner" after the dangerous experimentation of Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. It should be remembered that such great masterpieces of Dickens's late period were treated with disdain by the newspaper reviewers, who saw nothing in them but the wearisome longueurs of difficult plots combined with a somewhat strained and wayward humour. The relative brevity and succinctness of The Mystery of Edwin Drood came, in that sense, as a welcome relief. The illustrator of the new novel, Luke Fildes, also met with approval.

He was a young artist whose more modern style of graphic illustration seemed a world away from the caricatures of Hablot Browne or "Phiz" who had illustrated Dickens's earlier fictions. The new style, closer to Punch than to The Pickwick Papers, consorted well with the new age. Among the advertisements that accompanied the monthly numbers of the novel were those for washing machines and self-raising flour. It is clear enough that Dickens knew the direction in which his narrative was travelling. The disappearance of Edwin Drood, and the peculiar behaviour of John Jasper, provide evidence to suggest that Jasper was indeed the murderer. He may have killed his nephew in a delirium induced by opium, an act that he can only recall when he is once more in a drugged condition. This may have been the "curious" turn in the plot that Dickens had been contemplating. But there are so many loose ends in the unfinished story that a whole cottage industry has grown up around possible sequels. Who is the strange Mr Datchery who appears in Cloisterham? What is the role of "the Princess Puffer" in the resolution of the plot? What will happen to the Landless brother and sister?

These questions must alas remain unanswered, with the consolation that the plot itself was not the sole or principal object of Dickens's attention. He was in this novel concerned with the subtleties and inflections of human behaviour, with the sudden irruption of violence into a small community and the no less insistent note of secrecy and mystery involved in the understanding of human temperament. His own life enters in an oblique manner. He was preoccupied with secrecy too, in the conduct of his relationship with Ellen Ternan. One of the themes of the novel lies in the truth that the most interesting part of a life is that which remains concealed. It has been suggested, for example, that the passionate but now non-sexual relationship between Dickens and Ternan resembled the relationship in the novel between Rosa Bud and her "lover" Edwin Drood: ". . . let us be courageous. Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth." "Never be husband and wife?" "Never!" By the beginning of May 1870 Dickens had completed the fifth number of the novel but, rather like John Jasper himself, he was in such pain that he was forced to take large quantities of laudanum in order to sleep.

He had been discussing the book with a friend, emphasising its title as a clue to its meaning. "Well, you or we," he said to Dickens, "are approaching the mystery." By this he meant that they were approaching death itself, and at once Dickens became silent and fell into a reverie. It seems possible that Dickens knew that this book, so concerned with death and disappearance, would be his own final work. In some sense he identified the book with death itself, and may have been loath to complete it. During the last days of May he was working on the sixth number in the offices of All The Year Round in Wellington Street. It should not be forgotten that, busy and infirm as he was, he still continued to edit this weekly periodical. His son, Charles Dickens Jr, came in to bid him goodbye. He found his father "writing very earnestly", and said a few words to him. Dickens looked up, but showed no awareness of his presence. His son spoke out again, and Dickens looked at him. But he did not see him. He was so enveloped in the world of Cloisterham and Jasper that he saw nothing around him.

"He was in dreamland with Edwin Drood," Charles wrote later, "and I left him - for the last time." This is an apt image of the novelist at the very end of his life, still in thrall to his visions. He went back that weekend to Gad's Hill where he began work on the last chapter he would ever complete. He wrote of Rosa Bud arriving in London and gliding on a boat down the dark Thames when "all too soon, the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life". He walked in the garden and his daughter, Kate, was shocked to see him "a good deal changed". After dinner he talked of his hopes and plans for the novel "if, please God, I live to finish it". But he never did. On the morning of Wednesday, June 8, 1870, he walked over to his chalet, as was his custom, and worked with some concentration upon the narrative. The surviving manuscript shows that he was writing with unusual ease and facility. He wrote down the words "and then falls to with an appetite", and broke off for the day.

He returned to the house an hour before dinner, but then he became noticeably paler. He experienced some kind of fit, and fell to the ground. He never regained consciousness. The pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood were later found in the chalet. In its unfinished state it is fated forever to remain just that. · The Mystery of Edwin Drood is published by Everyman's Library Classics (foreword by Peter Ackroyd) at £9.99. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.

Question: Which novel did Charles Dickens leave unfinished upon his death in 1870?
Answer: 'THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD'