The Mystery of Edwin Drood by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General
ISBN: 9781526724373
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2018-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Collins joins the fray

Wilson’s idea found an ally of sorts in Philip Collins’ 1962 book Dickens and Crime. Collins was unequivocally in favour of Forster’s summary and the idea of a no-surprises ending: ‘Jasper has killed Edwin and we are never intended to doubt it.’218 Collins was writing in an era where scholarly exploration of Dickens was growing, and he had little time for those unwilling to take an intellectual approach to Drood. Where Wilson had gently poked fun at ‘the old duffer’, Collins went at them with barbed sword:

It would be a very stupid and inattentive reader who could fail to see that John Jasper is a wicked man, that he has ‘cause, and will, and strength, and means’ to kill Edwin, that he makes careful preparation to do so and to throw suspicion elsewhere, that Edwin disappears permanently at the climax of these preparations, and that Jasper thereafter continues to act in a fashion compatible – to say the least – with his being a reasonably prudent murderer.219

Where once Dickensians had railed at each other in public over the minutiae of surprise twists in Drood’s end, now Collins dismissed the entire thing as ludicrous and pointless. Accordingly, when he does refer to earlier critics it is usually to attack or dismiss their work. While Wilson championed Duffield’s thuggee theory, Collins regarded it as ‘one of the many theories about Edwin Drood which deserve to be cut off by a literary Occam’s Razor’.220 But as much as Collins agreed with Wilson’s fundamental principle that Drood was not a detective story, he still opened fire on many of Wilson’s other ideas. He did not think, as Wilson did, that Drood was some of Dickens’ finest writing:

Nor need we assume that everything in the fragment is perfect in its placing and relevance, or that Dickens was, for once, going to write the perfect plot. The completed novel might well have contained as many loose ends and imperfections as usual.221

This is not quite a return to the tactics of Proctor who would rubbish the original in order to justify and triumph the necessity of his solution, but nor is it the celebration of Dickens’ writing that Wilson trumpets. Instead Collins begrudgingly states ‘I wish that Dickens had been capable of writing the novel that Mr Wilson thinks up for him’, in a manner simultaneously wistful and patronising. It relegates such thoughts of Drood as a great book to the realm of dreams. It is a pleasant, but untrue, idea for Collins, and to think it of Drood renders Wilson’s work as subjective and emotional in Collins’ eye, rather than objective and logical.

The second major deviation from Wilson’s argument rests on Jasper himself. While Collins agrees he is the murderer, and the story to document his downfall, he cannot believe that Jasper should be the divided man that Wilson describes:

I find it difficult, indeed, to see any ‘insoluble moral problem’ in Jasper or in his creator. Jasper, I have insisted, is a wicked

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