The Problem of 'Edwin Drood' Part 12

Poe says:

We are not prepared to say, so positively as we could wish, whether by the public at large, the whole _mystery_ of the murder committed by Rudge, with the ident.i.ty of the Maypole ruffian with Rudge himself, was fathomed at any period previous to the period intended, or, if so, whether at a period so early as materially to interfere with the interest designed; but we are forced, through sheer modesty, to suppose this the case; since, by ourselves individually, the secret was distinctly understood immediately upon the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy, which occurs at the seventh page of this volume of three hundred and twenty-three. In the number of the Philadelphia _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ for 1st May 1841 (the tale having then only begun), will be found a prospective notice of some length, in which we make use of the following words:

'That Barnaby is the son of the murderer may not appear evident to our readers-but we will explain. The person murdered is Mr. Reuben Haredale. He was found a.s.sa.s.sinated in his bed-chamber. His steward (Mr. Rudge, senior) and his gardener (name not mentioned) are missing. At first both are suspected. "Some months afterward"-here we use the words of the story-"the steward's body, scarcely to be recognised but by his clothes and the watch and ring he wore, was found at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds, with a deep gash in the breast, where he had been stabbed by a knife. He was only partly dressed; and all the people agreed that he had been sitting up reading in his own room, where there were many traces of blood, and was suddenly fallen upon and killed, before his master."

'Now, be it observed, it is not the author himself who a.s.serts that the steward's body was found; he has put the words in the mouth of one of his characters. His design is to make it appear, in the _denouement_, that the steward, Rudge, first murdered the gardener, then went to his master's chamber, murdered _him_, was interrupted by his (Rudge's) wife, whom he seized and held _by the wrist_, to prevent her giving the alarm-that he then, after possessing himself of the booty desired, returned to the gardener's room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.'

This is the prediction we have to examine. In the first place, was such an article published in the Philadelphia _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ for 1st May 1841? Mr. J. H. Ingram, the chief authority on Poe in this country, very kindly informs me that this review has never been reprinted in any edition of Poe's works. Should it not be searched out and reprinted in full? I should like to see the context of Poe's extract, and I should like still more to be sure that the article appeared as he says it did.

Mr. Ingram has no doubt that the article appeared as stated by Poe. Mr.

J. H. Whitty of Richmond, Va., kindly informs me that all the early files of the _Post_ are inaccessible.

In the second place, Poe affirms that the article appeared in the Philadelphia paper for 1st May 1841, and that the tale was only then begun. As for that, _Barnaby Rudge_ was first published as a volume in 1841, after having run as a serial in the pages of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ from 13th February 1841 to 27th November 1841. I have failed to find the precise date of its first appearance in America. No doubt it appeared in serial form, and the first instalments on which Poe bases his a.s.sertions should have been printed in America considerably earlier than 1st May. But the a.s.sertion which chiefly demands scrutiny is very definitely made by Poe. He says: The secret was _distinctly_ understood _immediately_ upon the perusal of the story of Solomon Daisy.' The italics are mine.

THE STORY OF SOLOMON DAISY

We turn to the story of Solomon Daisy 'as told in the _Maypole_ at any time for four and twenty years.' It is very simple and matter-of-fact.

It tells how Mr. Reuben Haredale, of The Warren, a widower with one child, left the place when his lady died. He went up to London, where he stopped some months, but, finding that place as lonely as The Warren, he suddenly came back with his little girl, bringing with him besides, that day, only two women servants, and his steward and a gardener. The rest stayed behind in London, and were to follow next day. That night, an old gentleman who lived at Chigwell Row, and had long been poorly, died, and an order came to Solomon at half after twelve o'clock at night to go and toll the pa.s.sing bell. Solomon relates to a thrilled audience how he went out in a windy, rainy, very dark night; how he entered the church, trimmed the candle, thought of old tales about dead people rising and sitting at the head of their own graves, fancying that he saw the old gentleman who was just dead, wrapping his shroud round him, and s.h.i.+vering as if he felt it cold. At length he started up and took the bell rope in his hands. At that minute there rang-not that bell, for he had scarcely touched the rope-but another! It was only for an instant, and even then the wind carried the sound away, but he heard it. He listened for a long time, but it rang no more. He then tolled his own bell and ran home to bed as fast as he could touch the ground. Next morning came the news that Mr. Reuben Haredale was found murdered in his bed-chamber, and in his hand was a piece of the cord attached to an alarm bell outside, which hung in his room, and had been cut asunder, no doubt by the murderer when he seized it. 'That was the bell I heard.' He further relates how the steward and the gardener were both missing, both suspected, but never found. The body of Mr. Rudge, the steward-scarcely to be recognised by his clothes and the watch and the ring he wore-was found months afterwards at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds with a deep gash in the breast where he had been stabbed by a knife. Every one knew now that the gardener must be the murderer, and Solomon Daisy predicted that he would be heard of. That is the whole story as told by Solomon Daisy, and Poe affirms that he perceived from this story: (1) That the steward Rudge first murdered the gardener; (2) that he then went to his master's chamber and murdered him; (3) that he was interrupted by Rudge's wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist to prevent her giving the alarm; (4) that he possessed himself of the booty, returned to the gardener's room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified.

WHERE POE FAILED

Poe admits that his preconceived ideas were not entirely correct:

The gardener was murdered, not before, but after his master; and that Rudge's wife seized _him_ by the wrist, instead of his seizing _her_, has so much the air of a mistake on the part of Mr. d.i.c.kens that we can scarcely speak of our own version as erroneous. The grasp of a murderer's b.l.o.o.d.y hand on the wrist of a woman _enceinte_ would have been more likely to produce the effect described (and this every one will allow) than the grasp of the hand of the woman upon the wrist of the a.s.sa.s.sin. We may, therefore, say of our supposition, as Talleyrand said of some c.o.c.kney's bad French-_que s'il ne soit pas Francais a.s.surement donc il le doit etre_-that if we did not rightly prophesy, yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right.

I have no hesitation in saying that this is largely a piece of pure mystification, another _Tale of the Grotesque and Arabesque_. It is conceivable that Poe guesses from Solomon Daisy's story that the steward Rudge murdered the gardener and his master. It follows that the steward changed clothes with the murdered gardener, put upon the corpse his own watch and ring, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified. But that Poe should have guessed immediately after reading Solomon Daisy's story that he seized and held by the wrist his wife to prevent her giving the alarm is beyond belief. 'By the wrist' are the three significant words, and they prove that Poe must have had before him when writing the parts of the novel up to and including chapter V. For it is in the fifth chapter that the first mention is made of the smear of blood on Barnaby's wrist.

We read there:

They who knew the Maypole story, and could remember what the widow was, before her husband's and his master's murder, understood it well. They recollected how the change had come, and could call to mind that when her son was born, upon the very day the deed was known, he bore upon his wrist what seemed a smear of blood but half washed out.

Near the beginning of chapter lxii., where Rudge is making his confession in prison, he says of his wife:

Did I see her fall upon the ground; and, when I stooped to raise her, did she thrust me back with a force that cast me off as if I had been a child, staining the hand with which she clasped my wrist? Is _that_ fancy?

To claim that the seizing of the wrist could have been deduced from Solomon Daisy's story by itself is to affirm an impossibility.

And so vanishes the main value of the prediction. If Poe wrote that article in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_, he wrote it after having read the fifth chapter of d.i.c.kens's novel.

WHERE POE SUCCEEDED

It may be asked whether Poe discovered anything from his reading of the first pages. The only thing which he may have guessed is the thing which it was comparatively easy to guess. He may have conjectured that the mysterious stranger at the Maypole was Rudge Redux. When this surmise had been lodged in his mind the other deductions follow as a matter of course from later chapters, as the tale unfolds itself. Even if Poe identified the stranger at the Maypole with the murderer it was no great feat, for the murderer is closely disguised, from which any intelligent reader would infer that he has a motive for fearing detection in an old haunt. He is shabbily dressed; he is very curious about the people and events at The Warren; he is suspected as a criminal of some kind by the cronies; he strikes Joe as he leaves. On the road he threatens Varden with murder. This shows us that we have before us a fugitive criminal.

He is presented to us with all the marks of a villain in hiding. It may be noted that from Solomon Daisy's story the inference is that only one of two men committed the murder of Reuben Haredale, the gardener or Rudge. There has also been a difficulty in identifying the remains.

This leaves Poe no special credit. There is considerable keenness in his conjecture that the treatment of the Gordon Riots was an afterthought of d.i.c.kens. Poe says:

The t.i.tle of the book, the elaborate and pointed manner of the commencement, the impressive description of The Warren, and especially of Mrs. Rudge, go far to show that Mr. d.i.c.kens has really deceived himself-that the soul of the plot, as originally conceived, was the murder of Haredale, with the subsequent discovery of the murderer in Rudge-but that this idea was afterwards abandoned, or, rather, suffered to be merged in that of the Popish riots. The result has been most unfavourable. That which, of itself, would have proved highly effective, has been rendered nearly null by its situation. In the mult.i.tudinous outrage and horror of the Rebellion, the _one_ atrocity is utterly whelmed and extinguished.

But facts, as Poe admits, are against this supposition. d.i.c.kens says in his Preface:

If the object an author has had, in writing a book, cannot be discovered from its perusal, the probability is that it is either very deep or very shallow. Hoping that mine may lie somewhere between these two extremes, I shall say very little about it, and that only in reference to one point. No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced into any work of fiction, and the subject presenting very extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project this tale.

This is final. It appears from Forster's biography that d.i.c.kens desired to expose the brutalising character of laws which led to the incessant execution of men and women comparatively innocent. It is clear also that d.i.c.kens made a special study of the contemporary newspapers and annual registers. But Forster admits that the form ultimately taken by _Barnaby Rudge_ had been comprised only partially within its first design, and he admits also that the interest with which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close. 'What has chiefly taken the reader's fancy at the outset almost wholly disappears in the power and pa.s.sion with which, in the later chapters, great riots are described. So admirable is this description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it even for a more perfect structure of fable.' To this I may add that the letters to the artist Cattermole on the ill.u.s.trations to _Barnaby Rudge_ are very valuable for the fullness and precision of their detail.

d.i.c.kENS'S WAY

That it is legitimate to draw inferences from the hints given by d.i.c.kens I should be the last to deny. His purpose was to provide hints which, when contemplated with what he called a backward glance, should appear luminous at the end of the story. Their meaning at the time might be more or less obscure, but when from the end of the book one could look back upon its course even to the beginning, he would see that the artist had a purpose all through, and that he was steadily preparing his reader for the _denouement_. Of this I give a striking proof, on which, so far as I am aware, little stress has been laid. {104} The _Edinburgh Review_ of July 1857 contains an article, 'The License of Modern Novelists,' in which the critic deals with _Little Dorrit_, and denounces his charges against the administrative system of England. Among other things, the reviewer says: 'Even the catastrophe in _Little Dorrit_ is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient period.'

d.i.c.kens, for the first and only time in his life, so far as I know, publicly replied to a reviewer. He wrote an article in _Household Words_ of 1st August 1857, ent.i.tled 'Curious Misprint in the _Edinburgh Review_,' in which he turned upon his critic fiercely and sharply. He quotes the sentence about the catastrophe in _Little Dorrit_, and goes on to say:

Thus, the Reviewer. The Novelist begs to ask him whether there is no License in his writing those words, and stating that a.s.sumption as a truth, when any man accustomed to the critical examination of a book cannot fail, attentively turning over the pages of _Little Dorrit_, to observe that that catastrophe is carefully prepared for from the very first presentation of the old house in the story; that when Rigaud, the man who is crushed by the fall of the house, first enters it (hundreds of pages before the end) he is beset by a mysterious fear and shuddering; that the rotten and crazy state of the house is laboriously kept before the reader, whenever the house is shown; that the way to the demolition of the man and the house together is paved all through the book with a painful minuteness and reiterated care of preparation, the necessity of which (in order that the thread may be kept in the reader's mind through nearly two years) is one of the adverse incidents of the serial form of publication? It may be nothing to the question that Mr. d.i.c.kens now publicly declares, on his word of honour, that that catastrophe was written, was engraved on steel, was printed, had pa.s.sed through the hands of compositors, readers for the press, and pressmen, and was in type and in proof in the Printing House of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans before the accident in Tottenham Court Road occurred. But, it is much to the question that an honourable reviewer might have easily traced this out in the internal evidence of the book itself, before he stated, for a fact, what is utterly and entirely, in every particular and respect, untrue.

The blows are dealt with a will, and it should be noted that d.i.c.kens is more irritated at the stupidity of the reviewer in failing to see the way in which he contrived the catastrophe than at his mistake in the fact.

It is to be noted also that d.i.c.kens considered that his serial form of publication compelled him to be almost too minute, copious, and constant in keeping the thread in the mind of a reader whose attention had to be maintained for nearly two years.

PART II-ATTEMPT AT A SOLUTION

CHAPTER V-WAS EDWIN DROOD MURDERED?

I reply in the affirmative, and for the following reasons:

I.

1. The external testimonies as given in a previous chapter are all explicit as far as they go in their testimony that in the intention of d.i.c.kens Edwin Drood was murdered. There is first the testimony of John Forster. To him d.i.c.kens plainly declared that a nephew was to be murdered by his uncle. The murderer was to discover that his crime was useless for its purpose, but he was not to be convicted in the ordinary way. It was by means of a gold ring, which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which the body had been cast, that the murderer and the person murdered were to be identified.

2. Madame Perugini corroborates Forster's testimony, and points out that the only thing on which he is not positive is the ending of Neville Landless. He guards himself by saying, 'I think,' and this makes his testimony to the more important facts the more impressive. Madame Perugini, who thoroughly understood the relations between Forster and d.i.c.kens, finds it impossible to believe that d.i.c.kens should have altered his plan without communicating with Forster. Forster's strong character, and the peculiar friends.h.i.+p that existed between him and d.i.c.kens, make it impossible to believe that d.i.c.kens should suddenly become 'underhand,'

and we might say treacherous, by inventing a plot which he did not intend to carry into execution. Forster became a little jealous of d.i.c.kens's confidence, and more than a little exacting in his demands on it. This d.i.c.kens knew, and smiled at occasionally. But he was very careful not to wound his friend's very sensitive nature, and he so trusted Forster's judgment as to be uneasy and unhappy if he did not obtain its sanction for his decisions and his actions. If there had been any change of plan Forster would certainly have been told. He never was told.

3. Again, we know that Charles d.i.c.kens the younger positively declared that he heard from his father's lips that Edwin Drood was dead. I have been able to print part of a play written by Charles d.i.c.kens the younger and Joseph Hatton. This shows beyond contradiction that the authors believed Drood to be dead. Mr. Hatton says: 'Consulting his son, Charles, to whom I offered my sketch, I found that his father had revealed to him sufficient of the plot to clearly indicate how the story was to end.' How far this may apply to details we cannot be sure, but most certainly it certifies the death.

4. To this I may add that Madame Perugini's own firm belief that Drood was dead is of no small importance, considering that she was the wife of Charles Allston Collins, who drew the much discussed wrapper. It did not occur either to Madame Perugini or her husband that there was any doubt as to the fate of Edwin Drood.

5. The weighty letter of Sir Luke Fildes printed on pages 545 confirms unmistakably and strongly the witness already adduced. Fildes was the sole ill.u.s.trator of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, and he testifies that Collins did not in the least know the significance of the various groups on the wrapper. Further, when Sir Luke was puzzled by the statement that John Jasper was described as wearing a neckerchief that would go twice round his neck he drew d.i.c.kens's attention to the circ.u.mstance that he had previously dressed Jasper as wearing a little black tie once round the neck, and asked why the alteration was made. d.i.c.kens, a little disconcerted, suddenly asked, 'Can you keep a secret?' He then said: 'I must have the double necktie! It is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it.' Fildes was impressed by d.i.c.kens's earnestness, and resented the suggestion often made that d.i.c.kens's hints dropped to members of his family or friends may have been intentionally misleading.

'It is a little startling,' says Sir Luke, 'after more than thirty-five years of profound belief in the n.o.bility of character and sincerity of Charles d.i.c.kens, to be told now that he probably was more or less of a humbug on such occasions.'

I cannot but feel that the external testimony is too strong to be explained away, and it ought to be read and pondered in its entirety.