4. But the final proof of the impossibility of making trustworthy deductions from the cover is to be found in the fact that no readers read it in the same way. In proof of this I give the readings of Professor Henry Jackson, Mr. Andrew Lang, Dr. M. R. James, and Mr. Cuming Walters. Through the great kindness of Mr. Hugh Thomson the artist, who has made a study of this subject and has given me his results, I am able to add another interpretation certainly of no lower authority than those which accompany it.
PROFESSOR JACKSON’S READING
We may fairly presume that the figures in the four corners represent comedy, tragedy, the opium-woman, and the Chinaman. In the nave of the Cathedral, Edwin and Rosa pair off against Jasper and Crisparkle. Despite the discrepancy which Mr. Lang points out, I think that the lower of the two pictures on our left shows Jasper and Rosa in the garden of the Nuns’ House. In the upper side-piece, the girl is, I am sure, Rosa flying from Jasper’s pursuit, in full view of a placard announcing Edwin’s disappearance. It is true that the hatless girl with her hair streaming down her back does not answer very well to Dickens’s description of Rosa, and has no resemblance to Sir L. Fildes’s pictures of her: but if Dickens, when he had not yet thought out his conception of her personality, told Collins to draw a frightened girl of seventeen running away from school, no more than this could be expected. For the scheme of the sketch, compare the picture in Bleak House, which shows Lady Dedlock, as she mounts the staircase, turning to look at a bill announcing a reward for the discovery of the murderer of Tulkinghorn. That placards and advertisements, imploring Edwin to communicate with his uncle, had been widely circulated, we have been told at p. 182. On the right, the two men in the lower picture are, I suppose, Jasper and Durdles ascending the tower on the night of ‘the unaccountable expedition’; while the man above is Jasper on Christmas Eve looking down at ‘that,’ p. 276: ‘Look down, look down! You see what lies at the bottom there?’ p. 274. I demur to Mr. Lang’s statements that the young man whom I venture to identify with Jasper is represented as ‘whiskerless,’ and that the figure which I take to be Durdles is well-dressed.
Professor Jackson then mentions the views of Mr. Proctor and Mr. Lang on the important vignette at the bottom of the page:
For my own part, I suspect that the upright figure represents Drood, but that the Drood which it represents is a phantom of Jasper’s imagination. Let us suppose that an advertisement for a ring known to have been in the possession of the late Edwin Drood appears in the local newspaper, and that Jasper, now for the first time aware of the ring’s existence, goes to the crypt to look for it. Dickens might well suppose him at such a moment to see a vision of the murdered man, and might instruct Collins to represent what Jasper imagined himself to see. Indeed, I fancy that I recognise an intentional contrast between the two figures: the one in the foreground, full of movement, solidly drawn; the other, in the background, statuesque, and a little shadowy. Doubtless Dickens was anxious that the reader should not know too much; and if he made Collins give visible form to a hallucination of Jasper’s brain, I for one do not think the procedure illegitimate. It is sad that Dickens did not live to explain the innocent deception which, as I imagine, he meant for a few months to practise upon his readers.
MR. ANDREW LANG’S INTERPRETATION IN ‘THE PUZZLE OF DICKENS’S LAST PLOT’
The cover lies before the reader. In the left-hand top corner appears an allegorical female figure of joy, with flowers. The central top space contains the front of Cloisterham Cathedral, or rather, the nave. To the left walks Edwin, with hyacinthine locks, and a thoroughly classical type of face, and Grecian nose. Like Datchery, he does not wear, but carries his hat; this means nothing, if they are in the nave. He seems bored. On his arm is Rosa; she seems bored; she trails her parasol, and looks away from Edwin, looks down, to her right. On the spectator’s right march the surpliced men and boys of the choir. Behind them is Jasper, black whiskers and all; he stares after Edwin and Rosa; his right hand hides his mouth. In the corner above him is an allegorical female, clasping a stiletto.
Beneath Edwin and Rosa is, first, an allegorical female figure, looking at a placard, headed ‘LOST,’ on a door. Under that again, is a girl in a garden-chair; a young man, whiskerless, with wavy hair, kneels and kisses her hand. She looks rather unimpassioned. I conceive the man to be Landless, taking leave of Rosa after urging his hopeless suit for which Helena, we learn, ‘seems to compassionate him.’ He has avowed his passion, early in the story, to Crisparkle. Below, the opium hag is smoking. On the other side, under the figures of Jasper and the choir, the young man who kneels to the girl is seen bounding up a spiral staircase. His left hand is on the iron railing; he stoops over it, looking down at others who follow him. His right hand, the index finger protruded, points upward, and, by chance or design, points straight at Jasper in the vignette above. Beneath this man (clearly Landless) follows a tall man in a ‘bowler’ hat, a ‘cut-away’ coat, and trousers which show an inch of white stocking above the low shoes. His profile is hid by the wall of the spiral staircase: he might be Grewgious of the shoes, white stockings, and short trousers, but he may be Tartar: he takes two steps at a stride. Beneath him a youngish man, in a low, soft, clerical hat and a black pea-coat, ascends, looking downwards and backwards. This is clearly Crisparkle. A Chinaman is smoking opium beneath.
In the central lowest space, a dark and whiskered man enters a dark chamber; his left hand is on the lock of the door; in his right he holds up a lantern. The light of the lantern reveals a young man in a soft hat of Tyrolese shape. His features are purely classical, his nose is Grecian, his locks are long (at least, according to the taste of to-day); he wears a light paletot, buttoned to the throat; his right arm hangs by his side; his left hand is thrust into the breast of his coat. He calmly regards the dark man with the lantern. That man, of course, is Jasper. The young man is Edwin Drood, of the Grecian nose, hyacinthine locks, and classic features, as in Sir L. Fildes’s third illustration.
Mr. Proctor correctly understood the unmistakable meaning of this last design, Jasper entering the vault:
‘To-day the dead are living,
The lost is found to-day.’
DR. JAMES’S VIEW
In the Cambridge Review for 9th March 1911 Dr. James says:
Now, as to the figures at the angles and the scene at the top there is general agreement. As to those on the left, H. J. is, I think, right in calling the upper one Rosa’s flight; but the lower one cannot be Jasper and Rosa. The young man has a moustache. Jasper had none, and has none in the two pictures of him on this same cover. Also, the artist has carefully emphasised the fact that the girl is indifferent to her suitor. The figures, I believe, represent Rosa and Neville Landless.
On the right, H. J. assumes that there are two scenes. I am clear that there is but one: for, whereas, on the left side the two scenes are separated by a sprig of the rose-wreath which surrounds the centre, and a similar sprig parts them from the top scene, there is on the right only the division from the top scene, managed in the same way as on the left. And yet, had the scene been two, there was great necessity to separate them, inasmuch as they are taking place in the same surroundings, namely, the winding staircase. As to the identity of the three men, the lowest one is a cleric, Crisparkle, the next above him I will not identify; the uppermost is either Jasper or just possibly (since he is pointing pretty directly at the figure of Jasper in the top scene, and seems to be acting as a guide to those below him) Datchery.