Like Collins, Dickens was keenly interested in the possibilities of opium. Collins himself was a lavish consumer of the drug, but I do not think it has been suggested that Dickens himself ever touched it. Nor is it likely, for Dickens with all his tenseness of nerve was an eminently self-controlled and temperate man. But in Edwin Drood he has inserted a sentence in praise of opium. The opium woman says to Datchery: ‘It’s opium, deary. Neither more nor less. And it’s like a human creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but seldom what can be said in its praise.’ The last sentence was an afterthought on the part of Dickens. It has been written in.
As to whether Jasper was made ultimately to repeat his crime in any fashion under the influence of opium, it is impossible to say. He was unquestionably more or less under the influence of the drug when he committed it.
The literary men of Dickens’s period were much interested in the action of drugs, in mesmerism, and the like. Elliotson, to whom Pendennis is dedicated, was on intimate terms with Dickens. Dickens plainly implies that Crisparkle went to the weir because Jasper willed him to do so. Collins and Dickens were both addicted to calling witnesses to their accuracy. At the close of Armadale, Collins says: ‘Wherever the story touches on questions connected with law, medicine, or chemistry, it has been submitted before publication to the experience of professional men. The kindness of a friend supplied me with a plan of the doctor’s apparatus—I saw the chemical ingredients at work before I ventured on describing the action of them in the closing scenes of this book.’ Every one remembers the ‘spontaneous combustion’ preface to Bleak House. I do not know whether any medical man can be found to confirm the science of Armadale, or of Bleak House, or of The Moonstone. But that is not the question before us. We have only to do with what the novelist himself believed to be a scientific possibility. In Kenilworth [200] Wayland compounds ‘the true Orvietan, that noble medicine which is so seldom found genuine and effective within these realms of Europe.’ Scott adds a note: ‘Orvietan, or Venice treacle, as it is sometimes called, was understood to be a sovereign remedy against poison; and the reader must be contented, for the time he peruses these pages, to hold the same opinion, which was once universally received by the learned as well as the vulgar.’ Dickens’s science must be received in the same manner.
Mr. Crisparkle has one piece of evidence in his memory. ‘Long afterwards he had cause to remember’ how, when he entered Jasper’s rooms and found him asleep by the fire, the choirmaster ‘sprang from the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out, “What is the matter? Who did it?”’
As we have already seen, the gathering of the threads is in the strong hands of Datchery.
As we know, Forster adds that Neville Landless was to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer. It will be seen that this part of his testimony is more doubtful than the rest, and cannot, therefore, be so implicitly accepted, but it may well be true. Melancholy seems to mark Neville Landless for its own, and his passion for Rosa is hopeless. If he dies, it is a heavy blow for his devoted sister, who finds her triumph marred by the death of her brother. Singularly enough, some writers who have hesitated to accept Forster’s more expressed testimony make much of the death of Neville Landless and its circumstances. It need only be pointed out that all this is pure conjecture, however ingenious it may be.
I find no difficulty in believing that Dickens carried out his plan of making Jasper give in prison a review of his own career. This has been called a poor and conventional idea, but as worked out by Dickens it would neither have been poor nor conventional. What remains to be told is, I repeat, largely the story of John Jasper’s earlier life.
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD
A BIBLIOGRAPHY COMPILED BY B. W. MATZ
The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By Charles Dickens. Parts 1–6. With 12 illustrations by Sir Luke Fildes, R.A. 1870.
How Mr. Sapsea ceased to be a Member of the Eight Club. Fragment found by John Forster. See his Life of the Novelist. Added to the ‘Biographical,’ ‘National,’ and ‘Centenary’ editions of the novel.