FOR the discovery of Dickens’s secret in _Edwin Drood_ it is necessary to
obtain a clear view of the characters in the tale, and of their relations
to each other.
About the middle of the nineteenth century there lived in Cloisterham, a
cathedral city sketched from Rochester, a young University man, Mr. Bud,
who had a friend Mr. Drood, one of a firm of engineers—somewhere. They
were “fast friends and old college companions.” Both married young. Mr.
Bud wedded a lady unnamed, by whom he was the father of one child, a
daughter, Rosa Bud. Mr. Drood, whose wife’s maiden name was Jasper, had
one son, Edwin Drood. Mrs. Bud was drowned in a boating accident, when
her daughter, Rosa, was a child. Mr. Drood, already a widower, and the
bereaved Mr. Bud “betrothed” the two children, Rosa and Edwin, and then
expired, when the orphans were about seven and eleven years old. The
guardian of Rosa was a lawyer, Mr. Grewgious, who had been in love with
her mother. To Grewgious Mr. Bud entrusted his wife’s engagement ring,
rubies and diamonds, which Grewgious was to hand over to Edwin Drood, if,
when he attained his majority, he and Rosa decided to marry.
Grewgious was apparently legal agent for Edwin, while Edwin’s maternal
uncle, John Jasper (aged about sixteen when the male parents died), was
Edwin’s “trustee,” as well as his uncle and devoted friend. Rosa’s
little fortune was an annuity producing £250 a-year: Edwin succeeded to
his father’s share in an engineering firm.
When the story opens, Edwin is nearly twenty-one, and is about to proceed
to Egypt, as an engineer. Rosa, at school in Cloisterham, is about
seventeen; John Jasper is twenty-six. He is conductor of the Choir of
the Cathedral, a “lay precentor;” he is very dark, with thick black
whiskers, and, for a number of years, has been a victim to the habit of
opium smoking. He began very early. He takes this drug both in his
lodgings, over the gate of the Cathedral, and in a den in East London,
kept by a woman nicknamed “The Princess Puffer.” This hag, we learn, has
been a determined drunkard,—“I drank heaven’s-hard,”—for sixteen years
_before_ she took to opium. If she has been dealing in opium for ten
years (the exact period is not stated), she has been very disreputable
for twenty-six years, that is ever since John Jasper’s birth. Mr. Cuming
Walters suggests that she is the mother of John Jasper, and, therefore,
maternal grandmother of Edwin Drood. She detests her client, Jasper, and
plays the spy on his movements, for reasons unexplained.
Jasper is secretly in love with Rosa, the _fiancée_ of his nephew, and
his own pupil in the musical art. He makes her aware of his passion,
silently, and she fears and detests him, but keeps these emotions
private. She is a saucy school-girl, and she and Edwin are on
uncomfortable terms: she does not love him, while he perhaps does love
her, but is annoyed by her manner, and by the gossip about their
betrothal. “The bloom is off the plum” of their prearranged loves, he
says to his friend, uncle, and confidant, Jasper, whose own concealed
passion for Rosa is of a ferocious and homicidal character. Rosa is
aware of this fact; “a glaze comes over his eyes,” sometimes, she says,
“and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream, in which he
threatens most . . . ” The man appears to have these frightful dreams
even when he is not under opium.