WE have some external evidence as to Dickens’s solution of his own
problem, from Forster. {48} On August 6, 1869, some weeks before he
began to work at his tale, Dickens, in a letter, told Forster, “I have a
very curious and new idea for my new story. Not communicable (or the
interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though
difficult to work.” Forster must have instantly asked that the
incommunicable secret should be communicated to _him_, for he tells us
that “_immediately after_ I learnt”—the secret. But did he learn it?
Dickens was ill, and his plot, whatever it may have been, would be
irritatingly criticized by Forster before it was fully thought out.
“Fules and bairns should not see half-done work,” and Dickens may well
have felt that Forster should not see work not even begun, but merely
simmering in the author’s own fancy.
Forster does not tell us that Dickens communicated the secret in a
letter. He quotes none: he says “I was told,” orally, that is. When he
writes, five years later (1874), “Landless was, _I think_, to have
perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer,”
he is clearly trusting, not to a letter of Dickens’s, but to a defective
memory; and he knows it. He says that a nephew was to be murdered by an
uncle. The criminal was to confess in the condemned cell. He was to
find out that his crime had been needless, and to be convicted by means
of the ring (Rosa’s mother’s ring) remaining in the quicklime that had
destroyed the body of Edwin.
Nothing “new” in all this, as Forster must have seen. “The originality,”
he explains, “was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career by
himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if,
not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.”
But all this is not “hard to work,” and is not “original.” As Mr.
Proctor remarks, Dickens had used that trick twice already. (“Madman’s
Manuscript,” _Pickwick_; “Clock Case Confession,” in _Master Humphrey’s
Clock_.) The quicklime trick is also very old indeed. The disguise of a
woman as a man is as ancient as the art of fiction: yet Helena _may_ be
Datchery, though nobody guessed it before Mr. Cuming Walters. She ought
not to be Datchery; she is quite out of keeping in her speech and manner
as Datchery, and is much more like Drood.
“A NEW IDEA”
There are no new ideas in plots. “All the stories have been told,” and
all the merit lies in the manner of the telling. Dickens had used the
unsuspected watcher, as Mr. Proctor shows, in almost all his novels. In
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, when Jonas finds that Nadgett has been the watcher,
Dickens writes, “The dead man might have come out of his grave and not
confounded and appalled him so.” Now, to Jasper, Edwin _was_ “the dead
man,” and Edwin’s grave contained quicklime. Jasper was sure that he had
done for Edwin: he had taken Edwin’s watch, chain, and scarf-pin; he
believed that he had left him, drugged, in quicklime, in a locked vault.
Consequently the reappearance of Edwin, quite well, in the vault where
Jasper had buried him, would be a very new idea to Jasper; would
“confound and appall him.” Jasper would have emotions, at that
spectacle, and so would the reader! It is not every day, even in our age
of sixpenny novels, that a murderer is compelled to visit, alone, at
night, the vault which holds his victim’s “cold remains,” and therein
finds the victim “come up, smiling.”
Yes, for business purposes, this idea was new enough! The idea was
“difficult to work,” says Dickens, with obvious truth. How was he to get
the quicklime into the vault, and Drood, alive, out of the vault? As to
the reader, he would at first take Datchery for Drood, and then think,
“No, that is impossible, and also is stale. Datchery cannot be Drood,”
and thus the reader would remain in a pleasant state of puzzledom, as he
does, unto this day.
If Edwin is dead, there is not much “Mystery” about him. We have as good
as seen Jasper strangle him and take his pin, chain, and watch. Yet by
adroitly managing the conduct of Mr. Grewgious, Dickens persuaded Mr.
Proctor that certainly, Grewgious knew Edwin to be alive. As Grewgious
knew, from Helena, all that was necessary to provoke his experiment on
Jasper’s nerves, Mr. Proctor argued on false premises, but that was due
to the craft of Dickens. Mr. Proctor rejected Forster’s report, from
memory, of what he understood to be the “incommunicable secret” of
Dickens’s plot, and I think that he was justified in the rejection.
Forster does not seem to have cared about the thing—he refers lightly to
“the reader curious in such matters”—when once he had received his
explanation from Dickens. His memory, in the space of five years, may
have been inaccurate: he probably neither knew nor cared who Datchery
was; and he may readily have misunderstood what Dickens told him, orally,
about the ring, as the instrument of detection. Moreover, Forster quite
overlooked one source of evidence, as I shall show later.