Who was Jasper? He was the brother-in-law of the late Mr. Drood, a
respected engineer, and University man. We do not know whence came Mrs.
Drood, Jasper’s sister, but is it likely that her mother “drank
heaven’s-hard”—so the hag says of herself—then took to keeping an opium
den, and there entertained her son Jasper, already an accomplished
vocalist, but in a lower station than that to which his musical genius
later raised him, as lay Precentor? If the Princess Puffer be, as on Mr.
Cuming Walters’s theory she is, Edwin’s long-lost grandmother, her
discovery would be unwelcome to Edwin. Probably she did not live much
longer; “my lungs are like cabbage nets,” she says. Mr. Cuming Walters
goes on—
“Her purpose is left obscure. How easily, however, we see possibilities
in a direction such as this. The father, perhaps a proud, handsome man,
deserts the woman, and removes the child. The woman hates both for
scorning her, but the father dies, or disappears, and is beyond her
vengeance. Then the child, victim to the ills in his blood, creeps back
to the opium den, not knowing his mother, but immediately recognized by
her. She will make the child suffer for the sins of the father, who had
destroyed her happiness. Such a theme was one which appealed to Dickens.
It must not, however, be urged; and the crucial question after all is
concerned with the opium woman as one of the unconscious instruments of
justice, aiding with her trifle of circumstantial evidence the Nemesis
awaiting Jasper.
“Another hypothesis—following on the Carker theme in ‘Dombey and Son’—is
that Jasper, a dissolute and degenerate man, lascivious, and heartless,
may have wronged a child of the woman’s; but it is not likely that
Dickens would repeat the Mrs. Brown story.”
Jasper, _père_, father of John Jasper and of Mrs. Drood, however
handsome, ought not to have deserted Mrs. Jasper. Whether John Jasper,
prematurely devoted to opium, became Edwin’s guardian at about the age of
fifteen, or whether, on attaining his majority, he succeeded to some
other guardian, is not very obvious. In short, we cannot guess why the
Princess Puffer hated Jasper, a paying client of long standing. We are
only certain that Jasper was a bad fellow, and that the Princess Puffer
said, “I know him, better than all the Reverend Parsons put together know
him.” On the other hand, Edwin “seems to know” the opium woman, when he
meets her on Christmas Eve, which may be a point in favour of her being
his long-lost grandmother.
Jasper was certainly tried and condemned; for Dickens intended “to take
Mr. Fildes to a condemned cell in Maidstone, or some other gaol, in order
to make a drawing.” {96} Possibly Jasper managed to take his own life,
in the cell; possibly he was duly hanged.
Jasper, after all, was a failure as a murderer, even if we suppose him to
have strangled his nephew successfully. “It is obvious to the most
excruciatingly feeble capacity” that, if he meant to get rid of proofs of
the identity of Drood’s body by means of quicklime, it did not suffice to
remove Drood’s pin, watch, and chain. Drood would have coins of the
realm in his pockets, gold, silver, bronze. Quicklime would not destroy
these metallic objects, nor would it destroy keys, which would easily
prove Drood’s identity. If Jasper knew his business, he would, of
course, rifle _all_ of Edwin’s pockets minutely, and would remove the
metallic buttons of his braces, which generally display the maker’s name,
or the tailor’s. On research I find “H. Poole & Co., Savile Row” on my
buttons. In this inquiry of his, Jasper would have discovered the ring
in Edwin’s breast pocket, and would have taken it away. Perhaps Dickens
never thought of that little fact: if he did think of it, no doubt he
found some mode of accounting for Jasper’s unworkmanlike negligence. The
trouser-buttons would have led any inquirer straight to Edwin’s tailor; I
incline to suspect that neither Dickens nor Jasper noticed that
circumstance. The conscientious artist in crime cannot afford to neglect
the humblest and most obvious details.