The more closely Edwin Drood is studied the stronger the conviction grows that Dickens in this last work had lost none of his powers, that he was as capable as ever of writing controlled English prose while creating character and incident and at the same time retaining a firm grasp on all the threads of a complex pattern, keeping the totality of its design behind his hand until publication of his last two numbers. The fragment is therefore worth reading for its own sake; but it is still interesting to speculate on the nature of the completed pattern, so long as the speculation is based on careful analysis of known facts concerning the work and the author.
  It was noted on page 75 that in making such attempts, not only the author's past work but his own past are legitimate bases for conjecture; this is particularly true of Dickens who, though he seldom steps down from the narrator's high chair to address his readers in the first person as do Thackeray and Trollope, freely allows his personal opinions and beliefs to show as he relates the story. Less voluntarily perhaps, his own experiences are clearly to be seen influencing the course his fictions take - which is probably true of most novelists.
  His own life and convictions wherefores so far as they can be accepted without question, can and should be taken into consideration in any attempt to reach into his mind as it was at the time of the composition of his last novel. This short study has taken for granted reasonable familiarity of the reader with Dickensian fiction, journalism, correspondence and biographical facts and has avoided the tedium of adducing witness after witness to his strong, often-stated and still more often-implied religious beliefs. They were a part

136

of his life both as man and as artist, and the present study might well have been called Edwin Drood: The Resurrection and the Life with this in mind. In Drood resurrection is an essential part of the conception; so is the life-experience of its author. That his religious beliefs were liberal and imprecise and that his own personal behaviour often fell short of the Christian ideal there is no doubt. But that they were held with full conviction and that he preached them (though without obtrusion) in his work is what I have attempted to show. But so little has the fundamental part played by religious and ecclesiastical matters in Edwin Drood been noted by critics that even Dr. Walder whose special subject this is (Dickens and Religion), makes only the briefest of references to Drood, towards the end of his book. It has been my main purpose to call attention to these strong threads of religion and its observances in the novel, and to Dickens's last attempt to put his Christian message across. He knew in his own mind what Christ had meant; he knew that he had got hold of the Christian Truth; and of all nineteenth-century novelists he holds firmest to the ancient belief/superstition that Truth will Out. This is stated twice in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), first by the hypocrite Pecksniff, unconsciously predicting his own downfall: 'Occasionally we had the presumption to console ourselves with the remark that Truth would in the end prevail, and Virtue be triumphant. . .' (Ch. 8); and later, with more serious intent, in the conviction of Jonas Chuzzlewit for murder:

And now he heard the voice of his accomplice stating to his face, with every circumstance of time and place and incident; and openly proclaiming, with no reserve, suppression, passion, or concealment, all the truth. The truth, which nothing would keep down; which blood would not smother, and earth would not hide; the truth, whose terrible inspiration seemed to change dotards into strong men; and on whose avenging wings, one whom he had supposed to be at the extremest corner of the earth came swooping down upon him.(Martin Chuzzlewit, Ch. LI)

  This is Truth as Nemesis, and this profile of it is shown again in Edwin Drood as the powerful and immutable law in which Dickens believes completely: that private murder

137

for gain is an offence against the law of God and the law of man; that, such murder once committed, lies and evasions are required to shield the murderer from discovery; but that, in time, God and man working together will pierce the murderer's shield and expose him to the truth of natural justice, And the murder and subsequent resurrection of Christ are seen as symbolic of this law. The body may be murdered, but the Truth it enshrined will rise from the dead.
  But there is another facet of Dickens's Truth to be seen in Drood also: not the avenging angel but the Christian message, which the Church (i.e. the Cathedral) has almost buried under a heap of differing sects, interpretations and internal squabbles. The Cathedral is failing in its sacred duty to present that Truth intelligibly to the people, a failure due in part to the retention of meaningless ritual carelessly observed, and in part to the enthusiasm of ecclesiastical lawyers for argument, in which they subject his deeply and emotionally held religious tenets to dissection, opinion and dis- agreement. But Truth will in the end prevail; it is resurgence if men will take the spades of faith and hope and dig it out.
  Whether the novels of Dickens had the slightest effect on the society of his or any later time by the inclusion in their structure of such socio-ethical layers as these is at least arguable. Well over a century after his death the law continues to absorb time and costs and to make business for itself (Bleak House); the Circumlocution Office, re-named Bureaucracy, is, if anything, stronger and more widely spread than it was in 1856 (Little Dorrit), and the Churchmen are still arguing. Clifford Longley, Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Times, writes on 23 October 1987:

On the one side are those for whom the essence of Christianity is revelation; that God has disclosed once and for all the moral rules by which mankind must conduct itself, and all argument must fall sil ent in the presence of His Word. . . . On the other side, Christianity is seen as a process of discovery, a journey through historic and all its inherited teachings must be measured against contemporary experience and later knowledge. . . . The obvious danger to Christianity (of this side's positions is that virtually every bit of it can be whittled away by such special pleading, leaving nothing much more

138

than a generally benign disposition towards all humanity, with nothing to say to any of it except perhaps 'Please be nice to one another.'

It is paradoxical perhaps that Dickens is so often accused of boiling down Christianity to the same six words, by less intellectual methods. But if the lawyers (sacred or secular) are obscuring the truth, they are to be fought and perhaps after all he had taken both sides of St. Matthew on board: 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword' (Matthew 11, 34).
  Appreciation of the merit of what we have of Edwin Drood is of far greater interest and importance than speculation on what we might have had, whether such guesswork is concerned with the mechanics of the plot or the broad lines of the novel's construction. But appreciation of what we have may be much assisted by knowledge of what the novelist intended and may be enhanced to some extent by suggestions of what might have followed. The test for such suggestions is to accept them for the moment and to see whether their adoption throws light on what the author has left us. Sir Angus Wilson was quoted at the beginning of this study as saying that in a Dickens novel 'only the whole gives the key to the whole.' Certainly. But there are keys, master-keys and skeleton keys; and by reading the novels against the back- ground of their author's life experience and beliefs, a master- key might be cut, opening them all, and from that, perhaps, a skeleton to open parts at least of an unfinished last work. Most of what I have set down here has concerned the possible background and development of Jasper, who was I believe his author's main interest in the book. Antichrist serving in the Cathedral was a fascinating idea, and in suggesting that such a creature could have grown in ordinary English domestic soil, I believe I have kept close to Dickens's usual imaginative practice and to what he has laid down already in the fragment.
  Had the novel been completed, and with the implications I have suggested here made plain, it would undoubtedly have given offence to ecclesiastics. Lawyers had been offended by Bleak House and Government servants by Little Dorrit. Now his target was Churchmen; and there might well have been

139

another Edinburgh Review article after the manner of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who in writing on Little Dorrit had so touched him on the raw in 1857 by comparing his background with that of Lytton and Thackeray and referring contemptuously to his notions of law as those of an attorney's clerk (Edinburgh Review, Vol, 106, July 1857). The furious reply from Dickens (Household Words Vol. 16, 1 August 1857) left his readers in no doubt at all that he was not in the business of merely amusing them nor of 'making easy occasional books for idle young gentlemen and ladies to take up and lay down on sofas, drawing-room tables and window-seats'. The Circumlocution Office was shown to have been very deliberately introduced into the novel for the discomfiture of Government Departments. Had a similar attack been launched after Edwin Drood on behalf of the Church, provoking a similar reply, we might have been certain, instead of having to guess, that the underlying meaning of this book was to be a religious one, seen through the medium of the Cathedral. The Cathedral was to dominate the finished structure of the novel, and was to be seen as a massive stone sarcophagus, eating away at the truth it was supposed to enshrine; it had become, for the society it servers little more than a monolithic totem-pole at which alleged worshippers met to exchange greetings. But the novelist's knife was a surgeon's, not a killer's. The final resolution would have been one of resurrection, recovery and hope.

140