If we suppose (and it has been supposed many times) that Dickens in this novel had the intention of portraying the psychological development of a disturbed mind - or, as he himself might put it, a criminal mind - it seems likely that he would want to show that mind putting down its roots, and to give some account of the soil or environment in which those roots grew. He did it for Bradley Headstone; he sketched it in for Uriah Heep; and he gave it in full with considerable sympathy for Magwitch the convict. But in the existent fragment of Edwin Drood there is no trace at all of the inner lives of either John Jasper or Edwin Drood as they were before the book opens. Oddments of practical information we have, certainly: Edwin is an orphan; his father's firm has Egyptian connections, his patrimony is small, his father (by inference) married Jasper's sister and is buried in Cathedral ground (see Durdles, Ch. V) which gives Jasper a rather tenuous root in Cloisterham. But there is a purposeful avoidance of any mention of their pasts, which becomes significant when comparison is made with Rosa Bud and the Landless twins, all of whom have their childhood and early youth strongly etched in. I have drawn from this the inference that Jasper's character and motives were to be developed later, by means of the 'backward light' technique Dickens explained to Wilkie Collins. He did not, unhappily, live to illuminate Edwin Drood in this way, but there has been plenty of hindsight, provided unwittingly by Stevenson (Dr. ]ekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey), used by many who have felt that Dickens has 'anticipated' later ideas and theories-among them those of Freud and

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the psychoanalysts. Edmund Wilson, in 'Dickens: The Two Scrooges' (contained in The Wound and the Bow) (1) sees Jasper as a 'dual personality'. Dickens, says Wilson, 'is to explore the deep entanglement and conflict of the bad and the good in one man'. Jasper is to be both innocent and wicked-though Philip Collins (2), rightly suspicious of a conjecture for which there is no apparent evidence in the text, writes: 'Throughout. his fiction and journalism, Dickens regards murderers as unequivocally and entirely wicked men. Where, one wonders, does Mr. Wilson detect the 'good' in John Jasper?'
   The post-Stevenson and Doppelganger lights, however, continue to shine brilliantly. In The Decoding of 'Edwin Drood' (3) Mr . Charles Forsyte subjects the entire fragment to their penetrating rays, discovering references and allusions to the theme of duality to an astonishing extent; but Mr. Forsyte in my opinion goes too far, and inevitably finds what he is looking for. He also makes it quite clear that he not only postulates two personalities within Jasper but sees them as separable and at times completely separate, the 'good' side having neither knowledge nor consciousness of the 'bad': 'The two personalities are distinct, the affectionate uncle having no inkling of the murderous plans of his counterpart' (p. 82). On the other hand, Mr. Forsyte stipulates, 'The Murderer knows everything' (p. 196).
   This is Jekyll and Hyde without the chemistry , for Mr . Forsyte, rightly I think, discounts the opium in this context and sees it as being taken by Jasper only for relief. But with or without chemistry, the idea of a mind so divided that memory and conscience can link its two sides only in one direction, and that the direction of evil, would have been a very large pill indeed for the middle-class reader of 1870 to swallow. Moreover, whether by means of opium or by means of psychological tension, such a splitting of the personality reduces the 'curious and new idea' of Dickens to something very like a parlour trick, which both Stevenson and Wilde in their different ways thought only suitable for short-story work. If this were to be the resolution of Jasper's discordance, Dickens could hardly have escaped an accusation of plagiarism of Wilkie Collins. Franklin Blake in The Moonstone takes a diamond, but is under the influence of

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a drug and is therefore innocent. John Jasper in Edwin Drood takes a life, but is under the influence of either the same drug or some kind of psychological sickness. Is he also innocent? If, as Edmund Wilson has it, Jasper is both innocent and wicked, and in the kind of way Mr. Forsyte postulates, it seems to me that Dickens would be demanding a degree of psycho-medical sophistication in his readers which they probably did not possess. It would, surely, have fudged the  issue of  responsibility for the murder. For if the guilty Jasper is to suffer death for his crimes, the separate, blameless and innocent Jasper must die also. This might have been the tragedy of Jasper as seen by Dickens, but I doubt it. He was far too thoroughly impregnated with Shakespeare not to have known that a tragic figure contributes directly to his own downfall through innate faults or weaknesses in himself. The 'innocent' Jasper of the split-mind theory is far too innocent; he has merely been the victim, from his cradle, of 'circumstances over which he has had no control'-one of those circumstances being his alter ego, the 'guilty' or wicked Jasper, who has committed a murder of which he, the innocent, has no knowledge. Which is to blame? And there is a further standpoint from which it can be seen that the completely separable personality idea will not do for Dickens, particularly when he is writing for the public: it must be remembered that he was a committed Christian with a strong faith in his own particular interpretation of the New Testament (there is overwhelming evidence for it in all his writing, private and public). His view surely must have been that, however divided the mind of one of his characters might be, that character would have a soul which as a single entity would be answerable ultimately to God for its behaviour. To put it simply, Jasper might think he was two persons, but his author would know him as one.
  The key to an understanding of what Dickens was about in this book lies in his attitude to religion, and in particular to the New Testament and the manner of its presentation in churches at the time he was writing. It is too often forgotten that the Cathedral dominates the cover design, the opening sentences, and broods over the whole book as the Prison

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broods over Little Dorrit. Jasper serves it with his musical talent and hates it with his soul. This tension is set up in the very first pages of the novel as he moves from opium den to chancel, and must be of profound importance in its development. The Cathedral has been selected as part of the design, and unless some religious significance is intended, it becomes mere scenery-which is unlike Dickens in his later work. The choirmaster, hating the cramped monotony of his existence and ill-paid for his service, must have, in the author's mind, strong reasons for continuing to serve. He is a free agent and probably has other sources of income (see Edwin's comment, p. 54 above) and that he does not leave must be his own choice. He carries on, hypocritically keeping up the appearance of conventional worship. Like Pecksniff, whom he so little resembles in other ways, he will do evil of his own free will, and not under compulsion of any para-normal psychosis which might be seen as an excuse for his actions or a mitigation of the author's ultimate disapproval and condemnation.
   I do not seek to discount the' dual personality' theory altogether; I merely advance the suggestion that it is possible to over-exercise it until its supportive evidence begins to bear a strong likeness to the special pleading of an advocate bent on pulling everything in, however distant, which appears to point in his client's favour. That duality of one kind or another is intended here-in the book as a whole and in all probability in, the character of Jasper himself-it would be very difficult to deny, taking only the evidence in the text.  These points, for example, have been noted many times:

Miss Twinkleton and her double existence.

Durdles, speaking of himself as someone else.

Mr. Sapsea, referred to as the Dean's 'Fetch'.

The Landless twins, whose sympathetic rapport enables them on occasion to think as one person.

Mr. Grewgious, who in his talk with Edwin refers to the lover having 'no existence separable from that of the

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beloved object of his affections, and as living at once a doubled life and a halved life'.

The two waiters at Staple Inn.

Mrs. Crisparkle and her sister (' A pair of china shepherdessess').

   These and a great many more (all to be found in Mr . Forsyte's book) make it I think a reasonable assumption that Dickens had the theme of duality in his mind at this time. If I do not go along with Mr. Forsyte all the way, it is because I feel that, if Dickens had deliberately intended all the 'pair' references that Forsyte finds, even the great exaggerator himself might have felt that he was overdoing it. But if Mr. Forsyte be found guilty of somewhat overstating his case, the case is not thereby nullified. Undoubtedly there is a division of some sort within Jasper himself; but we shall do better to go back to the first indication we have that Dickens had any such idea in his head - the account of Forster (see p. 19), some of which I reproduce here for particular attention:

I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone) but a very strong one, though difficult to work.' The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which 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. ...

   I have never been able to understand, in studying the paragraph above, why so many commentators have attacked Forster for saying that an incommunicable idea was immediately communicated to himself. If this is really a contradiction, it makes either Forster or Dickens look very foolish. But it is the story Dickens is communicating, not necessarily the idea; moreover, we should not interpret the word 'incommunicable' too literally. Forster is quite consistent if one accepts that he transcribed the letter accurately in the full knowledge that Dickens's meaning was that the idea (whatever it was)

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could not be communicated to the general reader until the later stages of the novel were reached, or 'the interest of the book would be gone'-i.e., the reader's 'interest'. The notion that Forster will lose interest in a work of Dickens if the central theme or plot is told him at the outset is manifestly absurd, and Dickens uses 'interest' here in exactly the same sense as he has used it on previous occasions in outlining possible plots. 'Interest' in this context with Dickens always means the situation or plot, as designed to capture and hold the general reader's interest; and what could be communicated to the general reader at the outset, and what could be communicated to his friend and confidant Forster, were two very different things.
   I believe Forster also to have been quite as careful and accurate in reporting what seems to have been a subsequent conversation with Dickens ('immediately afterward'). This of course is hearsay; but I am not before a jury and I offer the suggestion that Forster, when he came to write his account of this conversation, used a particular word ('temptation') because he recollected it as having been used by Dickens.
   Now if Forster had written:

...a review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its crimes were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the criminal ...

it might with some reason be assumed that Forster (and through him, Dickens) intended double, and separable, personalities within the one man, for then the separation of the personality would refer to the commission of the crime, the doing of the deed; but Forster uses 'temptations' and reinforces it with 'tempted'. And I do not believe, as at least one commentator has it, that Dickens did not appreciate the difference between crime, which only exists when the deed has been done, and sin, which exists when the deed is intended or even only contemplated. If the word 'temptation' means anything at all here, it means that a struggle of some kind was to be present in Jasper's mind; that he was to be tempted and therefore to have at least some opportunity to make a choice between good and evil. He is not therefore

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conceived as having been a monster from birth like Shakespeare's Richard III. He is rather to be thought of as Macbeth, who yielded

   to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature. ...(Macbeth, Act I, sc. iii)

   It is of course impossible to say whether the temptations of Macbeth hovered over Dickens's mind as he spoke (if he did speak) of the temptations of Jasper. But that shades of the play were there during the writing has been noted many times. There are direct and indirect allusions to it; and without going so far as to say that he had a Macbeth-like character in mind when creating Jasper, it is permissible to deduce from the evidence above that Jasper, like Macbeth, was tempted and fell from a state of what must have been at least comparative grace. Therefore there was in the mind of Dickens, if not in the first six numbers of Edwin Drood some good or potential good in John Jasper. This could only have been revealed in the later stages of the book-by means of the 'backward light' , in fact-and very probably as part of the' confession' , if that is the right word for it, referred to in the sentence following the last one of Forster's quoted above: 'The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him' (Forster, Vol. 111, Ch. 18).
   That sentence is the fundamental justification for those who believe that the author intended, in Jasper, two separate minds. And indeed, there can be little doubt that, if Forster is reporting accurately, those two last statements of his can only mean that at the time of this 'confession' Jasper thought that he either was or had been two persons. But Forster neither says nor infers that Jasper was two persons, or either one of them, at the time the wickedness was committed.
   I have already offered an explanation for the 'look of intentness and intensity' which was always seen on Jasper's face when the face was turned to his nephew. If in that first scene the uncle was indeed forcing affection for the boy

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to the forefront of his mind to help him chain back the strength of jealousy and hatred that lay behind it, Forster (and Dickens) would seem to be justified in their use of the word 'temptation'. It has seemed essential to some critics to explain the apparent contradiction between an affectionate look and a murderous deed by postulating some psychosis or hypnotic or self-mesmeric state which would allow Jasper A not to know what Jasper B was doing at the time of the murder or even during its planning. It seems to me, however, that what Dickens could have had in mind was something simpler yet at the same time capable of deeper complexity of treatment, and which would owe nothing to the psychiatric hindsight of the twentieth century .In analysing the character of Edwin Drood above, I offered the theory that Dickens, with (in this case) an author's foreknowledge of the ultimate fate of his characters, knew that he was to show later in the book that Jasper at that first meeting with Edwin had already reached the stage of fighting the temptation to murder him. That this temptation had been felt, and indulged as an imaginative pleasure, is revealed in Chapter XXIII:

'. ..Look here. Suppose you had something in your mind; something you were going to do.'
'Yes, deary; something I was going to do?'
'But had not quite determined to do.'
'Yes, deary.'
'Might or might not do, you understand.'
'Yes.' With the point of a needle she stirs the contents of the bowl.
'Should you do it in your fancy, when you were lying here doing this?'
She nods her head. 'Over and over again.'
'Just like me! I did it over and over again. I have done it hundreds of times in this room.'
'It's to be hoped it was pleasant to do, deary.'
'It was pleasant to do!'(Ch. XXIII, p. 206)

   But at the earlier stage, in Chapter II, he is still indulging In the pleasure of opium-induced 'rehearsal' of the deed, and as not yet yielded to the temptation of carrying it out. He is still struggling; and forces himself, as he forces Edwin, to

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believe in his continued devotion. This is deeper and more complex than the simple hypocrisy practised by Pecksniff, Chadband and Heep. Jasper is not merely hiding his evil thoughts from the world; he is hiding them from himself. In the imaginative process of creating the character of Jasper, Dickens begins with the old fundamental idea of a conflict of good and evil in one man's mind. Temptation-and therefore freedom of choice-are to be present as usual; but in this case it is at first the temptation to indulge in evil thoughts rather than to commit evil deeds. As Jasper stands before the Cathedral's High Altar and outwardly offers worship to God in the form of exquisite musical expression, his bored mind begins to think how deeply satisfying it might be to throw defiance in the Cathedral's face by the commission of some evil deed-say murder. Murder suggests the image of a victim, which though at first repulsed with horror, takes with increasing strength the figure of his nephew, his sister's child, the boy of whom he is so fond. Putting this thought aside as too horrible to contemplate, the other more impersonal but more justifiable enemy emerges: the Cathedral. He begins to see the Cathedral as the source of all his frustration and discontent; it has taken his talent for music, which ought to have been his relaxation and pleasure, and made it into a hard, grinding daily penance which he resents. It is a poor paymaster to the musician. His work is acknowledged indeed, but only in words. His inferiors-Crisparkle the musical amateur, and the Dean (it is difficult to believe that Dickens and Jasper have not a contempt, good-natured or otherwise, for the Dean)-are better rewarded than he. As year after year goes by, his hatred for the Cathedral and all that it represents grows steadily; but he cannot leave it, for in leaving it and leaving Cloisterham, he leaves Rosa. He is trapped. What is he to do, short of carving demons out of the stalls and seats and desks? Must he take to 'carving them out of [his] heart?'
   It is unquestionably possible that an artist of the power of Dickens could have so written this novel that, completed, it might have shown how even at that moment of climax in the first scene with his nephew Jasper loved the boy and

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was fighting with all the moral strength he possessed to save his soul (and Edwin's body) alive. This is ambivalence and something more; but it is not a complete personality split. The John Jasper who loved Edwin Drood was the same John Jasper who hated him. The Jasper who fought to save Drood was the same Jasper who was fighting to kill him. Each knew perfectly well that the other existed; but they had become polarized as antagonists within the same mind. Dickens was no more above reworking earlier material than was Bach or Handel, and this is the reappearance of a theme which had already been stated in The Haunted Man (1848) and earlier still in another Christmas book. The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), in which Peerybingle the Carrier, in the belief that his wife is false, harbours thoughts of murder against her supposed lover:

There was a gun, hanging on the wall. He took it down, and moved a pace or two towards the door of the perfidious Stranger's room. He knew the gun was loaded. Some shadowy idea that it was just to shoot this man like a wild beast, seized him, and dilated in his mind until it grew into a monstrous demon in complete possession of him, casting out all milder thoughts and setting up its undivided empire.
  That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder thoughts, but artfully transforming them. Changing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning water into blood, love into hate, gentleness into blind ferocity. Her image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading to his tenderness and mercy with resistless power, never left his mind; but staying there, it urged him to the door; raised the weapon to his shoulder; fitted and nerved his finger to the trigger; and cried 'Kill him! In his bed! ('Chirp the Third')

  Note here that Dickens makes a particular point on the state of the Carrier's mind. Having written that the idea , grew into a monstrous demon in complete possession of him, casting out all milder thoughts. ..', he begins afresh paragraph firmly stating: 'That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder thoughts, but artfully transforming them. ...' Not only is there no suggestion here that his mind becomes wholly exclusive of milder thoughts; there is a positive contradiction that this is so. At the height of the urge to kill,

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the milder images may add to it, but they do not disappear from the consciousness altogether .
   In The Haunted Man the idea of self-division is taken a little further in that the morbidly melancholic thoughts of Redlaw the chemist do actually take the form of a visible likeness of himself: a ghost capable of sustaining a dialogue with its original; but there is not the slightest suggestion that either the ghost or Redlaw pursue an existence independently of each other or that Redlaw, when he yields to the temptation of the ghost, yields to anything other than a symbolic representation of his own state of mind. This is made clear at the end of the story:

Some people have said, since, that he only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his own gloomy thoughts, and Milly the embodiment of his better wisdom. (Ch. III)

  I do not argue that Dickens was incapable of imagining completely separable personalities within one mind (with or without Stevenson's chemical machinery). What I do say is that in the year 1870, a man whose mind could be shown to be so divided between villainy and virtue that the virtuous side had no conception of what the villainous side was planning or doing would simply be set down as insane. It must be noted that in 1843, shortly after Dickens's return from his first American visit, the famous M'Naghten case was heard at the Old Bailey. Daniel M'Naghten shot Sir Robert Peel's secretary in Downing Street. At his trial for murder the plea of insanity was made on his behalf. In his direction to the jury , Chief Justice Tindal said:

The question is whether this man had the competent use of his understanding so that he knew that he was doing a wicked and wrong thing. If he was not sensible that it was a violation of the law of God or man, undoubtedly he was not responsible for the act or liable to any punishment whatever.

   M'Naghten was acquitted. An uproar followed and a debate in the House of Lords, after which a symposium of Judges advised their Lordships on a direction which ought to be

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given to a jury in such cases and which became known as the 'M'Naghten Rules'. The advice states:

The jury ought to be told in all such cases that every man is presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that, to establish a defence on the ground of insanity , it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he knew that, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

These words were used by Mr. Justice Humphreys in his charge to the jury at the trial of Haigh, the Acid Bath murderer, in 1949. (4)
   The M'Naghten case created a great deal of stir, and its 'Rules' have been used on many occasions. It is unlikely that Dickens was ignorant of it or had forgotten it when he came to create Jasper. He would know that if it could be shown that Jasper, when he murdered his nephew, did not know that what he was doing was wrong, he could be acquitted. The murderer might find himself in a lunatic asylum, but quite possibly not in the condemned cell; and we know, not only from Forster but from Fildes, (5) that he was expected there. I am convinced, on evidence from his fiction, journalism and biographies, 'that Dickens meant Jasper to be the latest portrait in a line which had started with Bill Sikes: the killers. They are all killers - Sikes, Rudge, Chuzzlewit, Hortense, Blandois, Orlick, even Magwitch, though he is not, in the Dickensian sense, a murderer - and all killers with ordinary, sordid, human motives like revenge, hatred, jealousy, self-preservation, and so on. The last but one, Bradley Headstone, is only a would-be murderer, but he is no exception to the rest in that all their killings were done physically, with their own hands and in the full knowledge that what they were doing was a violation of the law of God and the law of man. In Dickens, there may be a psychological reason, but never a psychiatric excuse, for murder. In his work, neither insanity nor the abuse of drugs would be allowed as pleas on the killer's behalf. The remaining possibility as a vehicle

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for personality division is mesmerism (hypnotism) and Fred Kaplan in Dickens and Mesmerism (6) appears at first reading to have very little doubt about the author's intentions:

But through some mechanism that was to have been explained in the final sections of the book, undoubtedly Jasper was to have been revealed as self-mesmerised, through some vehicle, perhaps music or opium. Jasper could have conditioned himself to go into mesmeric trance while under the influence of opium; the mesmeric tool might have been the drug itself. But whatever the agent, Jasper lives in double consciousness, with two separate states of being: his everyday mind and his mesmeric state, in which he performs actions that his normal consciousness may be unaware of, may indeed purposely suppress because of the immoral and unsocial needs that are being gratified. He has kept them separate even from himself, though occasionally words and actions from his trance consciousness surface and appear in normal states.

   But the apparent confidence of this paragraph fades on a closer look, and almost every line is found to be qualified with doubt: 'some mechanism' ...'undoubtedly' ...'some vehicle' ...'perhaps music or opium' ...'could have conditioned' ...'might have been' ...'whatever the agent' ... and so on.
   Mr. Kaplan certainly knows all about mesmerism, but is less than convincing here as to the way in which Dickens intended to use it. Dickens in 1870 perhaps did not know quite so much, though he had experimented with it and knew of his own power in it and might well, as Kaplan says, have been intending to make it apart of his book. But not in this way. Kaplan appears to mean that Jasper was in' double consciousness' while planning or committing his crimes. I believe not. The 'double consciousness' came later. Moreover, it was strongly suspected in 1870, and is universally accepted today, that no subject can be directed or persuaded to perform any profoundly significant or irrevocable act (sexual intercourse for example) which he or she would know to be incompatible with their own likely behaviour in a normal state, whether that subject be self-mesmerized or not. Jasper as imagined by Dickens would not have committed his murder in a trance. But Mr. Kaplan is so far right, I believe, in that hypnotism

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was to be used in showing Jasper's 'divided mind' after he came to the prison and the condemned cell, in which, as Forster says, 'the last chapters were to be written' .By some means (and the odds are heavy that Dickens meant some form of hypnotism or mesmerism) Jasper's mind was then indeed, after sentence of death, to divide itself, so that he was able to indicate the manner of the murder, with its motives and its roots, as though he were telling the story of some other man; and this, I suggest, was the' curious and new idea' outlined to Forster, which was not 'communicable' in the sense that Jasper's knowledge and power in mesmerism were to be kept secret from the reader until the final scenes, when they were to be used against himself by another and stronger practitioner-Helena Landless, perhaps. Hints were to be given and the ground laid; his power over Rosa is heavily underlined in two places and is clearly to be seen, either at the time of reading or at a later stage of revelation, as hypnotic:

He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him; without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me then than ever. (Ch. Vll, pp. 53-4)

And in the 'Shadow on the Sundial' chapter:

The moment she sees him from the porch, leaning on the sundial, the old horrible feeling of being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her. She feels that she would even then go back, but that he draws her feet towards him. (Ch. XIX, p. 169)

   More obscurely hinted is his power of suggestion to Crisparkle, who finds himself at the Weir discovering clues,

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with no idea of how or why he came there (Ch. XVI). The 'creepy powers of an abnormal kind' noted by Dr. Leavis (see p. 15) are almost certainly those of hypnotism. The precise form in which Dickens intended to develop this sensitivity and power in Jasper cannot be clearly seen in the half novel we have; Mr. Kaplan's book is essential reading for those wishing to speculate on this. All I note here is that Dickens, in these indirect allusions to transferred thought or intangible power, is clearly preparing in his usual way for a later revelation of their purpose. When the end comes and the 'confession' is made, the reader will clearly see, on looking back, to what all the hints have been tending. It seems probable that the 'interest' of the plot after the fourth of fifth number is to turn on whether Edwin Drood has disappeared (voluntarily or not) or has been murdered. Dickens writes:

There is a curious interest steadily working up to No.5, which requires a great deal of art and self- enial. ...So I hope-at Nos. 5 and 6 the story will turn upon an interest suspended until the end. Quoted in Clarendon edn., p. xxiv)

   If this is so, the premature revelation of Jasper as a deliberate and evilly inclined mesmerist will not only virtually destroy the mystery; it will rob the author of his' curious and new idea' : the exhibition of a mind so deeply divided against itself that its susceptibility to mesmerism may result in its separation, at the end of the book, into two distinct personalities, the one capable of reporting on the temptations and actions of the other. The mesmeric power of Jasper is therefore 'not a communicable idea [to the reader] or the interest of the book would be gone'. Such a division of mind might well have been accepted by readers, though it might be asked today why, if Dickens had talked of mesmerism, did Forster say nothing of it when dealing with Edwin Drood in the Life? Not to travel too far into the realms of conjecture, there is a thoroughly probable explanation for the silence: Forster would take every step he could to ensure that unhallowed hands in crude attempts to complete the Master's work should be unable to claim

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assistance or justification of any sort from him; he would reveal or publish not a word more than he need, and this may well be the reason for the non-appearance of anything more than might have been deduced by an intelligent reading of the published parts and the author's notes. And without accusing him of Jesuitry, one can point to his statement that nothing had been written of the main parts of the design (reinforced by the marginal reference, 'Nothing written of his intentions', (7) and justify him in not officiously recollecting anything that had been said. But mesmerism as a vehicle for inducing confession and explanation is one thing; making it the mainspring of a book's action is another. That Dickens would have offered his readers a story in which, to put it bluntly, a man is able to split himself into two parts by means of opium, mesmerism, music or whatever, one part to have no knowledge or responsibility for what the other part does or thinks, seems improbable. The man would have been, to readers in 1870, a lunatic; and Forster was one of the Commissioners in lunacy. He, at least, must have known about M'Naghten.
   And finally, Dickens's notes for Chapter XVI begin: 'Jasper's artful use of the communication (that Edwin's engagement had been broken] on his recovery.' The creator of the Artful Dodger knew what 'artful' meant; Jasper was a clever crook and conscious of it. I have quoted Forster above as using the word (temptation' to some purpose. He also indicates clearly that what brings Jasper to the condemned cell is quite simply, wickedness. In the words of Sir Hartley Shawcross nearly eighty years later at the trial of the above-mentioned Haigh (another killer, incidentally, who thought he had discovered a detection-proof method of body disposal): ' A man not mad but bad. ..'.

NOTES

1. Edmund Wilson, 'Dickens: The Two Scrooges' in The Wound and the Bow (Methuen, 1961).
2. Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (Macmillan & Co., 1962), p. 305.
3. Charles Forsyte, The Decoding of 'Edwin Drood' (Gollancz, 1980).

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4. 'The Trial of John George Haigh' in Notable British Trials, ed. Lord Dunboyne (Wm. Hodge & Co., 1953), Vol. 78, pp. 215-16.
5. Margaret Cardwell (ed.), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972), Appendix E, p. 239.
6. Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism (Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 153.
7. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (Chapman & Hall, 1874), Vol. Ill, p. 426.