Percy Carden, in The Murder of Edwin Drood (see p. 39), asserts that the action, and particularly the murder, is precisely dated in 1842. His claim is buttressed with an admittedly striking number of passages from the novel which seem to point to that conclusion, some of which I have quoted; but the deduction — that a precise year was intended by Dickens — must be classed as not proven. The fragment makes it fairly clear that Dickens intended the murder to take place on a Christmas Eve, or the small hours of Christmas Day, the Christmas Eve to be a Saturday:

. . . Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly talking together. What they say, cannot be heard consecutively; but Mr. Jasper has already distinguished his own name, more than once.
  ’This is the first day of the week.’ Mr. Crisparkle can be distinctly heard to observe, as they turn back, ’and the last day of the week is Christmas Eve.’ (Ch. XII)

  Carden deduces from this that a precise year was intended, not merely in novelistic but in calendar terms, and from 1836, l842 and 1853 (years in which Christmas Eve falls on a Saturday) selects 1842 as the year fitting most nearly the indications he finds in the text. But the idea of Dickens consulting almanacs, in order to be pedantically certain that in creating a fictional murder he had selected a correct factual date for it, does not carry conviction to anyone moderately familiar with his methods of composition. It is possible certainly that on this occasion he had been more precise than usual in working out his ’time’ background; the experience of Collins’s The Moonstone, with its careful containment of

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events within one year (1848-49) might have had an effect, but there is, I believe, a far stronger reason for the coincidence of Christmas Day and Sunday than the mere dating of the action to a given year.
  The number of references to Christmas, as the murder approaches, is remarkable. There seems no doubt in the novelist's mind from towards the end of the second number (Ch. IX) that a crisis of some sort is to take place, essentially at Christmas. Rosa’s notice is to be given to Miss Twinkleton, Edwin is to visit to arrange marriage details, and Iasper and Grewgious are to 'put the final touches to the business'. There is nothing remarkable about this: the Christmas holiday before Edwin’s twenty—first birthday is a natural time for such an arrangement; but ’Christmas’ is mentioned and repeated so many times in this chapter and the two numbers that follow it that a suspicion arises in retrospect that the reiteration is either intentional or, if involuntary, has behind it the author’s knowledge that the season of Christmas is to play a definite part in the scheme of the book. I think it worth while to note these references (in the order in which they appear) to demonstrate not only their presence but the apparent lack of any particular significance of each one in its separate context, and their cumulative effect, which is to leave no doubt whatever in the reader’s mind that the catastrophe, whatever it is, is to take place at Christmas. And as Dickens could hardly fail to be aware that his public associated him with the keeping of Christmas in a very different kind of way (he was still including the Carol in his public readings), we are forced to the conclusion that he knew what he was about and was calling attention to the season deliberately. The following quotations, including footnotes, are taken from Margaret Cardwell’s Clarendon edition (1972) and have that edition’s pagination;

  [Mr. Grewgious to Rosa:] ’Good. All goes well, time moves on, and at this next Christmas-time it will become necessary, as a matter of form, to give [Miss Twinkleton] notice of your departure in the ensuing half-year.' (p. 69)

  [Mr. Grewgious to Rosa:] ’Is the young gentleman expected shortly?'

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  'He has gone away only this morning. He will be back at Christmas,’
  'Nothing could happen better. You will, on his return at Christmas, arrange all matters of detail with him .... (p. 72)

  ’Could I,' said Rosa, as he jerked out of his chair in his ungainly way: ’could I ask you, most kindly to come to me at Christmas, if I had anything particular to say to you?’

  ’Why, certainly, certainly,’ he rejoined .... ’I do not fit smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other engagement at Christmas-time than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a boiled turkey .... ’

  [Mr. Grewgious to Jasper:] ’Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils together, when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas, and then you and I will step in, and put the final touches to the business.’ (p. 75)
'So you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas?’ observed Jasper.

  The last quotation above is from the book as printed; but Dr. Cardwell gives in a footnote the passage as it was in the manuscript (deleted by Dickens in proof):

[Mr. Grewgious to Jasper, as above:] ’Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils together, when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas, and then you and I will step in, and put the final touches to the business.’
  ’So you settled with her that you would come back at that time?’ observed Jasper.
  ’Eh?' said the other, expressionlessly innocent. But not without adding internally: ’This is a very quick watch-dog!’
  ’So you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas,’ repeated Jasper.
  ’At Christmas? O dear yes, I settled with her that I would come back at Christmas,’ replied Mr. Grewgious, as if the question had previously lain between Lady Day, Midsummer Day, and Michaelmas.

  There may have been more than one reason for the deletion of the above lines, but it seems to me that Dickens, writing under his self-imposed discipline of economy of expression, might have felt here that the Christmas pointer had been

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over-expressed, and cut this piece out.
  Returning to the published version, we note that Jasper once more reiterates, as he parts from Grewgious, ’I understand that at Christmas they will complete their preparations for May, and that their marriage will be put in final train by themselves...’ (p. 75).
  There is the letter, ostensibly from Edwin Drood to Jasper, but in my view dictated by Iasper, which fixes precisely the date of the meeting and underlines it with a tag: ’Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed). . .’ (p. 87). After this, comes the night of the ’unaccountable expedition' and Mr. Crisparkle’s observation to Neville, quoted above, that ’the last day of the week is Christmas Eve.'
  Durdles on the same night has recollections of the previous year’s Christmas Eve:

  I happened to have been doing what was correct by the season, in the way of giving it a welcome it had a right to expect, when them town-boys set on me at their worst. At length I gave ’em the slip, and turned in here. And here I fell asleep. And what woke me? The ghost of a cry. The ghost of _ one terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the ghost of ` the howl of a dog: a long dismal woeful howl, such as a dog gives when a person's dead. That was my last Christmas Eve. (p. 107)

  After indicating at the beginning of Chapter XIII, ’Both at their Best' (p. 111), that ’the Christmas recess was at hand', another opportunity of pointing to the season is taken when Edwin and Rosa, having agreed to part, are discussing how it shall be broken to ’Jack’:

  It must be broken to him, before the town crier knows it. I dine with the dear fellow to-morrow and next day—Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—but it would never do to spoil his feast-days. (p. 117)

  And so to Chapter XIV, the murder chapter, the catastrophe. In case anyone has not yet recognized that it is Christmas-time, Dickens devotes the first two paragraphs to telling them so. But the treatment is very different from that given to the Ghost of Christmas Present in the Carol

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of 1843. In Edwin Drood he was using Christmas again, but with a different and perhaps more religious purpose, which is indicated, in the next reference, by Helena Landless to her brother as he prepares to set off on his solitary walking holiday: 'She is inclined to pity him, poor fellow, for going away solitary on the great Christmas festival. . .' (p. 123). Festival, here, does not mean a sumptuous feast, with Scrooge’s throne of turkey, game, mince-pies and candied peel.
  It has already been established within the novel (by Mr. Crisparkle and Neville) that Sunday is Christmas Day; the same two now establish the time of the murder by their dialogue when Neville is pursued and overtaken:

  [Mr. Crisparkle to Neville:] ’You left Mr. Jasper's last night, with Edwin Drood?' ’Yes.' 'At what hour?' 'Was it at twelve o’clock?’ asked Neville, with his hand to his confused head, and appealing to Jasper. 'Quite right,’ said Mr. Crisparkle; 'the hour Mr. Jasper has already named to me. You went down to the river together? 'Undoubtedly. To see the action of the wind there.' 'What followed? How long did you stay there?’ 'About ten minutes; I should say not more. We then walked together to your house, and he took leave of me at the door.’ 'Did he say that he was going down to the river again?' 'No. He said that he was going straight back.’ (p. 133)

  And undoubtedly he did go straight back, and was murdered by Jasper in the early hours of Christmas morning. But there are yet two further indications, as a sort of coda to the Christmas theme. After the murder has been done and Iasper has appeared, all distraught, at Minor Canon Corner the following morning:

  It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that lead from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and blown into the Close; and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the great tower. Christmas morning though it be, it is necessary to send up workmen .... (p. 130)

And when Crisparkle, finding himself at the Weir, feels

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that he should look more closely, the author has it that 'No search had been made up here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at that time of the night of Christmas Eve. . .’ (p. 142).
  Each of these allusions to Christmas, taken singly, is a perfectly natural and appropriate reference in its context at the time; but they occur so often as to suggest that Christmas _ is mentioned and sometimes underlined more than casual use would seem to justify. Taken together I believe they amount to one of Dickens’s hints: that the Cathedral and Christmas-time itself, in conjunction with the Sabbath, were to be of profound significance in the murderer’s motives. Moreover, the treatment of the season is so widely different as to make the author nearly unrecognizable as the Dickens who had almost single-handedly created the Festive Christmas twenty-seven years before. Compare these two passages:

  The Grocers’! oh the Grocers’! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases on the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, for the Christmas daws to peck at if they chose. (A Christmas Carol, Stave III)

And now in Edwin Drood:

Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there in the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-buttonholes of the Dean and Chapter. Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer's shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin—such a very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather call it a Twenty Fourth Cake, or a Forty Eighth Cake—to be raffled for at the pastry-cook’s, terms one shilling per member. Public amusements are not wanting. The Wax-Work which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable keeper up the lane; and a new grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying ’How do you do to-morrow?’ quite as large as life, and almost as miserably. In short, Cloisterham is up and doing .... (p. 120)

  The difference of treatment, making every allowance for over a quarter of a century’s writing experience and other obvious differences between the two works, points clearly to a profound difference of purpose in the author’s mind as to his use of Christmas in this novel. It is true, as Professor Philip Collins has pointed out, that Dickens, having as it were ’done’ Christmas very thoroughly in the Carol, would in any case have had to vary his treatment on any subsequent use of the theme; he only once deliberately tried to repeat his effects (Pickwick and the Wellers in Master Humphrey’s Clock) and had learnt from his failure. In Great Expectations the overtones at the Gargerys’ Christmas dinner are very different from those in the Carol or in Pickwick. In using Christmas yet again, therefore, he is giving himself special problems easily avoidable by avoidance of the subject—unless the subject is an integral part of the novel’s structure. And it is very hard to believe that the placing of a deed of murderous violence

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so very firmly in the Christmas season and with such particularity to the early hours of Christmas Day was without any significance, symbolic or not, to Dickens. He would at least have noticed that on this occasion he had displaced the I mirth, broke the good meeting and subjected the innocent pleasures of the Ghost of Christmas Present to biting satire. The twelfth cake is a feeble thing and the livery-stable keeper is bankrupt, which gives the Waxwork a cheap show-place; poor Signor Iacksonini is almost as miserable as life: this is the truth behind the tinsel. The man with the face of steel is looking at the popular Christmas as it really is.
  It is just possible that Dickens himself, in the twenty-seven years since A Christmas Carol, might have realized that he and Prince Albert between them had created a Christmas Tree which had not after all been planted by Iesus Christ. The tinsel and the toys and the presents did not truly symbolize the original message. But for the purposes of interpreting Edwin Drood, I am offering this suggestion: that the time and place of the murder, so carefully suggested by Dickens with the care that conceals care from Chapter IX to Chapter XIV, in all those allusions to Christmas, are of the very greatest importance to the elucidation of his mystery and are re-stated as being dominant in ]asper’s mind in Chapter XXIII, in his opium-induced half-revelation to the woman:

  'Hark!’
  ’Yes deary. I’m listening.’
  ’Time and place are both at hand.’   He is on his feet, speaking in a whisper, and as if in the dark.
   ’Time, place, and fellow-traveller,' she suggests, adopting his tone, and holding him softly by the arm.
  'How could the time be at hand unless the fellow-traveller was? Hush! The journey’s made. It’s over.’

  Another echo of Macbeth: ’Nor time, nor place,/ Did then adhere, and yet you would make both .... ’ The place is the Cathedral, and is always at hand, immovable. But time and the fellow-traveller, his nephew, will move on if left alone, and the opportunity, offered partly by chance and partly by his own desire to kill, may not recur. The novelist has arranged for Christmas Day to fall on a Sunday. I believe that in these first fourteen chapters he has also been

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arranging matters so that Jasper’s hatred of the Cathedral and of everything connected with it shall tempt him to the revenge of offering to the Christian Church of England the greatest possible insult and desecration he can conceive, in committing one of the oldest and foulest crimes, murder of a kinsman by his host, in one of that Church's major shrines in the early hours of its major festival of joy and on its weekly Sabbath.