(Maybe she was staunchly anti-spoiler, or maybe she was paying him back for refusing her so many times.)įorster, for his part, claimed that he knew exactly what Dickens intended, despite Dickens writing in that early letter that the plot of his latest novel was “not a communicable idea.”ĭickens would speak often to his dear friend about his work and even visited the Forster family to read each completed chapter aloud before it was published (take that, Queen Victoria). To the horror of those who have been haunted ever since by the unsolved crime, Victoria allegedly declined his offer. The author told her in no uncertain terms that he did not give private performances but, the story goes, he did offer to reveal to her the ending of Drood. (When it was published two years earlier, Dickens had written to a friend that it was “preposterous” and that he wouldn’t have joined “the Shameful lick-spittle chorus” and published a glowing review of it “for any money,” unlike the friend to whom his letter was addressed.)Īt one point, Victoria not-so-subtly hinted that she regretted never having been able to attend one of Dickens’s readings. Both parties stood throughout the visit, according to Claire Tomalin in her biography of the author, Charles Dickens: A Life, and they covered topics ranging from the popularity of the royal family in America to rising food costs and the Queen’s difficulty finding good servants.ĭickens, who Tomalin says had a “lack of enthusiasm for royalty” managed to graciously grin and bear it when Victoria presented him with a copy of a book she had written, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. She had tried to meet him on several occasions, but he had politely, and against royal protocol, declined each attempt.įinally, on March 7, 1870, only a few months before his death, the long-awaited meeting took place. Queen Victoria was a big fan of Dickens (she called Oliver Twist “excessively interesting”), and their reigns had largely coincided - hers on the throne and his as the country’s premier novelist. But there are some hints that he knew exactly how he planned to solve the puzzling twists and turns. In a move that was a departure from his previous writing process, Dickens did not leave any notes on the plot of his last novel or what he intended to do with the second half. “In a move that was a departure from his previous writing process, Dickens did not leave any notes on the plot of his last novel or what he intended to do with the final half”Īnd so was born the mystery within the mystery that has plagued Dickens obsessives for over a century with no resolution in sight: how did Dickens intend to resolve the main questions at the heart of the book - who killed Edwin Drood and is Drood, in fact, dead? The contract for the novel specified it would be published in 12 installments Dickens completed six, with the last of the chapters left two pages short. “It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand, and left it incomplete.”Īlas, the pen had fallen from Dickens’s hand when the tale was only halfway done. It is certainly one of his most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful of all,” Longfellow wrote in his condolence letter. When the nephew, one Edwin Drood, suddenly disappears, a murder mystery ensues. The story centered around a choirmaster with a hidden wicked side who covets his nephew’s fiancée. The novel was titled The Mystery of Edwin Drood and it was going to be Dickens’s version of a dark whodunnit set in his hometown of Rochester. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work.” 6, 1869, Dickens wrote to Forster that he had “a very curious and new idea for my new story. The fall before his untimely demise, he had not only begun a new novel, he had also launched a new speaking tour, commitments he normally did not take on simultaneously. But poor health didn’t slow him down one bit. An avid walker, he was beset by increasing leg pain in addition to a variety of other ailments that he was treating with self-prescribed laudanum. Towards the end of his life, Dickens was beginning to suffer from ill health.
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