The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The prevailing critical comment on Dickens' The Mystery of Eduwn Drood has been directed more toward the second than toward the first half, that is, more toward what Dickens did not write than what he did. As a result most of the criticism has taken the form of speculation, with the major recent effort representing a masterly Sherlock Holmes solution to its mystery.' Critical reluctance to engage with anything as problematic as half a literary creation is only natural, but the result has been a devaluation of the novel, the general opinion being that it is the tired work of a tired imagination. There are, however, sufficient guide lines to permit our understanding of its: aims: complicated patterns of character relationship and density of symbolic texture manifest the fine imaginative intricacy of Dickens' treatment of a subject which had long occupied him. A recurrent concern in Dickens' novels is with the dualism which constitutes the human entity: the relation between the inner and outer man. The inner man is that part of a person which determines his being as an entity separate from the world around him. It includes those faculties which determine what is real within the individual consciousness, whereas the outer man is that part of a man which provides him with a reality outside his individual consciousness, in the world. In their ideal states the inner and outer parts of man are so balanced and blended that they cannot be distinguished analytically, but in fallen or corrupted man, these two conditions of self become separated. They exist disjunctively in the single character of Wemmick in Great Expectations, where his public self relates to the outer world of Little Britain and his private self to Walworth (which is indeed walled-in worth). In Wemmick the two halves of the self are so far disjoined that they cannot confirm each other. The characters who receive the brunt of Dickens' satiric attack are

Art · Art history · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy

• The Empire as Metaphor

  John S DeWind•Victorian Literature and Culture•1993

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