On June 8 he wrote his final words of fiction, a wonderful bookend to the opening of the novel. Earlier in the day, as he had done for several months, Dickens spent several hours at a small replica of a Swiss chalet near his home, where he did most of his writing. The day before he died, Dickens wrote his last words, a letter to one of his many admirers about Christian imagery in one of his works, thanking the writer for calling it to his attention. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a strange novel, filled with storms, crypts, sinister characters, dominated by the images of Rochester (named Cloisterham in the novel), its cathedral and environs, only a few miles away from where Dickens spent his early childhood, where Pip met the convict at the opening of Great Expectations, and where Dickens died at his nearby home, Gad’s Hill Place. A Cockney girl was alleged to have asked, “Dickens Dead? Then will Father Christmas die, too?” An elaborate funeral and internment followed, with Dickens accorded the highest honors in English letters-full burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster abbey, near the remains of Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson, and followed in death by the nearby cremated remains of Thomas Hardy (minus his heart) and Rudyard Kipling. Less than three months later, on June 9, 1870, one hundred fifty years ago, at age 58, Charles Dickens died with the novel less than half finished. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility." Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. "An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. The Inimitable Boz was back.īut what were readers to make of these cryptic opening lines, a phantasmagoric look into the mind of an opium user, beset by images sacred and profane, a blend of East and West, of glory and squalor? Here is the opening paragraph: But readers were hopeful, and when the first pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood appeared on March 31, 1870, Dickens was thrilled to see that 50,000 copies sold, more in line with his great successes- Bleak House, David Copperfield, and the novel that had started it all twenty-four years earlier- The Pickwick Papers. Sales of Our Mutual Friend had disappointed fewer than 20,000 copies of the closing installment sold. Readers had waited almost five years since the end of his previous novel, Our Mutual Friend, for a new book-length story from the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. In February, 1870, Charles Dickens announced that a new novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, would start appearing in his favored format, stand-alone monthly installments, beginning at the end of March. I wish I hadn’t waited too long-it has some of Dickens’s most beautiful and strange writing. I have read all of his novels several times, but the last book I tackled was The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I did not read until I was almost thirty.
I have been reading Dickens for more than fifty years. Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member and published author, Carl Wilson, describes Dickens's final novel's instant success, along with the effect of its sudden conclusion.
0 kommentar(er)
