These Three, Met Again: The Real Resurrection of Edwin Drood

Despite a comparatively recent flourishing of postcolonial readings of the novel, criticism of The Mystery of Edwin Drood has been focused predominantly on John Jasper, the respected choir-master and outwardly doting uncle whose opium-fueled fantasies lead, to all appearances, to an earnest, seemingly successful attempt on his nephew’s life. Seething with resentment and frustrated passion, Jasper is a figure of doubleness and repression whose depiction reflects an emerging Victorian interest in the unconscious mind; several biographers and critics have read him as a refracted mirror into Dickens’s own troubled psyche.1 Far less attention has been paid to the eponymous Edwin himself. A self-confessed “shallow, surface kind of fellow” whose early death seems in any case to remove him from the narrative economy (11; ch. 2), Edwin proves less compelling than his tormented uncle. Yet Edwin, I will argue, lies at the center of the novel’s exploration of proto-Freudian notions of consciousness and selfhood. Representative of a character type far more typical of Dickens’s earlier novels, Edwin, in death, suggests the psychological and narrative limits of this model: the surface fellow cannot withstand either a world that demands increasing interiority of its heroes or the villain–protagonist who possesses such complexity. At the same time, Edwin’s disappearance casts into relief the ultimate unfitness of Jasper – and, perhaps, of any other character – to fulfill his vacated place, a position supported by strong hints that Edwin must return in some form before the work of the novel can be completed. As a reminder of a previous phase of Dickens’s career and as a symbolic other half of Jasper’s divided consciousness, Edwin, in death, resists obsolescence and suggests his continuing relevance to models of both narrative and the self.