47 pages • 1 hour read
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
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Background
Authorial Context: Charles Dickens and His Final Novel
Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870, at the age of 58. The immediate cause of death was a stroke that Dickens had the previous day. He spent the hours immediately before this stroke working on the manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his final and unfinished novel. Dickens’s health was in decline for a number of years; he had never fully regained his strength after a serious railroad accident in 1865, during which Dickens assisted a number of injured and dying passengers while also salvaging the manuscript for his penultimate novel, Our Mutual Friend (published in installments between 1864 and 1865). Despite failing health, in the period between 1865 and 1870, Dickens continued to work with his hallmark intensity. He travelled to America in 1867 and spent several months on tour, presenting public readings; after he returned, he continued to tour and give readings throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1868 and 1869. However, the tour was cut short when Dickens had a stroke in April 1869.
After his ill health brought an end to travelling to give public readings, Dickens turned to writing a final novel: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Like all of Dickens’s previous novels, it would be published in serial form (in which short installments of a novel were published at regular intervals, often in a magazine or literary journal). Drood was scheduled to be published in 12 installments, spanning April 1870 to February 1871. When Dickens died in June, three installments covering the first 12 chapters had been published; he had written the fourth, fifth and sixth installments, which were published successively in July, August, and September 1870. Dickens did not leave behind any clear plan for the remaining plot of the novel, which has led to much speculation about how the novel might have concluded if Dickens had lived to finish it.
Historical Context: Opium
John Jasper regularly consumes opium, a substance extracted from the poppy plant. Opium can be consumed in a number of forms, including via smoking or consuming in liquid form and can be used for multiple purposes, ranging from pain relief to recreational use for the purpose of achieving an altered state. Cultivation of the poppy plant and use of opium for medicinal purposes dates back to ancient times in the Mediterranean and Middle East; trade gradually spread opium to other regions, first to India and China, and then eventually to Europe. In the 1660s, an English doctor named Thomas Sydenham popularized a tincture called laudanum, in which opium is combined with alcohol. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in England, laudanum was widely used for a variety of ailments and pain relief and was available without restriction. By contrast, consuming opium purely for recreational purposes, and more often by smoking, was rarer and more stigmatized. Opium consumption was often associated with racist stereotypes. However, it was sometimes also connected to achieving access to higher planes of imagination and vision, and prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals sometimes openly admitted to consuming it for the purpose of enhancing creativity and insight. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge reported composing his poem Kubla Khan after consuming opium in 1797, and the English writer Thomas de Quincy detailed his experiences with the drug in a memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821).
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