The Enduring Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870–1986
With (maybe) the exception of Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, no other single mystery novel has captured the imaginations of so many for so long as Dickens’s unfinished book The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Solutions to the mystery are still being written.
Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, [in parts]. London: Chapman and Hall, April–September, 1870.
The final, unfinished novel of Charles Dickens. Because it was by Dickens and because it was unfinished—with little or nothing in the way of notes about the conclusion—it has spawned hundreds of thousands of words of supposition, numerous “continuations,” and even a Broadway musical. This edition, the serialized parts, was how the public first encountered the novel. Dickens died in 1870 after only six parts had been written and only three published. A Haycraft-Queen selection.
Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London: Chapman and Hall, 1870. Two copies.
Two states of the first collected edition. One copy is made up of the serialized printings, sans advertisements, with plain white endpapers. The other copy is the Chapman and Hall official first edition, with two pages of ads for books by Dickens and thirty-two pages of ads for other Chapman and Hall books, with light yellow endpapers.
Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Some Uncollected Pieces. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1870.
Likely the first standalone hardcover US edition. Fields, Osgood, and Co. (originally Ticknor and Fields) were Dickens’s only authorized American publishers. The text of Dickens’s will is also included in this edition.
Charles Dickens. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1870.
Probably a pirated edition, this version of Drood is listed in Don R. Cox’s bibliography of Drood as no. 133 but had not been seen by him.
Orpheus C. Kerr [R. N. Newell]. The Cloven Foot: Being an Adaptation of the English Novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (by Charles Dickens) to American Scenes, Characters, Customs, and Nomenclature. New York: Carleton; London: S. Low and Son, 1870.
A satire of Drood and the earliest attempt at a conclusion, though absurd (the John Jasper character loses his sleeping nephew and assumes he has been murdered).
[Thomas P. James]. The Mystery of Edwin Drood Complete. Part Second of the Mystery of Edwin Drood. By the Spirit Pen of Charles Dickens, Through a Medium. Brattleboro, VT: T. P. James, 1873.
One of the first and certainly the most unusual of the continuations, purported to have been written by Dickens after his death. “This ghostly sequel” (Don R. Cox, no. 524) adds several new characters and ends with John Jasper dead on a grave. The book was written and published by Thomas P. James, a Vermont clairvoyant.
Charles Collins. Charles Collins on The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Jonathan Clark for The Artichoke Press, 2010.
This keepsake published for the members of the Roxburghe and Zamorano clubs contains the text and a facsimile of a previously unpublished letter, written in 1871 by Charles A. Collins. Collins was Dickens’s son-in-law, the brother of Dickens’s close friend Wilkie Collins, and the illustrator of the cover to the serialization of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Collins states that Dickens had shared some general plot outline with him and that John Jasper was to be found guilty of murdering young Edwin Drood – upending many later exotic theories and the often repeated myth that Dickens had not shared plot information with anyone. Published by fellow Grolier Club members Mary E. and Bruce J. Crawford, John Crichton, Thomas A. Goldwasser, and Thomas Edwin Woodhouse.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Broadway Musical). Playbill.
A copy of the Playbill from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a musical by Rupert Holmes starring Betty Buckley and Cleo Laine, the Imperial Theatre, New York City, 1986.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Hollywood Motion Picture). Photographic Still [n.d.]
This photographic still of Neville and Helena Landless (actors Douglas Montgomery and Valerie Hobson) is from the 1935 Universal Pictures production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
