Arguably the most famous unfinished novel in the English language, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is also itself all about incompletion, fragmentation, interruption, endings and the failure of endings. The novel, that is, anticipates its own incompletion. After all, the pawnbroker in Cloisterham “offers vainly […] unredeemed […] odd volumes of dismal books” (p.52, Penguin Edition, 1985), one of which, presumably, might be The Mystery of Edwin Drood itself. In this way, Dickens's final novel continues and, indeed, discontinues the narratorial strategy of Dickens's previous novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), in which stories are continually breaking up and clashing with one another.
Dickens began work proper on the novel in August 1869. The projected length of the novel was twelve monthly instalments of approximately 16,000 words each – considerably shorter, that is, than the...
2050 words
Citation: Taylor, Jonathan. "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 October 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=114, accessed 14 December 2025.]
