Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Jonathan Taylor (De Montfort University)

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 prop

This article in full comprises 2050 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members. All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

Citation:
Taylor, Jonathan. "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". The Literary Encyclopedia. first published 25 October 2002
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=114, accessed 03 September 2010.]

Search

Browse

Life, Works and Times

Dates:

1869 to 1870

Places:

Country of Origin: England

Genres and Modes:

Novel