Being more detailed, complicated, and serious than necessary for a thriller, The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl is a work of scholarly obsession. How much fiction is flensed in he carefully details in the end notes and the clever interview between himself and his lead character appended to the book.
It concerns the scramble among American publishers in Boston and NYC to pirate from the only legitimate publisher Dickens’s final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, (MED). They’re all in a scrum to find the ending; the book was half-finished when Dickens died.
Many “completions” have been done since, of course. Dickens left no notes or hints, so no one knows how he planned to work out all the complications set up by what he’d written. It may be he did write an ending first, too, in the way of the new mystery stories then just beginning to become popular, but if so, no sign of it has surfaced.
It could be also that he based MED on a true mystery, a disappearance and subsequent gruesome discovery local to Rochester, where he lived at Gad’s Hill Place and where he wrote MED. Turns out, across from his estate an inn was operated by a family by the name of Trood. That family had the misfortune of losing track of a rather wild son, whose remains were discovered decades later walled up and skeletal. It’s a tantalizing hint of what Dickens likely knew and the parallel of the names is certainly beyond coincidence.
Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins had already established two kinds of mysteries. In his The Lady In White he created the first great sensation novel, a thriller in other words. In The Moonstone he created the first detective novel.
In letters and other communiqués, Dickens had promised his publishers and friends something new in MED. This is provocative; solving a real-life mystery in a novel would break new ground. It would be consonant with Dickens’s methods, too; he routinely did portraits of real people all the time and interpolated actual events into his storylines.
Meanwhile, solving the mystery posed in the novel is a cottage industry today, perhaps rivaling the solutions to the Jack the Ripper crimes in popularity, at least among Dickensians.
The central problem in MED is that young Edwin Drood has vanished. Foul play is feasible from several quarters. Whether he’s alive or dead, even perhaps lurking in disguise, is left an open question. Of a planned dozen chapters, Dickens completed only six.
Unless he wrote the last six first, as some speculate. Evidence for this exists. He’d met Edgar Allan Poe during his first visit to America and had discussed mystery stories with him, particularly that Poe wrote the endings first, so the solution was known from the start. It is known via correspondence that Wilkie Collins discussed the same approach with Dickens. Remember, this was the dawn of the story of sensation and of detecting: Mystery novels were a fresh new thing. Dickens, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, dived straight into both, perhaps all three. Sensation there is, mystery there is, and there may even be a detective lurking…
There is marriage, inheritance, and reputation at stake, with a good deal of strong personal clashes mixed in. While not a locked room mystery, it is claustrophobic because the town is so small. In fact, although the setting is obviously Rochester, Dickens calls it Cloisterham in the fiction. That is a telling detail, as cloisters are closed and full of guarded secrets.
It is often a funny novel, too, sometimes using vicious, blunt satire, and occasionally references are introduced that may hint at solutions. He’s teasing the reader mercilessly and having Hitchcockian fun while doing it.
It goes without saying that MED is well-written but it’s also modern in feel. This could easily be a contemporary literary thriller mystery. That alone is remarkable. Remember, Dickens died on 8 June 1870.
Pearl’s book focuses on James R. Osgood, publisher at the firm once known as Tichnor & Fields in Boston. This was the sole official, approved, and contracted publisher of the works of Charles Dickens. When the latest packet of manuscript from England goes astray, stolen by bookaneers, a group of scurrilous if highly-literate thieves who work for pirate publishers such as Osgood’s arch rivals, the Harper brothers, Osgood is hot on the trail. (Note: Pearl has written another novel focused on the bookaneers, a fascinating rag-tag group of scallywags.)
Osgood goes to England, first to consult with Dickens’s British publishers, Chapman & Hall, then to seek a solution to the fictional mystery posed by the first six chapters. If Fields & Co. can publish that, it will sweep away the pirate editions in triumph. Naturally, thing become instantly nefarious.
This would make a wonderful movie in the hands of the right director, and would appeal even to steampunk fans, although every detail in Pearl’s narrative is carefully researched and accurate to history and biography.
Along the way we learn the history of publishing is clotted with dark, vile, and underhanded crimes. We think publishing is vile and exploitative now, but in the days when books were actually in demand, each hot commodity such as a new Dickens novel was about profit only and to hell with ethics. We see a dirty business of contrasts; ideals clashing with vermin, criminals subverting honorable deals, contracts broken to thwart lofty goals, plagiarism and pirating common, and so on. Murder is not an obstacle if it means acquiring a lucrative property.
Harper’s was founded by brothers. The Mayor, who was the NYC mayor to set up the first police, basically his private army to do is bidding, further his agenda, and fix things, usually by breaking heads, akin to Bloomberg’s in later years. Mayor Harper ran things thuggishly but efficiently. He was just prior to Tammany Hall, incidentally, and may have made that cess-pool look swimmable.
The General, the Colonel, and the Major were not as congenial, nor as restrained, it seems. Bullies, thugs, and martinets, all, concerned only with books as sales units and profit points. They pumped out cheap editions on bad paper full of crap plagiarism trumpeted as the real thing. Sound familiar?
By contrast Fields & Co. were a quaint Boston firm, genteel and aiming at elevating its readers by offering only the best, the most refined, published beautifully. Think of a specialty small press for collectors, these days.
Osgood the Bostonian idealist published Tennyson, Emerson, and Thoreau. And Dickens, officially. Hugely and even crazily popular and profitable in his time, Dickens was a name whose work was coveted like gold by the less-ethical rivals.
So we’ve forgotten or never knew how vicious publishing was in the Victorian age but we should perhaps have realized, as we scan the dregs today. Anywhere there is money we find corruption and crime.
As to Dickens, he was the equivalent then of a rock star today. Crowds surrounded him, people tore at his hair and clothes, his personal effects were stolen, (his pillow from a hotel, while he was still in residence, for example), his hotels broken into, his luggage rifled, his papers grabbed. He was celebrated and condemned; those graced by his attention or presence were charmed. He had an astounding charisma. Those who felt snubbed when he could not visit their town wrote scathing editorials, lying as viciously as any GOP candidate today.
Reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood is recommended. It is literate fun and masterful fiction for intelligent readers. It is sharply observed and full of surprises. Reading Matthew Pearl’s book The Last Dickens is recommended, too, both for its boisterous, rollicking adventure and perhaps even more for its clear glimpses into both the Victorian reality and the life and times of Charles Dickens. In Pearl’s book we see Dickens on his second American tour and through to his death at Gad’s Hill, his estate, not long after.
Details are wonderful. We learn that Dickens saw flooding in central New York state and had to be transported to Utica by steamboat. He watched houses, barns, and even a railroad train float by, its cattle cars full of screaming, drowning beasts. This so moved him that Dickens demanded they save the animals. He vowed not a single one would die, and led the rescue efforts in icy weather, risking life and health to release the animals from the train cars, guiding them to dry land, and even insisting he would not leave until they’d been fed. All this came to pass, and only then did Dickens consent to complete his journey to his next reading.
We see, too, his growing shadow of fear and doubt about travel, stemming from the near-fatal train crash he’d survived at Staplehurst, in England, when his private car ended up dangling over a ravine and river. He saved many people that day and acquitted himself well, leaping and climbing at age 54 like a much younger man.
Keep in mind he died four years later at age 58 of a stroke, suffered literally as he wrote the line, “He fell to with an appetite,” and went in from his miniature Swiss chalet where he often worked, to have dinner at Gad’s Hill. He lingered on the sofa brought down to accommodate him, but died without revealing MED’s ending.
He’d offered to tell Queen Victoria the ending, by the way, but she declined, saying she’d rather read it with everyone else and be surprised.
We are not amused.
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