Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Jonathan Taylor (The University of Leicester)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.07: English Writing and Culture of the Victorian Period, 1837-1901.
Vol. editors: Gillian Fenwick (University of Toronto), Grace Moore (University of Otago)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1869 - 1870

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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 w…

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2050 words

Citation: Taylor, Jonathan. "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 October 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=114, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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