Dickens sets their fates in motion in a melodramatic murder mystery plot for which we can guess the identity of the villain early on but are left wondering about his psychology and fate, until we reach the end of Chapter Twenty-Three, at which point Dickens died, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), tantalizingly half-finished. Septimus Cripsarkle, the physically and spiritually fit minor canon and the conflicted choirmaster John Jasper, uncle of Edwin and music teacher of Rosa. There are Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud, a pair of orphans engaged to be married from when they were infants by their fathers' wills Neville and Helena Landless, mysterious orphan twins from Ceylon Hiram Grewgious, the kind-hearted and "particularly angular" lawyer Thomas Sapsea, the egotistical auctioneer/mayor "Stony" Durdle, the alcoholic stonemason Deputy, the demonic-cherubic stone-throwing urchin Dick Datchery, the stranger with an unbelievably thick shock of white hair Rev.
The novel is mostly set in Cloisterham, a moribund Cathedral town peopled by or visited by plenty of "Dickensian" characters, ranging from the grotesque and comic to the malevolent and innocent, most equipped with idiosyncrasies. Yikes, this is vintage Charles Dickens, but perhaps a Dickens with a darker urgency than in his earlier novels. Later that same day, the man dons his white robe and joins the choir of a Cathedral for the vesper service.
The first chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) begins with a nightmarish opium-vision involving a cathedral spike on which an impaled body ought to be writhing, until the spike seems to resolve itself into the rusty post of an old bed, on which a man is "shaking from head to foot" as he lies next to the drug-stupored bodies of "a Chinaman" and "a Lascar," while the mistress of the den, "a haggard woman," offers him another lit pipe.
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