The Mystery of Edwin Drood

"This is some ways the evil twin of A Christmas Carol . If A Christmas Carol is about somebody discovering previously hidden reserves of happiness and family feeling, and going off to celebrate Christmas with his nephew, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is about someone discovering previously unknown reserves of unhappiness and fury on Christmas Eve, and probably killing his nephew. It’s a mirror reverse of his most famous Christmas story. It also takes some of the ingredients of A Christmas Carol and warps them. In A Christmas Carol , Scrooge has visions of three spirits; in The Mystery of Edwin Drood , Jasper, who is the anti-hero and probably the murderer, also has visions, probably caused by opium. He too finds it hard to tell what is real and what is not real—which, in some ways, is the dream of fiction, isn’t it? To not really know the difference between what is real and not real. But it’s also for him a kind of nightmare, because it means that he can no longer be sure what he’s done and what he’s not done. If Christmas is a time where the normal rules of life are suspended, then in some ways an opium dream is like a kind of chemically-induced version of Christmas. The ordinary rules of life no longer seem to apply. What Dickens seems to be interested in here, as in Great Expectations , is realizing that Christmas isn’t only a time for family and friendship and roasting chestnuts on an open fire. It’s also potentially a time where tensions, unhappinesses and uncertainties can become concentrated. It’s a little like an EastEnders Christmas special. All the things that have been floating around in the rest of the year come to a point. Absolutely. Ignorance and Want, the two children Scrooge meets in A Christmas Carol , in some ways are allegorical versions of Dickens’s own anxieties, laced throughout his entire career. It’s also that ignorance and want aren’t only things that children suffer from: adults, too, want things, and are ignorant where they shouldn’t be. Dickens is all too aware of that. A heightened attention to a bit of the world our eyes normally gloss over. That includes poverty, but it also includes the people around us we take for granted. That might begin with family, but it shouldn’t end with family. I suspect Dickens knew that Christmas then was a way of concentrating our attention on not so much trying to draw morals, as trying to encourage us to look at the world as a novelist might look at it. In other words, with attention to detail. That’s exactly right."