The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Her solution, she added, “still seems plausible enough”. The bestselling novelist said that she first decided she wanted to become a writer when she wrote the paper, and that she was “unbelievably honoured” to have her work shown in the exhibition. “Probably Durdles and Deputy would have discovered the ring … and Jasper, the murderer, would have been brought to justice.”Ĭornwell has loaned the term paper – for which she received an A – to the Charles Dickens Museum as part of a new special exhibition, A Dickens Whodunit: Solving The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In a sense, natural order is restored because it preserves the one shred of evidence that will convict John Jasper,” writes Cornwell. And on the night of Drood’s disappearance, we read that Jasper was indeed wearing a long black scarf.”Ĭornwell ends by stating that Dickens would have had the murderer exposed for his deeds, because Jasper did not realise that Drood had Rosa’s gold engagement ring in his pocket when he killed him and covered his body in quick lime. She also points to the fact that “before Dickens died he took Luke Fildes, his illustrator, into his confidence and told him to draw Jasper with a double-length scarf because he was going to strangle someone with it. She points to “Dickens’s symbolic use of time” – when Drood’s watch is retrieved from a weir, it has stopped, while a storm the previous evening has torn the hands off the cathedral tower clock. Highlighting her belief that “Jasper’s use of opium could have easily rendered him capable of murder”, Cornwell goes on to show in her paper, The Mystery of John Jasper, “that Drood is definitely dead and that Jasper really did kill him”.

Cornwell’s, written for an English class at Davidson College in 1977 and the piece which the bestselling author credits with inspiring her to become a writer, pinpoints Jasper as the villain, taking issue with the assertion by some that Drood does not die, and laying out in meticulously-argued prose just why her theory fits. According to Louisa Price, curator of the Charles Dickens museum in London, more than 200 different endings have been suggested for the story, from novels to plays, films and musicals.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens